Lent Through Your Senses

I’m all about small steps and short accessible faith practices to give meaning to time and bring reminders throughout our days of God’s presence in our lives. I discovered the following practice in the “Lent at Home” guide for 2024 from Mennonite Education Agency. It’s intended for Lent, but could absolutely be used any time of year and any time you have a moment (or more than just a moment) to spend outside.

When I get all wound up or anxious or I’m trying to do too many things at once, I will occasionally turn to a simple centering practice of the senses: still my body and name 5 things I see, 4 things I feel, 3 things I hear, 2 things I smell, and 1 thing I taste. Author Talashia Keim Yoder’s suggestions below remind me of that practice. I appreciate both the simplicity and how kid-friendly this way of engaging in Spirituality is.

During the days of Covid lock-down, my kids and I would go on walks - so many walks! - and try different things to make it more engaging. One of the practices we had, in addition to scavenger hunts and chalk obstacle courses (two other faves) was to test what we could notice with all our senses. Encountering God through the sound of birds rustling in the tall grass, the smell of apple blossoms, or the damp air on our cheeks. May you continue to find connections to Creator and the created world in this season!

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Jesus began his ministry with forty days in the desert, and this practice is an invitation to step into the desert with him throughout Lent. Many of us see this time in the desert as a time of starvation, hardship, and temptation, but that’s a quite narrow view! In an interview on “The Bible for Normal People Podcast,” a member of the Chickasaw Nation Chris Hoklotubbe reframes the desert time from a Native perspective. Jesus was on a 40-day spiritual quest! It was Jesus’ extended Sabbath that prepared him for his ministry. Hoklotubbe thinks that perhaps it was on his quest that Jesus came up with some of his musings like, “Consider the lilies of the field…”

So, here’s your quest. Find a moment every day during Lent to be outside in a spirit of openness. It’s okay if somedays it’s only for two minutes! When you’re outside, take in what you discover through your senses. If you want more guidance, try this:

1. Start with your breath. Breathe in and out, counting to 3 on your breath in and 6 on your breath out. Do this until you feel centered.

2. Touch: What do you feel on your skin? Is it warm or cold? Breezy or still? Damp or dry? Notice the ground holding you up, the gravity that keeps you rooted.

3. Smell: What does it smell like today? Can you identify particular scents?

4. Taste: Stick your tongue out. Can you taste the air today?

5. Listen: What do you hear? Can you isolate and identify particular sounds?

6. Look: Where do you see life around you? Where do you see dormancy? What colors do you see? Other creatures? Pay some attention to the margins - what do you see where what is cultivated meets the area that is not?

Maybe once a week you want to carve out time for a longer desert quest. If you have young children, this can be a helpful part of the daily rhythm with an extended family quest each week.

Fertile Soil and Growing Light

In these clear, bright days I have been extra attuned to the beauty of the growing light. We're about to enter the season of Lent. Like Advent it's a season of anticipation. But unlike Advent which heads steadily into darkness, Lent anticipates new life and the light grows. It is also a time of waiting readiness. Under the dark soil, seeds are being germinated and prepared, inside the buds, trees ready themselves to bloom.

In worship this season, we're using the theme "I want to see," acknowledging the difficulty in following through on Jesus' message and the gap in our understanding of what we're really supposed to do as disciples. As the adults in the lives of young people we're not only trying to be disciples ourselves, we have this extra responsibility (if we take it on) of bringing the kids in our lives along on the Jesus road. During the time of growing light, we're praying that the light may grow in us too. During this time of fertile germination, we pray that moments of clarity might bloom.

I wonder Lent gives us some opportunities for introducing faith formation practices into our homes and to our children. Seasonal practices can be times to say, "Let's try this thing for a few weeks as we wait for Easter." I know lots of adults who give something up for Lent - the practice of fasting intended to make space in our spirit for a depth of connection with our Creator. But giving up food isn't necessarily going to be a fruitful practice for a little one - or for a family to practice together.

Last year for a time I tried prayer cards with dinner prayers and psalms. It worked for awhile until the cards became a source of conflict - who gets to pick the card, which color we'd read, etc. This year I'm going to try again with beloved Bible texts - especially prophetic and hope-filled verses that have helped me to remember the coming newness of life, and which I hope my children will also learn to know.

Here are a few other suggestions for practices for Lent. Maybe some of them will resonate or be adaptable for your family.

Reading together: In her book Faith at Home: A Handbook for Cautiously Christian Parents, Wendy Claire Barrie suggests a family read-aloud, choosing a book with spiritual resonance like The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe or A Wrinkle in Time. I remember my mind being blown as a pre-teen when I began to see the Biblical story in the story of Aslan and the Pevensies in C.S. Lewis's book.

Planting Seeds: If you're a gardener who starts their own seeds, now is a great time to start plants and to use that opportunity to talk about new life. Lacy Finn Borgo and Ben Barczi in Good Dirt: Lent, Holy Week and Eastertide suggest planting a seed next to the side of a clear cup, so that you can see the roots grow and change. Each time the seeds is watered and observed is a time to remember the way we are 'watered' and nurtured through a relationship with God.

Grow a Butterfly: Borgo and Barczi also suggest ordering a butterfly kit to see the growth and transformation of caterpillar to butterfly in real time. A butterfly emerging from a cocoon is a beautiful way to draw a parallel to the coming story of Easter and resurrection. This seems like a very cool project and I think I'm going to try it! The authors suggest Carolina Biological Supply but I'm sure there are plenty of other suppliers if you Google.

Collecting an offering: Almsgiving (along with fasting and prayer) is one of the 'Three Pillars of Lent' A Catholic family I know keeps a collection box on their table which they fill through the season for a church relief organization. As a family you could choose either a local organization or food bank or an international organization like Mennonite Central Committee to collect for. Keep talking about why you're collecting and include them in your prayer if you pray together at meals.

I hope that whatever you decide to do (or not do!) during this coming season, you and your family will be filled with God's Spirit.

Hearts and Ashes

"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me." These are the words we hear or sing or recite each Ash Wednesday when we come before God in petition.  When we invite God to make our hearts new, having failed to love God or God's people as fully and wholly as we should.  We are marked with ashes as a reminder of our humanness - that very thing that identifies us as created in Gods image and that causes us to mess up.

Still God is faithful.  God's heart is for us.  As we progress through Lent this year we will hear in worship (or you can follow along yourself here) the story of God's covenant love for all creation and for us in particular.  One of my favorite texts of this season comes near the end. "I will put my law within them," God says, "and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people." This is written in Jeremiah to a people longing to feel connected to God again.

This is an intimate kind of law.  It is a law of love that will be known to us because God is within us, loving us from the inside out.  A love so known to us that we cannot help but show it and live it.  A love so strong and so much a part of us that when we don't show it and live it, it will endure because God endures.

People often give something up for Lent.  I have, myself, opted for the classic giving up coffee or chocolate.  I've also fasted from Facebook or other media.  If that's a practice that works for you as a posture of prayer, a way to connect your heart to God's heart, great!  If that's not your gig, or if you're looking for something to practice with others, or with your family, what about some of these:

• send a handwritten card or note to someone each day (or let's be real: each week)
• deciding on an amount per ounce of water everyone consumes to donate to a water charity
• collecting and donating a bag of toys, clothes or clutter, one item each day
• doing a random act of kindness each day
• reading through one of the Gospels, (this year it's Mark - the shortest)
• print out a 'Praying in Color' lent calendar and fill in each day with a doodle or a color that illustrates a prayer (scroll down a little to see the pdf links) or make your own.
• Create and decorate a donation box and put something in it each day to bring to a local foodbank
• Create a thanksgiving wall or poster and add a note to it each day. Or go the extra step and make it a tree - by the end, as spring arrives, the tree will be full of leaves

Most of the suggestions above are from the Practicing Families site or my own head, but for more and more detail try Traci Smith's website.  Her book Faithful Families: Creating Sacred Spaces at Home has wonderful ways of making room for God in the everyday life of family. 

May your hearts be pliable to God's to the writing of God. 
May God's heart be the heart in which you find home.

Mother to the Lost: a Monologue

Seattle Mennonite Church

Luke 15:11-32

Let me tell you about my family.  I am married and I have two sons.  I love my sons.  I love my husband.  Yet my loving them does not make them love each other well, and loving them only deepens the grief when they are estranged or conflicted.

When he came of age, my younger son came to my husband and made a demand, “Give me my half of my inheritance.”  To hear it, I was aghast.  I was aggrieved.  I could barely believe it.  I did not think that we had raised a son to offer such disrespect and I questioned: Had we been too permissive?  Had he always felt such entitlement?  Where had I gone wrong? 

Maybe you already understand this: he essentially was saying to his father, to me, to his community, ‘I wish you were dead.  You’re nothing to me.’ What kind of a son treats his parents like that?  I was angry!  At my son and at my husband.  Because what does my husband do?  He gives in.  He talks to the neighbors to negotiate selling off land.  He liquidates some of our holdings.  He auctions livestock.  He hands over fully half (half!!) of our family’s livelihood to the boy!  He was a boy!  Foolish and vain and ungrateful.  And ignorant and naïve.

I heard the neighbors.  I knew the gossip.  The whole village thought we were irresponsible, undisciplined parents.  I was implicated in my crazy husband’s actions too.  They thought our whole family was crazy, and who wouldn’t?  Any sane father would refuse!  Would say, ‘Young man, your responsibility is here.  Your responsibility is to get married, have a family, to care for your mother and for me in our old age.  We didn’t raise you so you could leave us.  Shape up! Go back to work.’  As the head of the household he certainly would have had the right.

But he let him go.  So I had to let him go too.  We all did.  My boy had declared us dead, but when he left, it was as if he was the one who had died.  To not hear from him, to not know where he was or how he was faring.  There was nothing I could do. He could have been dead for all we knew.

Just like when someone dies, there was a hole.  I grieved.  And somehow life kept going, find a new normal.

Ever the responsible, my elder son just kept his head down, diligent as always.  It was a burden on him.  Now all the responsibility would be his but he was resolute.  A hard worker.  He’s a perfectionist - with himself and with everyone else.   Classic older child, really.  He never gives himself a break, never takes a day off.  My husband would never have thought to suggest it.  Life had found a new normal but it was a sort of half-life.  

I think the village saw this too.  We may have been irresponsible and crazy, but my son was the one who had abandoned us.  They saw the way our he cut us off and I knew they had the qetsatsah[i] all planned.  If he would ever show his face in the village again, the jar would be broken, the burned corn would be spilled, his name would be proclaimed and he would be ritually broken off from the community.  No better than a Gentile.  I have to admit, I was angry with him for leaving us but I was also grieved.  And I would be heartbroken were such a thing to happen.

It was hunger that put him back on the road to us. I knew there had been famine not so very far from us. And sure enough that’s where the young man went.  Lost it all.  Every last penny.  I don’t know who saw him first, but my husband got wind of it and I have never seen anything like it.  He was out like a shot – arms pumping, legs flying, kicking up dust.  No way for a grown man to act, the patriarch, the master of the house.  He was making a fool of himself.  I was glad to see the boy too.  I could barely breathe, in fact.  But the man was making himself ridiculous.  Again.

I’m sure that kid had his speech rehearsed.  He was always a big of a schemer: “I have sinned before heaven and before you…”  A hungry belly will do that.  But before he could get it all out, it was all robes and ring and sandals and fatted calf.  Musicians and dancing and feast.  Before he could speak the word to his speech but before anyone could organize the qetsatsah.  That boy may have spent everything and learned nothing, he may have been brought low and gone hungry, but he was not cut off.  I’ll give my husband this: he thought fast.  He looked like an idiot giving up all that property to a son that as good as proclaimed us dead.  And he looked like an idiot to prevent that son from being made as dead himself.  He brought the boy back.

I’m not sure my elder boy was so happy about that, though.  In fact, I know he wasn’t.  I mean, how does it make him look, after all.  He doesn’t like looking foolish.  But it all happened so fast no one had even gone to the field to get him so he arrived in the thick of it.  And like it or not, it was his responsibility to go in, to honor his father’s decision, to join his father as host.  He didn’t like it when his brother disrespected his dad but now what did he think he was doing?  Pouting and raging outside when his father and brother were inside. 

And again, my husband, paying no mind to his duty and position, leaves the party to beg and plead.  And he got an earful: “This son of yours spent all your money on whores!”  He almost spat it.  And I mean…where did he get that idea?? None of us know where the money actually went.  He hadn’t even talked to his brother yet – not that he acknowledged that they were even related.  His father is trying to bring him around. 

And here we all are.  Three lost boys – well, men – one lost and then found but maybe still lost to any understanding of what he really did to us and what this welcome back really means.  One lost in his anger and resentment, refusing to come in, to accept restoration for himself as well as his brother. One lost to any semblance of dignity and decorum and authority of position but wanting more than anything for both his boys to be restored.  Willing to let all that go.

But I love them.  God help me, I will always love them.  They are my sons.  He is my husband. And I pray: God, in your mercy, restore what is lost.  Restore them to you and to each other.  May not my love but yours reconcile.  In your mercy may a way be made where it seems as if there is no way.  In your mercy, God, may my sons and my husband find a place at the table and feast together.

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[i] Thanks to Barbara Brown Taylor’s essay,  “The Parable of the Dysfunctional Family” for introducing me to this notion of qetsatsah

The Color of Lent

The other night, for bed-time reading, I was handed My First Message open to the crucifixion story   and told, “Here, read this.”  While it not unusual that the reading choice would be Bible stories, the choice of content was unexpected.  Usually we either skip right over the crucifixion in favor of the more happy and appealing resurrection story.  Or we just skip adult Jesus altogether and read about the annunciation and the nativity. Baby Jesus is so cute and the angels are so beautiful.

I was grateful.  Our usual mode for Bible story reading is the usual mode for many church-goers: we have a big festival at Christmas to celebrate and adore the baby Jesus, skip over his life and (maybe especially) his death to celebrating his resurrection with all things spring: new life, growth, color.  Reading the crucifixion story together was an opportunity.  We talked about Jesus’ offer of forgiveness, the way he loved the criminals who were crucified with him, that he was crucified because his love was threatening to people with power – that he hadn’t done anything deserving punishment.  And we often talk about what it means to follow Jesus.  This story and the conversation about following Jesus were an apt way to begin thinking about the following Jesus into the season of Lent.

We often think of Lent as a time to follow Jesus into the wilderness.  We think of the asceticism, the sparseness, of letting things go and giving things up.  We associate Lent with fasting and prayer and renunciation.  Although the liturgical color of Lent is a rich purple, if Lent were to be characterized by any color, it would (in my mind anyway)be the gray of the ashes we are marked with on Ash Wednesday. 

And yet, this year – year B of the three cycles of the lectionary – is markedly colorful.  It begins with the multi-hued promise of God to Noah and all creation that God will be present in covenant relationship.  That God’s mark of covenant would be the rainbow, a reminder to God like a string around a finger, that God will never again visit such destruction on the earth and that ‘every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth’ is included in covenant with God.

In fact the whole season of Lent is an assurance, turning our usual idea of Lent 'Upside Down and Inside Out'.  Using this theme throughout our Lenten worship, Sunday after Sunday, we hear that God’s covenant is for God’s creation – and for us, God’s creatures.  We will hear after the rainbow promise the covenant and promise to Abraham and then to the Israelites, a covenant written on our hearts, a promise that in love, God “did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”  The story of Jesus as we follow him to the cross and through the cross to Easter is the story of the new covenant, in which Jesus gave his very blood in an act of love that exposed evil and pointed to the triumph of life. 

That doesn’t seem gray at all!  That seems exciting, bright, vibrant.  An upside-down notion of victory - that violent death would lead to new life.  We in turn are invited to turn ourselves around, toward the God who love us and all creation so fully that in spite of the many times that humanity has failed, turned away, God continues to turn toward us.

I feel personally an extra turning upside down of Lenten seasons past.  Two years ago, I felt thrust suddenly and painfully into the gray wilderness of Lent after experiencing a miscarriage.  So it is feels wonderful to me to be anticipating new life in this season, that Lent is a time of waiting with joy.  And it seems right and good that date given for the triumphant entry of the little one we wait for is on Palm Sunday. 

This year, by all means, offer something up to God for Lent in an act of letting go and fasting.  But consider taking up something that will color your Lent experience.  Pray in color, create something, plant something new, take pictures, visit galleries, get to know the colors and cultures of God’s people.  God’s colorful promise to all creation is still alive and growing and waiting for us to  be drawn in and turned inside out.

Dust and Sand

This past Wednesday evening members of our congregation worshiped together and were marked with ashes, a reminder that we are made of dust and that we return there.  We also heard and saw the pouring out of sand.  We symbolically poured ourselves out before our God and the sand became a symbol of cleansing, renewal and assurance as we offered ourselves to God for forgiveness.

For the past seven years as I’ve worked with youth, sand has not been a symbol of renewal or assurance.  It has instead been the counterpart of oil, as we share the sand and the oil of our lives with each other.  Where oil is the anointed and assured presence of God with us, sand is the barrenness and where we feel bereft.  Sand represents the all-alone breadth of the wilderness.

This week my experience turned from the former to the latter.  On Wednesday I ran my fingers through the sands of Ash Wednesday and on Friday I felt thrust into the dusty sand of the desert.  I learned that, although my body had given  no indication, had continued giving me all the right (although uncomfortable) signals, I am no longer pregnant.  Probably for several weeks now.  Probably even as I announced the news with joy.  

I was shocked.  I was upset.  I lay on the ultrasound table alone and bereft and totally utterly thrust into the wilderness.  And so Lent becomes something much different than I had ever anticipated.  It was going to be a season of waiting and preparation and growth.  It becomes a season of introspection and discernment and grief, learning to hope and wondering what is next.

When Jesus went into the wilderness, he was driven there.  He was thrust by the Holy Spirit.  That entry too was not gentle.  Although not in the Luke version of the story that we read this morning, it is in the other Gospels that record this story that he was waited on by angels.  Our psalm, Psalm 91speaks of the angels that 'will bear you up.'  In that psalm it is to God that the Psalmist turns for refuge.  This season of Lent I am looking to God’s providence and am grateful for the angels that have already offered comfort, understanding and presence.  I pour myself out to my Creator like sand.  I pray that I may find renewal.

Resurrection is Gradual - a note for the SMC newsletter

This year, as you might expect, Lent held none of the same ritual celebrations that it often holds for me. The week of Ash Wednesday I was sent a very nice facebook message from Jeanne Rempel noting my absence from the Ash Wednesday service that, for the past five years, we have planned together. I missed her, and that service, too. I would never have thought that I would miss it – another evening commitment among so many. I even missed cleaning my fire-place and burning the previous year’s palms as I’ve done the past few years. Those events have been a marker for me. And then I missed the regular way in which worship calls our attention to the Lenten journey. This past Sunday, I longed for the palm (or bamboo) procession, the joy of the hosanna hymns and the turning with Jesus toward the passion and the cross.

This year, my Lenten experience has been all about the waiting for and coming of spring. It has been agonizing. Spring comes too early in Seattle for Easter and the year’s first blooms to coincide. Here in Korea, where is was genuinely, bone-chillingly cold during the winter, I ached for spring, for sunshine, for warmth on my skin. I kept hearing about how beautiful spring in Korea is, but all around through March and into April, spring seemed to have no intention of showing itself. Every morning, when I walked Naomi to school I would examine the branches of the hedge outside our building. Was that a hint of a shoot breaking through the grey thicket? Never. And when, finally, some tiny buds began to appear, again every day I would look for signs of them opening into leaves or blossoms. The magnolias seemed to take months, the cherry blossoms weeks upon weeks. I have never waited with such eagerness for the blossoming of spring, even in the Canadian winters of my childhood and youth.

By now the magnolias and the cherry blossoms are both beginning to shower their petals on the sidewalks, but there are still azaleas to wait for. And the grass and trees have yet to really come into true green. There is more to wait for, but this year, for me Easter comes slowly, achingly, joyfully and - most remarkably - very, very gradually.

The last time an article of mine appeared in the SMC newsletter, I said that I was ‘on the upward trajectory.’ Indeed it continues to be so. And that too has been and is a gradual but undoubtedly satisfactory journey. I have been quilting and sewing everything I take a notion to make (and to have the time and space to engage in this creative endeavor is something and cannot be more grateful for), reading for pleasure and challenge, (most recently Rob Bell’s Love Wins which I strongly recommend) and most recently re-engaging my pastorly/teacherly mind through leading a bi-monthly Bible study at our English worship service and teaching a class on Anabaptist worship to a small group of young adults exploring Anabaptism for the first time. This last is at the Korea Anabaptist Center.

New life hardly ever happens all at once. There is a moment when the baby is born, when the shoot bursts through the ground, when the flower petals break from the bud. But life has been working all along. This is surely the case for me: God of Life, Creating Spirit, Risen Christ, working in me all through the waiting and longing of Lent.

This Easter I hope to spend celebrating resurrection – each gradual moment of it – with fellow Mennonites at Grace and Peace Mennonite Church. We will sing, and pray, share Communion and communion, and I will give thanks. I miss you all and look forward to seeing you all again. Peace of the risen Christ to you this Easter.

The trouble with Easter

I am finding it difficult to write the Easter message this year. There are a number of friends and members of my congregation who are weighted with burdens that will not some how magically disappear when the sun rises on Easter Sunday. There are some who will continue to live in the liminal space between Good Friday and Resurrection. Last Sunday my friend and fellow pastor Sarah Klaassen reminded us in her sermon that our Lenten task – our Christian task – is 'to accompany shadows.' We are a people who do not choose the happy and easy road, but who walk the way of the cross. We forgo the pursuit of happiness in favor of walking the dusty road with Christ. On Good Friday and throughout Lent this is, if not a welcome message and challenge, an appropriate one. But on Easter, full of budding flowers, sweet hot-crossed rolls, and loud Hallelujah choruses, where does the lingering grief and confusion still fit?

I often feel this way around Christmas as well. A celebration of light and joy when, for some, life seems full of darkness and sorrow must feel particularly oppressive. My pastoral colleague Jonathan often says, ‘What you see depends on where you sit.’ I think it may be difficult to see and hear a story of resurrection when you’re sitting in the tomb next to death, or addiction, or depression, or unemployment or homelessness or any number of losses and traumas that we bear in ourselves or on behalf of another.

For this reason I think I will speak from Mary’s perspective this year. Mary Magdalene who first encountered the risen Jesus, also first encountered the confusion and fear of the empty tomb. Where is the body? Has someone taken him? Why is the stone moved? Who are the strange and white robed men? Who is this man, the gardener and does he know what has become of my Lord? I weep with Mary who ‘as yet did not understand the scripture that he had to rise from the dead.’ (John 20:9) And I will try to proclaim with her ‘I have seen the Lord!’ even though I, like she, may not recognize him right now.

**The image above is by Chinese artist He Qi, entitled 'The Empty Tomb'

Holy Shit

"Holy Shit!" might have been my response to news that Jesus hears about in Luke 13: ‘Pilate massacred a group of Galileans while the were worshiping in the temple. It was so brutal that their own blood was mingled with the blood of the animals that they were sacrificing!’*

Instead, he told this parable:

"A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, 'See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?'
He replied, 'Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'" (Luke 13:6-9)

What?! One might expect outrage from Jesus. Or at least astonishment. A rant, maybe, against the occupying government. But instead, when informed of the senseless deaths of Galileans at the hands of Pilate, he says, ‘Oh and that other instance of people being killed by the tower falling. I bet you think that they must have done something to deserve it.” But after he reminds his listeners that God does not punish us for our sins, he also reminds them - twice - that at any moment they too could be called before their Creator; repent in the time that is left, or perish as those others perished. And he goes on to tell the parable above.

From ‘holy shit!’ to holy shit. How does Jesus manage these remarkable transitions? This is a story about a gardener who, as the King James Version puts it, ‘digs and dungs’ the poor unproductive fruit tree. In almost the same breath as Jesus is demanding repentance or perish-ment from his bewildered audience, he is offering a reprieve. A way to use the time we have left to seek productivity. And we are not in it alone. The faithful gardener will be there digging around the roots, looking for what is rotten, packing in the stinky but vitamin-rich manure. Thank you, gardener!!

I have been wondering about the gardener’s final pronouncement to the tree’s owner: “If the tree bears fruit, well and good, but if not, you can cut it down.” My junior high Sunday school class pointed out to me that the gardener doesn’t say, “I’ll cut it down for you.” but “you can cut it down.” I don’t know whether the emphasis is my own wishful thinking or whether it was Jesus' intention, but I like to think that not only will the gardener bravely intervene on behalf of the tree, he will spread the holy shit and he will not have anything to do with the tree's destruction. The tree may still perish, but the gardener will have done everything in his power to protect and nurture it into health and fruitfulness.

The junior high class was pretty certain that the gardener was Jesus and I’m pretty certain as well, although I don’t necessarily think Jesus always lines up one-for-one with any given character in his stories. But in this case, I do think he’s inviting us to seek the holy shit. Look for opportunities that are being offered to be enriched. Sometime the enrichment and growth opportunities will not smell good or seem enticing. The best compost is filled with slimy and squirming worms and sometimes the digging around the roots will hurt. But we’re in it with the gardener! Thank you, God for holy shit.


* It is unclear whether this was an actual event, but Pilate’s recorded governance practices in other instances make it very plausible - eg. the massacre of a group of Samaritans while on pilgrimage up Mt. Gerizim, their most holy site.

** Thanks to Jonathan, my co-pastor, for the colorful and evocative inspiration that began these reflections!

*** After March 7, see the related sermon ‘One More Year’

The tender place in the heart

Neko Case’s song ‘Hold On, Hold On’ begins “The most tender place in my heart is for strangers.” I was listening to it as I wrote the article for the front of the SMC newsletter introducing the theme for Lent: Holding on, Letting go. During this time of pondering that to which we will hold fast, and that which we will give up or let go, those close to us seem an obvious inclusion in the ‘in’ column. The tender place in our hearts is reserved for our dearest loved ones. Strangers are extraneous.

It was about this time two years ago that I commemorated the life of Carole Marnet, a dear woman from our congregation who died after a battle with cancer – her third. I still smile when I remember her. Always ready with a tight hug, she had a constant sparkle of mischief in her eyes and she was gentle but strong. She loved her family fiercely and proudly, telling anyone who would listen about the accomplishments of two daughters. She would have been overjoyed at the birth of twin granddaughters a year after her death. But Carole also had a very tender place in her heart for the ‘stranger’.

She was tough advocate for people who many would ignore or despise. Carole welcomed into her home, a man who had for many years had lived in his van. From stranger to loved one.

Although we let go of Carole two years ago, I believe that what is worth holding on to is her legacy of love of stranger. I am so grateful to have known her. I thank God for her fierce and loving presence in my life. Marilyn prayed on Sunday as she began her sermon 'Make our hearts to be tender, that we may welcome you.' Indeed, Christ often comes as a stranger, and I pray too that we might be open to receive him.

Hold On, Letting Go

Heaven's net is cast wide
and though its meshes are loose,
nothing is ever lost.
- Tao Te Ching

We come to Lent every year knowing that it is a time of being in the wild, spare space of self-examination and confession. The season begins with Jesus in the desert, tempted by Satan, the Adversary. He has let go of everything, emptying himself in preparation for what will be the intense and full life of the itinerant preacher and teacher, healer and wonder worker. He is fasting and weak. He is offered by Satan feasts and kingdoms and invulnerability at the moment when he might most want to grasp at those things. He has not yet begun his ministry, he has no disciples, no followers, no ardent supporters. And in the time of greatest emptiness, what his net retains are the Hebrew scriptures in which he has been immersed all his life. When he is tempted he replies from the scriptures that have formed and fed him.

The wilderness of the Pacific Northwest is nothing like the one that Jesus experienced. Our wildernesses are craggy mountains, pine forest, cascading waterfalls, and the vast ocean. It was the shore and the empty, waiting nets of the ocean’s fishers that began to seem like an appropriate metaphor for the wilderness of Lent as we planned the worship series in which we will be immersing ourselves these next six weeks. Here at the shore we are at the verge, in a place between earth and water. An empty space, a space full of possibility. A space where we anticipate and discern action and direction.

Certainly the first disciples of Jesus knew what it meant to be on the shore. They also know what is meant to come up empty again and again, nothing in their nets but the holes. And they knew then what it meant to be filled to brimming; Jesus’ word offering a rich harvest so that when they were called, they went with their whole hearts. We will come before Christ with empty nets, waiting to be filled. Many people give something up for Lent, but this wilderness time is also about pondering that to which we shall hold fast. We will discern together and before Christ what the net will hold and what we will let fall through its mesh.