Welcome to a new day, friends.
I’ll start this morning with quotes from two others:
I speak to God in public.
That’s Chance the Rapper in his song, Blessings.
I have always thought that to be a good description for my job.
Last night my friend Cathy, who took a daring and worthy risk by singing to all of us in church yesterday, sent me this: David Whyte once said sometimes, when you listen, you might hear yourself saying something you didn’t even know you knew.
Sometimes.
If you listen.
The thing about that truth is that it often happens to me publicly.
Yesterday morning I was talking about the story of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead. I totally get the head-shakers and the naysayers and the people who wonder why we’re still referencing stories from two thousand years ago that may or may not have happened the way they were written down, sometimes long after they traveled through humans like the game of telephone in which someone starts a line then it goes through a circle of people and by the time it gets to the end it’s completely different.
How’s that for a nice, long sentence?
I mean, the story is weird. Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha, are good friends with Jesus, though we are never given any information about how or why. There is, in fact, a LOT of time in Jesus’s short life that is undocumented, like from the time he was a kid until he was about 30.
John Prine wrote a great song about it.
So Lazarus dies and his sisters are pissed that Jesus didn’t show up to wave his magic hand to make the sickness go away. Jesus is very casual about the whole thing, knowing he’s going to die soon, too, knowing he has to make this miracle one for the books. He takes his sweet time getting to Judea.
When he does get there he’s faced with the usual scene of mourning: very sad people, angry sisters and his friend entombed, now for four days.
For just a moment he loses his prophetic composure; when he sees everyone crying he starts to cry.
The line goes like this: Jesus wept.
It’s such a moment of complete humanity. I cannot ever read it without crying.
Which was what happened in church yesterday.
I had told myself I wasn’t going to cry. It was a beautiful, light-filled, music-rich morning, with no fewer than FIVE people playing guitar in front of the church, three different singers, one gifting us with Joni Mitchell, Cathy singing from The Sound of Music, Mason singing an old Bill Staines tune. I mean, the life flowing through this little church is truly transformative.
I didn’t want to bum anyone out with my tears.
But what happened when I let go was a David Whyte moment. I said some completely unplanned things, things I didn’t even know I knew.
Once I started crying the thing took on a life of its own.
I said something like this: “I have no idea what God is. I don’t have the words to define God. But every time I read those words, Jesus wept, I cry. I think that’s what it is. I think that’s what faith is …”
And when I looked out I saw a lot of folks wiping tears away.
When the service was done several people thanked me for crying.
I realized, thinking about it later, that I had tapped into something I never knew was there.
I thought back to all the years when I was force-fed religion, when I sat on uncomfortable pews, scared and confused, spoken down to by men in weird costumes, made to believe that God would only love me if I was good. And I thanked all the heavenly and mysterious forces that put me in front of a congregation, giving me the opportunity to turn that straw into gold.
The people of the Peru Church allow me to stand in front of them on a Sunday morning and say out loud, I have no idea what God is.
They thank me for expressing real emotion.
My mom nailed it: “this is why we need more women in the pulpit.”
The tears and the words came from a place of unknowing, a place older than time, a place so deeply embedded in me that it refuses to go away, no matter how much the world tries to erase it.
I am deeply, madly grateful that I get to speak to and of God in public. And that a band of astonishingly beautiful misfits show up to walk with me toward the mystery. I’m certain this is the antidote.
Amen.
How special that we have a safe space where we come together as community/ family to share our joys and concern, support each other, be vulnerable, praise God, work together for a better world, sing, laugh, cry, …. While babies gurgle and cry and dogs howl and bark!
We are so blessed to have each other and you as our guide. Thank you.
John Prine and Bill Staines in the same post. You know how to get to me <3