If you look in the bulletin, you’ll see that our sermon this week is titled, “Abide.” This is one of those moments that happens to preachers sometimes, where the idea they had for the sermon on Tuesday when the bulletin was due doesn’t exactly line up with where the sermon wanted to go on Wednesday... or Thursday... or Friday... or 11:30 at night on Saturday. Sometimes sermons have a mind of their own. So I promise that we will talk about abiding during this sermon, but I don’t think I want to start there. What’s been on my heart this week is change. Change and volcanoes. 

Let me explain. 

Thankfulness has been a challenge for me all of my life. It may not surprise you to hear that I was a serious little kid, one of the old souls you sometimes find amongst children. I was thoughtful and responsible to a fault. So when I was given a small plastic coin as a child at a Thanksgiving service, with a smiley face and the words, “Rejoice always! Again, I say rejoice!” printed on it, I took it and put it in my pocket, and began a lifelong journey of trying to figure out how to follow this new rule I had learned.

One of my basic theological beliefs is that there is an undying love at the center of the universe. When you strip away everything else, all our rituals and practice, all our questions and doubts, our understanding of good and bad and what to do with that information, when nothing else is left, there will still be an unending, undying love that will not let you go.

My senior year of high school, circa 2007, I remember receiving a gift made of olive wood from the holy land. I remember turning it over, feeling the stirrings of longing, or loneliness, maybe, that feeling of wanting to go home to a place you’ve never been. But this was real. This wood was from a real place, a place I could maybe go one day. This was the place in the Bible, the place that all those little towns of Bethlehem in the US were named after. Israel. 

A woman and her beloved child are sent out into the desert with nothing but some bread and a skin of water, which means they were sent out into the wilderness to die. Even if we weren’t caught up in the extraordinary story of Sarah and Abraham, this is anything but an ordinary bible story. It’s not every day that we see paragons of our faith like this patriarch and matriarch choose to be so cruel. 

Living Resistance did a gospel work on my soul: it called me into a better way of being, where the yoke is easy and the burden is light, while, at the same time, renewing my commitment to justice. As a United Methodist, I have committed myself to resisting evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves, but it took reading this book for me to understand that resistance must be life-giving. 

Some thoughts from Surgery Week, including a lot of complaints about prep drinks.

A sermon based on John 5:1-9. Acts 16:9-15, and Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5.

I was at home when the news alert came across my phone. There had been—

No. I have to start earlier.

I want to be profound. Aren’t chronic pain sufferers profound? Doesn’t the daily presence of the thing we’re all trying to avoid every moment of our lives cause them to see the world differently?

Jesus has proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor, a jubilee. In a jubilee year, everyone is set free. The land is given a rest from constant tilling and the people are released from all debts. It’s a reset, an equalization, a loosening of what binds us. Just as Lazarus is freed from his graveclothes after Jesus calls for him to come out, in a year of jubilee, we are freed from all that has held us in death.

On the day my friends were commissioned, I roasted pumpkin seeds.

A letter.

Through all the fog of this moment, and through all the storms of emotion that may lay ahead, I know I’ll hold onto that thought: she is home.

What do you do when someone is taken from you mid-conversation? What do you do when there is still work to do, when there was still a role for her to play, when you were waiting on a visit that will never happen, for a meal you’ll never share, for conversations that will never happen, for love with nowhere to go?

I’m not sure that I’ve let myself fell the full impact of that moment even now, more than sixteen Sundays down the road.