Say My Name

In John’s Gospel, chapter 20, Mary Magdalene visits the tomb of Jesus only to find it empty.

She immediately runs to tell to the disciples. They come back with her, see the empty tomb, and then return home.

Only Mary stays behind.

She is crying, weeping, when a strange man approaches her and asks her why she is so upset.

She explains that her Lord is missing and she asks the man if he knows where Jesus has been taken.

“Mary,” the man says.

Mary.

Mary.

And in that second Mary sees that the man she has been talking to is Jesus himself, and he is alive. Not a ghost, but a living, breathing, being.

Mary.

She doesn’t recognize him until he says her name.

How many times have we been blind to God? How many times have we failed to recognize Him even when He is standing right beside us?

Last Easter, I walked into Hope for the first time. I remember Mike standing at the door greeting everyone. I remember asking him if all the eggs had been found. I remember that at some point during the service, during one of the songs, I was bouncing up on my toes with what I thought was nerves but turned out to be something else entirely.

Walking into Hope that Easter was a Mary moment for me. Like Mary, I knew God, but it was my first glimpse of a living God. I thought I knew Him, but I know now how blind I was, how I didn’t really understand His presence in my life until I found Hope.

It was like He was calling my name.

And in that call, I saw Him—truly saw Him—for the first time.

I was filled with what seemed like unending joy, the same joy Mary must have felt.

That joy stayed with me for the better part of this last year. Only recently has it taken a bit of beating. I have found myself smiling less. My soul has felt wounded.

Last night, though, during the Easter Vigil, I felt that joy return. The moment Pastor Debbie handed me the Communion wafer, I felt my lips quiver, wanting desperately to smile. And when we sang, I found myself bouncing up and down on my toes. Not nerves at all, but joy, threatening to explode.

It was like I had heard my name again, had heard God call me once again.

He never stops, by the way. He never stops calling our name.

This Easter, today, I was the greeter, welcoming in people who were coming to Hope for the first time as I had last year.

And I was bouncing a little too, rocking back and forth on my feet because I knew, I knew a secret.

Someone was going to walk into that church today and have their life changed as mine had been a year ago.

Someone was going to hear God say their name.

Someone was going to feel that joy for the first time.

Someone’s life was never going to be the same.

Labyrinth

I walked my first prayer labyrinth the other night.

I hadn’t planned on going to church and when I got there I didn’t plan on staying, but the request seemed so small. Just sit for a minute and listen to the music of a Taize service. Just sit and listen.

Pastor Debbie started on the path first. The labyrinth was set out on the floor of the Parish Hall, nearly covering the floor from wall to wall. A wooden cross, taller than me, sat in the center. Pastor Debbie carried a stone with her as she walked and when she came to the cross, she put the rock at its base and then started back around the labyrinth again.

There were about a dozen of us and we didn’t walk the labyrinth one at a time. Some started well behind the person in front of them. Some started just a few feet behind, but at one point it seemed like we were all on the path together.

The path twisted into a maze of tight turns and more than once I almost lost my balance. Really I could have lost my balance … there was no penalty for falling off the path. But I fought hard to stay on, even turning sideways sometimes to avoid brushing up against someone whose journey brought them close to me.

At first I wished that I was walking the labyrinth alone, but as more and more people joined the path, I realized how important it was that we all walked together.

Sometimes the path wound back on itself so that I would brush up against someone who was much further along than me. Sometimes, our paths were parallel so that someone behind me was now walking beside me.

It was a truly brilliant message.

We are all on the same journey together. Some are further along. Some are right behind us, but no matter where we are in the journey, there are opportunities to walk together, to brush up against someone even for a second and make a difference, to be able to point out to the person behind you what struggles may be ahead.

I had wanted to walk the labyrinth alone. I had wanted to be alone with my thoughts and to pray and meditate and in the end I learned that night that I am so thankful for people. I am so blessed with people … who walk and sometimes clear the path ahead, who join me sometimes on the path, who follow behind me, who guard my back.

Community.

It’s so vital to understand that even when we want to be alone, even when we think we’re alone, God has given us people who take the journey with us.

Who those people are may change throughout our lives as we move and grow, but they are always there and we can’t think for a second that we’re alone.

Healing

When I was sixteen, I broke my finger playing football in the backyard. My step-brother threw the pass to my dad and I reached out to block it only to have the football jam my finger and break off a piece of the bone below the knuckle.

It was very painful.

I had to see a hand specialist and was fitted for a special splint called a figure-eight splint that would allow me to still move the finger while it healed.

It’s been almost twenty years and while I can say that the finger is fully healed, sometimes I hit it wrong. Someone bumps into it or I ram it up against a doorframe and the finger explodes in pain. In the space of five or ten seconds, I feel both the current pain, and layered underneath it the memory of the initial pain all those years ago.

In those few seconds, I wonder if I’ve broken the finger again. I wonder if it’s still damaged. Fear replaces pain. Fear and worry and then I break out into a sweat.

But the pain passes almost as quickly as it came. I flex the finger and there’s nothing, not even a twinge as a reminder.

The same sort of thing happens with emotional pain too. Years pass and we are far removed from the initial hurt, but then something happens. Someone says something to us. Something happens at work, at home, at church and suddenly a nerve is struck and the pain returns, sometimes taking our breath away.

Fear creeps in behind the pain and adrenaline floods the brain.

And then we’re nothing but a rabbit in the woods, ears perked, heart racing, ready to bolt in a second.

Isn’t it amazing that as complicated as human beings are, that when it comes to fear and pain, we’re really no different from any animal.

This week we celebrate Holy Week, the days leading up to Easter. Holy Week is a study of fear and pain, from Jesus’s plea to God in Gethsemane “to take this cup away from me,” to Judas’s betrayal.  From Peter’s denial, to Jesus’s isolation on the cross “my God, my God why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus suffers. His disciples suffer. His mother suffers. Can you imagine really his mother’s pain, watching her son dying on the cross? Even newly-raised-from-the-dead Lazarus is on the run as the chief priests consider killing him because he is an example of what the divine Jesus is capable of doing.

Jesus dies and the earth itself is not immune the pain of that loss, splitting open in that moment that he takes his last breath.

I cannot even begin to fathom the despair, the grief, the hopelessness, the helplessness that must have settled in on all those who loved Jesus.

I cannot imagine a darker time.

How does one survive that kind pain?

Some ran. Some, like Mary Magdalene, stayed, keeping a vigil at the tomb.

I can’t imagine there could have been any healing for any of them. The pain was too deep.

But then on the third day Jesus rose from the dead.

And with him, hope was reborn.

What I think is interesting to note, though, is that Jesus rising from the dead did not erase anyone’s pain. It allowed for healing, but it didn’t erase the pain completely.

I think of Jesus showing Thomas his wounds. Though dead and now alive, even Jesus still carried the scars of what was done to him.

Healing takes time and even when the healing is complete, scars still remain.

Again, Jesus was healed from death, yet still carried the holes from where he was nailed to the cross.

Healing takes time. We need to remember that.

And reminders of that pain don’t need to send us scurrying under the nearest bush like some frightened animal.

When we are healed, we are healed and nothing can take that away from us.

The reminders, the twinges of pain, the scars shouldn’t scare us. We should embrace them and bear them because they are not signs of weakness, but signs of strength, signs of what we lived through and what we survived.

And there is no greater example of that than the risen Jesus.

Thoughts on Palm Sunday

When I was a kid, Palm Sunday was my favorite Sunday of the year. It was the only Sunday where I could go to church, sit an hour and walk out with a gift, and not just any gift, but a palm frond.

And since I grew up in upstate New York, it wasn’t like I could just walk into my backyard any old time and get a palm frond. Palm Sunday was something special.

I joined Hope last Easter and this Sunday marks my first Palm Sunday with them and it’s actually my first Palm Sunday anywhere in many, many years.

Where Easter is a time of joy, Palm Sunday is much more solemn, something I definitely didn’t understand as a child. During Palm Sunday the Passion is read as we follow Jesus in his last days leading up to and including his death.

It is a heartbreaking read. Jesus is first betrayed by Judas. We all know that story, but then something even darker happens. Jesus is denied by Peter. I have always been bothered more by Peter’s betrayal, I think because Judas has always been portrayed as a villain, but Peter was very close to Jesus.

After Jesus is captured, all the other disciples flee, except for Peter, who follows at a distance to see what will happen next. But his fear gets the better of him and when confronted and accused of being a follower of Jesus, he denies it three times. To me that betrayal cuts deeper. We expect better of Peter.

[Peter later gets a chance to redeem himself after the resurrection. In the Gospel of John, Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loves him and three times Peter responds yes.]

The Passion concludes with the death of Jesus.

It is an agonizing death.

Jesus is spit on, mocked, stripped, flogged and hung on a cross. It takes hours for him to die.

As he dies, the sky grows dark and when he finally takes his last breath, we see a scene of almost apocalyptic destruction. Matthew 27:51-52 says “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen sleep were raised.”

Then the centurion and the others with him declare, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”

“Ah,” I would say to them now if I could, “but just you wait. This isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning.”

If the story of Jesus ended with the Passion, well that would be a very different story. It would be dark and fraught with loss and bitterness and grief. But the Passion is only the end of that chapter. It is only a prelude of things to come.

The next chapter begins with Mary Magdalene waiting at the tomb and we all know what happened next.

Staking Your Claim

In the novel Christy, a young, nineteen-year-old woman travels to an impoverished area of the Smokey Mountains in the early part of the 20th century to become a teacher.

It is a difficult journey. Though she feels called to do the work, she is in no way prepared for what she finds in Cutter Gap, not the sixty-seven children who she must teach in a one room schoolhouse, not the poverty, not the casual acceptance of that poverty by the residents. She is sensitive to and heartbroken by children with no shoes walking through the snow, babies dying due to lack of medical care.

After a month, she is ready to quit and confronts her mentor, Miss Alice, with her concerns. Christy doesn’t understand why God allows such horrible things to happen to people and she doubts that He means her to be at Cutter Gap at all.

Miss Alice then says a number of things (you could write a whole of the book on the wisdom of Miss Alice, she’s that good), but the one thing she says that really stood out to me today as I read it was this:

“God has all kind of riches for all of us … His promises in the Bible are His way of telling us what’s available. But this plenty doesn’t become ours until we drive in our stake on a particular promise and thus indicate that we accept that gift. That Christy is ‘claiming.’”

I’m at a part of my life right now where I’m getting ready to start a “Christy” kind of journey. I’m already a teacher—I’m not traveling out to the Smokies, but I am getting ready to make another kind of journey. Just like Christy left home, comfort and safety behind, I too will have to leave behind the comfort and safety of my current job to pursue this calling to the priesthood.

It may be tomorrow (that would be scary)—it may be ten years from now, but eventually, I will leave a job that I have loved and cherished through the good and the bad, so that I can do this thing that God has put in my heart to do.

And I must admit, I’m scared and I’m having a hard time letting go.

God’s call to the priesthood is a gift that He has presented me. But I haven’t yet claimed it.

I’m standing there staring at it. And make no mistake, I want it very much, but I am also afraid to leave my old life behind and I also worry whether God means the gift for me at all. Maybe He means it for the person standing behind me, and I’ve just been blind in thinking I’m the only one in the room.

But then I remember BACAM and the Parish Discernment Committee and Pat who stopped me in the restroom at work the other day and asked me if I was still “lovin that church.” And then told me that I’d make a very good priest because I was a teacher and compassionate.

All these people … and every single one assuring me that yes the gift is meant for me. Claim it.

And I will. I will claim it. I know this. I will never be truly happy if I don’t.

I don’t what God will do with me next.

But I know that nothing will happen until I claim His gift.

Epilogue

The story of Lazarus from the New Testament is my favorite.

I love how wonderfully imperfect Martha is because I think we’re all wonderfully imperfect and therefore Martha is someone I can relate to. I love how even though she tells Jesus again and again that she believes in him, that when he asks for the stone to be rolled away from Lazarus’s tomb, she hesitates, confused at what he’s about to do and perhaps questioning as to whether or not he’s even capable of doing it.

She doubts. We all doubt even though we believe. We doubt because we’re human. If we didn’t doubt, there would be no need for faith.

I love that as Jesus is about to show his divinity in the raising of Lazarus, he also shows us his most human side. He weeps for Lazarus. He cries for Mary and Martha and their loss. He grieves for what he has lost even though he knows what he is about to do.

It is a beautifully complete story, except for one thing.

It is something missing in most every one of the miracles that Jesus performs.

We’re missing the epilogue.

Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. Jesus restores the sight of the blind man. Jesus turns water into wine. Jesus casts the demons out.

But what happens the next day? What happens after?

In the case of the blind man, what do you do with yourself the day after? You’ve been blind all your life. You’ve been a beggar. You’ve probably been alone with no family. We see a little of what happens to the blind man in John 9 after the miracle. People question if he was really blind at all. His own parents really want nothing to do with him.

What happens to him? Does he get a job? Does he leave his life and family behind and follow Jesus?

And for the men who had demons cast out of them, what happens to them? Will people believe that they are whole again? Will their families still be frightened of them? How can they return to any kind of normal life? What are their options?

And Lazarus? What do you do with your life when you’ve already been dead? What kind of life did Lazarus lead after? How was he changed?

I think these are important questions to ask. All of Jesus’s miracles were miracles of transformation and though they all produced different results, they all had one thing in common … they were designed to bring people closer to God, so that they might know Him better through His son.

In that way, miracles of transformation still happen today. We may not be able to see someone rise from the dead, or someone have their sight restored with a bit of mud in their eye, but people are transformed by Jesus Christ every day.

They are called “mountaintop moments,” times when we feel so close to God that all we want to do is cover our face in His presence and swear to do His work all the days of our life.

But as I’ve been told repeatedly, we don’t live on the mountaintops.

So what happens to us the next day?

Much like the people who experienced or witnessed miracles in the Gospels, what do we do now that we know, now that we know how it is that we are saved?

I find myself thinking back to the Samaritan woman at the well. She did not experience a miracle as we have come to know them, but she was transformed by her meeting with Jesus. What did she do with that new knowledge?

She ran back to her village and told everyone she knew about what she had experienced.

I don’t know what Lazarus did the next day. I don’t know what the blind man did or the men who had demons driven from them. But I hope they did what the Samaritan woman did, what we all need to do, and that is share their miraculous journey with everyone and give credit to God.

Home

That Yankees game I attended a few weeks ago with my grandfather was, I think, the hottest game I have ever sat through. We were sitting behind home plate, up about twenty rows. Normally my grandfather’s seats are along the first base line up under a large awning, but on that day, we sat directly in the sun.

It was so hot it was like an old Western where you see the hero staggering across a desert landscape, beaten down by a sun whose intense heat makes the air shimmer like water.

I had not dressed for the sun. I had dressed for the shade and so it didn’t take very long for me to start feeling very uncomfortable. I didn’t want to complain though because being at the game with my grandfather meant so much to me.

But as the sun moved across the sky, I could swear I could hear my face sizzling as I slowly roasted.

It was hot for my grandfather too and I worried about him as he’s eighty-nine years old.

The game was well into the second inning when a couple, a man and a woman joined us in our row. Though their seats were a few down from us, the woman made a point of walking to my grandfather and introducing herself.

I think her name was Elsie.

She asked him how he was doing and she smiled as if finding him in this row was the highlight of her day.

My grandfather didn’t know quite what to make of her and after a minute, she took her seat next to her husband. She didn’t say another word the rest of the game, but when we stood up to leave in the eighth inning, she stood up too, patted my grandfather on his shoulder and told him how glad she was that he had made it to the game.

And then, and I’m still not sure why I did this, I took her hand, squeezed it and said, “Thank you.”

She smiled at me and that was last time I saw her.

There is a part of me that thinks she was an angel. There is a part of me that knows she was. And there is still another part of me that thinks my experience with her is just one of many such experiences I’ve shared since joining Hope last year.

On Sunday I wrote how people are such a blessing to me. Not just my friends, but even strangers.

There was a time in my life when I was so shy I was terrified to look anyone in the eye. I usually wound up staring somewhere out over their left shoulder which I imagine was a little disconcerting to them.

I’ve trained myself over the years, forced myself, to look people in the eye, but only in the past year have I realized the gift of eye contact.

When I look at people now … I see love.

Over the past year, I’ve come to see the various different people I’ve met as lost members of my family.

But last night, I realized suddenly, they weren’t the ones who were lost. I was the lost one.

And now I’ve come home and now when people look at me, I see what they see. To them I am their sister, their daughter, their granddaughter home for the holidays. And they seem so relieved that I made it safely and so happy that I’ve decided to come home.

I don’t know who that woman was at the baseball game that day, but she looked at me with that same look, like she knew me and was so happy to know me.

I don’t know if that makes her an angel or just a very nice lady.

But she’s not an exception in my life. Because I meet someone like her, it seems every day.

Some days it seems as though the world is welcoming me home.

One Year Later

Below is the text from the Moment in Faith I gave this morning at the 8:00 and 10:15 services:

A year ago, this Sunday was Easter Sunday which means that today is my one year anniversary here at Hope.

Though I have been a Christian all my life, this past year has felt like the beginning of my story rather than somewhere in the middle.

Over the past year I have told virtually everyone I know and even complete strangers the story of how I came to Hope, but now that I’ve told that story, now that I’ve been here a year, I’m ready to move on to another story, the story of how God works sometimes quietly and sometimes aggressively to bring you to a place where He can remake you.

The message is not lost on me that God sent me to a church named Hope. For hope, especially in our darkest times, may be the only thing that sustains us.

Hope is faith. It is faith and belief that even when the world seems against us, we know that God has a plan and that because God loves us so much, that plan is the spring to our winter. It is the promise of new life when the world looks so gray.

St. Clement of Alexandria said that “If you do not hope, you will not find what is beyond your hopes.”

I know that I have always lived in a state of hope but that never could I have imagined the wonderful things, the wonderful people, the wonderful world that God has introduced me to this past year.

Every person I meet these days whether it’s here or out there is a blessing to me. And I realize how blind I was, how much I took for granted. How the world passed me by and I barely noticed it.

Have you ever driven to work in the morning and part way through the drive suddenly realized that you have no memory of the last mile or so? You were awake but not seeing.

That was how my life was before I came to Hope. I was awake, but not truly seeing. Now I’m awake and aware.

This year has been the happiest year of my life, despite all the tears I have shed. God is changing me still and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

In Philippians 3:12, Paul writes, “I have not yet reached my goal, and I am not perfect. But Christ has taken hold of me. So I keep on running and struggling to take hold of the prize.”

I am so glad that I get to undertake that same journey here at Hope.

Thank you.

Castles, Coasters and Straws

Last Thursday, for one hour, I was the coolest person on the face of the planet …

… at least to the three-year-old sitting across the table from me at Chilis.

For my first trick, I took the coasters and leaned them and stacked them until I had a towering castle.

My greatest feat came later though, when the waitress set down a handful of straws. They were individually wrapped in white paper and when I handed one of the still wrapped straws to the little boy, I asked him what he thought was inside.

He took the straw from me and furrowed his brow, but couldn’t come up with an answer.

“Is it a straw?” I suggested.

Methodically he began peeling the wrapper away until finally, he pulled out a straw and held it up to me, smiling.

“It is a straw!” he exclaimed.

As if it could have been anything else. But here he was staring at me like I had just revealed the secrets of the universe to him.

The secret being that sometimes that straw-shaped mini-package is hiding exactly what you expect it to hide … a straw.

Sometimes I feel like a three-year-old in the presence of God.

His tricks, of course, aren’t tricks at all. He doesn’t have to use coasters to build facsimiles of castles. He is the creator of the universe. Unlike my card castle, God’s mountain ranges, His stars aren’t snuffed out by a persistent child with crayon.

God endures.

But I do feel like a three-year-old sometimes in the sense that I have a hard time trusting God even when He is constantly proving Himself to me (something that He is really under no obligation to do).

That little boy at Chilis didn’t trust me, didn’t trust what was right in front of his eyes. He had to figure it out himself and only when he unwrapped the straw, and saw it for himself, did he believe.

How many times in my life has God handed me something so beautiful, so blessed and so obvious and yet I’ve held it at arm’s length, struggling to make sense of it, trying to figure out if it is what I think it is and not truly believing until I’ve seen said blessing in action?

Why is trusting God so difficult when we know God is so benevolent? We know God intends only the best for us, so why is it so hard to trust Him and the good things He brings into our lives?

I think it probably comes down to self-worth. Are we worthy of God’s grace? Are we worthy to be loved? And because we struggle with those questions, because we have suffered so much at times, we doubt God’s love.

Worthiness is beside the point.

As author Max Lucado writes, “God loves you simply because he has chosen to do so.”

God loves.

God is love.

It’s so obvious and yet we doubt.

But we have to move beyond that doubt. Think of all the time we waste trying to make God prove Himself. All that time we waste unwrapping metaphorical straws when it’s so obvious what we have been given.

It’s a lesson I have to learn.