I have all the time in the world for you.
There is nothing more important than this.

I want to be the kind of pastor and friend who says this. I want to be the kind of neighbor and daughter and wife and colleague whom people know means it when she says it.

Someone said that phrase to me today in a training on suicide prevention, and she meant it.
“Everything else can wait. Put a pin in it. It’ll still be there,” she said.

Right now, we need to put a pin in it.
Whatever we are doing, it will still be there.
Seventeen people died in Parkland, Florida, yesterday, and, today at least, there is nothing more important than this.

I attended a suicide prevention training today. And I know suicide is different from homicide (suicide actually kills more people than homicide does), but the two have some common contributing factors: illness, isolation and access.

Oregon has one of the highest rates of suicide in the country. Nationally, suicide is the second-leading cause of death for young people (ages 25-34) and the third-leading cause of death for adolescents (ages 10-24). I am choked up just writing that.

And today at the training, I choked up listening to good people describe how so many of their [clients, students, patients, family members, children] couldn’t access mental health care because of long waiting lists. Illness.

I choked up listening to good, good people describe how so many folks, folks who haven’t yet reached experienced suicidal thoughts, simply need someone to talk to. Someone to listen. Isolation.

But I got angry at this statistic: Gun owners and their families suffer from suicide at a rate three times higher than those who don’t own guns. They are not sicker or more isolated. They have better access to lethal weapons. While we can debate whether guns cause suicides and homicides, we cannot debate that guns offer access. Guns are means to an end, and they are highly effective. There is little room for ambivalence or doubt with a gun. Access.

So I’m putting a pin in it. Rage can be productive, but it has its limits. I am in serious brainstorming mode about what moral people–spiritual people–of any background and persuasion can prioritize right now so that we can prevent more loss of life–more days of frustration and sorrow. Faithful response to the deaths of our fellow beloveds is necessary, political and spiritual.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Let your heart be broken by this. Every time. School and other mass shootings are now commonplace in the United States. That is not okay. We each carry the Holy within us; the Hebrew Scriptures tell us that God created humans in God’s very image. When we feel our hearts wanting to break, let’s let them. Then let’s use our sorrow as righteous fuel for what comes next.

Be in community. Listen to your neighbors. Create webs of belonging. Talk with other people about how to do that. We need one another when something hard happens: divorce, job loss, poverty & other forms of oppression, death. A national tragedy like a school shooting. I often take for granted that I have lots of people with whom to vent my shit. Not everyone has that. Put a pin in whatever you are doing. Tell someone that you have all the time in the world for them. This is how we can create resilient communities.

Get political about this. Not divisive. Not righteous. Speak truth to bullshit. Be public about the ways you are called to live into your [moral, spiritual, religious, parental, medical, etc.] identity. Jesus says: You are the salt of the earth, the light of the world. So be that. Find out your congressional representatives’ position on common-sense gun laws. If your congressional representatives refuse to act in response to these shootings, and that includes amping up mental health funding in local, state and federal settings, find out who is running against them and when. Research those people’s positions. Give them money and vote for them and knock on doors for them. For folks who, like me, live in Oregon’s 2nd congressional district, know that Greg Walden is among the top twenty lifetime recipients of money from the NRA. He’s up for reelection this year. Just sayin’.

Let me know what other ideas you might have. I know the list can grow long, but this is what is coming to the surface for me today.

And, of course, I hope it goes without saying:

I have all the time in the world for you.
There’s nothing more important than this.

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

1 “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. 2 “So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

5 “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

16 “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 18 so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

 

“You are stardust and to stardust you shall return.”

These are the words I’ll say to whatever poor souls happen to ask me what I’m up to downtown today between 3 and 5:30 pm;

I’ll be poised, ready to give out “ashes to go,”

and Hershey kisses. And paper stars with inspirational words on them.

I’ll stick out like a sore thumb.

 

It will be the opposite of praying in secret.

 

Did I mention there will be glitter in these ashes?

I mixed them in as a sign of my intention to be an ally alongside the LGBTQ community,

mixed that glitter in in the tradition of other churches that have done so,

so that I might mark the bodies of my gay, lesbian, bi and trans friends with a sign of their mortality

but also a sign of their belovedness.

 

It will be the opposite of praying in secret.

In fact, most of what we do in our churches is the opposite of everything Jesus tells us in this Sermon on the Mount we ought not to do.

The robes, the confessional hymns, the big stewardship campaigns, the widely advertised classes on spiritual disciplines. If you are a church person, you do this, and you know what I’m talking about. We do this.

And we will all leave here today with a big ol’ ash cross on our foreheads, and we’ll go to work or the grocery store or, if you’re like me, you will go pick up a pepperoni heart-shaped pizza from Papa Murphy’s and just be the most obvious church-going Christian ever.

And then maybe someone will ask you what it means.

———

Maybe you’ll say it’s from church. Ash Wednesday. Have a nice day.

Maybe you’ll say it’s a sign of your mortality, of your sinfulness. Have a nice day?

Maybe you’ll say it’s a ritual you grew up with, and you don’t remember what it means.

There’s no judgment. That is usually the case with most of us.

No matter what you say, there’s a good chance that Jesus would call you a hypocrite.

Just sayin’.

You’re in decent company: I am literally going to be a standing on a street corner today, just like the scribes and the pharisees Jesus’ has so much contempt for.

The scribes and the pharisees were the “good Jews.” They followed the laws and codes of Judaism to a tee and had a sense that they were more blessed by God because of it. They thought themselves “more Jewish” than the rest.

And Jesus has a lot of contempt for this. He ministered with his disciples and those gathered on that mountain–folks desperate for a new way, a different reality, a true Messiah–and his mission was all about debunking the popular wisdom that the better you follow the rules the more blessed you are.

And yet we have gathered as good Christians, to do the public ritual that we hold dear. Something that makes us publicly announce our adherence to the codes. That separates us from everyone else with their clean faces.

I didn’t grow up with Ash Wednesday as a ritual, I grew up in a less-liturgical setting, but when I first stumbled upon the tradition it felt like yessssssssssss another thing I can do to be more Christian.

We will each reconcile our presence here, the ashes on our foreheads, in our own way.

I trust, and I choose to believe, that it is not all religious posturing. Not all hypocrisy.

———–

Here is how I will make meaning of this day:

Meister Eckhart, a 13th century Christian mystic, once wrote: To be full of things is to be empty of God; to be empty of things is to be full of God.

 

For me, Ash Wednesday is a day for such a paradox.

Not a day when I add one more thing to my list of piousness, but rather the one day of the year when I am really clear, in a public way, about how human I am.

 

A day to take things away rather than to add things on.

 

A day to be less Christian and more human:

more honest about the shame that lives deep in me; the fear that comes from thinking I will never be enough.

More honest about the jagged vulnerability within me, the way so many things, especially love, feels risky.

More honest about how I often fear the day, hopefully far in the future, my husband will die.

 

How I don’t usually give money to folks who ask me for it,

how I have made embarrassing assumptions in casual conversation about people of color,

how I have sometimes not believed women who tell me their stories.

How I am bound up in systems of injustice that are destroying our planet.

 

How I keep on keeping on, adding more things–activities, TV shows, friendships, Target runs, another glass of wine–hoping against hope that they will be enough to keep the truth at bay.

 

The truth that I am just human.

From dust I came and to dust I will return.

———–

I was guilty of just such a flurry of activity recently. One of my very best friends in the world is having her first child, her long-awaited baby. She is due next month.

We celebrated her baby shower this past weekend, and amidst all the busyness of life, I had overcommitted myself to bringing a vegetable tray, buying the champagne, planning the games and making the party favors. I did not really have time for all of that. It was tempting, as I scrambled to wash and dry the onesies for the decorate-a-onesie station to think: gosh, it’s just a baby.

Which is true. Babies get born literally every minute of every day.

It’s tempting to think: it’s just a baby.

 

And yet: it’s a baby.

 

One of God’s great affirmations that what God created is good.

 

We are just human.

And yet: we are human.

 

Literally made of bits and pieces of stardust, magical debris from cosmic explosions billions of years ago that continues to float through the air and land on Earth: on our corn, on our wheat, on our coffee plants. We eat and drink it and it becomes a part of us. Over and over, until we die.

At which point our bones become a part of the earth, co-mingling with all that stardust, and becoming a part of the soil and the plants and bread and wine we eat today.

 

We are made of stardust.

We are also made of one another.

 

We are human.

What a beloved thing we have been created to be.

The God who wore skin to be close to us certainly seems to believe so.

————

That incarnate God seems to believe that following codes and laws, being good Christians or good Jews; that is not where our blessedness lies. God came to us as a stardust creature, a human, and so I cannot help but believe that, when everything else has been stripped away, our blessedness is in our humanness.

 

The things that divide us– our religion, our attitude, our fear of loving the other for fear it might disrupt our comfort, might change who we are. Well, that is all so irrelevant when you consider the stars.

 

The list of things that divide us is puny compared to that thing which unites us.

 

We are made of the same God-given stuff.

Living. Dying.

The same rotting bones.

The same stardust.

 

Stardust that walks around in skin to be one another’s neighbors, teachers, nurses.

Confidants, siblings; house-builders and taco-makers.

Messiah.

 

And all of a sudden, “us” and “them” has become “we.”

All of a sudden, we are a we.

A family of star specks.

 

We are so small.

So mortal. So human.

What very good news.

 

Remember: you are stardust and to stardust you shall return.

 

Amen.

 

Sermon at Madras United Methodist Church, January 28, 2018

Mark 1:21-28

21 They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. 22 They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, 24 and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” 25 But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” 26 And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. 27 They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” 28 At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.

 

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

 

The words of the late Leonard Cohen in his song “Anthem.”

 

Words of hope in a time of chaos.

Words of encouragement in a moment when it feels difficult to muster more energy.

 

At least, that is my situation.

 

I have been struggling with insomnia lately;

perhaps it’s my pillow,

or that I am known to check my email right before bed,

or that I carry excitement and anxiety in my body and my bones

as I and others begin to form a new spiritual community.

 

That is work that might keep one up at night.

 

And so Cohen’s words: that light comes from the hard, cracked places–

that feels like good news.

Cohen himself, a Jew from Canada,

said that that line was about resurrection.

 

And I dare say we have all known the cracked places:

the death of a parent,

the loss of a job,

the empty nest–

the everyday cracks and losses that accompany this human life,

and whose brokenness reveals some new grace to us.

 

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

———

 

Jesus’ first public act of ministry is in an encounter with man who,

coincidentally, ironically,

we today might call “cracked.”

 

The people said that he was inhabited by demons.

We might draw a dotted line between demonic forces then and

mental illness now.

We might best understand this man in today’s terms as one

who wrestles constantly with pure evil.

Mental illness,

addiction,

a binding force that will not let him be free.

 

And yet he is not really broken.

This illness, this force, has so seemlessly taken over this man

that those around him cannot tell where one stops and the other begins.

Where human stops and demon begins.

 

He is probably someone in the community who people write off by saying:

“Oh, him, yeah: he’s cracked.”

His affliction and his self are united;

the man’s voice, the demon’s,

the demon’s body, that of a man.

 

They are one in the same.

 

Not so far from the writing off we do when we say, well:

he’s a felon,

she’s an druggie;

he’s a bum,

she’s a welfare queen.

 

Affliction and self are united in

the world as it is.

No one is better than the worst thing they have done.

No one is more whole than the most broken parts of them.

 

So many have accused the young women who stepped forward to

tell their stories of abuse as gymnasts at the hands of their doctor–

accused them of being in it for the money and the publicity.

 

And yet they have run the risk that whenever they

perform,

give an interview,

plan a playdate for their child–

 

“Oh yeah, she’s one of those victims.”

 

In the world as it is,

we are not able to discern where human stops

and affliction begins.

———-

 

In the world as it was, in the cultural-political situation of

Caperneaum and the entire peninsula

where Jesus lived and did his ministry,

people may have been like us: not able to discern where human stopped

and affliction began.

 

But the original hearers, those huddled around the table,

listening to this new story, the Gospel of Jesus Christ According to Mark,

were able to discern something else:

where human stopped and occupier began.

 

These are working-class and poor folks,

both Jewish and Gentile,

who knew well what it meant to be occupied.

They lived under the thumb of Caesar,

subject to high taxes and a life of hard physical work.

Their land was not their own.

 

They know what it is to be occupied by military forces.

So when they hear this story–

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?”–

they hear military language.

They will hear it again several stories later when Jesus heals another man afflicted by demons.

The demons will call themselves “legion.”

What might be a personal story about the desolation of mental illness,

might also be a very political story about the desolation caused by military occupancy and

economic oppression.

 

Which may not be so different from mental illness after all.

We know that undocumented people in this country suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts more than others.

We know survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts more than others.

 

Fear makes us sick.

 

And, if I’m being honest, it makes us all sick,

whether we are safe and secure

or we fear each new day;

we are not all okay until we are all okay.

 

Both occupier and occupied suffer under systems

that do not let us see where

human stops and affliction begins.

———–

 

There is a crack in everything–that’s how the light gets in.

And if there isn’t a crack there:

someone needs to make it.

 

We are reminded of this over and over again in Scripture:

as Jesus is being baptized, the heavens are “torn apart”;

as Jesus dies, the curtain to the temple is torn in two.

 

The Prophet Isaiah prays to God:

“oh that you would rend the heavens and come down,

that the mountains would tremble before you.”

 

There is a crack in everything–that’s how the light gets in.

And if there isn’t a crack there:

someone needs to make it.

 

You see, Jesus has come to do a new thing.

In the One wearing flesh, God making all things new.

Putting a crack in the system

that separates us from one another,

breaking open the system that makes us call one another names

rather than calling one another “beloved.”

 

God knows: that’s how the light gets in.

 

To the relational God–

the One who creates and calls us,

the One who heals and sustains us–

you are absolutely better and more beautiful than the worst thing you have done.

You are, without a doubt, more whole than the most broken part of you.

Jesus makes holy trouble in that temple–

puts cracks in the system–

for the sake of us all seeing that we are children of God,

when we are afflicted, and when we are at peace.

 

Your demons are but temporary.

Whether they occupy your body,

your mind,

your freedom.

They say nothing about who and whose you are.

 

Your belovedness cannot be put into question.

———-

 

The belovedness of that possessed man–

for Jesus, there was no doubt.

 

And so his act of healing was an act of

breaking.

Breaking the lie that says we are how we act,

we are what ails us,

we are mere canvases on which unjust systems can paint

the identity they wish us to have: felon, druggie; victim, illegal.

 

Jesus’ healing act

was an act of breaking.

The man was shaken.

 

This is what “exorcism” can look like: for individuals and for communities.

What withdrawal from drugs can look like.

What hard years of therapy can look like,

what the back-breaking work of revitalizing a town can look like.

What it can look like for a community to reclaim its identity after the occupiers leave.

 

We are shaken to the core,

weak and weeping,

broken.

Cracked.

 

God storms in to those places

that are desperate for it.

That need to be splintered, shattered, burst.

God goes into those places in our lives

that are desperate for the light.

 

So that we might know that we are made to be beloved,

and that there is no affliction–

personal or societal–

that can take that away.

 

God charges in to do the terrifying work of

healing us and our world,

over and over again.

 

So, there will be cracks.

Thanks be to God.

Because that’s how the light gets in.