Tag

Dear People of Christ Church,
I’m delighted to be back writing in this space again, and so grateful for our ministry together as well as the space for reflection and time away. Thanks to senior warden Victoria Sundgren and junior warden Sasha Killewald for holding down the fort when I was away, and especially for Sasha’s kind words in this space two weeks ago about my work! Parish ministry really is a strange and wonderful, and most particularly, shared thing. Christ Church didn’t belong to Frederic Fales, the first rector of Christ Church (though our parish halls are now named for him), and it doesn’t belong to me. The ministry of this place belongs to God, and we individually and jointly are honored to participate in it.

This year when I was away, I found myself returning to the idea of wilderness. Much of our vacation this year was in Utah—canyons and red rock wilderness that stretches for miles and miles and miles, climate and landscape totally unlike the northeast. Mostly we hiked, and mostly the beasts of the wild kept to their own corners—except one backcountry trip when a rattlesnake got too tail-shakingly close to 5 year old Adah and we woke to find that a mountain lion had been through our campsite. Creation is a complicated place—we humans imagine that we are at the top, but it’s not that simple.

One of the most striking experiences we had over vacation was visiting first Mesa Verde National Park, and then the Ute Mountain Tribal Park just over the border in New Mexico. Both are home to literally millions of artifacts of the ancestral pueblo people who lived in the area between around 650 and 1300. We toured cave dwellings and pit houses with guides from the National Park Service Mesa Verde and with a Ute guide at the tribal park, and the views of history are so different. At the Ute Tribal Park, the artifacts were scattered around. Black and white pottery sherds were in mounds not far from the side of the road, exposed to wind and rain and, even more perilously, eight year olds. We picked through them and found our favorite designs. At Mesa Verde, artifacts like that were behind glass—old-style museum history, not living history. The National Park Service guide talked about the astonishing mystery of why such an archaeologically advanced culture would pick up and leave—maybe drought, maybe warfare, crop failure or over hunting. The Ute guide just said that it became clear to them that it was time to leave, so they left. It was time. They were supposed to go at one time, and supposed to leave at another. Allowing the artifacts be where they were was part of honoring the past.

Planning fall liturgy with Daniel, our director of music, our relationship to the past is a living question. Instead of potsherds, we have prayers. We worship a living God who moves in our lives today, but our forms are 2000 years old. How often do we sing the traditional Gloria, how often a more contemporary song that praises God in different language? How do we “sing to the Lord a new song” (Psalm 96) in our lives today?

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week in our Lent series, we continued our conversation about prayer, along with several of the SSJE brothers’ meditations on work. Brother Geoffrey talked about how he’d learned from their experiences with sustainable farming at their retreat place in West Newbury. As the brothers have experimented with raising pigs, chickens, growing plants, and collecting seeds, they’ve learned about sustainability: you don’t take out more from the land than you put in.

Sustainability is a concept that the Christ Church vestry has talked about a lot; how are we careful about the commitments we undertake as a parish to be sure we can be faithful to the core of our mission. There are so many things we could be doing in our own lives and as a parish—really good things!—but we have to choose the ones that God specifically calls us to at this time and this place, not just those things which might be good in general. The same goes for our own lives; there is a line between finding the joy in serving others and being trapped by the drudgery of more that you can do. And there are seasons, too—season of hard work and seasons of rest. Brother Geoffrey ends up on the word “balance;”—it’s a word that gets kicked around a lot, most often in reference to not having enough of it. I recently ran into a review of a book by poet and philosopher David Whyte, who writes:

[Work/life balance] is a phrase that often becomes a lash with which we punish ourselves … ; People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. 1

Instead of thinking of the things we do as outside of ourselves—a core “me” that spends its energy on parenting, then writing sermons, then parish administration, then being a spouse, then a friend—what if instead each of those identities were woven together in whole? Instead of a “me” as a fulcrum in the middle, what if you were yourself all the time? What kind of life would you live?

One place to start is to try to envision a different fulcrum; instead of “me” as the middle, what would it mean if God were the middle? This is what’s most striking to me about thinking about the Ten Commandments. At first glance they seem so ordinary and so like a general humanist way of living: who wouldn’t think a society based on avoiding theft and murder would be a good idea?

The difference comes in the reason for avoiding all kinds of bad behavior: I am the Lord your God. What it means for God’s providence and love for us to be the center fulcrum is a different sense of freedom, a new place of interpreting our lives. If nothing can separate us from the love of God, then we’re given a new freedom in Christ to offer ourselves. The Sabbath is the one place where this is made most concrete. And, of course, the Sabbath. The Sabbath is God’s making-sacred of time, God’s gift of taking hold of us in time for God’s self. No working, no buying, no selling. Because we are God’s.

There’s a lot at stake in shifting that fulcrum point away from our individual selves. If God has already reconciled me to God, then I’m judged by more than the quality of my last sermon or the readership on my last blog post. My kid messing up isn’t a wholesale condemnation on all of my parenting, it’s an invitation to come closer to each other and for us both to try something different.

Take a minute to re-center yourself in God’s grace. What does your work look like now? How do you feel about yourself? How can you let that grace be your fulcrum? What would help you bring that into each day?

Blessings,
Sara +

This week, I’m passing on a bit from Walter Brueggeman, whose book I read this week while home on a sick day: Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. I’ve written a lot in this space about feeling impatient about social justice and the Advent of Christ’s restoration of all things—I’ll try to be faithful to that holy impatience. Unholy impatience, however, is the kind I fall into more often. Short tempered with my kids when they take what seems like EIGHT YEARS to brush their teeth. Impatient in traffic, trying to avoid the distracting allure of the little red notifying sign that I have a Facebook message from someone. These kinds of impatiences are habits of thought absorbed in our technological world, when it feels like anything worth having must be eligible for overnight shipping, and anything worth doing must be able to be finished in an afternoon.

Here’s what Brueggeman says about that.
The divine rest on the seventh day of creation has made clear:
a. that Yahweh is not a workaholic
b. that Yahweh is not anxious about the full function of creation and
c. that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work (6).

Hear that? Creation doesn’t depend on your constant work. It doesn’t even depend on God’s constant work. Sabbath, Brueggeman says, is as necessary to God as it is to us—and rather archly reminds us that God did not just “check in” on creation on God’s day off. God knew it would be fine.

Sabbath, Sabbath, Sabbath. Rest, faithfulness, joy.
I feel like I’ve been writing and preaching grief and tragedy for too many weeks, and the sin of our world is still glaring, still there. But we will not be made more compassionate or more fruitful in our work in refusing to trust God. I’ve been so moved by all the stories of protest that have come out recently—high school students all over Boston leaving their classrooms, Harvard Medical School students in their white jackets leaving their lecture halls. To cease to operate in the usual economy of accomplishment and “business as usual” seems to me a sacramental response. The holy is revealed in the ordinary.

There is often a complaint that protest actions don’t directly impact the issues the protestors want changed. Blocking a highway entrance does nothing against police violence. Laying down on the street does nothing directly to end the racism that leaves black children more likely to be expelled from school than their white peers. 9 years of the Waltham peace vigil (see below), has not ended any wars. Those critiques may be compelling, but both racial injustice and war politics are so woven into our judicial and economic system and into our very habits of mind that there is no simple chain of cause and effect, anywhere. The critique just doesn’t fit.

Justice comes in God’s time, with all of us needing to pray and hope and work and, yes, rest. We already know the end of the story. Jesus was born among us. God, in our midst. God just came to be with us. The birth of a holy child has no apparent causal relationship to the end of sin and suffering. Still in one week at the manger we will adore him, still we have confidence that the child, Emmanu-el, is God with us. Still, that light will shine.

Blessings,
Sara+