Hey Y'all, Watch This!

In the South, these four words often precede the most events that qualify for Darwin Awards (Google if you don't know about these gems). Things like irritating an alligator by touching your nose to its snout, stripping the old paint off your trailer with the gallons of high octane grain alcohol left over from your bachelor party, or bungee jumping off the roof of your high school with the rope you found in the back of your pick up. Around these parts, not-so-well thought out ideas like this almost always begin with too much beer and too few brain cells. One bad idea, a, "Hey y'all, watch this," and seven minutes later, someone's gravely injured, dead, or a trailer has burned to the ground.

Most clergy I know utter some form of those words, maybe after consuming one chalice too many of consecrated wine or a too-long vestry meeting or just because we, too, are human and have a nice collection of bad thoughts and ideas trolling around our brains. Thoughts and ideas that will lead to no good, a gravely injured priest, and perhaps a church burned to the ground. "Not me," you say? Well, read on.

I think I'll tell the altar guild how it really ought to be done. Clergy suicide statement, if one has ever been uttered. Do not take on the altar guild. Really, don't. Irritating the alligator is a better idea. These ladies were around when Moses and the priesthood of Aaron thought they ran the temple. You will not convince them, charm them, or educate them on how it ought to be done. You will just make them hate you. Let it go, fix it yourself, and live.

No one will notice if I get rid of these old vestments. Somehow, somewhere, the great-great-great grandchild of the person whose neighbor's brother's wife designed and sewed those vestments will find out what you did, hunt you down, and regale you with stories about how the love of each parishioner went into every stitch and lime green and orange chasubles will come back in style, you'll see, and how could you be so heartless. And they'll do it at your home on the night that you and your significant other were just about to get busy.

I think I'll tell the ECW how to run their annual rummage sale. Yeah. They haven't found his body yet.

But in seminary, THIS is how we learned it's supposed to be done.Say this to a parishioner, and you might get away with your wet-behind-the-ears moment. Say this to a seasoned priest, and you might as well know that s/he will talk about you the minute you leave and we'll also make fun of your seminary. First, we've all been stupid enough to think that the way we learned in seminary was the only way. Second, living in the trenches of the church gives you something called experience. And third, the nifty new approach you learned at your last continuing education class also isn't the only way.

Why am I doing this? Don't ask. You won't get a valid answer, and someone will ask you about the old vestments you threw away.

The Sermon I Did Not Preach on Ash Wednesday

You punish yourself because you don’t believe that you are worthy of God’s grace and forgiveness. You kid yourself or try to delude yourself that you are okay. You keep busy doing good so you don’t have to feel. You do good, or else you will be punished. You put up boundaries to keep the hurt out but instead it keeps the hurt in like a box of razors. You feel sorry for yourself. Nobody would care if you lived or died. God is just like your angry parent, shaking their finger at you. You might earn that forgiveness yet, this Lent. Discipline, sacrifice, fasting, punishment, you understand- kind of. Contemplating that God might actually love your sorry ass, well that is completely foreign to you, isn’t it?

Of course, this is just your problem. No one else sees or suffers because you cannot receive or give love, right? No one knows just how much you hate yourself. You feel ugly inside because you are ugly inside. Your teeth are white, you are in the best shape of your life, but it is a whitewash tomb. If everyone knew just how sad you really were, they would just tell you to go kill yourself or to go away. At the same time, you are so lonely. So very lonely.

If someone would just touch you, that would be nice, but you would shy away. You are desperate, but you don’t want anyone to know that you are desperate. Don’t pity me! You say, but you are pitiful. This Lent, this year you will earn Jesus’ love. Mommy and Daddy will finally forgive you, and love you, and keep you safe like they should have, but they didn’t.

Maybe these rituals will help you with this hollowness, emptiness, this utter failure that is your life. You know your life is a failure- no matter what everyone else tells you. You don’t even cry about it anymore because you feel so powerless. It is futile to even get upset. You don’t even want to cry out about it because it is whiney and because you think that God wants you to suffer through this. Somehow, this is as good as it gets for you. Heck, you are just lucky that God doesn’t do something worse to you. If you could just figure out what you did, you would say you were sorry. You have been sorry for so long.

So here you are. You have been here before. It is habit. You have heard the story. The question is do you believe it? Is it just so hard to believe that maybe God created you in God’s image? Is it possible that you could be the image of God? Could you possibly be beautiful like a sunset? Could you be an elegant reminder of one who creates, watches, loves and waits for the world’s reply? Does God really see and feel everything in your heart? Does he know the truth about you?

You have heard the story year after year. Logically, somehow you agree that God must love us. Jesus dies on the cross to prove it. You hear others talk about that amazing grace. It is like watching everyone else dance at the prom, but you don’t have a date. You smile. You say: “Isn’t this fun? Oh no, you guys go on ahead, I just like to watch.” Deep down, you want to dance, but who would want to dance with you?

Can you imagine that God loves you and wants you to know? Can you contemplate that? Instead are you going to read 1st and 2nd Chronicles because those books of the Bible seem particularly penitential? Perhaps you will walk the Via Dolorosa, contemplating Jesus’ broken body, but can you contemplate that he loves you? Are you part of this salvation story or are you just watching?

For you (and you know who you are), I put forth this image for Lent: Jesus looks down from the cross at the sea of humanity, salvation to all he sees. He sees you. He knows you. He loves you.

Do you even know what that really means? Have you ever loved anyone that much? Has anyone ever loved you that much? I am guessing that the answer is no.

So, now what? Can you open yourself to him? Will you acknowledge that he is all ready there waiting for you? Are you ready for him? Are you ready to be loved and to love like never before? Can you contemplate that?

I know that I will try every day. I will try every day this Lent to contemplate that God can and does love me even when I don’t love myself, even when I am not sure I can believe it. I will contemplate that Jesus’ saving work was not just for the world but for me. I will contemplate that God can do anything. I will contemplate that God can redeem me. I will be moved by that Grace. I believe that you will be also. I hope that you will contemplate this with me this Lent.

Standing in the Corner

The poet Rumi speaks of separation: [Separation] becomes more poignant if in the distance you can't tell whether a friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in. Or, if you happened to be human and like some sense of control in one's life, separation is enough to cause you to flip the crazy switch.

Rumi did not add the last part, but in the waning moments of Epiphany, we enter the separation season of Lent, a time when we ought to reflect on those things we do and allow to be done to us in our lives that add distance between us, between God, and between all the moments in life when we could celebrate, but shiver in the corner instead because of what might happen.

Corner, you say. Is that in the Ash Wednesday confession?

Yes and no. Not specifically, it isn't. We confess and repent for all the crap we do to others, all the unkindness we show to those whom we don't like and justify why we don't like them to God.

"But it's in the Bible I don't have to like that sinner!" we whine.

And then confess that sin. And we confess the sins of omission, where we were just too stupid and unaware to even know we were up to no good. Oh yes, God notices those gems of human activity, too.

But somewhere in Lent, we ought to find a way to reflect on the corners we stand in during life, avoiding the gifts God places in our path. The opportunities that come our way, the ministries and mission, the love in friendships and relationships, even, that stand in front of us, just outside our comfortable reach from our safety zone (that blasted corner). To touch them and to allow them to touch us, we have to step out - out of the place that seems safe and known and controllable.

But let me say, that corner is safe. No doubt about that. We're covered on at least two sides, and can see things coming most of the time. No one will sneak up on us. We can keep those who love us and those who don't love us so much in our sites. We can watch the action from a safe distance, maybe easing out a bit when the coast is clear, but quickly able to run back when life feels unsafe and new.

And what really stinks is that most of us don't even know when we're standing in our corners, afraid of the party, until we try to move backward, away from the action, and crash into the walls behind us. Those lovely walls from the gashes of our life that haven't quite healed and probably never will completely. Those places that we long to share with someone who will care, but are simply convinced that those other children of God wouldn't understand and will say we're oversensitive or freaking out. Those corners that keep us standing when we were too overwhelmed to stand on our own from the pain and wounds.

Problem is, many of us don't need those corners anymore for strength, but we still lean on those walls. And we're missing the celebration and the gifts and the sheer chance of living while we continue to stand in the corner.

This Lent, can we listen to God calling us forward in the distance? That holy separation is never God walking away, but God asking us to take one step, two steps, three steps, forward to what waits. God doesn't promise that moving away from our corners will be easy or even successful every time. We'll run back a few times, even. We'll even crawl back and slide up the wall again as we let our fears subside and heal before we journey forward again.

Where is your corner? What party are you missing? And how can you begin to let the separation from the holy joy of God that standing in the corner is causing subside. Can we let the pushing away from those walls pull us into the surprises and opportunities the God shares with us?

One step at a time.

Who Dat Say They Gonna Beat Dem Saints?

Last night, I stood in blustery cold and waited for the Saints Superbowl Parade. I never thought of myself as being much of a fan, but lately, I have been swept into the frenzy. I watched and cried when I witnessed the field goal in the game against the Vikings. I almost threw my plate across the room when some player caught an interception and ran for the touchdown during the Superbowl. After the big game, I took to the streets of the French Quarter to be closer to my black and gold brothers and sisters.

I have a fleur-de-lis where my heart should be. My blood runs black and gold. I am a member of that Who Dat Nation. Admittedly, I do not know who any of the players are except Dree Brees and Reggie Bush (and I only know about Reggie Bush because he dates Kim Kardashian). I understand the game only in part, yet I have been drawn in.

I am surprised at the level of emotion that the Saints well up with in me. I usually disdain sports. I do not really watch or care, but I realize that I do care about symbols. Apparently, the City of New Orleans understands and cares about symbols as well.

We may want to discount their importance. We might turn our noses up and say we are more sophisticated than that, but our sophistication does not diminish the power of symbols. Our opinions do not diminish the power of symbols. A symbol is a symbol.

For the City of New Orleans, the Saints symbolize the devastation and disappointment of disaster and the fulfillment of enduring hope. The Saints making it to the Superbowl is a dream, a promise to everyone that maybe she too can rise above the present sorrow. The Saints winning the Superbowl is the fulfillment of a long awaited promise of Salvation. Things will change, and things have changed for the Saints, for the City of New Orleans, and for me.

So I stood out there, under the Crescent City Connection at the Convention Center, waited, watched, and cheered for a symbol, symbol of my beloved city and of me.

Letting the darkness into the light

I had that moment yesterday, where I had too much to do and not enough sleep because the Saints won the Superbowl and we party in Louisiana just a little too hard and, well, there's a point in your life where five hours' sleep just doesn't get it. So, after seven meetings, a to-do list that got longer with every thing I marked off because two things got added, and the general stress of realizing I'd acquired just a bit too much on my plate, She appeared.

The She that decides life is too complicated, too confusing, and too damned annoying at times, so leave Her alone. We all have her, that dark part of ourselves that could embrace Medea and cry with her in sympathy, saying, "We understand." You might remember Medea from Greek mythology. She was beautiful, a king's daughter, who fell in love with Jason and either directly killed her brother for Jason's sake or indirectly killed him and strew his body parts across an island. She offed her husband's new girlfriend with poison clothes. And I think she got really mad at her sons one day and ate them.

I mean, we can all be pushed only so far.

Okay, so maybe my moment wasn't that dramatic. I'd never hurt a child intentionally or kill a sibling. But I was tired and exhausted and I wanted to be left alone, mostly because we priestly types don't like to admit that life gets one over on us. Something about the collar, maybe, that convinces us, incorrectly, that we must always be cheerful, happy, grounded, and polite. So we save our dark and twisty times for home, or we do whatever we can to ignore what's not so nice.

Clergy aren't solo on this practice. Most of us in this human race would rather only expose our pretty selves, the cleaned up, scrubbed up, neatened up parts of our personalities that coordinate with our shoes and offend no one. But we aren't that. We all have Medea in our basements, or, as one friend calls the darker parts, the Rottweilers. And they get out in public sometimes.

If we make a habit of owning these lesser-attractive aspects of ourselves, the selfish, petty parts that like control and power and being right all the time at everyone else's expense, if we let the Medeas and the Rottweilers out of the basement to interact with those who care about us, I've noticed they do considerably less damage to the world than the ferrel demons who are so in need of being noticed that they slash and burn everything in their path.

If we trust that those who love us and care about us will still love us when they see Medea, the Rottweilers, or the demons, life becomes a bit safer, a bit less complicated and confusing. Not that this trust is easy or neat, but I decided to try it last night and found, to my surprise, that Medea wasn't nearly as dark as I'd thought. She just needed someone to say, "I understand and I'm here."