The church is the people

It’s only my second week working in my new church in a new town.

I’m still trying to connect people’s names and faces to the 3-year-old photo directory that was left in my office.

But worship still feels like homecoming, like returning to my roots. I’m surprised at how familiar the liturgy is, the sung and spoken responses, the prayers and creeds. They slide easily off my tongue like familiar childhood bedtime stories, all deep and nostalgic.

I stay for the entire coffee hour, wanting to make sure I write down this person’s prayer requests, and meet that family’s new baby, and listen to stories from that person’s recent hiking adventure.

When there is no one left to help clean up, two mothers volunteer, and we stand in the kitchen together, trying to figure out where bowls and coffee cups go. As I stash the extra banana bread in the freezer (between the communion bread and the freeze pops) I ask how the system usually works for coffee hour volunteers.

“We’re almost perfect,” one woman tells me, and they both laugh. “Someone always steps up to help.”

This week, I guess, it is the three of us, even though I’m too new to know where anything belongs.

The other woman puts down her towel and turns to face me. “It’s like that song…” She sings,

I am the church. You are the church. We are the church together.
The church is not a building. The church is not a steeple.
The church is not a resting place. The church is the people.

I smile, nodding, and fill a ziploc bag with extra kettlecorn to take home for later.

When God feeds us

In dire straights

1 Kings 19:4-8 includes one of my favorite lines of angel dialogue in all of scripture:

“Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”

The angel is saying this to Elijah, who is throwing himself a big pity party by not eating and hiding out in the desert.

Elijah is feeling pretty dismal about things because his life has recently been threatened by a very powerful woman: the Phoenician Queen Jezebel. (When I was in junior high, my religion teacher referred to Jezebel as the “Quicked Ween,” and that is how I always remember her.)

Jezebel has vowed to kill Elijah, and Elijah — frightened and alone — runs into the desert, hides under a tree, and asks God to take his life.

The gift of self care

What really hits me about this story is how God responds to Elijah.

When Elijah wakes, an angel has come to give him something to eat and drink. The angel says: “Get up and eat. Otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”

The angel doesn’t give Elijah safety. He doesn’t say that Elijah’s life will be spared.

He also doesn’t give him a solution. He doesn’t tell Elijah what to do next.

What the angel brings to Elijah is self-care.

“Take care of yourself,” the angel is telling him, “because you have a long way to go. And if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t have the strength to get through.”

The text tells us that Elijah did get up and eat, and in doing so he was given the strength to travel for “forty days and forty nights,” which is scripture’s way of telling us he journeyed for a long time.

Who knows if it was some kind of super-food the angel brought him that sustained him for so long? Still, I think perhaps the lesson here is the wisdom of the angel’s message: You cannot give up here. You have to keep going. And you have to take care of yourself to get there.

So Elijah starts with the basics: he rests, he drinks, he eats.

Otherwise the journey will be too much

Too often we can be like Elijah, looking to God for the wrong gifts — for safety or solutions when there are none.

Too often we, too, need this gentle wisdom to tend to ourselves — our hungry and tired bodies, our discouraged and frightened souls — before we embark on long and difficult journeys.

When we fail to care for ourselves adequately, we find it is just as the angel has said: the journey is too much for us.

When we are caring for ourselves, we are heeding the wisdom of God, we are opening ourselves to receive enough strength to make it through the next leg of the journey. When we give ourselves grace, we are truly stepping into the grace God has already given us.

Even if an angel isn’t the one to show up at our side with food and water and a reminder to rest, we can be that messenger to each other. That, after all, is part of what it means to be the Body. We take care of all our parts, especially the ones that are tired and hungry, because we are all on a journey together.

When blessing comes in quietly

A season of quiet blessing

I wrote earlier about what it means to be blessed, about the richness of life that comes through memories and forgiveness and small pleasures.

This has indeed been a season of blessing for me. Not the kind of blessing that runs through your life with extravagance — no miraculous late-life pregnancy like Sarai’s, no new name rewarded after an epic night of struggle like Jacob’s — but the kind of blessing that comes in quietly.

It has been a season of blessing more like the one God gives to his sheep in Ezekiel 34:

I will make with them a covenant of peace and banish wild animals from the land,
so that they may live in the wild and sleep in the woods securely.
I will make them and the region around my hill a blessing;
and I will send down the showers in their season;
they shall be showers of blessing.
The trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the earth shall yield its increase.

I love how gentle and open this blessing is: the very hills around the sheep are a blessing.

Why? Because they receive rain and yield fruit. That’s it. The land does what it is meant to do, and that is blessing enough to keep the sheep safe.

There is no overturning of religious or political systems, no supernatural force of change, no whirlwinds or fiery chariots — there’s just the abundance of the land. That is the blessing.

Breaking the dependence

Notice the text says God sends the showers of blessing in their season. They don’t come all the time. They come in appropriate balance: dryness and rain, sunshine and dark. That balance is life-giving blessing.

I imagine those sheep may have not even noticed the blessing of their safe, abundant hillside. They may have mistaken the showers of blessing for showers of normalcy.

In other words, they may have taken their blessing for granted.

I can relate. Sometimes blessings come into my life so quietly, I almost miss them — as though I’m too dependent on those supernatural fiery whirlwinds to mark the blessings that come in without them.

There is a deep importance around breaking that dependence, around noticing the balance, the abundance, the showers of blessing that we experience.

May we continue to be attentive to our sense of gratitude, our safe places, and the moments of goodness in our lives — no matter how subtle.

Constellations and Beginnings

Goodbye to this constellation

When I said goodbye to my wonderful therapist last week, she said: “We’re not saying goodbye to each other. We’re saying goodbye to our being together in this particular constellation in time.”

No one knows when or how our paths might cross again, but for now, we are parting. We are celebrating our time together and marking its end with tears and hugs.

I’m saying goodbye to many particular constellations in my life right now.

Goodbye to the San Francisco Bay and hello to the Massachusetts Bay. Goodbye to my cozy tiny apartment and hello to life in close community. Goodbye to the children of Oakland public schools and hello to the children of my new church family.

Hello to new beginnings

Moving is difficult and emotional and exciting — especially big moves across entire continents, from one ocean to another.

In this time of new beginnings, I am grateful to remember the wisdom offered by those who have gracefully gone through new beginnings:

There is nothing to fear in the act of beginning.
More often than not it knows the journey ahead better than we ever could.
Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives
is best achieved when we place profound trust in the act of beginning.
Risk may be our greatest ally. … There can be no growth
if we do not remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different.
I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth
that was not rewarded a thousand times over.
(John O’Donahue, To Bless the Space Between Us, 2)

Unbelievable love

Claims of (un)certainty

He leans across the table when he asks me, right there over the hush puppies and fried cheese curds. “When I read how Jesus lived and what he taught, I can get behind that,” his eyes are serious and deep, almost pleading, “but what about the rest of it? The claims of certainty about things that cannot be certain. Heaven and hell, resurrection, life after death. How do you deal with all of that?”

Jazz music is playing in the background. We love this New Orleans style restaurant, with its alligator décor and its cozy lighting, and this is our first double date with friends we don’t know well yet. Sometimes I’d like to have the option not to wear my Christianity like a scarlet letter, but as long as the whole “what do you do?” question remains acceptable small talk, I think it’s going to be unavoidable.

How do you explain words like “seminary” and “minister” without talking about religion?

So I tell him how I deal with it, with all the claims of certainty about the uncertain. Or, at least I fumble through some kind of answer. I tell him he’s not alone, that all kinds of Christians too are wrestling with these very questions. That, for me, it’s about resting in the mystery and not making the mystery into answers.

Creeds without checklists

There’s no checklist, I say, at least not one that anyone would actually be able to live up to.

This is how my creed would start, I tell him.

I would say: Love?
And we would all answer: Love!

I would say: Is it complicated?
And we would all answer: It’s complicated.

I say: Life is good?
We say: Life is good.

I: Is it complicated?
We: It’s complicated.

He nods, yes yes I can believe in that. Love and goodness and complicated mystery. Questions without answers, community without checklists.

Complicated belief

I tell him about Peter walking out to Jesus across the water because he believes so hard that he can’t not be part of the miracle. But then, the storm is enough to make him doubt what he’s already experiencing and he sinks, hands out toward God: “Save me!”

I tell him about the father in Mark, desperate for healing for his child who’s already dead, who utters the deepest words of truth imaginable: “I do believe, help me my unbelief.”

Is there ever not both, I wonder. Is there ever belief without unbelief, walking on water without sinking into doubt? I imagine myself like Peter, somewhere between walking and swimming, blind either to the fearsome storm around me or to my own extraordinary capability.

It is, indeed, complicated.

When the conversation lulls, we all lean back in our chairs simultaneously, as though on cue, and the moment feels pregnant with intimacy even though we are silent. We take a few breaths, pay the bill, gather our things.

“I’m impressed how long we were able to talk about religion without arguing,” he says, and we all laugh appreciatively.

I think to myself: Jesus never said his name wouldn’t be divisive, did he? But he did say his name was love. Complicated, mysterious, storm-stopping, water-walking love. In that creed I believe, help me my unbelief.