pastor prayers

God bless to us our bread
and give bread to all those who are hungry
and hunger for justice to those who are fed
God bless to us our bread

There’s a beautiful sung litany of this common prayer with a pastoral prayer on one of the Iona Community’s CD’s.  It has been coming to me a lot lately as the political clashes over the US budget have escalated.  Bread for the World has sponsored a fast in solidarity with people whose basic needs will go unmet if the budget passes in its current state.  And articles are floating around the internet naming the causes of the budget impasse as the specific agenda of whichever side you don’t agree with.  I have some strong opinions about those agendas driving some of the most dangerous cuts, but I don’t find my sense of righteousness about those opinions to be all that helpful for living in what feels like a very dangerous time.  The budget cuts threaten more than just food programs, but the whole debate has arisen a hunger in me that is deep.

I worry that we are stepping away from our humanity, away from that possibility for goodness born into each and all, instilled in us by the creative spirit who breathed us to life.  These budget priorities are born from willfully forgetting that the way God gives bread to those who are hungry is through the power of human hands, human generosity, human ingenuity.  When we stop praying that those of us who are fed might be filled with the hunger for justice, we forget that such hunger comes from knowing our connection, knowing how we are implicated in our neighbors’ hunger, knowing that we can do something about it.

The pain grips my belly as I consider how much power, how many resources, and how much ingenuity we have in this nation, and it closes in for a nice big cramp when I hold that up against the fact that one in every four children in the US struggles against poverty.  In what we call the wealthiest nation in the world.

In the words of Frederick Buechner:

When Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves, it was not just for our neighbors’ sakes that he commanded it, but for our own sakes as well.  Not to help find some way to feed the children who are starving to death is to have some precious art of who we are starve to death with them.  Not to give of ourselves to the human beings we know who may be starving not for food but for what we have in our hearts to nourish them with is to be, ourselves, diminished and crippled as human beings.[1]

In this Lenten season of fasting and contemplation, I pray that we might all join Bread for the World, Faithful America, and others in prayer and action.  The blessing must move through us if it is to be real.

It’s the Persian New Year, Now Ruz!

Celebrated on the vernal equinox, the moment of earth’s perfect balance.  The holiday honors life and our wishes to live it unencumbered, asking us to take time to ask and offer forgiveness, to give up what has been holding us back and take up new possibility.  It’s a time to let new winds blow through our homes and our hearts so that we might feel the spirit enlivening us for the year to come.

In my heart and on my mind today are those who are living in the midst of the possibility for new and liberated lives.  The people of Ivory Coast and Bahrain and Tunisia and Egypt and Iran and especially Libya.  People who are waiting to find out if their treatments for cancer or MS or any number of other things have brought about the results they wish for.  People who are working to mend relationships, and people who are making new lives after unmendable relationships have ended.  People who are living on the edges of addiction, poverty, incarceration whose lives are full of insight and possibility though the world may want to look the other way.  All of us, making sense of how to live a new future with the weight and the wisdom of where we have been.

My Now Ruz prayer is for the fresh winds of the spirit to move through us all.  May we find the time to lay down our heaviest burdens even for a moment, to imagine ourselves light enough to take flight on that wind.  May those who have learned the secret of soaring have the patience to coax others on; and may the sun shine brightly on each of us, wherever we are on the path.

This is a homily I gave in January of 2010, as part of a series on salvation.  In light of the current furor over Rob Bell’s new book “Love Wins” it seems worth posting.

The notion that someone would be destined to hell for not believing as I do is one that I reject outright.  I’ve been saying it just that plainly and matter-of-factly so long that it’s easy to forget how radical a message it still is to much of the world.  I’ve also been saying it so simply that sometimes I’m stopped short when I have to consider what it takes to live this theology not as a statement to explain what “Universalism” means to folks who ask what I do for a living, but what it means as a faith stance I take seriously and want to live.

What percentage of your time do you spend thinking about hell?    Few religious liberals tend to spend a lot of time entertaining thoughts of hell: pro, con, or otherwise.

If we frame our description of Universalism, then, in terms of not believing in hell, it can be easy to say it has nothing to do with us in modern times – we’ve grown past a regular notion of a punishing God, and we accept that there is truth in different faith paths.

The notion of universal salvation pre-dates Christianity, but the official name ‘Universalism’ didn’t come up until the mid-1700’s in England.  Soon after, a preacher and theologian named Hosea Ballou made it famous in the United States.  Ballou believed that the notion of  a punishing, judging God was not one that would inspire the best to come forth in God’s people.  He was concerned that the competition for salvation in fact brought out the worst in people, and that if folks simply took pleasure in living a moral life and doing good works they would find themselves reconciled to God.  Now, you can see that his approach sounds a little naïve: we know that it’s not so simple as saying “God loves you, now don’t you want to do the right thing?”

The idea that everyone is already saved is profoundly challenging.

Those of us who go about our lives earnestly trying to do the right thing know that it’s hard work.  Even when we’re working hard at it, it’s not always clear what the right thing is.

We want to know that effort is good for something, that it distinguishes us in some way.

Even if we’re not pinning our hopes on heaven, we want to be seen and known as the folks who have tried their best.

We don’t have to be believers in a saving God or in hell to find ourselves bound in habits of thinking that say our goodness is a zero-sum game.  As we strive to be good people, we can’t help but take some notice of those who, to put it nicely, may not be striving quite so hard as we are.  In our habits of thought, we distinguish our own goodness by negative judgments of others.

I am embarrassed to realize how much I do this myself.  It came to me clearly and somewhat comically while I was driving to the gym early one morning.  Now, we all know that early in the new year is a time when everyone makes their vows anew to practice their intentions with new discipline.  Especially after the indulgences of the holidays the gym is one of the places those intentions are carried out.  On this particular morning, I was very aware that the group exercise class I enjoy on Tuesday mornings was going to be filled to the brim, and I was racing to get there in time to stake out a spot.

I was not feeling charitable toward the interlopers who were inconveniencing me with their superficial commitment. “Just wait a few weeks and we’ll be back to normal” advised a friend.  Not only did I know it was true, I actively wished for the failure of my fellow gym members to come sooner.  I had won my place through hard work, for goodness sake, why should I have to make room for people who aren’t as serious, as committed… alright, let me just say it: as good as I am?

I don’t actively believe in or think about my own salvation, and I certainly don’t consciously tie it to my gym membership.  But this habit of thinking in even trivial ways shows a distance between my professed belief and my lived belief.  I caught myself this time, and asked what it would mean to live my Universalism in relationship to my neighbors and the gym.

It took admitting that I was trying to get some ‘credit’ for the hard work I’ve put in at the gym by assuming it earned me a higher place in the order of things.  It meant admitting that until two years ago, I was fairly often one of the ones who would sign up in the first week of January, go two or three times a week for a month, and then let the membership lapse by May.

But the crux of the matter was that if I was going to the gym regularly to prove myself more disciplined, tougher, or simply superior to those who did not go, I was doing it for the wrong reasons.  If I was doing it for my health and well-being, doing it was its own reward.

There was no reason for that same opportunity for health and well-being to be generously available to any and all comers.  In fact, the more of us pursuing that and joining the gym, the more services the gym could provide and the more healthy women there would be in the community.  A greater good all around.

Modern Universalism, if we are to really live it, asks us at every turn to replace habits of thought and action rooted in competition with the lived awareness of our radical kinship.  Universalism not only says that there is room for all of us, but that each and every one of us can be an important part of the healing and the hope of the world.

As the late Forrest Church sums it up, “Universalism says good behavior unites and heals; bad behavior destroys and divides.”

The reward for our goodness is the magnified expression of healing and connection; it is finding greater communion with the unifying source of our being and our destiny.

We know our faith is connecting us with that greatest good when our habits of mind and heart are helping us to heal our lives, inspiring us to reconcile with our neighbors, and helping us, as Church puts it, “plant our feet firmly on the ground of our being.”

We are surrounded by, held by a love that will not let us go.

All that love asks of us is that we magnify its presence in the world.

We are humbled, knowing that none of us has the whole picture of the scope of that sacred presence, but that each of us is a unique expression of it in the world.

If we tune our lives to the living that love, to seeking that truth that both shines through us and greater than all of us, we do indeed find healing, wholeness.

Salvation.

So may it be.

“…if we are not yet one in love at least we are one in sin, which is no mean bond because it precludes the possibility of separation through judgment.” (William Sloane Coffin)

There is a Facebook status cut-and-paste floating around in the wake of last Friday’s tsunami that reads:

Sept 11th (NY) Jan 11th (Haiti) and March 11th (Japan) …. Luke 21: 10-11 Then Jesus said to his disiples: “Nations will rise against nations, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven. Jesus says for behold I come quickly. So, ask yourself “Am I ready?” (It’s sad to say many won’t repost this message)

There are apples and oranges mixed up here (a terrorist attack versus two natural disasters), and dates confused (the Haiti earthquake was on January 12, 2010), but I must admit that it’s hard not to go to that place where we feel the sequence of all this devastation has some kind of lesson in it.  Because if there is no lesson in it, those lives do seem all to be lost in vain, don’t they?

We need to be careful with the speed at which we draw those lessons, though.  If we are in fact being asked to wake up, what is it that we should be noticing?  What new ways of living and being beckon us to the other side of grief and heartache?

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin’s words are with me this day, as I ponder the rush to some judgment read under the surface of the horrors we see.  Universalism asks me to ponder in my heart all the ways we truly are connected, our destinies one, and to ask how beyond the bond of our separation from love we might grow into our connection by divine love.

God who arrives not in wind or earthquake or fire, but in the sheer silence that follows them all, hold our heavy hearts in these days of our awe at the forces we cannot control.  Stand by us as we sink deep into the truth of our vulnerability.  Hold our hands as we grasp for answers that we think will soothe, so that we may keep them free for the work ahead, of building new meaning and new promise out of the rubble of these days’ tragedies.  Grant us the peace of the everlasting, as we face all that does perish.  Amen.