A Prayer for the New Year

Image from a stunning collection by Clare Benson

Standing on the threshold,

all we’ve left undone smirking in our periphery,

all we carry with us a finger’s breath away, waiting, waiting.

Unfinished business clings heavy, disappointment,

pressure, expectations straining at the seams.

And what we would love to step out of

and leave behind in an unwashed heap on the floor

abandoning on tipsy tiptoe, light and free.

It’s all right here, balanced, but barely,

on the threshold.

One day is pretty much the same as the last. 

Let’s not kid ourselves.

One day is completely new and  altogether different.

Anything can happen.

Anything.

We belong to you. 

(Pause and take it in. It’s beyond taking in, really.

Just pause, then, as near the reality as you can stand

for as long as you can stand it).

You.

Outside time, but entering all olds and news,

permeating every yesterday and each today,

inhabiting already all tomorrows, before they come upon us,

unannounced but right on schedule.

You.

To whom we belong.

Meet us here, Holy One, on this threshold.

Holding for us what was, carry us into what will be.

Drawing from strength we’ve been steadily building throughout the years,

exhaling the rubbish we’ve been steadily breathing throughout the years,

taking in instead the clean, the fresh timeless promises and bracing hope,

sucking them deep into our lungs,

with mouths and hearts wide, thrown open,

featherless, and trusting,

filling our strong bodies and sturdy dreams,

awakening with gentle possibility and mighty grace,

meet us on this threshold.

For the considerable stumbling we have ahead, grace.

For the remarkable triumphs yet to come, grace.

For the hot tears and searing pain before us, grace.

For the unrestrained laughter on the horizon,

and the astonishing joy waiting

around the corner, ready to spring, grace.

And to love.

Oh, to love.

(To You, Love, we belong, after all).

For this we pray.

In all things. 

All people. However

we might, faltering and faithful,

trembling and tenacious,

May we Love.

For this, then,

Holy, eternal, entered in You,

for the new year and all it holds,

for the past however it persists,

for love brimming over and unrelenting,

and for Us each one, standing 

here on the threshold of whatever may be,

grace.

Amen.

This poem was written by Reverend Kara Root, Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church. (Reprinted with permission.) You can find this poem, sermons, and other reflections on her blog, In the Here and Now: Musings on Motherhood and Ministry. 

Christmas Still Comes

In one week, one day, one moment, so much can change; so much can be lost. And we are left torn apart and disoriented. Waves of shock, anger, and grief come and go and come and go. The words of the psalmist become ours: How long, O Lord, must we endure?

This is not how I would have it. Losses have piled up—personal, professional, communal, national—in a very short time. A student dies; a beloved institution flounders and hopes and dreams teeter on the edge of loss; a loved one receives one horrible diagnosis upon another; the wellbeing of many is threatened; twenty children die. Twenty.

If I could cancel Christmas, I would. Take down the tree. Turn off the lights. Open the presents another year. We say that advent is a time of groping in the darkness, waiting for light and life. We say that it ends after four weeks. But it doesn’t. Not for the vast majority of humanity. Not for the young boys of my student. Not for the families, friends, neighbors of those lost in Newtown, CT. Not for those who wake up with chronic illness. Not in this life.

Yet Christmas still comes somehow. There are (and will again be) signs of Christ’s life breaking into hopelessness and unbearable sorrow, raising us up from our ashes and the many deaths we experience in the here-and-now. Until those signs appear once more, we live in lament—what one has called “faith’s answer to despair” (D. Hunsinger, Pray Without Ceasing). 

In 1983, Nicholas Wolterstorff, once professor of philosophy at Calvin College and then professor of philosophical theology at Yale University, lost his 23-year-old son in a tragic mountain climbing accident. He poured out his gut-wrenching lamentations onto paper and four years later published them with Eerdmans as Lament for a Son. While grief is always particular, I find myself returning to his words again and again when suffering and sorrow mount up.  I share them here as a reminder that Christmas still comes, because Christ still comes. This coming is neither the saccharine holiday promised by our culture nor the superhero God touted in too much popular theology. It is instead the coming of a God whose being has been marked by suffering and sin yet not overcome by it; the coming of a God who refuses to let evil have the last word.

How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity's song--all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself.

We strain to hear. But instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God.

A new and more disturbing question now arises: Why do you permit yourself to suffer, O God? If the death of the devout costs you dear (Psalm 116:15), why do you permit it? Why do you not grasp joy?

“Put your hands in my wounds,” said the risen Jesus to Thomas, “and you will know who I am.” The wounds of Christ are his identity. They tell us who he is. He did not lose them. They went down into the grave with him and they came up with him—visible, tangible, palpable. Rising did not remove them. He who broke the bonds of death kept his wounds.

To believe in Christ’s rising from the grave is to accept it as a sign of our own rising from our graves. If for each of us it was our destiny to be obliterated, and for all of us together it was our destiny to fade away without a trace, then not Christ’s rising but my dear son’s early dying would be the logo of our fate. . . .

So I shall struggle to live with the reality of Christ’s rising and death’s dying. In my living, my son’s dying will not be the last word. But as I rise up, I bear the wounds of his death. My rising does not remove them. They mark me. If you want to know who I am, put your hand in.

Awakening Longing in Advent

Advent is a season of anticipation, hope, and waiting for the arrival of Christ. The advent wreath, the lighting of candles, the preparation of the children’s nativity play: all of these church traditions invite us into the anticipation, hope, and waiting which are central to Christian life. I love these traditions, and probably for that very reason, I also find myself discontented with them, or at least with the way we sometimes engage them. They too easily become another part of the rush to Christmas, and we move through them like items on a to-do list.

Again, I appreciate these traditions (or at least many of them), because, even if they are co-opted by the rush of this season, they call our attention to something that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar—familiar in the sense that they are repeated practices, unfamiliar in the sense that they represent a change in the church year. Practices that blend familiarity and unfamiliarity have the potential to significantly shape us. We need surprise and newness to wake us out of our typical slumber, our going through the daily grind of life without noticing the works of God all around us. And such awakening often best happens in the comfort of the known. At the very least, I think this challenges us, as church leaders, to consider the re-working, the renewing of these Advent traditions, knowing that we are ultimately dependent upon God’s Spirit to move in and through us in the midst of these traditions. Renewal and awakening are the work of the Spirit after all. 

At the same time, I think there is something more that might revitalize our journey through Advent: the awakening of longing. Anticipation, hope, and waiting are lived realities when they are experienced in the context of heart-rending yearning for healing, peace, justice, wholeness, and goodness in our lives, in the lives of friends and family, indeed, in the whole world. Where is poignant longing in our churches? When are our hearts split wide open, leading us to prayer again and again and again that God’s kingdom of God might come? While this, too, is the work of the Spirit, our Advent rituals could be so ordered that we are invited into the longing for the kingdom of God in all its fullness to come--not an abstract longing but rather the very concrete, central longings of our own existence.

The Theater of Thanksgiving

It’s 11pm, the night before Thanksgiving. The house is clean; the table is set; and, the turkey is defrosted. My husband and I will awake at 6am to stoke the fires (okay, turn on the oven) for our family feast. Nieces and nephews, sisters and brothers will arrive in a little more than twelve hours.

This Thanksgiving holiday is a production, with a cast of characters who are set to play their parts. One will bring a vegetarian dish; one, a gluten free dessert; another, the makings for mimosas; another yet the stuffing for the gluten eaters. (We’re a challenging crowd to cook for.) My husband and I will probably repeat at least one of those same twenty arguments that they say married couples have throughout their life together. Our labradoodle Sandy will swipe food off the counter or someone’s plate. If she really scores, we’ll chase her around the table, trying to keep her from overdosing on tryptophan. We’ll cheer for opposing football teams, play charades, and take a group walk through the neighbor. Families, friends, and communities who are blessed with enough resources will produce their own version of this Thanksgiving Theater from east coast to west. Most of us will take at least a few moments to express gratitude to one another and God for the many gifts bestowed upon us this past year.

Gratitude is the essence of Christian life, as we have been taught by John Calvin, Karl Barth, and a whole host of other theologians. Gratitude is the human response to God’s grace. As twin moments in the divine-human encounter, grace and gratitude are inseparable. Just a taste of God’s bounty—that unmerited favor through which we are united to Christ and through Christ to one another—always elicits thankfulness and praise.  There simply is no other possible response when the Spirit awakens us to God’s abundant love showered upon us in Jesus Christ.  Gratitude sums up the entire disposition and action of the Christian. Covenant people are fundamentally thankful.

Knowledge of grace is itself a gift that cannot be received apart from Word and Spirit. Even our response of gratitude results from grace, not any human effort or innate capacity. Yet at the same time, we can cultivate thankfulness through meditation on scripture, through prayer, and contemplation of God’s glorious theater—the theater of creation, in which each of us has a part to play. So as I participate in my own quirky and beautiful corner of that theater, I'll be keeping these words of wisdom from Calvin in mind and inviting you to do so as well:

“Meanwhile let us not be ashamed to take pious delight in the works of God open and manifest in this most beautiful theater. For, as I have elsewhere said, although it is not the chief evidence of faith, yet it is the first evidence in the order of nature, to be mindful that wherever we cast our eyes, all things they meet are works of God, and at the same time to ponder with pious meditation to what end God has created them. . . . [In so doing, we shall learn] that he has so wonderfully adorned heaven and earth with as unlimited abundance, variety, and beauty of all things as could possibly be, quite like a spacious and splendid house, provided and filled with the most exquisite and at the same time the most abundant furnishings” (Institutes of the  Christian Religion, 1.14.20).

Celebrating Courage and Care

When I was ordained, I asked the presiding minister to preach on Colossians 1:15-23, because this text pointed me to the sovereignty of God in Jesus Christ. The vision of the cosmic Christ, “in whom all things hold together” (v. 17), comforts me greatly whenever the church is in distress (which is rather quite often). In this election season, with all the acrimony, inflammatory comments, polarization, and shocking pronunciations about rape and sexuality, it’s been easy for me to lose sight of Jesus at the center of all that is, holding us all.

Consequently I expected that I would head into election night with a fair amount of angst. But I didn’t. That’s not to say I wasn’t glued to the television set. It’s just that I lived with it all differently, because, in the days before the election, I was privileged to witness God’s passionate, faithful love lived out in the extraordinary lives of ordinary saints. Their courage and care shined forth with luminosity. Witnessing their lives not only sustained me but also inspired me—far outshining the Empire State building with its glowing red and blue columns.

A young gay man stood in the pulpit two days before election day, feeling the weight of the impending vote on the proposed marriage amendment in MN. Like all those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, this vote was profoundly personal. Yes, it was also political. But the political and personal are not ultimately separable, at least not in instances like this.  His very being was implicated in the vote. He had spent months working with Minnesota United for All Families, even talking with church members about the amendment. He entered into dialogue—respectful, open communication—with people who worshipped with him week in and week out, some of whom were going to vote against his right to someday commit himself in marraige to someone he loved.

When I saw him step up to the pulpit to lead worship, I was aware of this backstory, not all of it, not even the details of it, but enough to know that he was choosing vulnerability in that moment. And in doing so, he was exemplifying tremendous courage, the kind of courage that enables us to choose compassion and love and honesty and truth in the face of those who, intentionally or unintentionally, do not see us fully.  When he preached, he opened the biblical text in ways I had never heard before, pointing out the injustice (captivity and bondage actually) embedded in a story that was all about justice, freedom, and healing. He never made it about himself, but, like all good sermons, it lived in him and therefore through him. He never made it about the vote, though he could have. He provided space for the Spirit of God to convict, convert, and transform. And that took courage, profound trust in Christ, and loving commitment to a group of flawed disciples whose choices would be deeply hurtful to him.

Then on election day, I heard from a friend—a pastor—that one of the members of her church had decided to act with such care, kindness, commitment, and generosity that I’m still in awe. My friend’s sister took a number of foster children into her home this past year. The church had heard the stories of struggle and joy that resulted. They had prayed for these kids, some of whom had been horribly neglected and abused. They also heard that my friend’s sister became pregnant—a bit of miracle in its own right. This completely unexpected expansion of their family pushed up the timeline for their foster kids to be placed with biological, adoptive, or other foster families. Then my friend’s sister was placed on bed rest, and some of those placements fell through. A working dad, a bedridden mom, and a handful of kids, some with high needs requiring multiple kinds of special care: my friend was carrying the weight of this all, no doubt exacerbated by the fact that she lived states away from her sister, unable to help as she would like. But God provided. A church member, someone who had run an in-home daycare, offered to get on a plane and go support this family—a family she didn’t know yet to whom she was inextricably connected. She’s there now with them—caring for the physical, emotional, spiritual needs of people who were, on one level, effectively strangers. And through her, generosity and self-giving are writ large.

In Christ all things hold together. We hold together. And sometimes we actually get glimpses of that reality, glimpses that inspire us and move us and remind of the work of God breaking into our midst. This week I’m celebrating the glimpses that I received—the courage and care of these two people (and my friend’s sister) through whom God’s peace, love, and joy shine forth.