SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(Proper 3,Year A; 8th Ordinary, RCL)
May 25, 2008
+++++
The story is told of a community of ducks who were waddling off to duck church one Sunday to hear their duck preacher. After they waddled into the duck sanctuary, the service began, and the duck preacher spoke eloquently of how God had given the ducks wings with which to fly.
He pounded the pulpit with his beak and said, “With these wings, there is nowhere we ducks cannot go! There is no God-given task we ducks cannot accomplish! With these wings we no longer need walk through life. We can soar high in the sky!”
Shouts of “Amen!” quacked throughout the duck congregation.
Every duck loved the service. In fact all the ducks commented on what a wonderfully inspiring message they had heard from their duck preacher … and then they left the church and waddled all the way home.
Today’s Gospel from Matthew 6 affirms for us in very clear images that God loves us and cares for us unconditionally. It’s enough to make us fly, to go back to our lives having defeated fear and anxiety, ready to do the most difficult tasks for Christ and his Kingdom.
Yet, we waddle our way back into our lives as usual, all our doubts and worries still there—unmoved and maybe not convinced that this reassuring passage from the gospels applies to us and to our situation.
Life seems to go back and forth for us, from being confident and peaceful, to being fearful and desperate over whether God’s promises will turn out to be real or not.
A man took a ride in an airplane.
Unfortunately, he fell out.
Fortunately, he had on a parachute.
Unfortunately, it didn’t open.
Fortunately, there was a haystack below him.
Unfortunately, there was a pitchfork sticking out of it.
Fortunately, he missed the pitchfork.
Unfortunately, he missed the haystack.
We are hungry and thirsty for Good News that doesn’t have “unfortunately” in the next sentence.
A man riding in a taxi wanted to speak to the driver, so he leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder. The driver screamed, jumped up in his seat, hit his head, and jerked the wheel in the process. The car ran up over a curb, demolished a lamppost, and came to a stop inches from a shop window.
The startled passenger said, “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just wanted to ask you something.”
The taxi driver replied: “It’s not your fault, sir. It’s my first day as a cab driver. … I’ve been driving a hearse for the past 25 years.”
It’s not easy to change our way of thinking when we’ve been trying to avoid catastrophe, to stay “under the radar” of danger, to beat the grim statistics—rather than trust God for our very air, breath by breath. Expecting rational, Western thinkers and planners not to take thought for their lives is like telling us not to breathe at all. Yet, the Gospel asks pointedly, what worrier can thereby add a single hour to his or her span of life?
Todd W. Allen tells the following stories:
The famous playwright Aeschylus was not expecting to die as he went out walking one day. But an eagle that had captured a tortoise was looking for rock to smash open the shell of the tortoise it was carrying in its talons, and, spying the bald head of the Greek author of some 90 tragedies and plays, mistook his head for a rock and turned loose the tortoise … and the renowned playwright was killed instantly. But the tortoise shell remained intact.
Or take the death of another Greek named Calchas. Calchas was a famous soothsayer. One of his contemporaries made a prediction about him that when he planted a vineyard, he would never drink any wine from the grapes. After the vineyard began to produce grapes, Calchas made some wine and threw a party, to which he invited his rival soothsayer. He wanted to disprove the prophecy of his fellow seer. As he was raising his goblet filled with wine, the other man repeated his prophecy. Calchas was so struck by the humor of it all that he began to laugh uproariously, and he choked to death (from Reader’s Digest Facts & Fallacies).
Isadora Duncan, a flamboyant and controversial dancer of the last century took a drive in small racing car called Bugatta on September 14, 1927, in Nice, France—and, as usual, she was wearing an immense red silk scarf draped around her neck and streaming out behind her. Neither she nor the driver noticed that the scarf had drifted outside to the rear of the car. As the car pulled away, the scarf wound around a rear wheel, yanking her out of the car and dragging her for several yards before the driver realized what had happened and stopped. The dancer’s neck was broken. The beautiful scarf was the cause of her death.
It’s not that bad things cannot happen … even to the wise, wiser, or wisest—or to the most talented and conscientious of people. Rather, we are not to live either unaware of the perils of life OR overly concentrated on what COULD happen—so that we either bring it about in spite of ourselves, or meet it on the road just as our fears had dictated.
Thank God, there can be a third way.
Simply trust. That’s it. There is enough trouble already to fill up today’s date on the calendar. Don’t be overly concerned about tomorrow; it will bring its own commands with it, and, yes—you’ll be informed on a need-to-know basis.
Pray … follow Jesus’ commandments to love others as ourselves, whatever it may demand. And sleep on it. Rest. Trust. Live. Soar.
This illustration of how to live comes from the Desert tradition:
Some monks came to see Abba Lucius, and they said to him, “We do not work with our hands; we obey the command to pray without ceasing.” The old man said, “Do you not eat or sleep?” They said, “Yes, we do.” He said, “Who prays for you while you are asleep? … Excuse me, brothers, but you do not practice what you claim. I will show you how I pray without ceasing, though I work with my hands.”
“With God’s help, I collect a few palm-leaves and sit down and weave them, saying, ‘Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness; according to the multitude of thy mercies do away with mine offenses.’” He said to them, “Is this prayer or not?” They said, “Yes, it is.”
And he continued, “When I have worked and prayed in my heart all day, I make about sixteen pence. Two of these I put outside my door, and with the rest I buy food.
And he who find the two coins outside the door prays for me while I eat and sleep. And so, by the help of God, I pray without ceasing.”
(Fr. Phillip Ayers)
[Stories and commentary from Isabel Anders, in Synthesis for 5/25/2008]
archived musings and preachments
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Sermon: Pentecost
THE DAY OF PENTECOST
May 11, 2008
Fr. Phillip Ayers
+++++
Come, O Spirit of God,
And make within us your dwelling place and home.
May our darkness be dispelled by your light,
and our troubles calmed by your peace;
may all evil be redeemed by your love,
all pain transformed through the suffering of Christ,
and all dying glorified in his risen life.
+++++
On this year’s Feast of Pentecost, we didn’t read the lesson from Acts, the one with the rush of a mighty wind, the crowns of fire, the gift of tongues. And being drunk on new wine! But the Holy Spirit may also come as surely and definitely, and yet much more quietly. And the Spirit’s power may be as strong in listening as in speaking.
The student chaplain was green. Hospitals were new to her, and very sick people were new to her, and the awesome stillness of the dead was new to her. She saw chaplaincy as something she was doing, not something God was doing through her, and she was very self-conscious about presenting herself to patients. The reactions of some patients when she appeared at their doors to introduce herself as a chaplain did not help: some were hostile, some were embarrassed, some were indifferent. Walking into a new room always made her feel like a salesperson making cold calls. And she found it difficult to offer to pray with and for people.
Patients were always coming and going, so she had to confront the agony of introducing herself over and over. Some patients, she was ashamed to say, never even met her:
she would put off the introduction until they had left the hospital. She thought she had managed to put Priscilla off for two or three days—once poking her head into her room, finding to her relief that she was asleep. But when the third or fourth morning came and she was still there, she had to go in. Priscilla was awake. The chaplain’s heart sank slightly, but the patient’s warm face creased into a smile that was as welcoming as a homecoming, and the chaplain settled into the chair by her bed for a visit. It was the first of many.
Priscilla had rich brown skin, saintly white hair and the bones of a still-beautiful woman. They lay just under the skin, for she was far too thin. According to her medical chart, she had cancer. But they didn’t talk about her charts. They just talked, especially about Priscilla. The chaplain was fascinated by her life and asked many questions. She had grown up in the Deep South in the days of segregation and Jim Crow, but that wasn’t what she talked about either.
What she talked about most was the little girl she had been. She told about climbing pine trees and getting sap on her hands, and the way a pine forest smelled with the sun shining full on it and the breeze lifting scents from the dry, slick needles under the trees. She told about playing with dolls made of cornhusks, using a handkerchief as a blanket. She told about going fishing, walking early-morning roads with velvety dust puffing up under her bare feet. She told about living in a tiny cabin and sleeping in one bed with all her sisters, and going to a one-room school. She had loved school, and books, and dreamed of being a teacher. Once a teacher gave her a box of crayons and some paper, and she wore those crayons down to stubs, filling every corner of her paper with colored pictures.
But the school only went to the fifth grade, and so she had to go to work, first as a “kitchen girl” and then as a maid. And she told other, darker things: a man who had come along when she was 14 and left her with a daughter to raise alone. That daughter was her only child. And there were hints of other men, and too much drinking, and some hard and desperate days before Priscilla had settled down and found a job she liked with a family who adored her. She had also bought a little house in which she lived by herself.
Her daughter, who had finished high school, went north, got married for a time and had a baby. Priscilla’s only grandchild. Priscilla’s granddaughter had done better still: she had graduated from college, married a good man and had three children and a career as a professional. But Priscilla’s daughter died and so did her granddaughter’s husband, leaving her with three small children. Priscilla was old then and had no desire to live in a big northern city, but she felt the tug of duty. Nine years before Priscilla and the chaplain met, she had sold her little house and said goodbye to her old friends and her old life and come to Philadelphia to help her granddaughter raise her children.
Priscilla tended the house and garden and cooked and cleaned and was there when the children came home from school. She couldn’t help them do their homework, but she could see to it that it got done, and it did. She loved her granddaughter and her children, and when the chaplain met them, it was easy to see how much they loved Priscilla too. But they were mostly there in the evenings, and Priscilla had not really made other friends in the city. A time or two, there were visitors when the chaplain came by her door, but mostly she was in there by herself.
As the weeks wore on, it was easy to see that she was dying, her skin as thin as paper over the bones of her face. She was more tired too. Once the chaplain came to see her at the usual time and she was asleep. She wasn’t disturbed, but the next day, she reproved the chaplain gently. “Always wake me up,” she said. “I can sleep anytime. I’m in a bed, you know.” So after that, the chaplain woke her up. But she had to do it more and more frequently, and their visits were getting shorter and shorter.
The summer was wearing on too. The chaplain grew more confident in her role now and felt more comfortable with prayer. That was partly because of Priscilla. The first few days, the chaplain hadn’t said anything about praying with her, and she didn’t ask. But then one day, the chaplain asked Priscilla if she wanted to pray, and she flashed her wonderful smile and took the chaplain’s hands in her fragile ones. “Honey,” she said, “I’d like that a whole lot.” So every day after that they prayed together, and because the chaplain loved her and she loved the chaplain, their prayer was real, deep prayer: God-touched.
And then it was the chaplain’s last week in her summer program. And then it was her last day. She hadn’t really seen Priscilla the day before—there had been visitors when it was the chaplain’s usual time to visit, and later the doctors had been in her room. They said hello, but there hadn’t been time to talk.
When the chaplain went into the room, Priscilla was sleeping, and she looked as light and thin as a leaf in late autumn. The chaplain hated to wake her but she did, and she opened her eyes and smiled with a tired approximation of her old smile. “It’s my last day,” the chaplain said to her.
“I remember,” Priscilla said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
The chaplain waited.
“I don’t know what I have,” Priscilla said, “and I don’t want to know. But I know I’m pretty sick. And when I first got sick, I wasn’t sure about . . . about where I was going. I hadn’t paid attention to God for a long time. I had done a lot of things in my life that made it hard for me to go to God. But telling you about my life and remembering things I hadn’t thought about for years seemed to help me a lot. It was as if it all made a pattern. And the praying made it all go together. I don’t worry anymore about what will happen to me. I know where I’m going. I feel at peace now.” She smiled her weary, wonderful smile, and the chaplain smiled back through her sudden tears.
The room was filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit, coming in as softly and lightly as the dawn.
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
(T.S. Eliot: “Little Gidding”)
[Sorry, but I can’t find the source of the story about Priscilla and the chaplain. This sermon was first preached at Trinity Church, Marshall, MI, May 31, 1998]
May 11, 2008
Fr. Phillip Ayers
+++++
Come, O Spirit of God,
And make within us your dwelling place and home.
May our darkness be dispelled by your light,
and our troubles calmed by your peace;
may all evil be redeemed by your love,
all pain transformed through the suffering of Christ,
and all dying glorified in his risen life.
+++++
On this year’s Feast of Pentecost, we didn’t read the lesson from Acts, the one with the rush of a mighty wind, the crowns of fire, the gift of tongues. And being drunk on new wine! But the Holy Spirit may also come as surely and definitely, and yet much more quietly. And the Spirit’s power may be as strong in listening as in speaking.
The student chaplain was green. Hospitals were new to her, and very sick people were new to her, and the awesome stillness of the dead was new to her. She saw chaplaincy as something she was doing, not something God was doing through her, and she was very self-conscious about presenting herself to patients. The reactions of some patients when she appeared at their doors to introduce herself as a chaplain did not help: some were hostile, some were embarrassed, some were indifferent. Walking into a new room always made her feel like a salesperson making cold calls. And she found it difficult to offer to pray with and for people.
Patients were always coming and going, so she had to confront the agony of introducing herself over and over. Some patients, she was ashamed to say, never even met her:
she would put off the introduction until they had left the hospital. She thought she had managed to put Priscilla off for two or three days—once poking her head into her room, finding to her relief that she was asleep. But when the third or fourth morning came and she was still there, she had to go in. Priscilla was awake. The chaplain’s heart sank slightly, but the patient’s warm face creased into a smile that was as welcoming as a homecoming, and the chaplain settled into the chair by her bed for a visit. It was the first of many.
Priscilla had rich brown skin, saintly white hair and the bones of a still-beautiful woman. They lay just under the skin, for she was far too thin. According to her medical chart, she had cancer. But they didn’t talk about her charts. They just talked, especially about Priscilla. The chaplain was fascinated by her life and asked many questions. She had grown up in the Deep South in the days of segregation and Jim Crow, but that wasn’t what she talked about either.
What she talked about most was the little girl she had been. She told about climbing pine trees and getting sap on her hands, and the way a pine forest smelled with the sun shining full on it and the breeze lifting scents from the dry, slick needles under the trees. She told about playing with dolls made of cornhusks, using a handkerchief as a blanket. She told about going fishing, walking early-morning roads with velvety dust puffing up under her bare feet. She told about living in a tiny cabin and sleeping in one bed with all her sisters, and going to a one-room school. She had loved school, and books, and dreamed of being a teacher. Once a teacher gave her a box of crayons and some paper, and she wore those crayons down to stubs, filling every corner of her paper with colored pictures.
But the school only went to the fifth grade, and so she had to go to work, first as a “kitchen girl” and then as a maid. And she told other, darker things: a man who had come along when she was 14 and left her with a daughter to raise alone. That daughter was her only child. And there were hints of other men, and too much drinking, and some hard and desperate days before Priscilla had settled down and found a job she liked with a family who adored her. She had also bought a little house in which she lived by herself.
Her daughter, who had finished high school, went north, got married for a time and had a baby. Priscilla’s only grandchild. Priscilla’s granddaughter had done better still: she had graduated from college, married a good man and had three children and a career as a professional. But Priscilla’s daughter died and so did her granddaughter’s husband, leaving her with three small children. Priscilla was old then and had no desire to live in a big northern city, but she felt the tug of duty. Nine years before Priscilla and the chaplain met, she had sold her little house and said goodbye to her old friends and her old life and come to Philadelphia to help her granddaughter raise her children.
Priscilla tended the house and garden and cooked and cleaned and was there when the children came home from school. She couldn’t help them do their homework, but she could see to it that it got done, and it did. She loved her granddaughter and her children, and when the chaplain met them, it was easy to see how much they loved Priscilla too. But they were mostly there in the evenings, and Priscilla had not really made other friends in the city. A time or two, there were visitors when the chaplain came by her door, but mostly she was in there by herself.
As the weeks wore on, it was easy to see that she was dying, her skin as thin as paper over the bones of her face. She was more tired too. Once the chaplain came to see her at the usual time and she was asleep. She wasn’t disturbed, but the next day, she reproved the chaplain gently. “Always wake me up,” she said. “I can sleep anytime. I’m in a bed, you know.” So after that, the chaplain woke her up. But she had to do it more and more frequently, and their visits were getting shorter and shorter.
The summer was wearing on too. The chaplain grew more confident in her role now and felt more comfortable with prayer. That was partly because of Priscilla. The first few days, the chaplain hadn’t said anything about praying with her, and she didn’t ask. But then one day, the chaplain asked Priscilla if she wanted to pray, and she flashed her wonderful smile and took the chaplain’s hands in her fragile ones. “Honey,” she said, “I’d like that a whole lot.” So every day after that they prayed together, and because the chaplain loved her and she loved the chaplain, their prayer was real, deep prayer: God-touched.
And then it was the chaplain’s last week in her summer program. And then it was her last day. She hadn’t really seen Priscilla the day before—there had been visitors when it was the chaplain’s usual time to visit, and later the doctors had been in her room. They said hello, but there hadn’t been time to talk.
When the chaplain went into the room, Priscilla was sleeping, and she looked as light and thin as a leaf in late autumn. The chaplain hated to wake her but she did, and she opened her eyes and smiled with a tired approximation of her old smile. “It’s my last day,” the chaplain said to her.
“I remember,” Priscilla said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
The chaplain waited.
“I don’t know what I have,” Priscilla said, “and I don’t want to know. But I know I’m pretty sick. And when I first got sick, I wasn’t sure about . . . about where I was going. I hadn’t paid attention to God for a long time. I had done a lot of things in my life that made it hard for me to go to God. But telling you about my life and remembering things I hadn’t thought about for years seemed to help me a lot. It was as if it all made a pattern. And the praying made it all go together. I don’t worry anymore about what will happen to me. I know where I’m going. I feel at peace now.” She smiled her weary, wonderful smile, and the chaplain smiled back through her sudden tears.
The room was filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit, coming in as softly and lightly as the dawn.
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
(T.S. Eliot: “Little Gidding”)
[Sorry, but I can’t find the source of the story about Priscilla and the chaplain. This sermon was first preached at Trinity Church, Marshall, MI, May 31, 1998]
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Father Kurt is on sabbatical
Starting May 1st, Father Kurt is on sabbatical. I'm Malcolm, the webmaster and now blog master for Sts. Peter and Paul Episcopal.
Over the coming months, I'll be posting sermons given by our clergy in Fr. Kurt's absence, inviting guest bloggers to post, and perhaps even posting myself.
With any luck, this blog will continue to be a source of information, joy, and usefulness to the parish and the broader community. Please feel free to comment here and let me know how I'm doing.
Fr. Kurt will be returning in September.
Over the coming months, I'll be posting sermons given by our clergy in Fr. Kurt's absence, inviting guest bloggers to post, and perhaps even posting myself.
With any luck, this blog will continue to be a source of information, joy, and usefulness to the parish and the broader community. Please feel free to comment here and let me know how I'm doing.
Fr. Kurt will be returning in September.
Ascension
(NB: This sermon is by Deacon Tracy LeBlanc)
On the surface Ascension is an odd feast. Have you ever wondered why we celebrate? If I had been a disciple I would have been devastated. First death, scary, painful death, then back with us for only forty days. We still don’t have all the answers – and poof, there you go again, Jesus –riding off in the clouds like Elijah! I really would have liked it if you had just stuck around! But there is something profound, something very necessary about this odd way of leaving. Still, I would have liked it more spelled out, something in a poetic kind of hymn would have been nice…
Something like: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God…and the word became flesh and dwelt among us… and the word, full of grace and truth took on humanity, experienced joyous friendships and painful betrayal, the pleasure of anointing oil and the pain of death, and the word, full of humanity, full of God, ascended into heaven and that word was with God and that word was God.
We aren’t offered a glorious hymn for the ascension such as is offered for the incarnation though– still I wish we were, because I think in many ways the ascension of Christ is the completion of the incarnation. In the incarnation God became human and in so doing declared the stuff of humanity holy, God becomes a part of who we are. At the ascension the person Jesus – the one who has lived and laughed and suffered, the body whose hands and feet bear scars from crucifixion – all of that humanity becomes for eternity part of who God is.
Fr. James Liggett says “The Ascension, along with the Incarnation, is here to tell us that it is a good thing to be a human being; indeed it is a wonderful and an important and holy thing to be a human being. It is such an important thing that God did it. Even more, the fullness of God now includes what it means to be a human being. The experience, the reality, and the stuff of being a person is so valuable that God has made it a part of God’s life.”
See, Jesus could not slip off with a quiet death so we might think his spirit drifted up to God while his humanity stayed behind. He left -wounded body, fully person so that when you and I are sobbing in our loneliness, are despairing in our pain we might know a God who has taken those things to himself, and know that holiness is in the midst of that struggle. I love the names of God in today’s psalm: “Father of orphans, protector of widows, the one who gives the desolate a home, provider to the needy”. God is in the midst of struggle. The Ascension is one more way God powerfully illustrates connection to the deepest needs of our hearts.
Like a master weaver God has woven himself into the tapestry of humanity and woven humanity into the tapestry of God such that no threads can be removed without unraveling the full picture of truth.
He is in us and we are in him…the language starts to sound circular a Celtic knot of words strikingly familiar to our Gospel text. The first time I read this text I remember coming away with something like “mine, yours, me, you, them, me yours theirs, me, you, them ONE – with a blur of words in between. This is a rich prayer, one could preach five weeks on the questions and themes found here. But the overriding sense of the prayer is that of relationship. Jesus and the Father share all things, are connected in all things are in every sense one. Jesus’ glory is to share all of his Father with humanity – to include them in that oneness.
In fact, the definition of eternal life here is striking. “and this is eternal life, that they may know you…and that they may know me”. The word for know here isn’t about head knowledge, about having the right answers – it is that “marriage” sense of the word know, a deep intimate connection with the Holy that has created your being – that is eternal life.
But this whole knotting, binding, weaving together thing isn’t only about the connection within the Godhead, or the connection between each of us and God it is also very much about our life with one another.
In Acts the disciples stand, awe struck, gawking up into the sky as Jesus disappears. It takes an Angel to get their attention to bring them back to earth, “Hey, what are you looking up into the sky for???” In our Gospel Jesus has waxed poetic about his connection with the Father and about the Father’s hope for a deep connection with us as well –we have gotten lost in looking toward heaven and then Jesus does it too –inserts the pull back to the humans that surround us “And Father I pray that they may be one”.
As God is bound together, has bound himself to us so it is God’s hope that we be bound to one another. One…what would that look like? I have a hunch that it isn’t much about agreeing with one another on all things, about liking the same kind of food or even the same kind of worship. I doubt it means we would all become introverted, intuitive, process oriented people or spunky, “get it done”, energetic church members. But what would it be like if we said to each other, even to those most different from ourselves ‘you belong to me, I belong to you, and we together belong to God’, ‘Your pains, your hopes, your worries, your joys – they matter to me too”? What would that mean for how we relate with one another, what would that mean for our time, our pocket books, our worship – what would our community look like? How would this affect the way we experience God. What kind of witness would this be to the world?
The beauty of this Celtic knot kind of oneness can take on as many forms as there are beautiful works of art. But I’d like to share two short examples of places I have seen the need or power of oneness.
As a chaplain intern I had the opportunity to spend some of each day in the adult mental health ward. One day I met Carlos, who was admitted for the first time to the hospital after a heroine crash, a habit he had picked up to try to make sense of/deal with/ block out the voices that were constantly in his head. He heard voices constantly calling his name. He was an intense, bright man. He sat with me for a very long time telling his story and then in a pained tone asked, “
This week I had an opportunity to see an example of the power of oneness. My mother belongs to a women’s group that over time has included the spouses so much that a tight community has formed among the families. In one of these families the husband has terminal cancer. The medical co-pays have become tremendous. This man, Brad, is expected to live about one more month. So this group of families put together a huge party. They invited everyone that knew Brad and his wife – about 125 people came. They found bands and spent days preparing food, skits and decorations and rounded up donations for a silent auction. They rented a hall. And Friday night they brought Brad and his wife to the hall, surrounded by people who knew them. They played Brad’s favorite tunes, told funny stories about his life until people were in tears. They ate a last meal with Brad, laughed with him, for many it was a chance to say goodbye. And in the midst of this they raised thousands of dollars to help defray medical costs and hopefully to help Brad’s wife keep her house. They said to Brad – all of your life, it matters to us, we want to hear your stories told. All of your struggles – they matter to us. We will not leave you to figure out financial stress on your own – your struggles, they are ours too. And your death, that matters to us too. We will not let you pass without letting you know how deeply you are a part of who we are.
What will it mean for us to live more into the oneness to which we are called? What will change in the way we approach God as we become more aware of the holiness that permeates who we are and the humanity that permeates God? What will it mean for our community as we take more risks to be one with one another?
May God give us courage and hope and bundles of grace as we work to live more into this call we have been given.
Amen
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)