in february, our youngest cat started losing weight--several pounds over two weeks. we took her into the vet, where we found out she had a mass effect. gently, our vet told us that there was nothing to be done and we could decide to let her go that night or the next morning.

we brought her home, hugged her, held her with our other furry girls, took her outside. we told each other stories--about how evie climbed in trees and bit us and would do just about anything to sit in nathan's lap.

and the next day we hugged her some more and blessed her with oil. nathan held her as they sedated her, and together we wept as we let her go. our hearts broke.

and now, weeks later: easter.

after worship at the local episcopal church, where we celebrated the impossible victory over death of Jesus Christ, we went for a walk. stories of when evie climbed into the rafters of our garage and when she sat in the back window of our old neon and when she first came to live with us--they welled up in us.

we carried evie's ashes to the ocean, and found the best rocks to sit on. we lit a candle. i tried to pray, letting the tears slip from my eyes. and then we tipped the bag of our little evie's ashes into the water, letting the waves take her into the wider world she always longed to explore.

it's mohaupt tradition to sing "swing low, sweet chariot" when we let our furry ones go, and the melody followed her and the waves.

and then she was gone.

life hands us lots of hard impossible things: loving this little one and letting her go, finally, on this day which is supposed to celebrate that life has the final say.

and perhaps letting her go into the ocean was about letting life win and knowing that she's never completely gone. impossibly.

Every year
everything
I have ever learned  

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side  

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world  

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it  

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
(mary oliver)

my heart has been full the last few weeks--brimming over the gratitude and pain and grief and joy. aching from discernment and eased by a commitment to simply look at this moment in this place and see it fully.

much of these emotions are born from approaching the one year anniversary of when i left church as the place of my ministry, when i listened to the voices within and without, and hung on to the love of those who said it was time to move to a new and different thing.

in that year, i have been given the gift of so many who have loved me into a new place and a new self, a self that trusts wherever God is calling me and a self that seeks the good in all things.

but also in that year, i've sought to distance myself from my body--the home of my soul--and i want to reclaim its goodness and strength.

so this is a love letter to the whole self that i'm living into, the self i want to embrace--with love and gratitude and hope for another year.

dear one:

to my hair, whose strands I sheared off to start anew, strands that change color from blonde to brown to red, like a living mood ring. i miss reaching my hand to my back and holding to your ends, miss the long braid over my shoulder. but i love the curl in the growing layers and the patience you've grown in me as i wait for your full length to return.

to my nose and lips and cheeks, with your scars and bumps hidden by freckles and the wrinkles that have begun to emerge this year, you have been a mark of resistance with your nosering, a mark of hope with your smile, a mark of joy with your laughter. do not be afraid.

to my eyes, rung by these great green glasses, you see what so many others do not and you let the images of others exist in your soul, changed by the beauty and pain of others, the injustice of life and the inexplicable places of grace.

to my brain and head and heart, you three have wrestled this year with possibility and change and hope and grief. you've asked hard questions and looked to the heavens. you seek the hope of the universe with untameable curiosity and optimism. do not let this fire burn out.

to my hands, especially the crooked one which will never again be the same--you give life to creativity, covered in paint or crayon or dirt, holding on to the hands of those who are lonely, feeding those who are hungry, carrying little ones and slapping encouraging high fives. you hold me up in handstands, reminding me to claim joy and new perspective. my right hand, your weakness reminds me to be humble and to ask for help. thank you.

to my breasts and my belly, you have been the places i've neglected, places of trouble and places of hope, you remind me to feed others and to claim my place in this world.

to my legs, these legs that have given me shame when i try to buy pants--you have carried me over hundreds of miles and your strength outpaces the ability of my mind. you carried me to new places, over finish lines and into the ocean. you hold me up and remind me that the arthritis in my hips are just a force to contain.

to my feet--oh feet. thank you. you weird and wonderful collections of bone and sinew and muscle. your toes with their missing nails and cracked paint and words of love: you feet. my feet.

do not be afraid.

My mom and I recently led a workshop on raising the next generation of environmentalists and in preparation for that presentation, I realized that much of my childhood had prepared me to go to seminary and study earth care and God. 

When I was in seminary, I got to study with a variety of professors and mentors who let me love God and creation in my studies. My mom worried about whether I'd ever find a job that let me linger on the parts of life I love the most: earth, people, God. 

But it was all preparation. It was my own personal advent.

This summer and fall, I convinced one of those professors, Ted Hiebert to help me think about an Advent Resource for our community on the South Coast, the community that I now serve. My colleagues and supervisors at Puente have helped me dream about what speaks to and about our work. I'm reminded that my mom never had to worry. 

It's October, still too early in our ordinary time to really prepare ourselves for the extraordinary event that will come in a couple of months, when God breaks into our world and welcomes us with love. 

But here is my own love letter back to the community and to those who have prepared me: Waiting for the Extraordinary.

I went back to the ocean today
With my books and my papers
I went to the rocks by the ocean
But the weather changed quickly

Oh the ocean said, “what are you trying to find
I don’t care, I’m not kind?”

You don’t know how precious you are
Walking around with your little shoes dangling
I am the one who lives with the ocean
It’s where we came from, you know
And sometimes I just want to go back
-Dar Williams, “The Ocean”

I hear two things from my bedroom window: the foghorn from the harbor and the waves of the ocean. I can hear other things too – cars and dogs and children and music – but there is the constant hum of the ocean and the regular call of the horn.

I live on the California coast, just over the hill from Silicon Valley, the center of the tech world, absurd housing costs, ambition, innovation, and work. I started my career as a Christian clergyperson in a congregation just blocks from where Hewlett Packard began, surrounded by tiny houses worth millions of dollars and high school students suicidal because of the social pressures to be perfect and successful. For most of us in the Valley, there is so much pressure not to fail, to be the best. This culture is a microcosm of our larger United States culture that insists if we dream big and work hard enough, we can “have it all.”

I served a congregation here for almost three years and struggled to hold the consistent grace of the ocean in tension with the insane demand of the Valley. I met with congregation members who struggled to keep up with that world, and I wanted to lead them over the hill to sit at the ocean, to find calm, and let the horn from the harbor be their pulse. The world tells them that they need to be better, but the ocean does not care what degrees you have, if your kids got into Harvard, what car you drive, or what app you’ve created.

Instead, the ocean curves toward the shore, wave after wave. Sometimes the waves are big and billowing, and sometimes they are small and flat. But, they keep coming.

Last week, I was sitting in front of the water, and the ocean kept coming, affecting everything it touched. The beach in front of me was covered in kelp and rippled sand from countless waves. The rocks I was sitting among had become home to ice plants and algae. The line where the sea level reached, depending on the time of day, was obvious.

There were surfers on the water. They lingered in the shallow waters watching the waves, waiting for whatever sign surfers wait for to know the next wave is the one. Then they slithered onto their boards, paddled out into the waves, hopped up and let the waves carry them back. And then they went back out again.

I was perched on a rock and tried to capture the grace of the ocean in crayon, letting the movement of the waves direct my stroke on the page. Watching the surfers, I marveled at how their bodies weathered the relentless waves, how the waves curled around them: water and people and earth. I wondered at how the surfers could just keep climbing back up onto their boards. I couldn’t easily explain those connections, so I trusted my hands to do that work, arching color across the page in wax.



I’m originally from the Midwest, and when I left it for my first call in Palo Alto, I was sure that I would miss the flat farmland and white oaks and the riverbanks of Northern Illinois. Three years later, I’m not quite used to this landscape. This view – this never-ending water running into sky – I’ve never gotten used to it. The waves keep coming, never exactly the same, but never completely different. Water is water. The waves remind me of God’s grace because the waves come no matter what. This big blue body of life is just pulled inward, kissing the sand.

Grace, in my Protestant tradition, is a gift from God that we cannot earn – it is a gift that makes a bridge between God, people, and creation, and it is so hard to understand. We can’t actually be perfect, try as we might, even if we are trying to reach out to God. We’ve tried, in the doctrines and confessions of my tradition, to describe it as whatever it is that draws us to God. And so I’ve begun to try to understand grace – and God – through the ocean.

Whenever I sit on the shore, letting the sound of the waves hold me there, I’m reminded of how much we do not know about the ocean. Explorers across the ages have traveled across the seas and into the deepest parts of the waters – and there’s still so much more to know about the ecosystems and species of the oceans. The oceans have called others to dream bigger dreams and to live larger lives than they could imagine. Sometimes that’s scary (hurricanes and sharks and the unknown), and sometimes it’s exhilarating. And yet it calls, bringing those adventurers and surfers from what they already know to something more.

Grace is like that, unknowable and yet recognizable, a little scary because we cannot define it or understand it in an objective way, and scary too because of how we in many Christian traditions try to describe it: God’s ceaseless love for creation even though we fail to care for each other in the ways that we are supposed to.

And that is grace: big, beautiful, perfect grace. Grace that comes washing over us whether we know the right words, have the right car, or do the right things. Grace that leaves our skin sandy, hair salty, and face wet – relentlessly calling like the horn in the harbor, beckoning us from our own little bedrooms and out into the world, to climb back into life and living, even if we fail to meet that world’s expectations.

originally posted at http://nomosjournal.org/columns/cultivating-a-co-creator/blue-with-grace/

Matthew 22:36-40 (CEB)

36 “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37 He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being,[a] and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39  And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.[b] 40  All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”

++
I’m very much a young woman from the Midwest.

I love flat farmland and white oaks and the riverbanks of Northern Illinois. I love the autumn leaves and the way Lake Michigan freezes over. I think trees should lose their leaves in beautiful dances to the ground, and I think that the savannahs along the Rock River are breathtaking.

I don’t understand earthquakes and I miss thunderstorms.

When I left the Midwest, when I said yes to my first call in a congregation in Palo Alto, CA, my thesis advisor Ted Hiebert told me that I should never take the redwoods for granted. I wondered how anyone could look at those beautiful giants not be overwhelmed.

Three years later, I’m not quite used to this landscape. On the drive from Palo Alto to Pescadero where I now work, I spend the last twenty minutes by the ocean.

Almost without fail, I lose my breath coming over the last ridge before I turn inland again.

I’m somehow used to the redwoods, but this view—this never-ending water running into sky—I never get used to it. The waves keep coming, never exactly the same, but never completely different. They remind me of God, and they remind me of this call to love creation that I can’t refuse—because how can you not love the ocean?

This love for our world and for each other marks us as Christians and as a species on this planet—we are connected and so we have to act out of that connectedness in love.

It seems so easy and straightforward

--but it is hard.

NASA released an article this week about how the global concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – the primary driver of recent climate change – has reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in recorded history. They included quotes from some of their leading scientists about what this milestone means to them.

            Have you seen it?       

It is not surprising that we’ve reached 400ppm—the world is responding to how we’ve failed to love the earth.

Nature is crying out as we frack more of the earth, as we pollute more air and water, as we create more waste, as we drive more and share less.

Climate is changing and thus cultivating agriculture is more difficult.

                        Water is scarcer.

More people go hungry and illness spreads more easily in denser populations as people seek refuge in new locations—and these hungry and homeless people have been people of color and people who are poor first.

It’s all connected.

That is a scary reality that we’ve created for ourselves.

                                    It cannot be undone—not in our life times.

            It’s bad and it’s a terrible way to love our neighbors.

Anyway, we know all this. I know all this.

And still, when I read, NASA’s piece with some of its scientists’ reflections on climate change, I froze.

Listen:

We are a society that has inadvertently chosen the double-black diamond run without having learned to ski first. It will be a bumpy ride.[1]

and

As a college professor who lectures on climate change, I will have to find a way to look into those 70 sets of eyes that have learned all semester long to trust me and somehow explain to those students, my students how much we as people have altered our environment, and that they will end up facing the consequences of our inability to act.[2]

These aren’t scientists just speaking from the science—they’re speaking from their hearts.

As a species we’ve done so little to stop the change in earth’s climate that we’ve created.

Some of us in the world just don’t care, or don’t believe the science or have other, more immediate needs like struggling to pay rent or protecting our children.

But there are others of us who know and believe the science and have the time to respond and haven’t.

We’ve gotten stuck in place, feeling helpless and unable to respond to climate change—overwhelmed by the facts and figures that point to the end of everything we know about creation and life in it.

We look to the impending end of everything and everyone that we know and love and we become paralyzed.

This is not the first time members of our species have faced the real possibility of our end or worried about future generations—parents have clung to their babies and children in real fear when we’ve faced colonization, Cold War, Nuclear Weapons,etc etc.  

And this is different only in that all creation faces this reality together and there is no way out—it’s already in motion.

Facing head on the reality of climate change means facing a self-created trauma.

            Psychologists define trauma as something that is inflicted on someone that can be perceived as a threat and cannot be resisted.[3] One of the effects that trauma causes is a “paralyzing lack of agency.”[4]

                        There is too much to do, too much to lose.

And so we do nothing.

But this is where I think Christianity is necessary for the climate change movement.

We bring two powerful assumptions to the conversation.

The first is this: Our world is so broken.

We cannot deny that our human actions—and mostly the actions of industrialized countries—have created a new world. Environmental activist Bill McKibben says that we’ve changed creation so much that we need a new name for our planet Earth. While the world that the Genesis stories of creation tell us are made out of God’s love, McKibben says that this new planet “represents the deepest of human failures.”

Our Reformed Tradition sort of prepares us for this brokenness, right? Calvin reminds us of our “total depravity”—we’ve always been broken—and says that this brokenness is why we need God’s grace to save us through Jesus.

So it’s nothing new that we can’t save the world ourselves.

It’s our faith that holds us when we live in fear and helps us work in hope, as we face a world we must live on ‘lightly, carefully, gracefully.”[5]

Because our faith has a second assumption: God loves this world—and us.

            “in the very moment we are marked as sinful by the world, God marks us as loved, as recipients of forgiveness.

Marked in this way, we are freed to act not as perfect creatures, but

as fallen people who are nonetheless called to persistently seek ways to embody

God’s will for the flourishing of all creation.”[6]

            That is, after all, what the greatest and second greatest commandments call us to, right?

Love God.

You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. 

All the Law and the Prophets and the world depend on these two commands.

Love one another—love one another in caring for each other and for the earth because we are each of us connected to other people and all creation.

Love one another because it is the only way to us heal from the trauma.

When we love one another, we remember that the earth isn’t the only climate we can change—when we love each other, we change the climate of our hearts, so that we—together—face the new world with hope, not fear.

            And in hope we can move into action.

We can reduce our carbon footprints--

We can reduce the amount of water we use--

We can tread lightly on the planet when we travel--

We can tread lightly on our food systems and eat less meat and buy locally grown foods--

We can work for political change on all levels of our government---

We can work for change within our denomination, particularly in the process to divest from fossil fuel companies.

Each of these actions are necessary in our work to make a better world.

I want to focus for just a moment on the movement to divest from fossil fuels. At its heart, the movement centers around the commitment that if it is morally wrong to hurt the planet, it is wrong to profit from that climate change. Since Bill McKibben and students from Middlebury College first began the divestment from fossil fuel campaign in 2011, millions of people around the world have joined the movement.

Jesus was a powerful community organizer, because he understood that the powers and principalities of his time were no match for the work of love in the world. Social movements continue to be a viable way to change things because they recognize our interconnectedness.

            When we stand—together—and take our money away from fossil fuel investments, we tell those companies that they no longer have the singular right to our world.

Love can change things.


Because “the power of our love is what the resource companies… inevitably underestimate precisely because no amount of money can extinguish it. When what is being fought for is an identity, a culture, a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their grandchildren, there is nothing companies can offer as a bargaining chip.”[7] What grace reminds us is that we are not on our own. That when we love each other, we discover that we are loved—as God has loved us. Love one another—the world depends on it.

That is some powerful love, church, and that love and grace can cover our fears and trauma, and strengthen us for the work ahead. Amen.


[1] Dr. Gavin Schmidt, Climatologist and climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
[2] Laura Faye Tenenbaum, Oceanography Professor, Glendale Community College; Communications Specialist for NASA's Global Climate Change Website
[3] Jones. Trauma and Grace. 13.
[4] Ibid., 15.
[5] McKibben’s Eaarth, 153-ff
[6] Jones. Trauma and Grace. 37
[7] Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, 342

Acts 8:26-40

26 An angel from the Lord spoke to Philip, “At noon, take the road that leads from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a desert road.) 27 So he did. Meanwhile, an Ethiopian man was on his way home from Jerusalem, where he had come to worship. He was a eunuch and an official responsible for the entire treasury of Candace. (Candace is the title given to the Ethiopian queen.) 28 He was reading the prophet Isaiah while sitting in his carriage. 29 The Spirit told Philip, “Approach this carriage and stay with it.” 30 Running up to the carriage, Philip heard the man reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you really understand what you are reading?” 31 The man replied, “Without someone to guide me, how could I?” Then he invited Philip to climb up and sit with him. 32 This was the passage of scripture he was reading:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearer is silent so he didn’t open his mouth. 33 In his humiliation justice was taken away from him. Who can tell the story of his descendants because his life was taken from the earth?

34 The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, about whom does the prophet say this? Is he talking about himself or someone else?” 35 Starting with that passage, Philip proclaimed the good news about Jesus to him. 36 As they went down the road, they came to some water. The eunuch said, “Look! Water! What would keep me from being baptized?”38 He ordered that the carriage halt. Both Philip and the eunuch went down to the water, where Philip baptized him. 39 When they came up out of the water, the Lord’s Spirit suddenly took Philip away. The eunuch never saw him again but went on his way rejoicing. 40 Philip found himself in Azotus. He traveled through that area, preaching the good news in all the cities until he reached Caesarea.

1 John 4:7-21

7 Dear friends, let’s love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. 8 The person who doesn’t love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how the love of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. 10 This is love: it is not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins.

11 Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other. 12 No one has ever seen God. If we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us. 13 This is how we know we remain in him and he remains in us, because he has given us a measure of his Spirit. 14 We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the savior of the world. 15 If any of us confess that Jesus is God’s Son, God remains in us and we remain in God.16 We have known and have believed the love that God has for us.

God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them. 17 This is how love has been perfected in us, so that we can have confidence on the Judgment Day, because we are exactly the same as God is in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear expects punishment. The person who is afraid has not been made perfect in love. 19 We love because God first loved us. 20 If anyone says, I love God, and hates a brother or sister, he is a liar, because the person who doesn’t love a brother or sister who can be seen can’t love God, who can’t be seen. 21 This commandment we have from him: Those who claim to love God ought to love their brother and sister also.

I think you know this song:

All you need is Love
All you need is Love
All you need is Love- Love- Love is all you need

 
And maybe you know this song:
What is love? 
Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more. 

+++

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.
Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.
We have known and believe the love that God has for us.
God is love.
All you need is love.

Love is a universal hunger—we long for it—we write cheesy love songs and do crazy things for love.

We watch movies about love and read magazines about the love lives of celebrities and we try to figure out how to get more love in our lives. It is a hunger that can drive us crazy because we starve for it or it can feed us and fuel us for things beyond what we think is capable.  Human love is so slippery—so hard to understand. The Greeks had three different words for love and I think we probably have 47 meanings for the word “love.” We worry about who will love us and who we love.

We fear that we won’t live up to being loved because we know ourselves and who wants to love us.

But. God loves us perfectly and completely.

As I was writing this sermon, I felt like that transition—we think we suck but God loves us—it’s so trite. But every time I tried to edit that line, I couldn’t take it out.

What is love? Well, it’s God… and what is God? God is love—this is a pretty circular text…

how many times do we have to hear this in order to understand?! It’s really so simple.

I can’t ignore that God loves us perfectly and completely.

Because it’s true: God loves us.

Trying to understand who God is is like trying to understand love. “We often yearn for a God who can control nature and prevent sickness or violence, a God who will protect us from all harm.”[1] Because that’s a kind of God we can understand—a God we can make rules about or put into a box.

            But this isn’t really who we meet in the Gospels—not really—because a God who controls everything is a flat caricature of the fullness of God we meet in the Scriptures.

            God loves us, so we must love one another, in that same way. It’s not the other way around—we don’t love each other so God must love us. Instead, it is the love of God for us that defines us and calls us to love others. We cannot love each other until we understand God’s deep and perfect love for us.

            We can actually catch a glimpse of God’s love—we catch in the way in which community gathers, particularly in a community of faith. Where else do we find a community of love that isn’t divided by race, gender, politics, orientation, age, or anything else that separates us from each other?

If we look to the Scriptures we see that we cannot separate God from love. Whenever we encounter God, we encounter love—in creation, in rules, in judgement--- there is so much love. God’s love responds to our human anxiety, fear, doubts as a doctrine we can trust and lean on.  And out of that love, we’re called to love in response to God’s perfect love.

            Our other text—from Acts is a manifestation of God’s love. There’s something so sad about the Eunuch—here is someone who is rich and works for the powerful and is literate. The Eunuch has so much and yet wonders if the love of God is for him.

            The Eunuch has been to worship, and so we know that he wants to believe in God. It’s not so much a question about his ethnicity or race or belief—in the time of the early church, the Jewish tradition would have already been shared with Ethiopia, so we can assume that the Eunuch has been to Jerusalem to worship because he’s Jewish.  In the early church, he would have been known as a “God-fearer”, someone who believes in God but hasn’t taken on all the rituals of the Jewish faith, like circumcision, which would have been a little tricky for a eunuch. Even so, the eunuch feels set apart from God, from community. It’s not that the Eunuch is black or that he isn’t part of the early church—instead, it’s his physical condition that would have left him on the outskirts of society. Dueteronomic laws would have cast the Eunuch out of their community of faith because his body is mutilated. I want to be clear about this—it doesn’t matter what color his skin is or what his faith tradition is or his orientation or whatever… what matters in this moment is that he feels unworthy. He’s been cast aside by the world and so believes that God has cast him aside too.

          And so he cries out to Phillip—this random man he encounters on the road—“is this promise of God’s love and grace just for Isaiah or is it for me too?” He’s asking if the promises of God’s love is just a story or if it is a living promise for real, living, breathing people.  And Phillip is fast. Immediately he goes to the road.  Immediately he goes to the chariot. Immediately he opens the scriptures to this man who has known humiliation and suffering.  Immediately he responds to the fear and anxiety of the eunuch who asks what prevents him from from experiencing the wide embrace of God’s deep love.  Immediately he welcomes the Eunuch into God’s community.

Not because somehow the Eunuch magically changes and becomes part of the human community, but because God’s love is big enough.

There are so many implications of this text for our lives because there is not enough love in the world. There is not enough grace and hope in the world, and so we are called to love—can’t ignore this call and still be Christians.

           I’ve been thinking about this text and this call this week and letting it speak to the work we each do here in Pescadero.  I’ve been thinking about all the ways in which I see love being the vehicle through which relationships are made and justice is found in our little community that is often so cut off. But I’ve also been thinking about this text as I’ve been listening to stories coming out of Baltimore.

Maybe you’ve seen the video of the mom whose son was on his way to join the riots in Baltimore, after the peaceful protests, he was on his way to throw rocks at the police. She finds him and literally smacks him and screams at him.  The whole thing was recorded and this mom has been simultaneously demonized and honored for the way she treated her child.

            Is she protecting him?

            Is she hurting him?

I’m just so struck by the brokenness of our world—that we distrust mothers.

That's how broken we are--and we can't ignore it. 

            We cannot ignore how much hurt there is in our world—a world that empowers one part of humanity and systematically cuts out other parts—empowering people who are white and oppressing people who are not.

            Unlike for the eunuch—it DOES matter what color skin you have in the United States. It shouldn’t, but it does.

            To be welcomed, to be nurtured, to be protected, to be allowed to live—these are rights that should not be tied to the color of our skin. These are rights that should be assumed for ALL people. But they’re not—not in the United States. What Freddie Gray in Baltimore, what Eric Garner in Staten Island, what Michael Brown in Ferguson reminds us is that there is not enough love in this world because black bodies are dying.

          As people who are called to love each other, we cannot be silent in the face of the systemic discriminations of our country—we cannot be silent and still—we cannot be silent and expect to be identified as Christians.  We must let love guide us. We must become vulnerable and open to the hurt of other people, even as we get opened to the great possibility of love. 

This will be hard, because love isn’t a feeling—love is the conscious decision to do what is good for the other. Again: What you feel isn’t enough, the only thing that matters is how we treat each other. And how we treat each other is model on how God treats us. And how God treated us was embodied by Jesus' ministry he—he healed and fed and did everything he could to work for the good of others, no matter who they were, to the point of his death. Reading the stories of Jesus' ministry, "it is not enough to remember Jesus, to think about it, or even to be moved by it. We must live it. To know the God of love is to live the love of God.”[3]

          And love extends to everyone---love is all we need.

            So, we must lavish love on the people who are protesting—who live lives that are persecuted in our racist society. We must lavish love on young black men who face discrimination and death at disproportionately high rates in the United States. We must lavish love on immigrants and farmworkers—other people of color who are made to disappear into the shadows of our society, because their bodies have not mattered. Our love must know no bounds.  But we must also lavish love on the individuals and systems that perpetuate systems of inequality. Because only love can change things.
            If we don’t love each other, if we allow our love to be ruled by human divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, class—we lean on fear and fear is not of God. God is love, not fear. What is love? God is love. This is the heart of the Gospels. This is the point of the whole of who we are to be as followers of Jesus. People can’t see God but they can see us. What are we up to?  Amen.

[1] Feasting on the Word 466
[2] Feasting on the Word 454
[3] Feasting on the Word 468

Acts 4:32-35
Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

John 20:19-31
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Holy Week started for me on the Monday of Holy Week.

I participated in a rally in San Francisco, marching with hundreds who were hurt by the Catholic Archbishop in San Francisco who has recently restricted what diocesan high school teachers are allowed to talk about. We walked from the Mission District to the Cathedral, praying and singing and hoping for a new world. This procession reminded me so much of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday—a procession of hope and promise.

Later, on Good Friday, I participated in “Via cruces” … the Catholic Mexican reenactment of the fourteen stations of the cross… with residents of East Palo Alto. We walked the streets, praying and singing and remembering how much changes between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, watching as actors portrayed the humiliation and death of Jesus.

 On Holy Saturday, I went for a hike through the redwoods and listened to the wind in the trees and waited for resurrection.

And on Easter Sunday, I went to church where a friend is a pastor and celebrated with friends on the South Coast and gave thanks for the surprise of Easter, and the gift of resurrection.

Monday and Tuesday were “back to the grind” kind of days…
You know, back to the real world,
          back to life before Lent,
          back to life before we started any of those commitments we sometimes take on—like giving up sugar or Diet Coke or  swearing.
          Back to normal.

But on Wednesday of this last week, Easter—resurrection returned.

On Good Friday, the community of Pescadero, where Puente, the nonprofit where I work, is, this little community lost a young man in a car accident. It was incredibly tragic and so many parts of the community mourned.

I can’t imagine his mother getting the call from the police on GOOD FRIDAY that her son had died. What tragic symbolism, what horrifying, weighty reality for the day. This mother will never again read the passages of Mary watching her son die the same way—instead she will see herself in the unfathomable loss and grief.

Oh, God.

 On Wednesday, hundreds of people gathered at the major intersection in Pescadero to meet the hearse as it carried the young man into town, to pray and walk, and remember together.
His friends and coworkers pulled the casket out of the car.

His mother wept.  She bent over and she had to be held up. Her deep belly sobs resonated in my own rib cage, reminding me of when I’ve been racked by unexplainable grief that cannot be contained.  As she reached her arms across the casket, desperately trying to re-carry the life of her son, a mariachi band began the play.

It was—to my white experience—completely inappropriate. It was disrespectful. It was painful. Bright tuba tones and guitar chords playing over the wails of this young man’s mother.  I wanted to shake them—“how dare you insist on LIFE in the face of such grief!”

And I remembered Thomas in our reading.

Thomas who in our story must have wept and despaired at the death of Jesus, must have retreated to the locked rooms, must have mourned. Thomas witnessed the crucifixion, and Mary’s sorrow and felt his own grief and loss. I imagine that Thomas wept body-shaking tears. The early church portrays him as not being there when Jesus appears, and so he is still in mourning when the other disciples tell him that they have “seen the Lord.” He is still without peace.

In that kind of grief, I imagine Thomas recoiling from the peace of the other disciples.

                    “How DARE you insist on life!”

 As the casket made its journey through town to the cemetery, the crowd followed, carrying flowers. Step after step, I felt the presence of the people around me.

As we kept walking, another thought came to mind—this is resurrection.

We walked together, as a community in grief, rallying around the mother and family who wept with loss, and with the mariachi band that beat with our hearts that death was not the end, not the last stop on the journey. The band played and played, not over the tears of the family to drown them out, but to be a foundation… those notes knit together the community, so that they were not alone. “So that the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul.”

With each step, we proclaimed: this is really hard. But this is not the end.

It’s easy to think that Thomas was the only one who struggled to believe that the resurrection of Jesus was at hand. It is easy to see Thomas as the “incredulous nonbeliever who hides inside each of us… who always wants a little more proof.”[1] But the text says that all the disciples—even the ones who have already seen Jesus and have been sent into the world—are still in the room with the door shut, seven days later.

They’ve seen Jesus and they have not believed. They’ve returned to the room and locked the door—maybe out of fear that they too will be killed or fear that they will be accused of stealing Jesus’ body or fear of something else—fears that just seem a little ridiculous since they have seen Jesus alive.

Thomas hasn’t had that experience, so in some ways, he’s the only one with an excuse to be hiding. Thomas isn’t asking for anything more than what the other disciples have received.

Thomas is ready for Jesus. When Jesus appears, Thomas believes. The text doesn’t say that Thomas reached out to touch Jesus. It just says that Jesus arrives and gives Thomas peace. And Thomas, because now he sees that his grief does not need to continue—Thomas believes.

Easter Sunday was a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus—when we see and believe that death is not the end.

And this Sunday, we remember that resurrection is not the end—that God pursues us through the impossible, coming to us wherever we might be, undeterred by locked doors or fearful doubts. Serene Jones writes that this is “a strange thing to hold on to—[that] God comes seeking us, stepping through the walls that hardship builds around us, offering love at the very moment that grace seems nothing but a ghost story told by not-to-be-believed friends.”[2]

But what do we do the next day? The next week? How do we respond to that resurrection, defying death? What comes next? Do we go back to our homes, and shut the door, and refuse to be changed? Or do we somehow practice resurrection with and for each other?

Those mariachi band songs were defying death, choosing the impossibility of life over the inevitability of death. We walked, in Pescadero, through the streets to the top of the hill in the cemetery.  The catholic priest blessed the casket and when it was lowered into the earth, we dropped flowers into the grave.  Some of the men in the community filled in the hole and the family wept, but they were not alone. We held them as they grieved—looking up at the sun that kept shining in the impossibly blue sky.

Coming down from the hill, I looked at the flowers growing along the path and the cows that were grazing.


          Back to the real world,
          back to life before grief,
          back to life before we started the procession.
          Back to normal.

And the next day, I went to lunch at the taqueria where the young man worked and met with another young man to talk about programming for the next month. This was a different normal, a changed normal… but not the kind of change we create in Lent… when we give things up. A change to normal that acknowledges that in Easter, God gives up everything. For us.

          And then resurrection happens, with or without us.

          What does this tell us about faith, about God? That God, that resurrection is recognizable whenever “peace is offered, in those moments when life’s most brutal violence is honestly acknowledged and when… we realize we are not alone.”[3]

          When Jesus appears to the disciples, he gives them peace: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” They are not meant to return to their lives unchanged, but to go out into the world forgiving sins and loving other people as Jesus did, offering grace and peace to all.

Living into the weeks after Easter, we are called to new and different ways to live out resurrection, to join in on the resurrection that is around us, even amidst injustice, and suffering, and death, and grief. It is a resurrection build on a love that will not let us go, nor leave us alone.

And so, because that love is so hard to live into, the words from Wendell Berry’s Poem “Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front” have been echoing in my heart:

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.


Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful.

Lie down in the shade.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.



[1] Serene Jones, Feasting on the Word, 400
[2] Ibid., 402
[3] Ibid., 404

Everything has been in darkness,
covered over in dirt and refuse:
these thrown away flower stems and coffee grounds
            all used up and broken.
These fruit rinds and slimy leaves,
These egg shells and half-eaten remains of meals,
            tossed out of our home and into the world.
The heat has been building in the stillness of our garden,
            witnessed only by the bird that has nested in the tree,
            and the snails who are carrying their lives on their backs,
                        and the cat who lurks on the fence.
Foodstuff gives way to the dirt, as my fingers crumble the death in the pile,
            turning the tomato leaves into the molding strawberries I forgot to eat,
            mixing the scraps of yesterday with the leftovers from last month.
                        The smell lingers under my nails long after I’ve scrubbed the dirt from my skin.
There is an ache in my heart and arms as I reach into the pile, measuring the heat against my own body.
            These memories of meals and moments stick in my brain,
             and the weight of the decay resists the turning.
                        There is so much to mourn in this movement:
Childhood trips to our family compost pile, a sacred place in our family to which in winter we cut a path and our late beloved dog wore down to mud and matted grass.
Carrying eighty pounds of compost from its winter home on our Chicago back porch to the garden to surround the urban corn rows, letting the juice splash at our feet and legs as the wind changed from biting to loving.
Elbow-deep measuring with my grandmother, inhaling the tomato plants as my knees pressed into the ground, to be imprinted by mulch, another vestige of dying earth around me.
Beautiful, sacred moments, long lost to the turning of the earth around the hot, glowing sun.
I cannot get them back, I can only trust them to the God who is making something new in the darkness, calling forth life from all that has been strewn from our kitchens and lives:
bone upon bone, breath upon breath, heartbeat upon heartbeat.
Sweet, sacred earth. Somehow, you are made new—God always finding a way to make life out of the death that we so quickly accept as the end of the peel, stem, grounds of our being.
These artifacts of our waste gestate and re-incarnate, resurrecting into what they have always been—from stardust to stardust, ashes to ashes, topsoil to topsoil.
  
We mistake this miracle as just a process of earth, instead of seeing it the building of a just world, where death turns into life, again and again.
            Instead of seeing God making a new way:
                        Claiming life.
                        Naming life.
                        Giving life.
My palms are grimy as they scoop out the hot, dark earth that has been waiting for the light to be invited in.
Stardust into topsoil, the earth fills the empty waiting vessel, making space to welcome the fledging plant in its midst, making space in this death-into-life soil for more life, making space for miracles to birth more miracles.
            It is a new day. Christ is risen.
Alleluia.
                                    Amen.


originally posted on Presbyterians for Earth Care