August 7, 2022
Over the summer, we had our daughter going to gymnastics class. It was mostly about moving her body and getting comfortable with things like tumbling and jumping and balancing, but she had fun. One thing that would happen pretty frequently, though, was when she was up high somewhere. She was, as we all would be, afraid of falling. But, it didn’t seem to matter how high up she was as long as she was holding my hand. She would walk like a champ along the five foot high balance beams or hang on the six foot bars as long as I was there to catch her! Having that safety net let her be brave. And that’s the case any time we do something that’s scary, right? Trapeze artists do their crazy flips and jumps and twirls twenty, thirty feet in the air—but they can do it with confidence because they know there’s a net below them in case anything goes wrong. Skydivers, who are some of the craziest kinds of people I think, still only jump out of planes when they know there’s a second parachute in case the first doesn’t work. When we know there is something there to keep us safe, to support us in case something goes wrong, it’s pretty amazing the stuff we end up being able to do.
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July 31, 2022
Out on the west coast, around the Seattle area and up the coast of British Columbia, there is one of the largest temperate rainforests in the world. Water from the relatively warm Pacific Ocean feeds clouds that head straight for the coast, and then they run into the Cascades where they drop an absolutely stunning amount of water every year. The ocean also keeps the temperatures of the whole region pretty stable and mild, so the growing season basically doesn’t end. The result is a region of some of the highest biomass in the world outside of the tropics. In this region, for thousands of years, there were native tribes who were shaped by the sheer abundance of the landscape. Even though they never developed indigenous agriculture, tribes like the Chinook and Klamath were able to settle down instead of wandering from place to place looking for food and resources. These cultures were so accustomed to abundance that they developed a special kind of ceremony celebrating that abundance—the potlatch. July 24, 2022
There was an article I read recently that talked about how we are formed to make requests—to ask people for something. The author said that there are “askers” and “guessers.” “Askers” are the kind of people who are very comfortable asking for things—like requesting a pay raise from a boss, or asking for a friend to help them pack boxes for a big move, or a volunteer coordinator asking individuals to help out with things. Then the other type, the “guessers,” are people who are very selective about asking for things—they will wait until they’re basically certain the answer will be “yes” before they even ask. But it’s not just the way we make requests. It’s also the way we expect others to form their requests. Askers expect others to be like them, and ask for things when they need or want them. Askers are comfortable saying “no” because they themselves are comfortable with receiving a “no.” Guessers, on the other hand, don’t like to have to say “no,” and may even resent someone who asks them for something they think it’s obvious they won’t agree to. Obviously, like everything else, no one is 100% one or the other, but it’s a great way of understanding how and why people do what they do. It’s this crazy way of understanding how people interact that I find endlessly fascinating. July 17, 2022
For a long time, I’ve found that I’m the type of person who needs to make a to-do list in order to get things done. It helps me focus on what the next thing is, and makes sure that I get to each task I need to do for the day. I’m sure many of y’all are like that. To-do lists help us be productive and keep us from wasting too much time. Of course, there are some of y’all who don’t need a to-do list, and can just know, intuitively, what the next thing that needs to be done will be. But whether you’re a to-do lister or not, we all know that there are always tasks that need to be done. At the end of the day, there will always be another thing that could’ve been accomplished, another task that could’ve been finished, another project that could’ve been worked on. Whether it’s work or home, friendships or professional connections, we can always tack on more things that could be done to make us more productive. And productivity, it seems, is a cultural obsession of ours. There was a show that was on a few years ago starring Tim Allen called Home Improvement. If you haven’t seen it, Tim Allen played as Tim Taylor, who had a DIY show and gave tips and tricks to people doing home improvement projects. And, of course, it was a sitcom so the show included his family life and all their hijinks. There was this one particular part of his home life that I remember, and that was his neighbor, Wilson. They would often have chats peppered with the one-liners you expect from a 90s sitcom, but the thing that stuck out was that you only ever saw the neighbor from his eyes up—the rest of him was hidden behind a privacy fence. Whatever the extent of their conversations, Tim never interacted with Wilson except at eye level behind a fence.
Sometimes, neighborliness is exactly like that. We may be cordial and friendly, looking out for each other and sharing news, but a lot of the time—not always, but a lot of the time—our interactions with our neighbors end there. It’s like Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall when the neighbor tells him that “good fences make good neighbors”—essentially that it’s the separation that makes us get along with those who live next to us. So it’s with this idea of neighborliness in our cultural minds that we hear this story of the Good Samaritan and its focus on loving your “neighbor” as yourself. June 26, 2022
I heard a story on the radio recently about a man named Kenny Butler. He grew up without a lot of options, hemmed in by poverty and community violence, and ended up joining the ranks of the Crips gang. Well, as time went on he ended up in and out of jail, until he landed in federal prison on a plea deal. That should have been the end of the story—one more man caught up in the crackdown of law and order—except that Kenny had a realization in prison, that he didn’t want to be this way. He started studying, and by some miracle it just happened that he was able to earn his Bachelor’s degree. One thing led to another, and he reached the point where he was organizing a community program to reconcile former gang members for the good of their communities. Deep down, we all want to be good people. We want to do the right thing, even when we sometimes don’t know exactly what the right thing is. In the case of Kenny Butler, he was given the opportunity—you might say the grace—to grow into a person who could do the right thing. We all need the grace to try to do the right thing, and become the kind of people that God is calling us to be. June 19, 2022
Way back in the 1860s, there were two sites in Hawaii on the island of Molokai that were designated as leper colonies. In those days, leprosy didn’t really have any kind of cure. It was a frightening looking disease—people would be disfigured by it in ways that made them look like monsters. And since people didn’t really understand how it spread, the solution for millennia had been to isolate lepers in a colony, off by themselves. Those two leper colonies in Hawaii wouldn’t close until 1969. But isolating people we don’t want to deal with isn’t just something we did back decades or centuries ago. Even though we know from studies that the best way to deal with most kinds of criminals is to get them integrated into and invested in their communities, the United States instead has the biggest prison population in the world—bigger than the height of the Soviet Gulags or even (by percentage) the North Korean prison camp system, in fact. Criminals are undesirable so we hide them away—out of sight, out of mind. June 12, 2022
Today is such a joyful day! One of those things that all pastors love to do is preside at a baptism, and here I got to preside at five all at once! We got to welcome these five people into the body of Christ today, and that is really something. So much, in fact, that we made sure even the very space where we are worshipping reflected what a big deal it is that we have these five baptisms today. And the reason it’s such a joyful day, the reason I as a pastor am so excited that we got to do this incredible thing, is that baptism is the start of a wholly new kind of life for everyone who is baptized. Y’all get to be part of this incredible journey! This congregation got to bear witness to God saving you in these waters! And I got the honor of being God’s hands that washed you! How cool is that? June 5, 2022
When I was attending seminary, one of the dividing lines among the students was what you did before you came to seminary. There were people like me, who had come straight from college. But just as many—more, really—were coming from another career. The call to ministry was one that took them longer to finally answer, but they really did answer it. In fact, they answered the call and brought with them all the skills they had learned in their previous career. Because that’s something that will happen when you change what you’re doing—those skills you’ve acquired don’t go away, they just get repurposed. Today, as we celebrate Pentecost, we heard about how the disciples’ skills got repurposed in a big way. May 29, 2022
These past few weeks have been difficult for anyone who tries to be aware of what’s happening in the world. In the span of just a couple of weeks, acts of violence have grabbed the nation’s attention. Buffalo, New York saw a horrific vision of the racism that still captivates too many people in this country. Irvine, California was shocked by an assailant trying to murder churchgoers. And this week, the worst kind of tragedy happened in Uvalde, Texas. I have been exhausted by it, to tell y’all the truth. This kind of thing keeps happening, and it feels like nothing will ever be done to fix it. After nothing was done after Sandy Hook, I think something in me broke. And that pain was put into even sharper relief this time because this time I have children. I could not focus on this sermon this week. I couldn’t dig into the texts like I usually do, listening to your stories to see how what’s said could be relevant to our lives. And that’s not a good place for a pastor to be. |
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