A Fist Fast

Those who have heard me tell the story about punching a boy in the lip out at recess in first grade probably think that this post is about fighting and you are partially right.  When I say I am going on a “fist fast,” I mean something a little different than that.  Punching people isn’t something I have trouble with anymore, though I’ll admit sometimes I still feel like it.

There are things in our lives that function as barriers in our relationship with God.  We have allowed them to interfere with that trust by, in effect, making those things into our gods.  For some of us, it could be material things; stuff we buy to just to satisfy our impulsive desires or stuff we consume that does not contribute to a healthy life.

But attitudes and behaviors can be walls that we erect and then lean on, first for support, then out of habit.  We can use almost anything as a means of avoiding God without realizing it.  We so fill our time with activities, well beyond the tasks that we must do, that we leave nothing for prayer.  Rather than turn to God for help, we substitute something else we think will make us feel better, at least for now. They can be things that are not harmful in and of themselves, but when we use them to replace God, we have not only cheated ourselves but also the neighbor God calls us to love.

Have you ever offered a toddler some kind of treat to get them to let go of their death-grip on something you didn’t want them to have?  How can God give us good things if our hands are always full?

Habitually criticizing ourselves, making excuses for our accomplishments, or deflecting compliments are all reliance upon habits that are not life-giving.  Think of them as closed fists, hands that are unable to receive the good things God wants to give us.

As for me, like that little girl on the playground, I have made fighting into a habit; not using my fists in a literal sense, but figuratively.  In my defiant struggle for independence, to do everything my way, I have been defensive against suggestions that I perceived as attempts to control my life.  You can try telling me what you think I ought to do (I did eventually learn to at least be civil and won’t punch you now), but my internal fists will clench up and I will likely stop listening. 

After I withdrew from the nursing program I was enrolled in for a year, my mother told me she never thought I would have made a good nurse anyway.  “Why didn’t you tell me that before I started?” I said.  “You wouldn’t have listened,” she replied and I knew it was true.

So my fist fast is intended to be a prayerful recognition of those times I am tempted to grip other gods too tightly and asking God to open my hands to receive the life offered us all at the end of these 40 days.

Lighting Candles

On weekdays, he drove either a red pickup or a green tractor, wearing a blue chambray shirt under pin-striped overalls.  The pale head, normally covered by a seed corn cap, was only revealed on Sundays, when Herman* would put on his best dark suit, crisp white shirt and tie, shoes shined.  He was a constant in the church, more predictable than the squares of Jello at the funeral lunches. 

Oh, there were other people assigned to be greeters, of course, but Herman would never think of giving up his post in the narthex each Sunday.  He would be there to meet you as soon as your foot hit that top step, take your hand into both of his rough ones and look you in the eye as though he had been searching for you for a long, long time.

Herman was the first one to show up at church on Sunday and made sure he was there early for funerals as well, to help the funeral home staff make all the necessary preparations.  On wintry days, even after the custodian had cleared the walks, he was out sprinkling extra grit on the icy spots so that no one would fall.  Candle lighters were readied and lit for the acolytes as he cautioned them each time about holding the angle so as not to let wax run down inside where he would have to dig it out with his pen knife.  As the youth began to show up less frequently for their appointed duties, Herman took it upon himself to light the candles.

 

Ushering was his joy and he took great pride in directing the collection of the offering and the orderly procession to the communion rail.  He used that footage with the efficiency of a man who had worked many a field carefully from fence to fence. Without fail, he calculated correctly how many people could kneel there comfortably next to one another without crowding and had the next phalanx ready to advance as soon as the ones ahead of them received their blessing and rose to exit (to the sides, please.)

Woe to the secretary, who at the beginning of the year when new officers took over council positions, also left a description of ushering responsibilities in his mailbox.  He marched into the office in his overalls with that piece of paper in his hand, shaking as he shouted about what an insult had been dealt him.  No amount of apologizing would console him, and we walked back out, spent, his head down.

Yet it was the secretary he called at home one Saturday night in the spring, after the corn had been planted.  “I don’t think I’m going to make it to church tomorrow” he said, his voice uncharacteristically soft.  “I just don’t feel good at all.  Will you make sure the candles get lit?”  “I will, Herman," I said. “Don’t you worry. The candles will be lit.”

Herman never lit those candles again.  But the light that was Herman’s life had been passed on countless times in his 80-plus years, multiplying exponentially as it went.  You may not have known him, but chances are you’ve received that light from someone who received it from someone who received it from someone…who received it from Herman.

*(not his real name)

I Am Serious...

I’ve served on two different call committees, and listening to each candidate’s story taught me something about how people respond to God’s call to serve in ministry.  Being on the nominating committee this year, however, has allowed me to see the call process from a different perspective.

A new year at church typically means committees need new members and councils need new officers.  But here’s the thing: we can only pick from who’s available.  This is not to say that there isn't an abundance of wonderfully gifted people in our congregation.  We are blessed with folks with a wide variety of gifts.  We have builders, farmers, cooks, teachers, doctors, accountants, scientists, nurses, pharmacists, custodians, secretaries, musicians, writers, speakers, just to name a few.  The list goes on.

The nominating committee doesn’t assign people to open positions.  We ask.  And that is where I’ve gained a new appreciation, because sometimes they say no.  It surprises me, but it really shouldn’t. 

Why do people refuse? Sometimes they believe they aren’t qualified.  They think that there has to be someone else who could do a better job than they could do.  They decide what they have to offer isn’t good enough.  But we can’t put someone on the ballot who doesn’t say “yes,” no matter how highly regarded they are by the nominating committee.

This is going to seem like quite a stretch at first, but bear with me.  Remember the scene from the 1980 movie Airplane when Ted Striker is summoned to the cockpit because both of the pilots have become incapacitated? 

Rumack : “Can you fly this plane, and land it?” 

Striker: “Surely you can’t be serious.”

Rumack: “I am serious…and don’t call me Shirley.”

Striker tries to give some excuses about not having the right kind of experience to fly this type of aircraft, but the reality is there isn’t anyone else on that plane at that time that is better qualified.

What has that got to do with the church? When God wants something done, God calls someone in that place at that time to do it.  The bible is full of people who don’t appear to be the best candidates, but are called for a specific purpose in spite of (or maybe precisely because of) their apparent shortcomings. 

I’m not going to outline all the examples, but Mary has got to be at the top of the list. 

If God can use a teenage virgin to bear the Savior of the world, God can use you.

It's My Life. Now Let Me Be

One of our council members recently shared with the congregation how difficult it was for him to sing Here I Am, Lord and I’ll gladly second his motion.  That hymn certainly falls into the choker category for me as well, so you can be sure I didn’t include it on my list of favorites that our pastor asked us to submit.

The same goes for Take My Life and Let It Be by Frances Havergal.  I have my own version that goes more like, It’s My Life. Now Let Me Be.  Oh, sure, I have sung, “take my will and make it Thine,” plenty of times, but I knew full well that it wasn’t what I meant.  God can “take my moments and my days” when I haven’t got my own plans already.  It doesn’t matter if all I wanted to do was lie on the couch and watch Little House on the Prairie reruns; the important thing is that it was my idea.  If God had something else in mind for me, I did not want to hear it.

Dear God, I so much want to be in control. I want to be the master of my own destiny. Still I know that you are saying: “Let me take you by the hand and lead you.  Accept my love and trust that where I will bring you, the deepest desires of your heart will be fulfilled.”  Lord, open my hands to receive your gift of love. Amen.  (Nouwen 2006, 61)

So for me at least, this relationship between heart and hands is why giving is so important, not simply for the church to meet its budget, but for my own spiritual life.  An offering is only part of a larger spiritual discipline.  Each time I open my hands to release those material things (which God has given me in the first place), I practice for the more difficult task of letting go of myself.

Holding on isn’t only about maintaining control.  It's also about fear.  Henri Nouwen tells the story of an elderly woman being placed in a residential care facility.  All that she had left of her own was one coin, which she held onto it so tightly that it took two staff members to pry it out of her hand.   This woman had lost all that she felt identified who she was and feared giving up that final thing would mean the loss of herself.   While it may sound like an extreme example, it helps us to think about what we have to be afraid of.  Can there be anything that we cannot entrust to God? 

Trust was the focus of our pastor's recent stewardship article and it shows up also in Nouwen’s prayer.  When I can open my hands to God in trust, letting go of the need to control everything, I am in a position to receive and to be led.  Receive what?  Go where? How important is it to know? 

Worship is one of the ways we can practice and experience this.  Opening our hands, we receive the gift of Christ’s body and blood, strengthening our relationship with God. Opening our hands to share the peace of Christ, we strengthen relationships with each other.  Opening our hands, we offer our possessions and ourselves to be used in the service of God’s kingdom.   We pray God’s will be done.  It will be done… through our hands.

Join me in asking God to help us to trust, to open our hands and hearts to do what God has called us to do, not only as individuals, but also as Christ’s living body, the church.

___________________________________

 

Nouwen, Henri J.M. With Open Hands. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2006.

Thinking of You

Sometimes when looking back on something I’ve written long ago, I think, “How incredibly awful!”  This time, I actually hope that eventually this will be one of those pieces because that will mean that I have become so much wiser than I am now.  Wiser about things I don’t have sufficient answers for now.

It’s a subject I’ve thought of many times, but hesitated to write about; one that most of us would probably rather not think about.  We might even be afraid to admit that, as faithful Christians, we have such thoughts sometimes.  But somewhere along the way, we are bound to encounter the What if?.

Oh, we try our best to always think positively.  We send cheerful “Thinking of You” cards out to those who are facing difficulties, we even promise to pray for them, either personally or as a congregation.  We form prayer chains in the hope that more prayer is better.

But, if we’re honest, sometimes in the back of our minds, fear and doubt have at least a toe, if not a whole foot in the door.  And we hear the raspy whisper, What if?

Although memorization was never a big priority for me as a Sunday School teacher, for some reason I made my 5^th and 6^th graders learn Romans 8:28 one year.  We recited the verse over and over, in lots of different ways, even shouting by the end of class, We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. I must have reasoned that somewhere in their lives, those words might prove to be helpful. Maybe what I was really trying to do was to convince myself that they were true.  I knew that whisper, What if?

Now, I’m not sure if that was a worthwhile exercise; because I would never try to use those words with a boy whose father is dying of cancer, despite the radiation and the chemo, the prayers of the congregation, and the visits from the pastor.  How can you possibly believe them when you’re with a father of three small children whose wife is mysteriously stricken with a rare, sometimes fatal illness?  And are they at all reassuring to a worried parent, when you know that every year some teenagers succeed in committing suicide even though everyone concerned has done their best to prevent it?  How do they sound to the lonely elderly woman who wonders why her husband and only granddaughter both had to die within a few months of one another?

That episode of Little House on the Prairie in which the children are caught in a blizzard leaving school early on Christmas Eve has one scene I've always found particularly heart wrenching.  Everyone rejoices when Mr. Edwards bursts in the door of the schoolhouse after spending the night out alone searching for his children in the blizzard.  Everyone, that is, but the wife and son of the man whose body Charles Ingalls had found earlier, frozen to death. 

Those are the people who came to my mind when a Christian radio station recently played a message from a listener, thanking God for his hand of protection over her husband, who had just narrowly missed being killed in a car accident.  My thoughts went to the listeners who were not so fortunate.  How do they react upon hearing that woman’s story?  Do they wonder why their loved one was apparently lower on God’s priority list?  Do they feel somehow to blame for not asking God’s protection beforehand?  Are they wondering if they’re being punished for something? 

No, that Romans verse isn’t what I’ve turned to when I’ve found myself within earshot of the What if?  Experience has instead taught me a little more about why Psalm 23 provides comfort to so many; because sooner or later, in one way or another, the What if? will happen.  And when it does, there is no way to reason any goodness into the situation, no matter how you frame it.

As much as we would like to fix it, or at least package it more attractively, it doesn’t work.  Muster up all the positive thinking you can, but it won’t change the facts when What if? arrives.  I think that’s why the psalmist calls it the “darkest valley;” it is a place where no light exists, and it sucks in any light in its reach.  All the encouraging platitudes that come drifting through are drowned in its depth.

We cannot avoid going through the dark valley of What if? but hope comes from the presence of the One who is with us through it.  For you are with me (23:4b) are the most powerful words I’ve found in confronting the whisper. 

Because we have a God who is not sitting around somewhere up above waiting for us to get our acts together, to become better, more deserving people.  We have a God who came down to us, here on the earth where we live, as a human like us.  His death and resurrection defeated the darkest valley so that, while we will not avoid it, it does not have the final say.  It does not have the power to consume us.

If you’ve heard me talk about communion before, you know it generates a game-show/infomercial kind of excitement for me. And so, I feel compelled to add, But wait, that’s not all! We have a God who continues to come to us in the sacraments.  Maybe we don’t remember our baptism if we were infants, but in communion we (hopefully, frequently) have that opportunity to experience Christ in both a physical and spiritual way, through our senses of hearing, sight, touch, and taste.  Given for us and remaining with us and in us, communion is at the same time personal as well as shared.

So while it isn’t a celestial slot machine that I can share with you, one that gives you a payoff if only you will just feed it the proper type and amount of currency, there is this, if we go a little farther in Romans:

³⁸ And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. ³⁹ No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.(Romans 8:38-39 NLT)

Faith is Made For Walkin'

It always bothers me when I see people in town stopping their cars at their mailboxes.  For the most part, the lots around here are not that deep, so it’s only a matter of walking a few yards to the end of the driveway.  How lazy can we get?  I try to grant a mental exception to those whose ability to walk may be limited, but that probably applies to a small minority of the offenders.

Driving down a rural Iowa highway this past week, I saw an elderly man walking back up his lane with mail in one hand, a cane in the other.   He had a pretty good way left to go, too, the farmhouse being set back from the road at least the length of a football field.  It must have been something of a challenge for him, his legs not all that strong anymore, balance not what it used to be.  To keep steady on the uneven, unpaved surface probably required a fair amount of effort.  It took some time, too, I’m sure, but on he went, slowly and purposefully.

Had I not been driving, I would have applauded him for his courage and his perseverance.  How much more difficult it was for him to retrieve his mail this way than for the people in town who stop at the end of the driveway and reach through the car window before pulling into their garages.

I could go on to talk about how we take our transportation for granted here, after witnessing in Guatemala that vehicle ownership is far less common and how those who are fortunate enough to have a running set of wheels often use them to carry many more passengers than we typically do here.  But this is really about more than making us feel guilty for taking unnecessary trips in the car.  Though stewardship of our resources is important, what I saw in that man was more about the stewardship of self.

For me, at least, this man became a symbol of using our very selves to the fullest potential.  And while I can pat myself on the back for walking out to my mailbox every day on my own two legs, can I say the same thing for my walk of faith?  Have I given my faith feet to step forward or does it ride around comfortably seated inside, looking out the window, only occasionally reaching into the world around me?

The old man with the cane could certainly have used his mobility problems as an excuse.  In choosing to walk, though, he risked falling.  He risked being hurt.  It would not be unreasonable to assume, too, that using his legs involved some level of discomfort.   But what might he have missed had he not taken that walk? He breathed the fresh June air, felt the warm sun on his face.  Perhaps that day he even spotted an eagle flying overhead or heard the wind rustling through the tall grass along the ditch.  He inspired reflection in someone he didn’t know who happened to drive by.

Whenever we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask both that God’s kingdom come and will be done, but to what extent do we really expect to participate as instruments of God’s work toward accomplishing those things?  What changes would come about in the world if we all offered ourselves unreservedly, strengths and weaknesses both, to the ministry and mission of Christ’s Church?  What if we got out of our personal spiritual cars that we drive around, buckled securely inside?

Stuck in my head along with that image of the man in the lane is that Nancy Sinatra hit from 1966, These Boots.  But I think this time the message I hear is about our faith; it’s made for walkin’.

Peace and Carrots

Our pastor asked us to reflect on when we realized we were Lutheran, so here’s my way of explaining. 

Religion, it seemed to me, was like chasing a carrot at the end of a stick.  You could run as hard as you wanted, but you would never reach that carrot.  It was an elaborate and confusing point system that never quite allowed you to accumulate enough credit to reach your goal. 

What do you do when you realize you’re playing a game you can’t possibly win?  You quit and that’s pretty much what I did.  Oh, I would still pretend from time to time like I was still a part of the game, but I knew when it was all over, I was going to end up the loser, just like everyone else, except they didn’t know it yet. 

I played along so well that I was given a Sunday School class to teach.  We decided to do a skit, so I looked online for one with the right number of parts that wasn’t too long.  The format was a game show in which the contestants competed with one another by taking turns naming all the good things they had done.  This made perfect sense to me, until the game came to an end.  The winner wasn’t the obviously better competitor.  Something wasn’t right.

I re-read the script.  It referenced Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

The “carrot” was already mine.  It had been mine all along. And what a wonderful, life-changing, precious carrot it is.  

Eventually, I realized that there was a limitless supply of carrots.  In fact, I started finding carrots in a lot more places than I ever would have guessed, even in some strange places. Sometimes they snuck up and surprised me, in places like a cowboy movie or an Andy Griffith episode. 

When you have all the carrots you could ever want or need, you can afford to be exorbitantly generous.  There is no more reason to be stingy with or protective of carrots. You no longer have to worry about whether the other person has more carrots than you do.  You don’t have to try to figure out whether they deserve any carrots because there are more than enough for everyone. 

The carrots are free, but they don’t belong to us.  We can’t hoard the carrots for ourselves and dole them out to only the people we think should have them.  The carrots are for everyone, no exceptions.

But what about the good works?  What about going to church?  What happens when there is no longer an obligation to perform a list of items on an endless checklist? 

Freedom happens.  And out of that freedom comes a joyful desire to respond in whatever way the Spirit leads.  Worship still happens, but instead of something we have to do it becomes something we can’t not  do.  Service to others happens, too, but instead of doing it in order to gain something, we do it because we are already filled and can’t help but share from that abundance.

Peace and carrots be with you all.