Homeland
In my effort to keep track of everthing that's even vaguely a manuscript sermon, I'm posting something of today's from my notes. I didn't really preach from a full manuscript, though, so what's here isn't necessarily a true record... there are whole theads I'd woven through, which are now quite lost!
.......................................................................
Homeland
Hebrews 11:1, 8-16
I guess for many people their image of heaven begins with clouds, and a line of people waiting in sunlight at the pearly gates, which are guarded by St. Peter with his keys to heaven, and perhaps also by a benevolent-looking angel or two, perhaps strumming a harp.
In my mind the geography of heaven begins with a Cape Cod beach. It is the Atlantic Ocean sheltered by Nantucket and Martha's Vinyard, and it tastes of salt water and wild blueberries and fried dough and lobster -- although not all at the same time! It is seemingly endless days of laughter and swimming and run-the-bases and evening campfires on the beach. It is the golden glow of knotty pine walls, the character of weatherbeaten wood shingles, and cool ocean breezes through a screen porch. It is the remnants of rose bushes planted by my father, whom I cannot remember, but whose roses I could see year by year pushing their way each summer through the sandy soil along the rail fence.
Layered on top of these visions are other memories, more recent, of a summer cottage on Okracoke Island on North Carolina's Outer Banks: days of wind-swept beaches and sea kayaks and craft shops, evenings of friendship and laughter and bourbon-pecan chicken (which I promise you in itself tastes like a little piece of heaven on earth.)
The last time I saw that Cape house and that beach was twenty years ago. The last time we were all together on Ocracoke was perhaps seven years ago. But as I write and speak those tastes and smells and visions are so close, so immediate, that I almost feel I could simply turn my head and see them, reach out my arm and grab and pull myself into them. Those summers were bounded in time and in space, finite, but somehow they have a timeless quality to them: I carry them with me, and they are as bright and true and present as each breath I draw this morning.
There is something essential of me in these memories: who I am has been shaped by how I have lived these moments, and by the way in which I long for them.
...
I came in this morning early and sat to write this sermon in what -- heaven help me -- I still think of as John's office. I threw open a window and opened the blinds, and the sunshine streamed in, and with it the sweetness of a cool breeze. And as that sunlight fell on the desk, I discovered that John had left a book, Beginning a New Pastorate, on the desktop. And that book, together with the phone numbers pinned to the walls and the resources left on the shelves will link John with our new pastor, who will indeed be Beginning a New Pastorate.
I just left that office ten minutes ago, and I promise you that at this moment it is still bathed in sunshine, still cooled by that breeze from the open window. I'd been afraid that it would feel empty, that it would be pervaded by a sense of John's absence. But it does not feel empty: it feels full, full of all to which it has stood witness, full of John and decades of good pastoring stretching back into the past, full with the Spirit, full in anticipation of all the good pastoring which stretches into its future. The office itself is poised in a moment between the past and the future of which it is a part.
And we are all thus poised, each moment a threshold between what has come before and what is to come, encompassing within ourselves our past experiences, good and bad, and our future dreams and longings.
...
John would sometimes read us poetry from the pulpit. This morning I also want to share with you a poem, Ask Me, by William Stafford.
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
From miles away God calls us forward; from beside us and within us the Spirit supports us on our pilgrim journeys. With Abraham, we are all, I think, on a journey from a homeland remembered to a promised homeland, all of us in passage as moment dissolves into moment.
...
On Friday's Morning Edition, NPR spent seven minutes -- an eternity in broadcast journalism! -- reading the whole of the Declaration of Independance on the air, beginning to end. Listening to it actually brought a tear to my eye: it's beautiful.
Then yesterday, independance day, in the early evening I spent some time watching a PBS program about the founding of our country. It was partly about the war, but also largely about Thomas Jefferson, who penned the Declaration. From the best thinkers of the day he distilled their best thoughts, coupled them with his own bright intelligence and fluid eloquence, and produced a document which almost 250 years later still stands as a beacon to us, still resonates with us, still promises us that our Creator has endowed us all with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is Jefferson who articulated the ideal which lives in our minds and to this day shapes our country.
And yet I have lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I have wandered the halls and grounds of Monticello, and seen there beside the dome of its rotunda a lane which runs between the stone foundations of nearby slave cabins, now crumbled to ruins. Jefferson held other human beings in slavery. He kept slaves, and in his lifetime, he did not free them. And he did not keep them naïvely: by his writings it is clear that he knew it was wrong, yet he kept them regardless.
The disjunction is striking, between the ideal and the reality.
I think we all live in that gap between who we are and who we are called to become. Jefferson certainly did, as did all of our national heroes, and all of our Biblical heroes. It is part of what it means to be human, to live with the distance between the reality of where we find ourselves and where we wish to be, where we are called to be.
For us the distance between the two can seem impossibly wide, but for God it is only a breath, and the kingdom is at hand. Only turn your head and you might glimpse it; only reach out your arm, and you might pull yourself into it.
...
Last night I also watched another television program -- you can tell where I spent my evening yesterday! -- called Obsession, which chronicles the healing process of some people who have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Some of them had unwanted thoughts, and some had unwanted fears or anxieties. One was disturbed by the sight of her mother and brother's hands; another woman was so afraid of what might be lurking in the dark that she was unable to tuck her own child into bed at night, unable to lean over a bed under which something sinister might be waiting, unable to turn the light off and leave the room. What all of these folks shared was that their obsessions and related compulsions were disruptive; they were destroying their relationships with the people they loved the most.
Each of these people spent twelve weeks in cognitive behavioural therapy.
The idea behind cognitive behavioural therapy is that while we cannot directly change our thoughts and our anxieties, we can change the way in which we respond to them.
Each of these people -- guided by a therapist -- gradually increased their exposure to the thing which bothered them most. They faced their thoughts and their fears head-on, unmitigated by the compulsive behaviours they'd accrued. The woman who was bothered by hands sat in a room with her family showing their hands as her anxiety level grew, and grew, and finally topped out, and began to recede. The woman who was afraid of the dark similarly faced her fears. Neither could change the way they thought, but they could change their reactions: they could stand in the face of their fears rather than run from them.
And the surprising thing, the hopeful thing, is that the way they behaved in the face of their fears -- the way they behaved in the face of their bad thoughts -- actually changed those thoughts and fears, and mitigated them more than avoidance ever could.
When we change the ways we behave, when we change the ways in which we respond to those around us, we change ourselves. Each one of these steps towards who we are called to become is a step we take with God; each one of these pilgrim steps offers a little glimpse of God's kingdom.
...
(prayer: that we might perceive the kingdom, and yearn for it, and reach for it; that God might be with us on each step we take, and guide us towards where God would have us be.)
.......................................................................
Homeland
Hebrews 11:1, 8-16
I guess for many people their image of heaven begins with clouds, and a line of people waiting in sunlight at the pearly gates, which are guarded by St. Peter with his keys to heaven, and perhaps also by a benevolent-looking angel or two, perhaps strumming a harp.
In my mind the geography of heaven begins with a Cape Cod beach. It is the Atlantic Ocean sheltered by Nantucket and Martha's Vinyard, and it tastes of salt water and wild blueberries and fried dough and lobster -- although not all at the same time! It is seemingly endless days of laughter and swimming and run-the-bases and evening campfires on the beach. It is the golden glow of knotty pine walls, the character of weatherbeaten wood shingles, and cool ocean breezes through a screen porch. It is the remnants of rose bushes planted by my father, whom I cannot remember, but whose roses I could see year by year pushing their way each summer through the sandy soil along the rail fence.
Layered on top of these visions are other memories, more recent, of a summer cottage on Okracoke Island on North Carolina's Outer Banks: days of wind-swept beaches and sea kayaks and craft shops, evenings of friendship and laughter and bourbon-pecan chicken (which I promise you in itself tastes like a little piece of heaven on earth.)
The last time I saw that Cape house and that beach was twenty years ago. The last time we were all together on Ocracoke was perhaps seven years ago. But as I write and speak those tastes and smells and visions are so close, so immediate, that I almost feel I could simply turn my head and see them, reach out my arm and grab and pull myself into them. Those summers were bounded in time and in space, finite, but somehow they have a timeless quality to them: I carry them with me, and they are as bright and true and present as each breath I draw this morning.
There is something essential of me in these memories: who I am has been shaped by how I have lived these moments, and by the way in which I long for them.
...
I came in this morning early and sat to write this sermon in what -- heaven help me -- I still think of as John's office. I threw open a window and opened the blinds, and the sunshine streamed in, and with it the sweetness of a cool breeze. And as that sunlight fell on the desk, I discovered that John had left a book, Beginning a New Pastorate, on the desktop. And that book, together with the phone numbers pinned to the walls and the resources left on the shelves will link John with our new pastor, who will indeed be Beginning a New Pastorate.
I just left that office ten minutes ago, and I promise you that at this moment it is still bathed in sunshine, still cooled by that breeze from the open window. I'd been afraid that it would feel empty, that it would be pervaded by a sense of John's absence. But it does not feel empty: it feels full, full of all to which it has stood witness, full of John and decades of good pastoring stretching back into the past, full with the Spirit, full in anticipation of all the good pastoring which stretches into its future. The office itself is poised in a moment between the past and the future of which it is a part.
And we are all thus poised, each moment a threshold between what has come before and what is to come, encompassing within ourselves our past experiences, good and bad, and our future dreams and longings.
...
John would sometimes read us poetry from the pulpit. This morning I also want to share with you a poem, Ask Me, by William Stafford.
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
From miles away God calls us forward; from beside us and within us the Spirit supports us on our pilgrim journeys. With Abraham, we are all, I think, on a journey from a homeland remembered to a promised homeland, all of us in passage as moment dissolves into moment.
...
On Friday's Morning Edition, NPR spent seven minutes -- an eternity in broadcast journalism! -- reading the whole of the Declaration of Independance on the air, beginning to end. Listening to it actually brought a tear to my eye: it's beautiful.
Then yesterday, independance day, in the early evening I spent some time watching a PBS program about the founding of our country. It was partly about the war, but also largely about Thomas Jefferson, who penned the Declaration. From the best thinkers of the day he distilled their best thoughts, coupled them with his own bright intelligence and fluid eloquence, and produced a document which almost 250 years later still stands as a beacon to us, still resonates with us, still promises us that our Creator has endowed us all with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is Jefferson who articulated the ideal which lives in our minds and to this day shapes our country.
And yet I have lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I have wandered the halls and grounds of Monticello, and seen there beside the dome of its rotunda a lane which runs between the stone foundations of nearby slave cabins, now crumbled to ruins. Jefferson held other human beings in slavery. He kept slaves, and in his lifetime, he did not free them. And he did not keep them naïvely: by his writings it is clear that he knew it was wrong, yet he kept them regardless.
The disjunction is striking, between the ideal and the reality.
I think we all live in that gap between who we are and who we are called to become. Jefferson certainly did, as did all of our national heroes, and all of our Biblical heroes. It is part of what it means to be human, to live with the distance between the reality of where we find ourselves and where we wish to be, where we are called to be.
For us the distance between the two can seem impossibly wide, but for God it is only a breath, and the kingdom is at hand. Only turn your head and you might glimpse it; only reach out your arm, and you might pull yourself into it.
...
Last night I also watched another television program -- you can tell where I spent my evening yesterday! -- called Obsession, which chronicles the healing process of some people who have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Some of them had unwanted thoughts, and some had unwanted fears or anxieties. One was disturbed by the sight of her mother and brother's hands; another woman was so afraid of what might be lurking in the dark that she was unable to tuck her own child into bed at night, unable to lean over a bed under which something sinister might be waiting, unable to turn the light off and leave the room. What all of these folks shared was that their obsessions and related compulsions were disruptive; they were destroying their relationships with the people they loved the most.
Each of these people spent twelve weeks in cognitive behavioural therapy.
The idea behind cognitive behavioural therapy is that while we cannot directly change our thoughts and our anxieties, we can change the way in which we respond to them.
Each of these people -- guided by a therapist -- gradually increased their exposure to the thing which bothered them most. They faced their thoughts and their fears head-on, unmitigated by the compulsive behaviours they'd accrued. The woman who was bothered by hands sat in a room with her family showing their hands as her anxiety level grew, and grew, and finally topped out, and began to recede. The woman who was afraid of the dark similarly faced her fears. Neither could change the way they thought, but they could change their reactions: they could stand in the face of their fears rather than run from them.
And the surprising thing, the hopeful thing, is that the way they behaved in the face of their fears -- the way they behaved in the face of their bad thoughts -- actually changed those thoughts and fears, and mitigated them more than avoidance ever could.
When we change the ways we behave, when we change the ways in which we respond to those around us, we change ourselves. Each one of these steps towards who we are called to become is a step we take with God; each one of these pilgrim steps offers a little glimpse of God's kingdom.
...
(prayer: that we might perceive the kingdom, and yearn for it, and reach for it; that God might be with us on each step we take, and guide us towards where God would have us be.)