Of Weasels and Weaving

 Mark 4:26-34

When I was a freshman in college, aside from the trumped up PE class, the remedial calculus, and Introduction to Western Literature, I had to take what was called a “first year seminar.” I think it was a chance for those of us who were new to higher education and the liberal arts to take a step back and think about what all this might be about, think about why we signed off on all those loans and moved in to that tiny dorm room with the girl from West Michigan, before we dove in to the minutia and detailed particularities of our chosen majors and got lost in the parties and clubs and Lake Michigan beach that was just twenty minute drive down the road. In this class, we read philosophy, we read novels, we read speeches and poetry, and one particular, life changing essay by pulitzer prize winning author, Annie Dillard. The essay was called “Living like Weasels.”

Now I’m so very tempted to just stop right now, pull out the essay, and read it for you all and we can call it a day. The essay is beautiful and rich and a far greater testament to the intimacy and the brutality, and the intense passion that is the kingdom of God. But because I am a people pleaser, and I am afraid of being accused of not doing my own homework, I guess I’ll just summarize it here. 

Around sunset, Annie Dillard liked to walk a few blocks past her house in the suburbs to a pond, nestled between gated housing developments and the highway. She would go there to sit. To watch. To be.

While there, she encounters a weasel. She’s sitting on a log and thinking her thoughts, and there it is, her first encounter with a weasel. And she has this moment with it. She enters, as Howard Thurman would say, the “genuine” of the weasel, and the weasel enters in to the genuine in her. Suddenly there is no Annie. No weasel. No pond, or sunset, or rotting log. And there is also only Annie, and only the weasel, and only the pond and the sunset and the log. 

Weasels are wild and reckless things she says. Unpredictable. They are predators. Ruthlessly going for the jugular at the neck until the victim gives in to the circle that is life. 

She tells the story of a man who shot an eagle out of the sky, and when it landed with a thud onto the earth and he ran over to collect his prize, he found, firmly attached to the eagle’s neck, the skull of a weasel. Somehow, maybe it was the eagle looking for lunch, or maybe it was the trumped up vibrato of a wild and reckless weasel, but somehow, there was an encounter between the rodent and the scavenging bird of prey. Did the eagle eat what little it could reach of the weasel while it gripped its neck whatever the cost? Did the weasel simply refuse to let go until it lost everything of what it was except that grip to the neck? And then the eagle carried this millstone of a scull around its neck for the rest of its life, soaring above the tree line, swooping above the waves, nesting in the highest branches always with this weasel, clamped to the side of its neck?

It’s like that, she says.  But she never really tells us exactly what the “it” is that she’s referring to.

All the best things are like that though. The best things that can only be experienced through the wonder and intimacy and delicacy and precariousness of the physical things in our everyday worlds. 

It’s like this. It’s like that. Jesus says. Annie says. A weasel or a rose or a seed or a pearl. This thing we can’t quite get ahold of is like a coin in a field and bread that is broken, and vines and branches and a sower who went out to sow. That’s what it’s like, this kingdom of God - always at the tip of our tongues, always slipping through our fingers, but always, always leaving some hint, some kind of evidence that it was there or that it’s coming or that it’s here right now. The kingdom of God is like that moment that Annie Dillard has staring eye to eye with that weasel. They’re locked in an embrace of sorts, they’re entranced by the other, they’re intimately connected, and then poof, it’s gone, just like that, “enchantment” broken. She experienced a moment of the kingdom of God, and that made her think of the story of the weasel and the eagle, and of passionate intensity and gripping dedication, and relentless commitment to never letting go. She’s doing what Jesus is showing us how to do in our passage today. She’s looking at the world around her and finding the sacred, the intimate moments, that reveal to her that there is so much more around us than a “simple” drainage pond on the side of the highway. And she connecting it to more stories, more encounters of the world, weaving together likenesses until the warp and the weft combine to make one big tapestry.

It’s like this.

It’s like that.

It’s like a lamp under a bushel basket.

It’s like seed, scattered on the ground, and the guy who throws it out there goes about his life. He sleeps. He wakes up. And somehow, he doesn’t know how, but somehow the seed sprouts and grows and the “earth produces of itself.”

It’s like a tiny mustard seed, that when planted, gets huge and overgrown and out of control and the birds of the air can make nests in its branches. You get enough of these threads and an image of the whole starts to form. 

But the most important thing, the most important thing that we have to hold on to, that we must latch on to with our tightest grip, that we must lock our jaws upon, is that question itself. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?”

Look around you, Jesus is saying, we can’t hold the Kingdom of God in our hands, no more than we could hold water. We can’t put it in a box and say, “here it is! Oh good! I’m so glad that we’ve found it.” We can’t fully understand or name or control this thing that Jesus is inaugurating. We can only experience it, describe what it’s like, point in the direction from where it came, and then keep looking around for more. It’s just one thread. But it’s a thread. 

The kingdom of God is like exhausted children telling ghost stories with flashlights under their chins. The kingdom of God is like a cluttered house and the single mom who saves the yogurt containers because they can’t be recycled. The kingdom of God is like those two trees you go past everyday on your way to the dog park. It’s like cats scratching at the bottom of an empty food bowl. It’s like confused disciples and bewildered crowds. It’s like late night Netflix binges and like saying “I’m sorry” and hearing “I love you” for the very first time. It’s ponds in the suburbs and losing yourself in the eyes of a weasel. It’s like latching your whole self to a thing and never, ever, letting go. It’s like remembering how easy it is to forget that all this stuff, all this earth and wheat and leaves and clouds and the stories themselves, are so much like the kingdom that the division between the two things falls away, the “like” disappears, and when we experience it for exactly what it is, there it is, the kingdom of God. We stop seeing the individual threads, and a pattern starts to emerge. The kingdom of God is in that thread, because the kingdom of God is all the threads.

The kingdom of God is like a seed. And the kingdom of God is the seed. Jesus himself is so very much like God in God’s self, that the division between the two blurs. Jesus shows us what God is like. And Jesus is God. 

Jesus wants us to approach the whole world, approach him, like that. WIth so much intensity and determination and stubbornness that the divisions we set up between ourselves and all these other things disappear. We become so like Christ that we become “Christians” - or literally, “little Christs.” We grab on to the neck of the kingdom and we refuse to let go, no matter what happens, no matter if this is how it all ends. So that when our story is done, they’ll know what we could never let go of. They’ll know what we were so committed to that it cost us everything we had and everything we are. They’ll see our thread that was necessary to make the whole.

See, Jesus is showing us in this passage that it’s not about “understanding,” or comprehending, or writing a creed or a dissertation about how you know all that right answers. It’s about the experience. It’s about looking so hard for the kingdom of God in this world, in all the fleshy, incarnated, devastating, brokenness of this world, that we can no longer differentiate ourselves from it. The kingdom is in us. The kingdom becomes us. Or maybe rather, we become the kingdom. We weave ourselves so intimately with this world that we become the world.  

I know I’m swooping in here with flowery and philosophical language and I’m getting carried away with the imagery and metaphors and the stuff, but really, what I want us to keep looking at, what I want to keep looking for, are all those encounters - encounters with weasels and eagles and seeds and mustard bushes and bread and befuddled people - those encounters where we lose ourselves, for just a moment, where we look into the eyes of the other and we get lost, and thus, somehow, we’re found. We experience this life, this precious and frustrating and anxious and terrifying thing with so much intensity that we see the holy in it all, we see the kingdom, right here, right in front of us, in pianos and candles and pews and hymnals. We see it in the threads. We latch on to this life stuff so tightly that we never let it go, so that when it finally kills us, everyone will know, everyone will see how we made the kingdom of God real in our own lives. 

And there’s a resurrection in that. There’s a living beyond our lives and our selves when we fully enter in, when we fully clamp on to that thing that we will give our whole lives to. 

And that’s what Jesus did. He fully entered in. He embraced all the stuff. He ate and he drank and felt the sand between his toes. He got dirty and he got hurt and he bled and he looked around and saw the kingdom. He said, “Here it is. It’s like this. It’s this.” Clamp your jaws on that. Look so deeply in that you lose yourself. Give it everything you have. Don’t let it go. Weave yourself fully into that tapestry.

The kingdom of God is like a man, sent from God, who, though in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God something to cling to, but rather entered in to this world, clung to this world so completely that he was human, he clamped on to all the things that humans experienced, that he was so like a human he was a human, and he died the most human of deaths. He became so human that God exalted him to the highest of places, soaring above us all, so that we can bow and proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord. So that we can grab a hold of him, and never let go. So that we can be a thread in that tapestry of the kingdom of God.

Thanks be to God. 

Midrash as Spiritual Practice.

 

First, on the Third Day

    “Make a Gospel Contemplation on how Jesus, now Lord, appears to his mother, Mary. There is no scripture for this. But as Ignatius suggests in notation, it is presumed.” 

                  - The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, Veltri

When he was little, she’d pretend she couldn’t find him. 

This was before his wandering tween years. 

He’d jump out from behind a rock or a tree 

where she’d already seen his coat billowing around him, 

“Surprise! Gotcha!” 

She would act shocked every time.

Today, like yesterday, it is too quiet. 

She is tired of waiting.

“Hey, Momma,” he says, 

as if he’d just come home from summer camp 

or college 

or a tour overseas. 

As if he were opening the fridge, drinking milk straight from the bottle.

“There you are,” she says. “I’ve been waiting.”

“Sorry. I got held up.”

She laughs despite herself. She groans. 

She rolls her eyes and punches his shoulder. 

She has a pretty good reach for such tiny hands. 

Would he ever take any of this seriously? 

He has. He has. And now that’s done. It’s done.

What happens next?

He’s still the same. 

Maybe a little sadder, a little quieter, 

but still the same boy who collected his treasures on the windowsill. 

She hands them to him.

A snail shell.

An acorn.

A stalk of wheat.

A flat rock. Good for skipping.

A broken piece of clay.

“Here. These belong to you,” she says.

“Oh. I’d forgotten about those. Thanks for keeping them safe.”

“I think it was you that did that."

His smile is half, crooked. 

He is far away.

He knows a secret he cannot yet tell.

“Did you take that man with you? The one who asked?”

“Yeah, Ma, he’s fine. They’re all fine.”

He yawns, stretches, rubs his temples. 

That line in his forehead is new.

She knows that he will leave again.

It will be his choice.

She is so proud of him. Sometimes she wishes she didn’t have to be.

“Well, go on. Don’t you have work to do?”

“Yeah. I do,” he sighs, “and I’m starving.”

“Well. Get on then.”

She gives him a push. It’s harder than she meant.

He runs off. He seems lighter. 

He doesn’t look back.

Is this how it was? 

It is how it could have been, and that is enough.

Kahlua, Spiritual Trauma, and the Baby's Bathwater

Read this! It's Paul, I know, but you can do this. I believe in you. 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

 For me, it was vanilla flavored vodka. It wasn’t even some great event. We weren’t at a party or a wedding or in some random frat boy’s basement. We were just drinking vanilla vodka cokes and watching Saturday Night Live. And, I think, it was even Diet Coke. But by the time the second musical performance came around, wham, it hit me, and I spent the rest of the night hugging the cold tile in the bathroom. For my mom, it was Kahlua. So, sad, I know, right? She went with a group of friends to meet a friend coming in from Arizona. The flight was super delayed, so, she says, they went to the airport bar to wait it out. Apparently, they had a great time, and my mom, somehow, drank an entire bottle of Kahlua, and I’m not sure what she mixed it with, if anything. Well, the rest is history. Her friend’s flight landed, they grabbed her luggage, and dropped my mom at one of the friend’s houses. They left her in the tender care of Nally’s mom and then went back out to the bars to party some more. So fast forward twenty-five years, and on some Thanksgiving day, we’re all at my Grandma’s house, and someone pulls out a bottle of Kahlua. You know, just a little to drizzle over some ice cream. So good. And my mom has to leave the room. She can’t even stand the smell of it. So she tells us the tragic story of how she once drank too much and could never, ever, have it, ever again. I mean, no Kahlua, ever again? That’s just devastating. How could someone be so unable to tolerate that sweet yet bitter coffee vanilla caramel deliciousness for the rest of their lives? How can it be that someone must reject something that is so good?

Of course, this happens to us in other ways, too. We eat spaghetti and meatballs during the first months of pregnancy, and there goes that option for a quick and easy dinner plan. Levi, last summer, took a big spill on his bike and said, “I’m never going to ride a bike ever again!” I have a super tough time when I meet “Jasons” or “Robs” simply because of a few tragic encounters in my pre-teen and teenage years. I cannot stand the smell of funeral flowers, and I gave up softball after just one season. A certain song was playing on the radio just when you got the bad news, and now, you can’t ever listen to that song again. A certain smell takes you back to when you were little and heard your parents fighting, or you can no longer stomach that ham and bean soup mom would make every week for your whole childhood. Someone told you you weren’t a “math person” so you gave up and decided to be “bad at math.” Your first taste of beer or whisky or tobacco or a chemical high and you’re hooked, and you spend way too much time and energy and money pursuing the stuff until you’ve wasted your life. We are forever changed by our experiences, sometimes, so much so, that even good things in and of themselves, things that are fun or nourishing or invigorating, can never be experienced again, simply because we had one bad experience with it. Some things that other people can enjoy just fine are off limits for us, simply because we aren’t built to avoid abusing it.

We, on the outside, don’t understand it at all. How can it be that someone now hates or can no longer tolerate something that is so, so good?

I think we ask this question about the church all the time, but in different forms. We ask, why aren’t more people here? Why are so many churches closing? Don’t folks know how good it is here? Don’t they know that this place is home? That we are family? Why are so many people rejecting this church? This place where we have known love and community and connection and the actual spirit of God? But guys, all it takes is one bad experience, one bad encounter, to turn something good in to something that can never, ever be stomached again. Ask me sometime about how I feel about vanilla Cokes or pink carnations. 

He was told that who he loved was unacceptable. She left after the congregation took his side in a messy divorce. They were made to feel unwelcome because they are struggling with their gender identity. They could get married in the church, but he would not be allowed to take communion because he is not a member. He offered to play his classical guitar during the worship service, but first he’d need to “try out” because he was not a professional musician. Their autistic son asked uncomfortable questions. She was told that if she prayed harder, her depression would go away. She was sexually abused by her youth group leader. He never could speak in tongues. She kept coming forward to accept Christ into her heart, year after year, and nothing ever happened. She introduced her daughter to the pastor, and he said she must not be a Christian since she named her after a Buddhist concept of loving-kindness. He had a lot of doubts when everyone else seemed to be so sure. They came to church a little late one Sunday, and the doors were already locked. 

That’s all it takes for some of us. Just one bad experience. And that’s it. It’s enough for you never to return to church or think about God or faith or Jesus ever again.

Spiritual trauma takes many forms. And different people have varying sensitivities to that trauma. For some, not being allowed to doubt or ask certain questions is enough to turn them off from a religious community for the rest of their lives. Others have had atrocious, reprehensible experiences that scarred not only their spiritual lives, but their emotional, mental, relational, and physical lives as well. Some of us have the spirituality of an orchid; we need to be cared for delicately, carefully, our environment kept just right in order to achieve maximum growth and potential. Others of us are dandelions. Our faith is persistent, we are resilient, and we can thrive in almost any setting. For some of us, if we are mowed over, we bounce right back. Others of us may never recover. But for all of us, if the soil has been poisoned, if our roots have been pulled from the ground, if we have been blocked from the sun’s rays, if we’ve been separated from living water or we’ve been so constricted that we have no room to grow, whether dandelion or orchid, our spiritual potential is dramatically cut short, we find ourselves separated from community, and we leave our spirituality behind, resigned to let that aspect of our lives whither while we attempt to feed the other elements of our lives without it. 

Just one bad experience, and then never again. No more Kahlua Mocha Milkshakes, no more vanilla Cokes, no more pews or organs or Scripture or Sunday mornings. That’s it. 

So what can we do about it? How can we tend to the pain of all of this spiritual trauma all around us? I’m not quite sure. But I think maybe Paul has some words for us today. 

And oof. I struggle with Paul. I struggle with his Hellenistic dualities, I struggle with his rules and his bravado, I struggle with all the ways that his words have been misconstrued and applied to different contexts so that the Christian faith feels suffocating, I feel inept, and Paul’s words get used to drawn lines covered in razor wire to define who is “in” and who is “out.” But something told me to enter back in to this Pauline space this week — years after being the target of so many of his words, years after so many of his scripture bombs had been thrown at who I am, and at those I love. Maybe there’s something at the heart of his words that shouldn’t be thrown out just yet.

And there it is, right in that first verse in our reading today, it’s about the spirit. It’s about what is at the heart. The rest can just fall away, if it happens to make one of God’s beloveds violently ill. We don’t lose heart. We don’t lose what is at the heart. We don’t, as my mom loves to say, “throw the baby out with the bath water.” The hard thing for us, I think, is that we sure do love our bath water. The hard thing, I think, is that we find so much comfort in our building, in our history, in our customs and rituals and liturgies and stories, we mistake that for the baby. We love our hymnals and our doxology and our creeds and our order of worship. We love our spires and our white columns and our Sunday school and our committee meetings. And so we mistake all that for the baby. We invite people in and offer them Kahlua and vanilla vodka and spaghetti and meatballs and a pick-up softball game after the service. None of these things are bad. In fact, they are all pretty good. But for those who have had just one bad experience, these things will never hold their goodness for them ever again. Paul is telling the Corinthians, and telling us, that even if all of that falls away, if we lose all of these outer things, our inner nature is still being renewed day by day. And for some folks, in order for them to come back to the heart of what truly matters, we are going to have to learn to speak in a new language, we are going to have to learn some new rhythms, we are going to have to attend to the spiritual trauma that organs and buildings and communion wafers and pulpits represent. Because all of that is not the heart of what matters. They may be good for us. We may enjoy them very much. They may feed us with rich and delicious food. But they may also be keeping other people out. They may also be too painful and too poisonous for some to even taste.

Paul is imploring all of us to look to that which is inside of ourselves, look to that which cannot be seen, look to the uncompromising love and acceptance and healing power of Christ, because that’s the church, that’s what’s eternal. If we need to strip ourselves of all the “bath water” in order to express that uncompromising love and acceptance and healing power of Christ to those who have been traumatized by the Church, then we’ve got to do it. We’ve got to clear away all the oppressive language and the hurtful ideologies and the unattainable value systems in order to get to the heart of what is “the eternal weight of glory beyond all measure,” which is the baby, born in Bethlehem, to two peasant parents, who wandered around teaching us about uncompromising love and acceptance and resurrection and renewal and sacrificial love, who will be crucified on the cross, simply because he loved too much, and who will come back again to tell us that death is not the end. That’s at the heart of it all. That’s the spirit of our faith. That’s the good and nourishing and life giving and healing food that all people can find palatable. 

The bathwater goes cold. It gets dirty and murky. We are all going to die. This building will crumble. Nature is in a constant state of change. So, I ask, as the church changes, as this church changes, can we hold on to the spirit of faith that is in accordance with scripture, can we carry with us the heart of what is inside of us that is being renewed day by day, and can we let go of all the other stuff that might cause pain to someone, that might keep them from getting back on that bike or trying a new cocktail, or entering in to a spiritual space, risking relationships in community, or finding new language with which to talk about the love of God? Will our bathwater keep them away from the baby?

Paul tells us that we are to hold on to the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with the scriptures. And what is the spirit of our faith? It’s presence with Christ. It’s extending grace to more and more people. It’s increasing our thanksgiving, to the glory of God. The rest is just bathwater. Sometimes cozy. Sometimes warm. Sometimes cleansing and calming. But also sometimes scalding. Also sometimes far too frigid. Sometimes, it’s dirty and polluted. It could be drowning. Let’s keep the baby. And let’s be open to all the places where we might need to throw the bathwater out. 

My mom still can’t drink Kahlua. But she’s really in to wine now. No more vanilla Cokes for me, but I do enjoy an occasional gin and tonic, and we’ve been playing around with manhattans here and there. I can’t stand carnations and other “funeral flowers,” but we’re growing some sunflowers in our backyard and I enjoy a good lavender body lotion. After a lot of rest, support, encouragement and a new location, Levi got back on his bike. The baby is alive. Let’s go find him. Let’s share him, no matter where that takes us, no matter how that changes us, no matter what we need to leave behind.

Thanks be to God.

Born Again, Again.

 Read! John 3:1-17

 By the time I was in the ninth month of pregnancy with both of my boys, I was ready. I couldn’t sleep. I had to take short breaths and frequent bathroom breaks. My feet were swollen and I had to waddle, not walk, down the street. As terrifying as the thought of labor was, as difficult as this transition would be for both of us, baby and mom, the darkness of the womb had done its job, the baby had outgrown its cozy home, and it was time. Time for birth. 

Now birth, as many of you know, is messy work. I was so grateful to the discrete nurses who would wipe and sweep, wrap and cover, never making a big deal of the blood and slough as nature took its course. Birth is hard work. It’s difficult. It’s painful. It’s long. It’s labor. 

And it’s hard on a baby, too. The baby has to transition from the dark coziness of the womb to the harsh light and cold of the world. To go from darkness to light, from ease to pain, desire, need and want, warmth to cold, the baby all tucked in to suddenly having these limbs that flail, this stomach that hungers, a body that has to regulate its own temperature and a throat that has to swallow its own food. 

Birth is this hard, messy, miraculous thing. And although I wish I could protect my kids from all the struggles that life will bring, although I wish I could protect them from making mistakes, from being hurt, from taking missteps, they needed to come out from the safety of the womb, both for their own good and for mine. 

It’s like that, Jesus says. 

It’s like being born from above. 

You have to be born of the Spirit, just like you were born of the flesh. We are being birthed by God. It’s a labor. It’s hard and it’s messy and the transition from the womb to the world is difficult, cold, harsh, bright. 

The Spirit is the mother who births us. We, right now, are being birthed by God. 

And poor Nicodemus. Poor Nicodemus, who has read all the books, has studied all the texts, is an expert in the Jewish faith and has examined all the metaphors, has trouble with this one. He can’t wrap his mind around a God who labors for our spiritual births. 

I think we can relate. What does it mean to be “born again” or “born from above?” We don’t exactly know, and so, we simplify things, we harden things, we make things literal. We narrow our faith down to one chewable bite of a verse so that we don’t have to deal with the complexity of the entire narrative, the complicated metaphor.

We’ve taken John 3:16 and turned it into a kind of code language to determine if others are “in” or “out.” Have you been born again? Have you been saved like us? Are you one of us or one of them? 

Nicodemus, as a Pharisee, has spent his whole life learning about what it takes to be “in”. He has studied and read and taught and is an expert. He’s mastered this material. He’s taken the graduate level courses and written the dissertation and even applied for a couple of post-docs. And yet. And still. There is something missing. He’s not yet ready to give up all that he knows, all that he has, all that he has achieved to start over, so, he thinks, if he just takes what he has and adds a little Jesus to it, he’ll have it, he’ll be whole, he have it right, he will have graduated magna cum laude from “Perfect Faith in God University.” But this is a big risk. I mean, he could be wrong. Someone could find out that he has doubts about his faith. Folks might begin to question his authority. So he doesn’t take the chance; he visits Jesus at night. No one else will know. No one else will see that he hasn’t gotten it all figured out. He can just secretly add this one little idea to his library of knowledge, and then he’ll be complete. He’ll find the missing puzzle piece. He’ll have this God stuff all figured out.

So of course that’s not how it works with Jesus. Jesus has to turn our worlds upside down and inside out and challenge us from every angle. So when Nicodemus comes to him with a statement of faith of sorts, Jesus drags him out onto the high dive and pushes him in. 

Nicodemus is ready to accept that Jesus is a great teacher who has come from God. Isn’t that enough?

Nope. It’s not enough. And it is also too much. It’s simple really. You just have to go back to the beginning. You just have to go back to when you were brand new, when you knew nothing, when you were all potential and promise and hope and possibility. You have to be born again. You have to go back to that shocking rush of cold air on your skin, back to the light that’s too bright, back to that moment the flood of air filled your lungs and you could do nothing but let out a bold cry. You have to go back, to be born into something completely new. You have to come to this naked and vulnerable. You’re going to get a little squished, maybe come out a little purple, maybe with a dislocated shoulder or a cone head, covered in all that cheesy birth. 

And Nicodemus can’t seem to fathom how this is possible. How is it possible to start over? To start anew? How do we let go of all the things we have done, all the accomplishments we’ve made, all the degrees on our walls and the hard earned wisdom of our experiences? How do we let all that go and start over? And even harder, how do we let go of all of the regrets, all the mistakes and hurt and pain that we carry with us like trophies or scars or triumphs of our survival? How do we let go of what others have done to us? How can these things be?, Nicodemus asks. 

How do we let it go?

All that we’ve “earned.” All that we’ve accomplished. All that we’ve gathered and accumulated and all that makes us, us. How do we let it go? We can’t go back and undo the past. We can’t pretend that all this hasn’t happened, we can’t unknow what we know or unring the bell. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. I mean, can you?

What’s done is done. We’ve already been born. There are no do-overs.

Except, when there is. Every moment can be a do-over. Every moment can be a new start, a new birth, simply because the Son is lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. Simply because Jesus was torn from everything he knew, and then he was raised again, we can be, too.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

Jesus was born in flesh and blood, and Jesus was born again, through his flesh and his blood. Jesus was stripped of everything he knew and everything he had while he was lifted up on the cross. He had nothing. He was no longer anything. His clothing was stripped from his body, his miracles were stripped from his story, everything he had accomplished and taught and believed were gone. He was broken and beaten and naked. But in that crucifixion is the resurrection. Jesus, with nothing but the same self that came in to this world, was being born again. He was naked and bruised and carried the marks of his rebirth with him even after the resurrection. 

For God so loved the world that God gives us all a chance to be reborn, just like Jesus was, because Jesus was. This is eternal life, I think, I hope. It’s not necessarily some place of perfection where all of our problems go away and we never have to feel pain again, but rather it is this continual re-birth, this continue restarting, this continual renewing and wiping the slate clean. It’s a difficult, laborious process. We’re going to come out of it a little bit bruised. It’s a startling process. We’re going to experience sensations that we’ve never experienced before. 

But what it takes is a letting go. We have to let go of the place where we’ve been so cozy, so comfortable, where we’ve got it all figured out. I mean, think about it. You’re all snug in the womb. You don’t have to regulate your own temperature, chew your own food, pay any taxes or scrub the bathtub. And then comes a time when you’ve outgrown your comfortable spot. It’s time to come out. It’s time to expand. But to do that, you have to let go of the amniotic fluid that has been supporting you all this time. You have to let go of that immediate and comforting thrum of your mother’s heartbeat. You have to let go of climate control and weightlessness and this comfortable way of life that you’ve figured out for yourself. We have to let go of the answers and start asking the questions all over again. You have to leave all of that behind. And enter in to something entirely, completely, shockingly new. And enter in to something you are entirely, completely, and shockingly unequipped and unprepared for. We come into this new world with nothing for certain, except our need, our vulnerability, our absolute dependence upon the one who has just birthed us. 

So here we are in this cozy womb. In this cozy church. In this cozy neighborhood. We’ve worked so hard and learned so much and gotten used to the rhythms of life all around us. We’ve repaired the cracks in the walls and maintained the landscaping and joined the Bible studies and the women’s groups. We have communion once a month and we tithe to important charities and these are all really, really, good things. But we know that we are still missing something. We are still coming to Jesus in the middle of the night and asking, “What more do we need? What can we add?” And Jesus responds, “Well, you need nothing more than to start all over, to be reborn, to go through the difficult, painful process of becoming something new. You need to start again. You need to let go of all that you have so that you can see all that you are. So that you can see the one who has labored and cared for you all this time.”

My mom tells this funny story of when I was born. This was before they had precise due dates and detailed ultrasound measurements and somewhat accurate weight estimates. I was due just after Christmas in 1978. My Dad was hoping to squeeze me on as another tax write off. But I refused to budge. A few days passed, 1979 came along, and my mom waited. I can almost imagine how uncomfortable she must have been, how anxious she was to see what I looked like, to discover my personality, to meet me in a new way. But it wasn’t until January 15, three weeks after my due date, that I decided to make my appearance, and then they had to use some Pitocin to drag me out. I like to think that I was making a smart choice. It was safe and warm and comfortable, even if just a little cramped, nothing was required of me, nothing was asked of me, I could simply stay where I was, as I was. 

Except we can’t stay where we are, as we are. We have to be born. We have to come out of the comfortable, but confining spaces that we have grown out of so that we can come to be in new and wild and different ways. We can learn language and laughter and pain and heartbreak and the feel of the sun on our skin in deeper, more profound ways. But first, we have to let go of what we think we have. We have to let go of who we think we are. We have to let go of all of the things that we’ve achieved and learned and earned and accumulated, and we have to step out into something new. We need to embrace that beginner’s mind - that place in ourselves when we experience things for the first time. Where we have an openness, a willingness to receive, a need, and a kind of astonishment at encountering these new thoughts and feelings and experiences for the very first time. When we are born again, we have a chance to rediscover who we are, to have an innocence and emptiness of mind that is ready and anxious and open to be filled. We don’t have habits or preconceived notions or prescribed beliefs; we are simply open to the miracle of possibility. Of potential. Of what could be coming to life right in front of us. Like a child mesmerized by the feel of grass between her toes, or obsessed with stacking the blocks and then knocking them back down again, over and over, we can come to this life with our full attention, not trying to accomplish or “know” or “understand,” but simply to experience with our fullest, most attentive selves, moment after moment, again and again.

This is far from easy. This letting go is the hardest work we will ever do.

But God is birthing us into something new. We are being born again. Over and over.

We can resist that. Or we can embrace it.
Jesus shows us what can happen when we let go of all the things we thought we were and all the things we thought we knew and release ourselves to this painful process of being born again. We are continually becoming, we are continually being born again, and it is a rough and painful and messy process, both for us and for the One who births us. But it is an entrance into new possibilities, new experiences, and most importantly, new depths of relationship with our Mother who labors and gives and offers herself to us, over and over, life after life, revealed to us through the birth, life, and rebirth of Jesus Christ. 

Come, be born of water. Be born of Spirit. And then do it all over again. This is the kingdom of God. We have a loving laborer who will wrap us up and nurse us and protect us and also send us on our way to be human, send us on our way to make mistakes be vulnerable and to need Christ, and to start all over again. 

Thanks be to God.

Sand or Stars or Rubik's Cubes

 Read this! Acts 2:1-21

“Hey Mom,” Jonah says, “Did you know that the Rubik’s cube has something like a trillion different combination possibilities?” “What?” I said. “Nu uh.” 

See Jonah loves random facts. He reads these National Geographic “Weird But True” books and they’re full of things like “the world’s termites outweigh the world’s people” and “If you traveled at the speed of light, you’d reach Pluto in just four hours,” and, “you’d never get older.” And “It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.” Sometimes he just pulls random “facts” out of his butt. They aren’t really facts at all, just things he’s made up that he thinks he heard somewhere, so, meh, true enough. He’ll say stuff like, “Hey Mom, did you know that cotton candy is actually a vegetable,” and “Soccer player Lionel Messi can kick a soccer ball at 187 miles per hour,” and “It’s totally reasonable for an eleven year old to have three gaming monitors, a cell phone, and an 11 o’clock bedtime.” So you can see why I might be a little skeptical. But this got us all wondering about big, big numbers. There are almost 8 billion people on earth, and for every one person alive today, there are 1.6 million ants. It takes a human at least 89 days to count to a million. And Jeff Bezos has enough money to spend 11 million dollars a day for the next 50 years - or until he turns 107 - and have a few bucks left over. 

We wondered about how many stars are in the sky, and how many grains of sand are on the earth. And which would be a bigger number, the sand or the stars? Well, we had to look that one up. Turns out that if you assumed a grain of sand has an average size, and then you figured out approximately how many of those grains would fit into a teaspoon, and multiply that by the size of all the beaches and deserts in the world, Earth holds roughly seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand. Pretty impressive. That’s a number we can’t even get close to understanding or fathoming or comprehending, not even Jeff Bezos. But, with the help of a Hubble telescope and a calculator, they’ve figured out that there’s somewhere around 70 thousand million, million, million stars in the observable universe. So that means there are something like 10,000 stars for every grain of sand on Earth. So there you go, some random trivia for your next cocktail party. 

But outside of cocktail parties and eleven year old brains, who really cares about this stuff? Why should we even bother thinking about the bigness of such things? Well, I’m interested, at least, because it makes me think about how very very small we are. And about how God came to us as one of these very very small ones. God limited God’s self in space and time and got particular and individual and up close and intimate. And then whoosh, he’s gone, sucked up to who knows where through the clouds, never to be seen in a corporeal body again. Meanwhile, creation is still happening. Trees are still growing. Babies are being born. Cells are dividing. Stars are exploding. Grains of sand are being carved and smoothed and rolled against the shore. Jesus ascends, but the work keeps going. And just as we get to see a little bit of who Monet was in his “Water Lilies,” and we can hear a bit who Beethoven was in his 5th Symphony, and we understand Shakespeare a little better by reading Twelfth Night, we get the tiniest glimmers of who God is in all this stuff, in these quintillion grains of sand and these thousands of million, million, million stars in the observable universe, and in all those ants and termites and humans and dust bunnies and pine cones and glasses of beer and YouTube cat videos and late credit card payments and specks of afternoon light coming through our kitchen window. Friends, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, this searching for God thing. But somehow, somehow, it’s still so easy for us to miss.

Why is it still so easy for us to miss? Why is it everywhere, all around us, and yet we still can’t seem to see it, to trust it, to know that it’s there? 

I think we get some hints as to why this is so in our passage today. 

See the disciples are all hunkered down, gathered together in one place, and they’re waiting. They’re waiting just like Jesus told them to. God has come to them in a very particular place, at a very specific time, in the unique brown-eyed, olive complexioned, callused footed, five foot something physical mediocrity of Jesus. And so they’re waiting. What are they expecting, I wonder? I mean, Jesus has walked through walls and met them in crowded rooms before, maybe they’re expecting that again? They’ve seen miraculous healings and the defiance of physics and heard strange teachings, so, I wonder, are they expecting more of the same? Sometimes, I wonder, do we miss it because we’re just so used to more of the same? If we’ve seen one grain of sand, we’ve seen them all? The stars have always been there, so why notice tonight? 

Or are they hyper vigilant? Do they hear every creak in the floorboards and watch the sun go behind the clouds and feel a drip of sweat down their necks and wonder “what was that? Was that it? Did we miss it? Did you see it?” Sometimes, I wonder if we miss it because we’ve lost all sense of the sacred and we don’t trust ourselves when it’s there. 

God comes to us in our particularity, but it’s too small, we take it for granted.

God comes to us in our familiarity, but we glance over it, like leftovers in the fridge or the pile of dirty laundry that’s been languishing in the corner.

So this one time, God comes to them in fire and fury. Forget the particularity. Forget the familiarity. God comes in strangeness and astonishment. There’s the sound of the rush of a violent wind, and it fills the whole house. And then their heads catch on fire. Or something. These tongues of flames dance above their heads, and they all start talking in different languages and they’re “filled with the Holy Spirit.” God does not want them to miss this. God is making sure that God’s voice is heard and God’s presence is clearly recognized. God gives them an experience of God’s self that is like shooting fish in a barrel. They can’t miss it. It’s right there. Right in front of them. No doubts. No questions. No wonderings. It’s clearly God. But, you know, just in case it’s still not clear to them, they get witnesses. All these Jews from all over the world are in Jerusalem, and they hear it, too. So they gather around these instant polyglots and hear familiar words, words that they understand, words that they don’t have to process through the translation machines in their brains in order to get some semblance of meaning. These disciples are speaking their language. There’s an understanding going on between them that runs deeper than the marketplace or religious tradition or the exchange of commerce. And these witnesses are totally floored. These “others,” these Galileans, these followers of Jesus - this strange insurrectionist who was rumored to have healed and taught and then was put to death by the state - these nervous, hiding, awkward band of brothers, are speaking in their native languages, in their home tongues, in the words of their parents and their children and their earliest memories of comprehension. Everyone, in their own particularity, in their own specificity, in their own unique language, is hearing the word of God in a way they can understand and intimately connect with. God does not want anyone to miss this, so God pulls out all the stops - the rushing wind, the tongues of fire, the specificity of meeting each individual exactly where they are. 

God in the big and dramatic.

God in the tiny and specific.

All of it.

And of course, there are also still the cynics. “They’re all just drunk,” they say. 

And ready to defend himself and his friends, Peter attempts to make their defense. And in probably one of the greatest non sequiturs ever used, he says, “we’re not drunk, for it’s only nine o’clock in the morning!” As any of us who have had too much fun in college might attest, that really proves nothing. But maybe it’s not the argument that gets the crowd’s attention, but the common language of their holy scriptures. Peter quotes from the prophet Joel - a common language, familiar sounds that can unite them all. 

God is desperate that we don’t miss this. God sends wind. God sends flames. God sends witnesses. God sends the intimacy and particularity of our own languages and God sends the unifying common stories of our traditions. God in the rushing wind, and in the still, small voice. So, like a delicious gumbo, God throws in everything God’s got, right down to the kitchen sink. God cashes it all in. God goes for broke. God pulls out all the stops. Please, oh please, let’s not miss it.

Pentecost comes to us with all the wind raging and the chaos swirling and the languages speaking so that all we have to do is reach out our hands and just like that, we’ve caught it. Or, a little bit of it, at least. And well, that’s enough. It’s as easy and as close as our next breath. It’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. As finding a star in the sky. As discovering a grain of sand on the beach. This is the birth of the church.

It’s as particular to each of us as there are combinations on a Rubik’s cube.

See, Jonah was actually wrong. There are over 43 quintillion possible combinations on a standard 3x3 Rubik’s cube. 43 quintillion different ways to see and experience the same thing. See, I think we miss it, I think God comes to us in 43 quintillion different ways and we’re so busy trying to “solve it,” trying to get all the colors together and everything all lined up in the way it’s “supposed” to be, that we don’t realize that it’s all God. It’s all one cube in different languages. Because God came to us in the specificity and particularity and embodiedness and Aramaic of Jesus Christ, we get to experience God in all the specificity and particularity and embodiedness and native languages of our own lives. 

]43 quintillion combinations. One cube. 

Seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand in the world. One earth.

70 thousand million, million, million observable stars in the sky. One universe.

And here’s the biggest littlest mind-blowingest thing of them all: there are the same amount of molecules in ten drops of water as there are stars in the sky. Water that settles in, that fills up, that flows and travels and gets in to even the most tiniest of spaces and can be found everywhere we go, their number is beyond measure. 

See, big or little, vast and expansive or compressed and minuscule, God is in it all. God is coursing through our veins and crossing boundaries of language and rushing in to our lives in all the big expansive mind numbingly impossible ways, and in the smallest nooks and crannies of our lives. God gives us millions and billions and trillions and quintillions of ways to experience some part of who God is, because God is desperate that we don’t miss it. 

God is in the tiniest particularities, everywhere. 

God’s spirit poured out on all flesh. All of us. 

Holy God, give us ears to hear your rushing wind, eyes to see your tongues of fire, and hearts to understand the unique languages with which you speak to us. Let us reach out our hands and know that we’ve touched a bit of you. Maybe, God, may it be enough that we feel a little bit drunk on it all.

God, let’s not miss it.

Thanks be to God.