Waltzing with Potatoes

For Lent, I'm leading a study of Barbara Brown Taylor's book An Altar in the World. This book is all about spiritual practices you can do in your everyday lives, and one of the first ones she writes about is the Practice of Paying Attention. That might mean paying attention to nature, paying attention to people you'd ordinarily ignore, paying attention to what countries items in a catalogue come from--no matter what you pay attention to, doing so is supposed to evoke reverence in you. Everyone in our group, which met for the first time last night, is supposed to find some way to practice paying attention this week, and come back and talk about what they gleaned from it.

So today, since I Lead By Example, I was looking for something to pay attention to. What I quickly discovered is that there are lots of choices, but it's hard to think of something that would sound worthy of coming back and talking about.

I ended up at Bloom on my way home from our worship committee meeting tonight, because as is often the case, I had no food at home. I decided I was in the mood for mashed potatoes. And then I thought that maybe potatoes were something I could pay attention to.

So I got home and started paying attention. As I held and washed my potatoes I noticed how rough they felt and how if you looked close enough, their skin almost looked like snakeskin. I noticed their lumps and eyes and ridges. I don't know who first decided that a potato was something they might want to eat, because it is dull and brown and hard, like a rock.

The next thing I quickly discovered was that I was bored. Maybe it is hard to practice reverence when you are hungry.

So I went ahead and chopped my potatoes. I tried to pay attention as I did this, too. After all, I've read things about how distanced we Americans often are from our food, and how just slowing down and spending time actually cooking can reconnect us to what we eat. And I like cooking, in theory. I just don't always like cooking when I get home from a meeting at 8 or 9. Also I don't like washing dishes, which is somewhat of a deterrent. Anyway, I paid attention. I felt the tension between my knife and the potato, heard how the slices crunched like an apple when I cut them, felt how they were almost a little slimy on the inside. I suppose if you pushed me I might say the cutting became slightly meditative after a few minutes.

So I don't know. I'm glad God made potatoes. They are delicious mashed up with garlic. Did I develop a heightened sense of reverence for these potatoes and the God who made them? Maybe not so much. Maybe I stopped too early.

Or maybe the practice of reverence and paying attention really does take practice. Maybe it just takes a while to see something new in a vegetable, a person, a catalogue. In the meantime, I suppose it can't hurt to be a little more aware of the things and people God has put around you. And maybe you just have to be in the right frame of mind--and have a snack first.

Ashes and nail polish

For the past several years working and volunteering in various churches, one thing I avoided like the plague was the children's sermon. Every once in a while I was offered the chance to do one, and I would worm out of it as subtly as possible with an excuse like "it's just not my gift." Once or twice I wasn't able to worm far enough, and so I was stuck in front of the whole church, awkwardly rambling about Jesus while kids played hide and seek under the chairs.

It's not that I don't like kids. I love them. But I suppose I didn't have any confidence in my ability to communicate with them in groups, and especially in front of a crowd of adults.

Now it is my job to do the children's sermon almost every week, and in spite of myself, I have discovered I enjoy it. In a way, it's not so different from preaching to adults. No matter who you're preaching to, it is the preacher's job to figure out what God is saying in a certain scripture to his or her particular congregation, and communicate it in a way that is relevant. That comes out looking different for kids, but the process is similar.

I'm learning to go with the flow and be ready to improvise. Yesterday at the 8:15 service I sat on the chancel steps with a bowl of ashes left over from Wednesday's service, and two little girls came up and joined me (most of the kids come to the 11:00). I showed them the ashes and explained what they were, and asked if they knew what we used ashes for in church.

And one little girl eagerly extended her hand and replied, "Do you like my nail polish?!!!"

I did. It was sparkly.

And that's what I love about children's sermons, though it is hard to explain why. I love that they put me right in the middle of the immediacy and the urgency of whatever the kids are excited about at the time. I love that they force me to let go of the importance of my own message for a moment, and to instead celebrate something a child wants to share. I love that I am becoming more comfortable without having an exact plan.

I did, of course, steer the lesson back to my bowl of ashes. And maybe that little girl will remember something about ashes and Lent and saying we're sorry, or maybe not yet. But if nothing else I hope she'll grow up knowing that church is a place where people like her nail polish.

Post-it theology

I didn't have any profound theological thoughts of my own today, so I thought I would steal someone else's. I heard it on The View this morning. Sarah Silverman was on the show talking about a new movie she's in, and after they showed a scene from it, one of the hosts (forget who) said that her character was kind of a bitch. (Her words, not mine.) "Yeah," Sarah Silverman said, "but of course, as Mr. Rogers said, there's no one you couldn't love once you've heard their story."

(Disclaimer: a quick Google search actually attributes this quote to Mary Lou Kownacki...but maybe Mr. Rogers used it sometime.)

My first thought, because this is how I think these days, is that that would go great in a sermon sometime. Maybe my upcoming one on the woman at the well. So I grabbed a post it and wrote it down before I forgot. But now it's just sitting on my coffee table, and I think I might leave it there as a reminder for a little while.

I think it's kind of cool that actors get to practice knowing people's stories when it's their job to make "kind of a bitch" into a sympathetic character. I don't know how well that skill translates to real life. In real life, we don't always get to to hear the stories that would allow us to love people. But I think it's a good reminder to assume that those stories exist, and that if we only did know them, we could love someone--so I guess we might as well love them in the meantime too.

The Kingdom and Awkward Turtle, part 2

This Lent, our music director is leading Taize services every Thursday. Today was the first. We started early with a movie about the Taize community and what Taize worship is. A smattering of people sat quietly in the fellowship hall, watching.

About halfway through the movie, a woman came in and stood hesitantly at the entrance to the fellowship hall. The woman sitting next to me waved her in. She came in and put some stuff down on a chair. Then she started handing out bulletins.

The bulletins said "Taize" at the top, had a picture of a cross, and the words "United Methodist Church" at the bottom. Inside were the words to some Taize songs.

This was odd, because I did not know this woman, and I had seen the draft of Richard's bulletin, which this was not. But hey, I wasn't in charge. I figured either she knew something I didn't, or she was maybe a little crazy, in which case I would pick up the real bulletin and not worry about it.

This strategy seemed to be working out OK until Richard caught wind of what was going on, and brought her out to the lobby and asked her to leave. Only she didn't want to leave. I'm pretty sure she had no clue why she would be asked to leave. By this time it was becoming clear that she leaned a little more to the crazy side of things.

I tried to figure out what her story was. After all, she seemed to legitimately know something about Taize. I asked her if she had been there. But all she did was point at Brother Roger up on the movie screen and say that he had invited her. After a little while, a friend of hers came in. She was able to clear things up: the woman had, indeed, been to Taize, as had her friend. She had also gone to Yale Divinity School. She had also been diagnosed with dementia. Her friend agreed to sit with her for the service, which she did, with no more incidents.

Thoughts on this:

One, sometimes you have to take a step back and laugh at the hilariously absurd things that happen in the course of ministry--or, I suppose, life. Coming to a church service and handing out your own bulletins? That's great.

But second, it is things like this that should make us constantly examine what it means to be a welcoming church. Do we welcome people even when they are (non-maliciously) disruptive? If we think we should, are we able to in practice? What lines do we draw? We have certificates on the wall that declare us a Certified Welcoming Congregation. How do those accolades help us understand ourselves in situations like this one?

Third, if this woman was a Yale-trained Taize pilgrim now riddled with dementia, then I think it was probably more important for her to be there at that service than it was for anyone else. We might appreciate the beauty and the silence and the meditative music. For her, it might have been a connection to a life she had once loved, now out of her grasp. She might not have been able to worship God in the ways we often think of worshiping God. But tonight, she wanted to worship God.

In the end, even if events like tonight's are hard, awkward, uncomfortable, disruptive; whether we handle them wrong or handle them right; I believe with all my heart that they are blessings to the church. They make us think about how best to love people.

At the end of the service, I told the woman I was glad she came. I meant it.

To dust

When I was little, and just learning what death was, I was scared. I remember nights sitting on my bed with my mom sobbing over the inevitability of this thing I didn't understand. I remember Mom trying to comfort me, telling me that probably neither of us would die for a very long time. Eventually she took me to a therapist, who I remember suggested that belief in heaven was an answer.

I have no other memories of this counseling and don't recall if I went anymore. I know that I now consider myself a fairly well adjusted adult, on most days, probably no more or less wrapped up in morbidity than the next person. But I am still scared of death. The word "forever," if I stay with it a little while, is enough to make me panicky. Of course, the alternative is no better. Forever is forever, whether you spend it alive or dead.

I am scared of death, and yet it is my job to tell others that they should not be scared of death. I know that is an overstatement. But it is my job to speak at funerals, to stand at a casket and proclaim resurrection; to reassure people taking their loved ones off life support that to let them go is the unselfish thing;to preach on scriptures that tell us to lose one's life is to gain it; and to smear people's foreheads with ash and remind them that they will return to dust.

We had two Ash Wednesday services today, and I thought about this more at the second than at the first: for one thing, there were about a hundred more people at the evening service, so I had a lot more time, and for another, I read this essay by Sara Miles in the meantime, posted by several friends on Facebook.

Miles writes that a woman came up to her with a week-and-a-half old baby to receive ashes for both of them. "I crossed his forehead with ashes," she says, "and took a deep breath, and told the baby he was going to die."

I didn't tell any babies they were going to die tonight. I did tell one girl, maybe age nine, and I didn't like doing it. Miles writes about giving ashes to kitchen workers, and truck drivers, and drug dealers. I didn't tell any drug dealers they would die, as far as I know. But I did say those words to my senior pastor, and a retired bishop, and a bunch of college students with makeup on and hair done from their concert before the service. Telling people they were on their way back into dust, I felt embarrassed, even apologetic. True or not, who I am to tell them this--I, who am also dust, who am scared of my own dustiness?

I believe and love the words it is my job to say: that we will die, but that we will ultimately live. And I think that we're allowed to be scared, even if we believe that. And as always, I hope the truth and the good news of the words I say come through to people, whether or not I am scared.

Ecclesio-simple

For the past few days, I’ve been reading a book called Simple Church, by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger. Eric Geiger is coming to talk to a conference event in a few weeks that some of our church staff is attending, so this is like homework. And if you happened to see my Facebook status earlier today, you already know that I am not happy about it.

It's not just the patronizing language or the vapid metaphors that make the whole thing read like a cheesy children's sermon. It's not just the chauvinism that blares through whenever the authors mention their wives, or the rampant biblical eisegesis in defense of their premise. OK, it is partially all of those things. But I have some actual questions, too.

The premise of the book is that simple churches--churches with a clear, streamlined process for making disciples--tend to be healthier. I don't completely disagree with this premise. I think there's probably a lot to be said for getting rid of outgrown or ill-conceived ministries, and eliminating special programs that turn out to be more for show than for effectively reaching and forming people. So I admit there's some validity to their argument, even if I do wish they'd given ME their research and let me write a book targeted at moderately intelligent readers. I also admit I haven't read the whole book yet, so it's possible my questions might be answered or opinions changed by the end.

I also don't disagree with their assumption of spiritual growth as process. What good Wesleyan could?

But I do wonder how well we can assign parts of that process to aspects of an individual's involvement within the life of a church. Most of the churches they rank highly have a model that looks something like: people come to worship and meet God, people join small groups and learn about living in community, people pick a ministry and serve.

But what if I don't come to church first? I can't find a welcoming small group or a community ministry as an invitation into a relationship with God? I can't come to church and get plugged into the congregation by joining a Saturday service event? I have to go through a small group first? And couldn't there be some value in having a wide variety of ministries for people to choose to be involved in--even if they do clutter up the calendar, even if they're not particularly streamlined? I'm simply not convinced that the process of salvation "from the first dawning of light in the soul till it is consumed in glory" (that's probably misquoted slightly, sorry Wesley) is as neat as a three-step program. This "simple church" idea seems to want to plug people into a machine that spits them out as disciples on the other side.

And what happens when I do get the service stage of my spiritual growth process? I graduate? I'm good to go? How does continuing sanctification factor into the life of the individual and the church? When I think of how worship, education, fellowship, and service contribute to growth and discipleship, I envision less of a line and more of a positive feedback loop.

And of course, what their data show is not technically that simple churches are healthier, but that they are more popular. It's about growth--attendance and baptisms and membership. And really, if the church really, really faithfully lived out its calling as the church and expected its members to do the same--don't you think there would be far fewer Christians, rather than more?

That's not to say that people are leaving mainline Protestant churches in droves due to our stringent views on discipleship. It's also not to claim that numbers aren't useful, because they do speak to relevance. But there's really no good way to quantify faithful, transformative ministry.

Still, I wonder how the study would change if we picked some different y-variables. What if we looked not at membership and attendance, but at ways churches positively impacted and transformed their communities? What if we looked at how much they made their little corner of the world look more like the Kingdom of God? I don't know what those variables would be, but I wonder if the x-variable would still turn out to be simplicity. Because if not, I want to know what it would be, and that's the way I would want to run my church.

The Kingdom and Awkward Turtle

Today at Rising Hope I was having a pleasant conversation about football over lunch. Yes, it was off season--the woman across the table from me was wearing a Redskins shirt--and no, it didn't involve much actual knowledge of the sport. We were having this conversation when a woman with long brown hair and a slightly vacant expression sat down and introduced herself as K. She opened her Bible on the table and told us she wanted to share some things from Luke.

Oh God, I thought. The woman in the Redskins shirt, who seemed to know K, rolled her eyes at me from across the table. I was careful not to return the look.

K began reading about earthquakes and persecutions. And then she kept reading. And then she kept reading some more. Gradually almost everyone at the table left while I listened politely, feeling a little trapped.

Finally I found a breaking point and said--a little desperately--"K, what does this mean to you?"

She stared at me for a second, surprised, and then said, "I can hear the earthquakes. I can hear the persecutions." I wasn't sure quite how literally she meant that, but wasn't about to ask.

Not really knowing what to say, I ventured, "I think this passage is about how hard it is to follow Christ, and about the challenges we'll face, but how God is with us through that."

K stared at me again and then repeated, "I can hear the earthquakes..."

I waited for her to finish, thanked her for sharing, and then excused myself to go back to the office. "You told her what she wanted to hear," said the woman in the Redskins shirt as I walked past her. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing.

I've often found myself in that kind of situation at Rising Hope and other places--listening to someone who's mentally unstable or just not quite with it--and not knowing what to say. I really want to know what to say. Or at least how to listen. I want to know how to take people seriously as people without always being able to take what they say seriously. I want to know how to love people without getting stuck in an endless stream of doomsday prophecies. Of course, there probably aren't any right answers, and most people probably don't know what to do any better than I do, but I do wish I knew some way to make those encounters less wrenchingly awkward.

But when I think about it--usually after the fact, but on better days during, too--I remind myself that I'm thankful for those awkward and uncomfortable encounters, too. Partially because it's good experience for me to get used to them and learn different approaches. But mostly because I am honestly thankful that K has a community where she can come and hang out, doomsday prophecies and questionable mental health and all, and I'm glad to be a part of that community.

A few years ago at Trinity I remember thinking something similar, when a probably-homeless woman got up during Joys and Concerns, walked to the front of the church, and began singing a song she appeared to be making up on the spot. Kathy, up front, had an expression that clearly said, "What on earth is going on?" No one knew what to do. We all listened politely. That was awkward enough, so imagine the awkward-turtle moment next week when the exact same thing happened again. And I thought--as uncomfortable as the whole thing was--how glad I was to go to a church where that kind of thing happened, because that woman could come in.

I fear--and laugh at--the thought of things like that happening in my own ministry down the road. But I hope those things do happen. I hope they happen all the time. Otherwise I'll have to wonder why the people who create those moments aren't around. I don't think the Kingdom would be the Kingdom without those painful-at-the-time, funny-in-retrospect, awkward, uncomfortable moments.