My words will not last

My words will not last,

No matter how wise they may seem

For time will dust them away,

In its endless task of cleaning

But if by grace I am able to inspire

One other soul to love

To take the risk of love, for the sake of love

Then I will have written something that will forever endure

For it will be written on the heart of another human being…

Words will one day pass away

But the love we release into creation will never be lost

          Steven Charleston

__________________________

I wake this morning

Knowing that some morning

I will not wake

My tired rising

My aching body

The haunted face in the mirror

Give testimony to my mortality

Statisticians say I am maxed out

(life expectancy for males having dropped in 2021 to 73)

A sobering thought

That one is living on borrowed time

So I wander, back along my stumbling steps

Wondering

About the sum of my life

I have done some good

I have done things that are a cause for shame

I am kind and cruel

I am disciplined and impulsive

I am giving and needy

I have helped people and hurt people

I have been someone to admire

And a profound disappointment

And I have written a lot of words

Words

Words

Words

Three books

A blog

Sermons

Posts

Words

Some of them are powerful

Some of them insipid

Words on paper

Words on a screen

Words spoken into the air

To ears listening and not listening

Ah

But have I written on any hearts?

Have I been able to stop being assertive

Stop being “right”

Stop being the one who “knows it all”

Stop being opinionated

Have I been able to put my impulsive need

For praise, for admiration

For comfort

For acceptance

Enough

To think of others?

Have I had moments when I have listened

Been kind

Been giving

Have I loved?

Have I been one who has

Released love into creation

As much as I have released need into creation?

And fear

I know that I am loved

By Love

I know that when the averages find me

I will return to love

But it would be nice to think

That I have left more than empty words behind

That I have left some love behind

Planted somewhere

In someone’s heart

Is it not time

The psalms show us what justice looks like.

Justice maintains the right of the weak, and it rescues the needy (Ps. 82). It rejects the desire to take advantage of the vulnerable (Ps. 94). The just refuse to speak out of two sides of their mouth (Ps. 28). They aren’t bloodthirsty (Ps. 139), greedy (Ps. 10), or conniving (Ps. 94), and they don’t love violence (Ps. 11). Those who love justice actively reject all systems that oppress people (Ps. 58).

Who are the recipients of justice? All people alike require justice. But those who need it most, according to the Psalms, are what philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff calls the “quartet of the vulnerable”: widows, orphans, poor, and resident aliens”

In other words, the very people being abandoned by the American right (those who paradoxically claim Jesus)

A Psalm for our times

God is

We know God

We know God

God is immanent and transcendent

God is in us

A spark

A roaring fire

A rushing wind

A spring of living wate

And God is just

And God demands justice

How long O Lord will this continue

How long with the liars, the frauds

The greedy

The abusive

Flourish

How long will they sit in the seats of power

And in the courts of justice

A promote inequity, and inequality

How long will they make the rich richer

And the poor poorer

O God love

Change us!

Transform us

Give us new minds, new hearts

New eyes

Make us a people

Make us a nation

That defends the weak rather than shames them

That lifts the poor up rather than shames them

That defends the weak rather than ridicules them

That refuses to accept and sustain systems that oppress

Rather than worshiping the wicked

May we see them for who they are

Destroyers

Dividers

Plunderers

They talk about God

They sell Bibles

They claim God’s favor

They claim God’s call

But they know nothing, they understand nothing.

They walk about in darkness;

all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

O God, is it not time?

Is it not time, before there is no time

For love to win?

The Table is the Point

If you are writing a play about [Holy Week}, the scenes would be table, trial (with its various locations), cross, tomb (burial), tomb (resurrection), and table. The table is the first setting, and it is the final setting of the story. Indeed, when the disciples want to meet Jesus again the next week, they return again to the upper room to meet him at the table.

They never return to the cross. Jesus never takes them back to the site of the execution. He never gathers his followers at Calvary, never points to the blood-stained hill, and never instructs them to meet him there. He never valorizes the events of Friday. He never mentions them. Yes, wounds remain, but how he got them isn’t mentioned. Instead, almost all the post-resurrection appearances — which are joyful and celebratory and conversational — take place at the upper room table or at other tables and meals.

Table – trial – cross – tomb – tomb – table.

What if the table is the point?

                     Diana Butler Bass

________________________________________

What if the table is the point?

What if community is the point?

What if Easter is, when all is said and done, about

People gathering

Laughing

Eating

People listening to each other

Supporting one other

Being together when it is easy, and when it is not

Being together in the rejoicing and in the lamenting

What if Easter is about Jesus stepping in

And saving us

Not from God’s wrath

But from the enmity of the Rulers of the World

From hate and violence

From those forces that would divide and destroy

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples,

a banquet of aged wine, the best of meats, and the finest of wines.

On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples,

the sheet that covers all nations;

   he will swallow up death forever.

In the great story of love

We move from a table, where feet were washed

Bread was broken

And wine was drunk

Out into a dark and painful world

To a garden of anguish

To betrayal

And abuse

To injustice and death

To a tomb filled and a tomb emptied

And ends up back in an upper room, that same room, perhaps

And at a  table

Where once again bread is broken

And by the Sea of Galilee

Where once again bread is broken

And fish are served

Food for the stomach

Food for the heart

Food for the soul

Perhaps the point is that because of Jesus

We can be together

We can be stuffed with all good things

We can be love

The table reminds us we are family

That we are stuck with each other

And we might as well love each other

It reminds us that faith is about being fed

And feeding one another

Perhaps the table is the point.  As Rachel Held Evans once wrote:

“This is what God’s kingdom is like a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there’s always room for more.”

God are you There?

When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it!” —Genesis 28:16

The Bible I set out to learn and love rewarded me with another way of approaching God, a way that trusts the union of spirit and flesh as much as it trusts the world to be a place of encounter with God…. People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay….

According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.”  How does one learn to see and hear such angels?

          Barbara Brown Taylor (quoted by the Center for Action and Contemplation)

________________________________

God!

Are you there?

I wonder sometimes

When my body hurts

And my eyes fail

I wonder sometimes

When I hear the disabled ridiculed

And people laugh

When I hear hate spewed

And people cheer

When I watch as masses, driven by resentment

Are fueled by a desire dominance

I wonder sometimes as I watch us

Destroy the planet for profit

And see dying and starving children

The flotsam of war

O God!

My heart fails within me

My feet stumble

As I see the prosperity of the wicked.

I know there is nothing new under the sun

We have seen this before

The words of an ancient Psalmist echo in my soul

As he laments human arrogance

“Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence.

  From their callous hearts comes iniquity; their evil imaginations have no limits.

  They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance, they threaten oppression.

  Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth.”

          (Psalm 73)

Where are you, God?

Why do you not set things right!?

Why do you not bring down the mighty and lift up the poor?

Are you in this place?

Surely, you are in this place.

Help me to know it.

Help me to see you, God of love

In the brilliant reds of the sunrise

In the majesty of the mountains

In the laughing voices of the streams

Help me to see you, Lord,

In the eagle that flies

And the deer that wanders

In creatures large and small

Help me to see you in the little things

In that act of kindness

That kind word

That smile, that laugh

That comes

I need glimmers of your presence Lord,

Help me to see you

Even where it is hardest to see you

In those human creatures who strive and toil

Love and hate

Destroy and heal

We are so confusing, O Sacred

So confused

Help me to see you, lord, in myself

And in all those others

In whom your image is badly blurred

May I see and hear the angels

Softly whispering

You are loved

You are loved

Grow

Grow

The danger of certainty

I walked through an earthquake once

as the ground shifted beneath my feet

and the world swayed

and all seemed undone

I breathed deeply

when the ground was once again

solid

and I stood on solid ground

certain

Certainty

I long for certainty

It would be nice to know

That God is there

That Love will win

I would love to be certain

About what is right and wrong

I envy, sometimes

Those who say with certitude

The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it

However

It has been said that the opposite of certainty is not doubt

It is openness

It is faith

And I have become certain that certainty

Can be a curse rather than a blessing

And that it is better to question

And struggle

To seek

And explore

Bertrand Russell once said

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

There is a strength to certainty

But weakness too

The strength of conviction, perhaps

The passion that comes from believing one is right

But with certainty closedness

Stuckness

A refusal to think, to challenge

To change

we indeed need a degree of certainty to get by

but it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal

For with the sureness of certainty comes

What can only be called

Arrogance, conceit, haughtiness

I know the truth, you don’t

I am right, you are wrong

I am saved, you are cursed

The earth is 6000 years old

LGBTQI+ people are sin

God hates all who do not believe the way I do

It is unintentional

Perhaps unseen

But it is there

A stolid, cold, cruelness

Blind faith is truly blind

Blind to people

To pain

To the radicality and irrationality

Of that power we often call God

Certainty stops us in our tracks

It keeps us from learning

Growing

Changing

From seeing God’s new thing

Give us uncertainty, God

Do not allow us to ever, ever

Believe we understand you (beyond that you are love)

Or to believe we speak for you

Or are the repositories of truth

Or the gatekeepers of the kingdom

Keep us questioning

Searching

Doubting

Struggling

Hoping

Loving

Changing

Growing

Let us join the man

Who on his knees in the dust

Cried to Jesus

Lord, I believe!

Help my unbelief

Help us believe

Help us question our beliefs

And lead us forward

always

Into uncertainty

And a fresh and beautiful

newness

Where is God

Through centuries God’s voice cried in the wilderness.  How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in the temples.  How often it was drowned or distorted?  Now we behold how it gradually withdraws, abandoning one people after another, departing from their souls, despising their wisdom.  The taste for the good has all but gone from the earth.  We heap spite upon cruelty, malice upon atrocity… There has never been more reason for human creatures to be ashamed than now. Silence hovers mercilessly over many dreadful lands.  The day of the Lord is a day without the Lord.  Where is God?

          Abraham Joshua Heschel, “I Asked for Wonder”

__________________________________________

Has God gone silent?

Has Jesus left the building?

Has the Sacred decided to depart

Is the day of the Lord without the Lord?

Where is God?

Is God gone, or have we simply silenced the voice of love

Have we drowned and distorted God’s Word

Have tried to contain the fire of the Spirit

The wild breath of God

In our sanctuaries and our creeds

We have attempted to trap the wind

We have slammed shut the windows of our sanctuaries

Hoping to contain that which cannot be contained

But a wind that cannot move cannot move us

We have attempted to enshrine the Sacred

We have invoked the name of God’s most high

In the high places we have created

Claiming God in the halls of justice

In the stifling halls of power

But God is not there

The wind of God is blowing

In the wilderness

In poverty stricken cities,

God is tenting with the homeless

God is digging through the rubble of Gaza

The voice of God cries out in the wildernesses

Created by our greed, our hate, our lust for power

As we in the name of God

“heap spite upon cruelty, malice upon atrocity”

God shows up

Among those we would throw away

Exclude

Shame

Diminish

Where is God?

In the rubble of Rafah

Under a freeway overpass in America

In the waters of the Rio Grande

In a bombed-out building in Ukraine

God is

God is present

God is love and power mixed

God still speaks, still acts, still loves, still transforms

In the wild places

In the broken open places

Of great need

And great humility

If we go to church, it may well be

that we do NOT hear the voice of God

but if we go to a person in need

if we stand with an LGBTQI+ person

if we stand with the oppressed and suppressed

we might well hear God’s song of love

echoing in the wilderness

beyond comfort

There is nothing more confusing to the postmodern personality, to the millennial sojourner, than to have to exist between the strange life of dealing with your Blues and Gospel all the time. Madness and ministry, chaos and Christ. My father heard an elder in Georgia say it this way. When he asked her, “How are you doing, Mother?” she said, “I’m living between Oh Lord and Thank you, Jesus.”

          Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III

______________________________________________

I have never been oppressed

I have been treated unfairly,

And accused of things that are not true

But most of my pain has been of my own making

And most of the flaws and errors attributed

Have been real

As a white male

Raised in relative affluence by decent parents

As a person with tons of privilege

A great education

Degrees and influence

Whatever obstacles I have faced in life

Have been minimal

I don’t know how it feels to be black, or indigenous

To deal with systematic oppression

Or with transgenerational trauma

I have been

Comfortable

For lack of a better word

And then along comes Jesus

Not the Jesus I met in the Sunday School classroom

In the basement of the Presbyterian Church in Lakeview, Oregon.

The Jesus introduced to me by my youth group leaders

Or those ministers who influenced me in college

Not even the one sliced and diced by my seminary professors at Princeton

Not a Jesus who is a ticket to heaven (get me out of here God!)

Not a Jesus who wants me to pull away from a sinful world

And huddle in fear

Nor a Jesus who wants me to grab power and wealth and control the world

(still out of fear)

Not a Jesus who is about exclusion, and piety

And, if truth were told, retribution not grace

The things I was taught about Jesus which no longer seem true

Could fill a book

But along comes Jesus

A Jesus who says (Mark 1)

“The time has come, the kingdom of God has come near.

  Repent and believe the good news!”

A Jesus who calls me to let go of everything

To die!

So that I might be raised to newness

A Jesus who is real, powerful,

Who fills me with a little bit of everything that is Sacred

Joy, hope, peace, kindness, forgiveness,

And yes, pain

Pain over the pain I see

Anguish over the injustice and inequity

Over poverty

Racism

Hate

A Jesus who wants me to change

To turn from all that is not love

To become the best self I can possibly be

Not to escape wrath

But to become a person who touches the people around me

With Sacred Love

And works to change the world into the likeness of heaven

Who strives to bring the kindom of God nearer

So here I am

Living between

Oh Lord and Thank you, Jesus.

Seeing the world

Being stunned by the greed, the hate

The lust for power

The lies

The distortion of the Gospel

The malignancy

Seeing myself in the mirror

Still a mess

Still so full of confusion and fear

Still making mistakes that hurt others, and me

And yet being so thankful

For Jesus

For resurrection

For newness

For the power I am given to work for Love

O Lord, help!

Thank you, Jesus, for all good things

The time has come

The kindom is near

I need to change

The world needs to change

I am called to change

I am called to participate in creating change

Not by insisting on dominance and control

But by loving, forgiving, caring, sharing

Oh, Lord!  (Help!)

Thank you, Jesus,

I can only believe

It haunts me

Lingering in my mind

Like the foul stench of something dead that I cannot find

It sticks to my clothes

My mind, my heart

And I cannot wash it away

With good thoughts

Or good theology

It is the smell of hate, fear, resentment,

And vindictiveness

My four horsemen of the apocalypse

We live in a world dominated by malefaction

These profane powers eat away

At the fabric of decency like a cancer

Until people believe the lies

Support the unsupportable

Abandon not just truth but compassion

Justice

Equity

And all that is love and light

Seems overwhelmed

Powerless

Ezekiel like I am looking out on a valley of dry bones

As 30% of those around me believe a proven lie

And people of “faith” worship a vile person

Who, fists clenched, face and voice distorted

Ridicules, dehumanizes, and incites

We are stripped clean of wisdom and decency

Can these bones live?

Can these bones live?

I have to believe

I do believe

Lord, help my unbelief

This is what faith is about

Faith in a God of creativity and love

A God of justice and compassion

A God who cares

I do not know how

I do not know when

I only know

That this God is turn to

This God who is as close as my breath

This God who came, and lived among us

Paradoxically

Three and one

Human divine

Power and humility

This God can and will

Bring these bones to life

There has been evil before

There will always be evil

Foul souls will always seek and sometimes gain power

Ascendence

But always God is present

Working

Working through weakness and humility

Through kindness and grace

Working, working, working

Until in the driest, most lifeless moments

there is “a noise, a rattling sound,

and the bones come together, bone to bone…

and tendons and flesh appear on them and skin covers them,

and the breath of God

breathes life

and love wins

in ways small, ways large

ways obvious, ways hidden

I do not know what happens

To those people of the lie

To those who hate and destroy

And wallow in resentment and retribution

I cannot (yet) wish them well

But I cannot wish the hell

I can only hope for transformation

For restoration

For the light to shine in the darkness

I can only believe

Bless the echthroi

The echthroi are those who would separate us from stars and each other, un-Name, annihilate.  The fallen angels are echthroi, and so are disease and famine and hate nad vanity and a host of other little nasty things.  The echthroi would teach us despair, indifference, would have us believe that unmerited suffering is deliberately inflicted on the creature by an angry Creator.  The echthroi are forensic. They are powerful.  But love is greater

          Madeleine L’Engle

Oh that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me; those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves against you for evil!

Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise against you? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.

Search ME, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

          Psalm 139

______________________________________________

The world, it seems

Is filled with echthroi

With those who would separate and divide

The echthroi are everywhere

These fallen angels perhaps

This fallen humanity

Sometimes, it seems, they are people

We know their names

Those who stir up hate and enmity

Those who use fear and lies to manipulate and divide

To create violence

Sometimes they are bigger, more pervasive

Poverty, War, Disease and Dis-ease

And that lust for power and wealth

They can be anything

Even our own families (Mathew 10)

Anything that becomes more important than Sacred, than Love

Anything that hardens the heart and blinds us to others

And blinds us to ourselves

We feel the enmity

It lingers in our souls

That creeping hate, that foul malignancy

It eats away at us

And it separates us from ourselves

And it separates us from all that is Sacred

The stars, the moon, the sun

The planet

From Love

It feels as if the world is full of these “monsters”

These Echthroi

As if we are powerless before them

And so we lash out

We become violent in our souls

We become violent with our words

We become violent

And we hate

We hate the hate

We hate the haters

And in hating we become what we hate

But hear the good news of the Gospel

The Echthroni are powerful

Love is more powerful

Humility is more powerful

Love can say to hate,

“This stops here”

Let’s hear it for “hate interrupted”

For that moment when we stop and breathe

And become open

When Love stops us in the middle of our rant

“Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise against you? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.”

And takes us to that new place

“Search ME, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

These are troubling times

It is easy to despair

It is easy to slide into the abyss of hate

But this I believe

The more we resist the Echthroi with their own weapons

Hate

The more powerful they become

But the more we open ourselves up to love

To our “better angels”

To hope, and joy, and peace

The less room there is for the Echthroi

The less power they have

So bless those I love

Bless those I hate

Bless the echthroi

Let me hold them all out to the love of God

This is not easy

It is not soft, cozy, shallow love

It means stepping into the fear, the hate, the blind animosity

And holding it

Carrying it

As Jesus carried it all

To the cross

So bless the bullies

Bless the haters

Bless them so that they may turn

From anger, resentment, and violence

Into the light of God’s love

PS  This I know to be true.  I am not there, yet.  But I am trying

Time to stand

The hate is terrifying

The anger is terrifying

The lies are terrifying

Pour out of a person who would lead us

Into the abyss of hate, anger, and lies

More terrifying still

Is the adoration, the allegiance to the contagious hate

More frightening is the way

We are all affected

How some follow and some resist

But own in all of us

‘the worst ‘ emerged

How such horrible things are drawn out of us

And into the world

Hate begets hate

Violence, violence

And lies trap us in a circle of deception

From which we cannot escape

This is not new

It has happened over and over again

This slow slide into cruelty and violence

Into control and punishment

Into domination

In those attempts to oppress, suppress

Even eradicate

‘the other’

Jesus came into such a world

And he taught a different way

He gave us the antidote

Love

Love and the fruits of love

love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control

But when I look at many of those who claim to follow Jesus

When I look at many of those who say they are Christian

I wonder if Jesus would want to be one

Tony Campolo once said,

“If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitude Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity in North America”

When we look at much of Christendom today

We don’t see much love

We see people who hate gays

Who hate “liberals”

Who side with abusive power

Violence

Greed

Lies

Manipulation

Coercion

Shane Claibourne suggests

That what we see is “Christian extremists who have declared war

In the name of the lamb”

And in this war, they have aligned themselves

With an ideological movement

And a person

That is antithetical to Jesus

We need extremists

But we need extremists for love and grace

Not wealth and power

Our problem is that the way of Jesus

The way of

Love your enemy

Bless those who curse you

Turn the other cheek

Walk the second mile

Give up your life

Seems so defeating

As if we are being asked to masochistically let others

Walk all over us

I don’t think we are asked to give in to the terrorists

Walter Wink suggests that the option is not

Violence or abject passivity

That it is neither assault nor submission

But a third way

The way of standing up

Being present

Looking the other person in the eye

This is not cowering or running

It is confronting in a way that forces

The other to see (at some level)

Your humanity (which they try so hard to deny)

We ask them to “see” us

And we attempt to “see” them

Their poverty, in the midst of their wealth

Their fear and weakness, amid their attempts to hold power

We have two goals

To resist!  And we must resist

And to resist in a way that does not mirror, does not emulate

That which we resist

Our goal is to neutralize the oppressors

Not destroy them

Our goal is to interrupt the violence and oppression in

A way that seeks redemption and restoration

I cannot seek the destruction of Trump

Or I will lose even if I win

I must somehow seek his restoration and redemption

Much of me rebels, even as I say that

For there is a side of me (there is always that side)

That wants retribution

But I cannot become him

I cannot devolve into name-calling

Ridicule

Threats

Lies

Hate

Or I lose

And the Kindom of God loses

And in a way

All that is hate and violence wins

And I cannot go down that path

With those who in their fear and pain and emptiness

Follow the way of fear and pain and emptiness

Which looks like domination and exclusion

We are in terrifying times

We could lose our country

We could lose our planet to greed

We could see the end of

Justice

Equity

Truth

So we have to stand

As the prophets of old stood

And with prophetic imagination challenged the people of Israel

(who rarely listened)

As Martin Luther King Jr

And Gandhi

And Nelson Mandela

And Desmond Tutu

And Dag Hammarskjold

stood

And look hate in the eye

And say

This stops here

We need to become extremists for love