Greetings! I pray that these words find you well. I continue to lift you in prayer each day, trusting that the power of God’s love, which keeps us connected, rests peacefully within you. For the most part, I am fine. Mercifully, the days pass quickly as we begin the preparations to hand off this mission soon. It turns out that being deployed during the holidays is unideal. Who knew?!? The Army made it look so quaint on the brochure.
Luckily, the mail keeps a steady traffic of support coming into our offices. I wanted to express my gratitude for the two enormous boxes of goodies and the Advent Wreath. It was a huge hit. The irony is that we have all worked so hard to lose weight and get into shape on this deployment. Many of us are risking gaining that weight back eating our holiday feelings with all the stuff coming in the mail. I have started working out twice a day so that I can eat the good stuff with no guilt. There is no way I am going to pass on Christmas cookies.
The Advent Wreath is beautiful. Most of the people who come to our chapel program are part of religious traditions that don’t utilize this worship practice. I must have had twenty questions about it the first week. After so many conversations, I didn’t know what they would think of it. They love it, however. We run stripped-down and simplified services in Iraq, but when I introduce some traditional elements, I have been surprised by how welcomed the practices were. It will be interesting to see if any of these soldiers try to introduce an Advent Wreath into their churches back home.
I will miss the sanctuary of Saguaro CC this Christmas. It is my favorite time of year to worship with you. I tried to recreate some of that ambiance here, but I literally blew up the Christmas tree. It was a pre-lit tree and I forgot to check the wattage requirements. You would have thought that I learned my lesson with the coffee pot from back in June. There are so many things I wish they had taught me in Seminary. I have now added basic electrician skills to that list.
I pray that these next weeks are a true blessing. It is peculiar to lead soldiers during these days as they are conducting the operations of war. There is not a lot of gloss here. This is definitely not a Hallmark setting. In some ways, it has led me to consider Advent anew, free from the presents, parties, and general consumer saturation of the holiday. In the sparseness of this place, I find myself preaching the following theme: Advent is an experience in the unfiltered wonder of God. Within that journey, tragedy becomes the paradox of God’s grace, for out of the brokenness of the world’s despondence the promise of God’s peace is born. It is not the jolliest of sermon series, but there is part of me that thinks it is probably closer to the truth of that historical reality many years ago. Don’t feel too sorry for my chapel goers; I make it up to them by singing Christmas songs instead of Advent songs. It is a little trick I picked up from [our music staff,] Keith Koster and Jeff Myrmo!
I hope to write you one more letter before I leave. If I am not able to do so, then I say with all my heart: Merry Christmas.
This blog is dedicated to all church nursery staff and volunteers! You too are loved!
Where is faith birthed?
What early experiences correlate to a lifetime of prayer and service?
What opportunities are we overlooking or missing or failing to maximize for congregational vitality?
These are the questions that occupy me, especially on my commute to and from Shadow Rock UCC. As a parent and as a church staffer in the area of faith formation, these are crucial inquiries.
A couple of years ago, we were struggling with a mid-week after-school program. So many families couldn’t commit to regular attendance, and adult volunteers available 4 pm to 6 pm on a Wednesday were hard to find. For a time, we had a low-key program with several activity centers that required minimal adult direction. Different and often more cynical questions were asked: are social and play-oriented activities worth investing in? what kinds of experiences do kids need in the midst of the school week? where’s the proper balance between relationship-building and content for children’s faith programming?
In the end, we discontinued the program, but the period of questioning bore fruit for me. A vision for what children must experience in their spiritual community emerged: Church is where people love me.
I’ll say it again: Church is where people love me.
Church is where I am LOVED.
These wacky people really care about me!
When my teenage son was a wee Cub Scout, he got a little note from a church member congratulating him on a successful scout food drive. Under her signed name, she wrote (one of the church people you probably don’t really know). When I asked him about it, he said, “Of course I know who that is. She says hello to me every week.”
All of the life of faith, all service and care of people and creation, and all growth in faith, understanding and spirituality – the whole of what we do! – hang on this kind of experience. There will be time later to learn Psalm 23 and the Beatitudes, time for skits about Jesus calling the fishermen, even time for wrestling with Romans chapter 8.
But it starts in the nursery. The warm safety of the place, the gentle hands of nursery workers and volunteers, the opportunity to make connections and first friendships… for babies and toddlers, it’s their first Sunday learning.
So this week, show some appreciation and gratitude to those people who make this wonderment happen. Hug a nursery person. They might be a little sticky (or worse!), but it’s worth it.
There is nothing sinful about gathering as a family or with friends to eat a meal steeped in tradition and memories. God isn’t against football. Remember that there are people in the world who don’t have life as good as we do, and to do something nice for them, seems like a pretty good idea – dare I even say religious. Why, then, did I feel so guilty every fourth Thursday in November?
As a child I felt suspicious of the Pilgrims. There was something fundamentally unfair about strangers arriving in a new land and taking it away from the people who lived there first. A teacher’s, “Well, we’re here now so don’t worry about it,” only confirmed I was on to something. As much as I liked the day with my family, I knew families who wouldn’t be together because of the war (Viet Nam back then). When we got back to school I could tell from their silence when the rest of us compared pie counts and turkey sizes, I had friends who couldn’t have the feast my family enjoyed.
Growing up taught me a new word for my uneasiness: privilege. It didn’t help. Nor did it help to discover that the only truth in the first Thanksgiving story was that there were Pilgrims, there were Indians, and there was a celebration. As far as we know the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims never repeated their celebration. No one much thought about what happened that autumn in 1621 for 200 years. The details most of us learned in elementary school about what our teachers called ‘the first Thanksgiving’ were little more than the creation of Jane G. Austin in her 1889 historical novel Standish of Standish. Thanksgiving observances and rituals had been part of American Indian culture for thousands of years. Spanish colonists held a thanksgiving mass in St. Augustine, FL in 1565, and celebrated thanksgiving with Manso Indians near present day El Paso TX in 1598. French Huguenots observed a thanksgiving celebration in 1564 in what is now Jacksonville FL. English colonists had celebrated thanksgiving in New England in 1607, 1610, and 1619.
While the story of the Pilgrim’s Thanksgiving has remained relatively consistent since then, the roles of the Pilgrims and the Indians have been re-written time and again to reflect the crisis or the mood or the prejudices of the country. The Indians were hardly mentioned during the western expansion. The Pilgrims of World War 2 were hardy war-winners whose victory came from God. According to Look Magazine, the Pilgrims of the 1960s were “dissidents” and “commune builders.” How is a someone supposed to make peace with a holiday that seems always to be reinventing itself? And when I discovered that the Wampanoag people today observe a day of mourning on the day we celebrate Thanksgiving because of the pain they experienced at the hands of the doctrine of discovery, well… I needed to make peace with this holiday!
From the doctrine of the trinity to debates about the jurisdiction of the church in matters of marriage, Puritans held deep convictions about how to practice their faith, convictions out of step with the Church of England. In any religious movement there are always zealots. Puritan zealots were called Separatists. For them there was no compromise, and no value to reform-from-within. When the Scrooby Puritan Separatist congregation emigrated illegally to the Netherlands they thought religious freedom would complete their sense of well-being. But the society that afforded them freedom of religious expression also afforded others that same freedom. They worried about the moral influences of what they considered a corrupt and permissive culture. The Scrooby congregants were not skilled in ways that permitted them to participate successfully in their new economy. Poverty and deep concerns about providing for themselves in their old age took center stage. 37 of them, along with 65 adventurers recruited by the voyage’s financiers, decided to pursue a what they hoped would be a better life in the new world.
Those passengers and crew were unprepared to endure the winter of 1620 aboard a ship anchored in Provincetown Harbor. By harvest 1621, half of the passengers had died, including 14 of the 18 married women. Of the 53 passengers remaining nearly half were children and teens, and the adults were mostly widowers, only 3 of whom were over age 40.
That anyone survived was due to the intervention of the Wampanoag people, specifically a Patuxet named Tisquantum. After a 14-year odyssey as a slave, a story worthy of its own telling, Tisquantum returned to his homeland only to find his people had fallen victim to a plague, the origin of which was most likely European traders. Evidence proves Tisquantum’s duplicity when dealing with Wampanoag and Pilgrims alike, but motives aside, he attended to the well-being of the Plimoth (the Pilgrim’s spelling) colonists.
Thanksgivings in Puritan tradition were solemn religious occasions. This is the only paragraph – 112 words – that we have from eyewitnesses:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.
In today’s terms what the participants recorded about that event some 400 years ago reads more like what historian Robert Tracy McKenzie calls a week of “beer and barbecue, shooting and sports.” There turned out to be twice as many Indians as many as there were Pilgrims. Nothing like a good time to attract the neighbors! The scene reads like the typical human response to prolonged pain. Enough already – let’s party! After everything they had been through the survivors seem to have needed something to celebrate. And so they made the most of the legitimate reasons at hand to feel relief and gladness and gratitude, and to lay aside the concerns of the day at least for awhile. They needed to recover their sense of well-being.
The real story of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag is a story about the human quest for well-being. Christians have a word for that. The word is peace. We also have a word for how far people are willing to go to secure the welfare of others. Jesus called that peacemaking.
I have finally made my peace with Thanksgiving. No more trying to force a secular peg into a religious hole. The one-day observance we call Thanksgiving will be forever a secular holiday for me. No more outrage in God’s name about retailers opening at midnight Thursday; I choose to express my outrage in the name of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and others! Even in a secular world families’ well-being trumps corporate profits or personal savings.
My faith, like that of the Pilgrims, teaches me that gratitude is not a holiday to be celebrated but a discipline to be practiced each day at all times in every circumstance.
My faith teaches me to say I am sorry for wrongs done against others even when my ancestors did them, especially if it leads to reconciliation with others. Thanksgiving for me will forever be a day I stand in solidarity with the Indigenous People of this land as they mourn what they’ve lost, what my ancestors stole from them.
My faith teaches me that more important than the thanks I offer to God for my blessings is the thanks that someone else will offer to God because I have used my life to attend to, advocate for, and in any way I can, supply them with a greater sense of well-being. If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16and one of you says to them [even on Thanksgiving], “Go in peace [or Happy Thanksgiving]; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?“You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God through us; 12for the rendering of this ministry not only supplies the needs of the saints but also overflows with many thanksgivings to God.” (2 Cor 9:11)
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “a false but clear and precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.” Oh how that lesson has played out these past few weeks. While Thanksgiving is the occasion that brings us together, we have a more urgent need. Tonight there are people in our world who are not living in peace. So tonight I ask you to embrace a more complex celebration of Thanksgiving, one in which you strive to put words of gratitude on the lips of someone else by improving their personal well-being. In these frightening and uncertain times people are looking what our brand of Christianity is offering. We are the purveyors of well-being – hope, safety, sanctuary, meaning, dignity and love. Let us join one another on the narrow path that is peacemaking. Amen.
guest post by Andria Davis, Acting Senior Minister at Church of the Beatitudes in Phoenix, Arizona
In order to enter the main buildings of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, a visitor must walk down the Avenue of the Righteous Among Nations.
Situated in the middle of a large garden, this tree-lined walkway and the surrounding landscape commemorates those many non-Jews who risked their lives and their livelihoods in order to save Jews from the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust.
As you walk down the Avenue and stroll reflectively through the winding paths that weave through the surrounding garden, you may become overwhelmed with awe as you realize that each of the more then 2,000 trees that line the paths were planted to commemorate a unique person, and that each tree represents the life of one who worked diligently and under great threat to save the lives of countless others.
And as you walk through the garden, you may become overwhelmed with awe as you learn the stories of some of the thousands of names engraved on the stone walls that form the many coves and inlets, and when you hear the many stories of the ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
If you are like me, you may become overwhelmed with awe as you look around you, and you cannot see through the trees and benches and the signs and engravings, through those more than 25,000 markers commemorating those who worked diligently, ceaselessly to save the Jews from certain extermination.
I imagine that of many who walk down the Avenue of the Righteous Among Nations or who take time to sit with names that fill the garden walls, that they are as much overwhelmed by the stories of those remembered there, as they are by their own answers to the question: in the same situation, would I have done the same?
Would I have opened my door to that frantic knock in the middle of the night? Would I have opened that hidden passage in my house? Would I have secretly employed those fleeing for their lives and would I have arranged for their escape? Would I have said yes when the call came, or would I have said no?
A few years ago, as I sat in that Garden, I wanted to so badly to say that I too would have been counted among these who risked their lives to choose good instead of evil.
I wanted so badly to know that when faced with an impossible decision between my life and the lives of many others, the pursuit of safety for the many would have been the only pursuit I could follow.
I so badly wanted to be assured that when faced with the decision between what is right and what is wrong, I would always choose the hard path of righteousness and integrity over the easy path of complacency and status quo.
Above all, I wanted to know with conviction that when the world goes to pieces and all goodness, and all peace, and all love seems gone, that I would follow unwaveringly in the way of Christ, who said as he did in today’s passage from the Gospel of Mark, that it is better to sacrifice yourself in the name of justice, than to sacrifice another in the pursuit unreflective, unjust harmony.
In today’s passage, Jesus offers us a black and white way of living. He offers us a stark reminder of the obligations of one who calls him or herself a Christian.
Hear his words:
“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where the worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.” – Mark 9:38-50
For the faithful who strive to follow in the way of Christ, this is a black and white edict that comes to us who live in a much greyer world.
It comes to us in a world where right and wrong do not always appear so cut and dry and where our convictions sometimes have unintended consequences.
It comes to us in world where the small and individual injustice can build like a cancer, growing within us without our notice, that then spreads into the very blood and bones of our societal, religious and civic systems, unable to be amputated from us as we would a sick limb.
As you sit in the Garden of the Righteous Among Nations, among the trees and plaque commemorating the 25,000 brave souls who risked it all, life and limb, to save others, it’s hard to grapple with the thought that we ourselves might not have been so brave.
On the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, there is a quote from a named Martin Niemoller, who was a Lutheran minister in Germany during the Holocaust.
As a young man, he distinguished himself in the Navy as an officer and commander of a German U-Boat during World War 1. He was proud of his country and his service, but after Germany’s defeat in the first world war, he found himself at political odds with Weimar government.
Forced to give up his U-Boat and his office, he, like many Germans, felt like the changing government had abandoned him and all he stood for.
Disenfranchised, he sympathized with and supported the rising Nazi government.
Niemoller went on to pursue seminary and found himself in a prominent church in Berlin, where he was widely supported and his anti-Semitic sermons were well attended.
Quickly, however, Niemoller’s support for the Nazi government began to wane.
But It wasn’t the dangerous and xenophobic policies that were being solidified under the Nazi regime that ignited in him the spark of resistance, it was, instead, the Nazi interference in the life of the church and the removal rights of Christian of Jewish decent that caused him to take action.
It short, it was only when his own rights began to be infringed upon, that he spoke up.
Regardless of his motivations, his actions against the Nazi government were impactful and led to his arrest, apparently under orders from Hitler himself. Niemoller the spent the rest of the war imprisoned in concentration camps.
Unlike millions of others, Martin Niemoller survived the war imprisoned by the Nazis. His survival allowed him to live on into late life as an ardent anti-war activist, who spoke with ferocity about the importance of not remaining silent in the face of injustice.
His most famous quote, which is known in a few different forms, is inscribed on the Holocaust memorial in Boston. It reads as follows:
“They came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time, no one was left to speak up.”
I saw this quote shared widely this past Wednesday.
Among other things, it was the 78th anniversary of one of the defining moments of the Second World War, an event that is widely understood to be the beginning of the Holocaust as we know it.
On November 9th, 1938 Germans, fueled by anti-Jewish sentiment and supported by Nazi-issued propaganda, went on a rampage of terror that specifically targeted Jewish business, synagogue, and Jews themselves.
According to Nazi totals, 8,000 buildings across Germany were vandalized and defaced with anti-Jewish slogans and slurs. Nearly 100 Jews were murdered. Glass from widows strewn the streets, giving the event the name Kristallnacht – Crystal Night – the Night of Shattered Glass.
Two days later, on November 11, 30,000 thousand Jews were rounded up and deported to concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen.
This act brought to the surface the reign of terror that had already existed in Germany, and would soon be on the forefront of the minds of people across the world.
They say that hindsight is 20/20 – that when we know we now know, we can look back and feel confident about what we would have and could have and should have done.
That when we look back on that day, 78 years ago, we can proclaim boldly that hadweknown…
Had we known that this is what the future held,
We would have stood up.
We would have spoken up.
We would have put our bodies in between rocks and widows,
and used our selves as human shields.
We would have opened our homes and our safe spaces to our brothers and sisters and we would have gathered, arm in arm, linked in front of the rail cars, the tanks and the trucks to do everything in our power and anything at all, to reorient the world toward justice.
It is that 20/20 vision in hindsight tells that it would have been us, doing just what Jesus called on us to do:
That if we had been there, on that pivotal day 78 years ago, it would have been us giving up our hands and our feet and our eyes that our brothers and sisters might have a future in which they could continue feel and walk and see.
It would have been us.
We would have fought and screamed and risen up and joined together.
It would have been us.
We would not have stayed silent.
But two days later 30,000 Jews were rounded up and deported to concentration camps. Over the next six years, millions more would take that same journey. Millions would die.
Martin Niemoller was a Lutheran Minister who devoted his life to follow in the way of Christ. And yet even as a follower of Christ, an ordained minister, he felt sympathy for the ideologies of the Nazi government – ideologies that tended toward pointing a finger rather than lending a hand; ideologies that would exclude people who thought and acted and believed differently than the prevailing power; ideologies that said that ‘whoever is not with us is against us,’ rather than the ideology of Jesus who declares “whoever is not against us, is with us.”
It wasn’t until the communities of which he was a part and Niemoller himself came under attack by those ideologies, that he began to take action against them.
For his life following the war, Niemoller is said to have lived with the guilt of not taking a stand against those forces of evil until they came knocking on his door, when all the networks and systems that were designed protect him and those around him, had been stripped away.
“They came for the Communists,” he wrote, “and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time, no one was left to speak up.”
On Wednesday morning, I read Niemoller’s quote attached to an article depicting the events of Kristallnacht, 78 years ago. By Wednesday evening, I had read the poem more times than I could count, shared not in response to the historical past, but to the real and pressing present, shared in response to events that had happened that very day.
She was shopping in Walmart. A woman came up to her and ripped her Hijab off her head. “this is not allowed anymore, so go hang yourself with it around your neck not on your head.”
They came for my Muslim brothers and sisters,
but I did not speak out because I am not a Muslim
They woke up to a note on their car. “I can’t wait for your ‘marriage’ to be over turned. Gay families burn in hell.” Signed ‘#Godbless.
They came for my LGBTQ Brothers and Sisters
but I did not speak up because I am not LGBTQ
He came out to his car to find all four tires slashed.
She found hers covered in graffiti. “Go back to Africa you N word, you B word.”
A black baby doll was left in the gutter with a noose around its neck.
They came for our Black brothers and sisters
but I did not speak up because I am not black.
She was walking to math class at her high school
She was pumping gas
She was getting coffee
She was heading home
“Why aren’t you gone yet?”
“Build a wall”
“Grab her by the…”
“I should kill you right now, you’re just a waste of air.”
They came for our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our wives.
But I didn’t speak up because I am not a woman.
I didn’t speak up, not for my Muslim brothers and sisters, not for my Black brothers and sister, not for LGBTQ brothers and sisters.
I did not speak up for my immigrant brothers and sisters or my disable brothers and sisters. I did not speak up when it mattered the most.
As Christians, we must remember: they also came for Christ.
It wasn’t because he expressed a theological doctrine or dogma that ruffled the feathers of the powers that be, but because he spoke out for his brothers and sisters:
For the tax collectors and widows,
The prostitutes and the impoverished.
They came for Christ because he dared to say, “you matter” to those that society had pushed aside.
They came for Christ, but by then, Christ knew it was too late.
Jesus gave himself to the cross that no others should have to live and die as he did – that in his sacrifice, he could offer up a different view of the world – one in which all of God’s beloved creation lives in peaceful harmony befitting the kingdom of God.
But in his sacrifice, he did not absolve us, his followers, of our God given purpose in life and faith, that which is our salt and our saltiness.
He did not absolve us of our call to build around us world in which silence in the face of injustice cannot and does not prevail, where the evils xenophobia, homophobia, racism, and sexism are finally and eternally amputated from who and what we are; and a world in which all people are showered with the grace and dignity that is required to be shown all children of God.
You are the salt of the earth, he says.
But if salt has lost its saltiness, what good is then, but to thrown on the ground and trampled under foot. What good is it, if we, as Christians, do not share with the world our Christ-given call to stand behind and fight for our convictions of justice and peace?
You are the light of the world, he says. But what good is it if we should hide our light under a basket so that the world cannot see it and be shrouded in darkness. What good is it, if we do not illuminate a path forward with visions of love and hope?
How will you share your light? How will you season the world with the saltiness of God’s love?
My friends, we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
We are the voices that ring out in the silence.
We are people who stand up to show the world that the Kingdom of God is real, and that peace and justice and hope and love are at its foundation.
It’s time to stand up. It’s time to speak out. It’s time to let our light shine. Amen.
So in the midst of being heartbroken, I step outside this early morning and breathe in life. The waxing super-moon is veiled in thin clouds, throwing soft tree-shadows on the yard. The Big Dipper has wheeled around into the north sky. The wispy clouds on the horizon begin to show tinges of deep pink sunlight……Breathe…..Breathe….
The sun is still burning and the Earth is still turning—and we’re amazingly being given another day.
In the midst of being appalled, I seek the company of those also hurting and seeking hope. Together we pray and tell stories and cry and sing and hold silence and reach for the Spirit of Life.
In the midst of being angry, I re-visit what I wrote in June after the shooting in Orlando: “And we have to do this [pray and act] with an open heart and a spirit of love for all.
‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled.’
‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.’”
Somehow, someday, maybe beginning today in the midst of deep emotions, may we all find a way to shalom, to peace, to well-being for all beings on this beautiful Earth.
All of us more or less thrive on a predictable world, where things go as planned. When Brexit happened in Britain and when Donald Trump happened in America it was a jolt to our central nervous systems. And the shock waves were felt throughout the world. The establishment has been rocked.
For me, Bernie Sanders was the omen. His popularity, especially with young voters, was unprecedented. Then when Jeb Bush, who I thought was the strongest Republican nominee, departed the campaign, I thought to myself… “This country wants deep change. It does not want another Bush or Clinton. It wants someone who will disrupt business as usual, someone who will shake things up.” The American people want someone on the margins like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump.
Now I pray that our people, government, and nation will find ways to mend the divisions among people, heal the anger and hatred fueled by the campaigns, create hope where there has been fear and suspicion, and attend to the very real concerns, problems, and needs of people.
We live in tumultuous times. Political storms, storms of climate change, international storms are brewing around us. It is tempting to despair, to feel alone and forsaken. And most of all many feel insecure, like the ground is shaking beneath their feet.
In light of all this I think of the story of Jesus calming the storm at sea (Mark 4:35-41)… In the case of the storm at sea, the waves were crashing on and spilling over into the boat. In the midst of all that Jesus said “Be not terrified! There shall not be a hair of your head that perishes.” In other words, “Yes, there are many reasons to feel timid and hopeless. Yet, in the midst of it all, I will calm you. I will help you find your center of gravity. I will deliver you.”
I was comforted by Hillary Clinton’s conciliar speech on the morning of November ninth. She said (my paraphrase) that no matter how hopeless we may feel; we should never give up the fight. And that in the big scheme of things, our acts of service, no matter how small, are never wasted. They are chronicled and used by God to further the kingdom.
On the Sabbath the ancient Hebrews read Torah and rested from all physical work. The Hebrew notion of Sabbath made a profound impact on Western society. The two day “weekend” practiced by all industrialized countries has its roots in the Judaic Sabbath.[1]
A sense of Sabbath reconnects us with the burning desires of our lives. It puts our lives in perspective, and helps us discern what we in truth want to do with our time. “What are my priorities?” “Am I happy?” “Are my choices in line with my faith?” “What am I on fire about?” “Do I take time to serve?” “Is my life caught up with numerous insignificant details?” “Why am I doing what I’m doing?” “What is my life’s mission?”
If we don’t take regular time to get perspective, we may get ensnared in numerous commitments out of sync with our core values. Sabbath time is the Mary part of the Mary and Martha story (Luke 10:38-42). Martha was busy, multitasking to make it all happen. Mary simply sat at Jesus’ feet, absorbed his words, and listened in stillness and rapture.
The essence of the fourth commandment (a sense of Sabbath) is just as important today as it was to the ancients. The commandment is, “Remember the Sabbath day, by keeping it holy” (Exodus 20:8).
Greetings brothers and sisters! On this somewhat comfortable day here in Iraq, I carry my hope for you onto the pages you now read. Each day I wake with prayers for you on my heart and rejoice with you all the ways that God continues to shape and guide your lives and ministries. Celebration seems to be the theme these days. There is much to celebrate in the life of Saguaro. You held special services of worship to honor all the ways you are addressing hunger at the church’s doorstep. Many of you experienced the beautiful renewal of a spiritual retreat. The celebrations continue as you welcomed back Sarah Williams from India. In a world where people often wonder whether the spirit of the Living God still moves, it is meaningful to know that your ministries harness this spiritual gift.
Please know that I am doing well and that I am safe. No surprise, but I still miss my family terribly. Watching birthdays over FaceTime is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you actually get to witness the celebration, a privilege which many soldiers before me did not have. On the other hand, that tiny screen makes it painfully obvious that you are not there.
Thankfully, the weather is finally beginning to cool, which is a welcome reprieve. For whatever reason, the break in heat has decreased the intensity of the smells around here. I look forward to the day where I am not overwhelmed by the smell which I call, “Essence of Dirty Dudes and Toxic Dust”. At this point in the deployment, it is really about focusing on the small victories.
Celebrations are not always free of complications. These days our attention keeps a close watch on the happenings in Mosul, and the turning of the calendar which promises our return home. We spent successful months helping prepare the Iraqis for the fight. As we go about our day-to-day, one can’t help to look at the television screens and see the evidence of our logistical support for the effort up there. We resist the temptation to celebrate our efforts knowing that the fight there will be fierce and prolonged. I ask for you to pray for the families that are caught in the crossfire. It broke my heart to hear of a small village being massacred after the liberating forces moved too soon and DAESH circled back into the middle of the celebration leaving few alive. I cannot imagine such an evil, but I force myself to pray that God might change their hearts.
Like you at Saguaro, this past month was a time of celebration for me as well. The new Resiliency Center opened. We had a beautiful ceremony that was well-attended. Honestly, the Center (and especially the chapel within) is probably the nicest military-use building in Iraq. I called in all my favors for this project! Already we have uniquely increased the capacity of our care for the soldiers here in Iraq. We are learning that we are only scratching the surface of the Center’s full potential. When I hand over the Center soon, I pray that the new chaplains will take renewed energy and keep the momentum going. I hope that God will give them vision to see the opportunity this tool gives them in caring for our soldiers. I am thankful to be able to leave behind such a legacy.
Additionally, the time for my deployment personnel evaluation came due this month. Nothing brings back flashbacks of middle school more quickly than when the evaluations are conducted. The effort I provided was rated as Lieutenant Colonel quality work and I earned the highest evaluation, “top blocked”. I am not trying to boast, but I worked hard for the evaluation. That is the funny thing about the Army. You get report cards. When you get a good one, it is hard not to rush home to the people you love and pin it to the refrigerator!
I’m not going to lie; these days are a strange brew of emotions as I consider all the ways celebration manifested itself in October. It occurred to me last night on my walk back from the chapel that this week marks the 10th anniversary of my ordination. It seems like just yesterday. I remember waiting for the service to start at my home church in Henderson, Kentucky. Emily, my lady friend soon-to-be wife at the time, peeked her head into the office where I was sitting to let me know that the church wasn’t on fire. She guessed God was okay with the proceedings (I may be misremembering the exact details of this moment but it is more fun this way). I do remember clearly a retired minister sitting across from me. He smiled, “This is the official start of a great and challenging journey!”
As I type these words in Iraq, I can’t help but think that his observation was the understatement of a lifetime. Ministry has seldom been what I thought it would be – good and bad. Over the years I’ve made many mistakes and I’ve witnessed blessings beyond reason. And yet, here I am, thankful for the journey which humbles, bewilders, and stretches. It appears that God has not given up on me and neither have you.
We are getting closer.
I found this great photo opp. I thought to myself, “Hey! I live there.”
There is something special about desert sunsets.
I provided the invocation for the Taji 9/11 memorial service.
I got the honor of flying one of the flags on 9/11.
Thanks to your continued generosity, I am able to help out soldiers with care packages.
These are the reigning 3-on-3 Camp Taji basketball champions!
I got to share an experience of worship with the Spanish Chaplain.
Cake!
Here is the new chapel in the Resiliency Center.
This is the meditation room in the Resiliency Center.
We run our Bible studies and other education opportunities out of this room.
This is the Cafe in the Resiliency Center. Some of the behaviorial health and soldier care offices are attached to this space.
My church is kicking off a stewardship campaign this week. We chose the theme, “From seeds to fruit.” Today, I finished up posters with images of those steps. Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking about seeds.
I grew up on a farm, with a father who worked at a farm supply store. I remember being in the back of the store with giant bins of seeds. I’m pretty sure most people, when they think of seeds, think of the kind you plant. They think of seeds that create corn, beans and pumpkins. They think of seeds that are distinct. They think of seeds that can often be eaten or planted.
When I think of seeds, though, I think of the tiny ones that are sown. Sowing seeds sounds so eloquent, biblical even. In reality, it’s far more chaotic. Seeds that are sown are tiny, and more or less strewn into rows, or maybe seedbeds, or small pots. They’re never carefully placed like seeds of larger varieties. The tiny seeds that would be sown were the ones that filled up the bins in the back of the farm store of my childhood. I never got my fill of running my hands through them. My dad knew what each one was, of course. Many of them were grass seeds. I remember the way they flowed through my hands, softer, silkier than any fabric could ever be.
Believing those tiny seeds could produce anything was an act of faith. The seeds were so tiny, no one was even worried about the ones that spilled onto the ground when they were bagged for a customer. Of course, I recall Jesus’ words, “…faith the size of a mustard seed…”
Those of us who live apart from the rhythm of sowing or planting, waiting, and harvesting, miss out a little. We miss out on the beauty of a small plant peeking out of the ground. We miss out on the worry of too much or too little water. We miss out on the goodness of going out and picking our food to eat that very night. We miss out on that rhythm that offers a deep hope in the order of the world. It is a rhythm nearly as old as humanity, after all.
So I think about seeds, seeds that point to that rhythm, and let my body grow calm and my mind cease its worry. The anxieties of life run deep for me, as they do for most of us. There are many things to be done in my own life—and after all, if not me, who? I wait for an election days away, wondering if the outcome drastically alters my life. As they should, my friends remind me of the things I shouldn’t let slip from my view because they are the things of God. They are voting early in suffragette white. They drive by the places where people of color were killed, forgotten by most only days later. They call me to vigils for those things and others, like domestic violence, one of those things that is supposed to draw our awareness this month.
I know they struggle to remember those things, too, among jobs, and marriages, children to take care of, and babies on the way.
And I remember seeds.
I trust in the promise that they hold: our future is full of hope. Some days, that hope is evident, like a bit of green breaking the dirt for the first time. Some days, that hope is realized, like the bite of an apple when the first hint of cool is in the air.
And some days, that hope is buried beneath the earth, waiting. Just waiting. The rhythm of life long established will take over at any time, as holy as God’s ordering of the world in the first days of creation.
Several years ago when I was writing my memoir, From Blind Obedience to a Responsible Faith, I ran across a book by Paul F. Knitter titled, Without Buddha I Could Never be a Christian. Knitter has held the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and has been a leading advocate of globally responsible inter-religious dialogue. His book is described on back cover as “…a moving story of one man’s quest for truth and spirituality authenticity: from the nature of prayer to Christian views of life after death.” He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1966 and granted permission to leave the priesthood in 1975. His book is his personal exploration of Buddhism as a way of dealing with these issues and with blending of Eastern mysticism.
Knitter’s book proposes how the Buddhist perspective can inspire a more person-center understanding of Christianity. The preface of the book is titled Am I Still a Christian and rather than focusing on rigid dogma and rituals, its center of attention is religious experiences, and how a Buddhist approach can enliven Christianity and benefit worship, and social action.
In my naivety when I first read Knitter’s book, I was surprised that Buddhism didn’t have a God! It became apparent that I needed to research more about Buddhism. Knitter suggests we need to become familiar with the Buddha’s first sermon, which he preached sometime around the 500s BCE. The subject matter was The Four Noble Truths, which Knitter states “He (Buddha) preached it shortly after his Enlightenment…” The Four Noble Truths are:
Suffering (dukkha) comes up in everyone’s life.
This suffering is caused by craving (tanha).
We can stop suffering by stopping craving.
To stop craving, follow Buddha’s Eight-fold Path (which consists essentially of taking Buddha’s message seriously, living a moral life by avoiding harm to others and following a spiritual practice based on meditation.)
Let me suggest several books and articles that I found helpful in connecting the Four Noble Truths with Buddhism and Buddha with Jesus:
Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings, edited by Marcus Borg . In the preface of his book Borg warns the reader that although he is an “expert” in the study of Jesus but, “In my understanding of the Buddha, however I’m an amateur. I do not know the scholarship surrounding the Buddha as I do Jesus.” Having said that, he goes all the way back to a Dutch writer named Ernest de Bunsen who wrote a book in 1880 titled, The Angel-Messiah of Buddhists, Essenes, and Christians—up to the Dalai Lama himself when he wrote The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teaching of Jesus in 1999.
The rest of the book has eleven chapters including: Compassion, Wisdom, Materialism, Inner Life, Temptation, Salvation, The Future, Miracles, Discipleship, Attributes and Life Stories. Each chapter has at least ten examples of Jesus’ and Buddha’s moral teaching. For example under Compassion on page 14, is Jesus’ speaking about compassion, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” LUKE 6.31. On page 15 is Buddha’s thoughts about compassion “Consider others as yourself.” DHAMMAPADA 10.I. Here’s another saying on pages 36 and 37 under Wisdom. Jesus is quoted as saying “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” LUKE 6. 41.42. Buddha is quoted as saying, “The faults of others are easier to see than one’s own; the faults of others are easily seen, for they are sifted like chaff, but one’s own faults are hard to see. UDANAVARGA 27.1.
Here’s an article, Jesus and Buddha on Happiness that starts out by the 29 year old Prince Gautama Siddhartha (563-483 BC) , who later was called the Buddha (the enlightened one) left his family and set out on a search for the meaning of life, and for lasting happiness. Since he had no God happiness for him was being free from desires induced by suffering (dukkha). Jesus’ answers are very different than Buddha’s when a rich young man sought Jesus directions for eternal happiness. “You lack one thing: go, sell all you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasures in heaven; and come follow me.” (Mark 10:21)
The article goes on to say, “Jesus and Buddha agree that pursuing happiness is transient things is futile. But they direct us to opposite solutions. The Buddha say satisfaction is treasuring no thing. Jesus says it is treasuring God. In God we get all things. In no thing we get nothing.”
I found this article in a website titled All Well Within. The article is The Buddha’s Essential Guide to Happiness. The article starts out by saying, “You don’t have to become a Buddhist to benefit from the essential teachings of the Buddha because they are universal in nature. Moreover, they remain highly relevant to successfully modern life and finding the deeper sense of happiness and contentment you deserve.” Even though it doesn’t deal with both Jesus and Buddha, I thought most of us know a lot about Jesus and this article is worth it. It’s seven pages long, but again, it’s worth it. Plus I learned that “…the Buddha encouraged his followers to carefully examine his teachings and only accept them when they rang true, rather than following his guidance out of blind faith.” That sounds close to my memoir that I mentioned in the beginning of this blog.
I hope this blog inspires you to look deeper into Buddhism. As a present, here is a TED TALK The Habits of Happiness by biochemist turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard who says we can train our minds in habits of well-being, to generate a true sense of serenity and fulfillment. It already has 6,470,020 readers. It’s worth listening to.
