An invitation to be the reconcillor

My friend Lynell Walker, who is Canon Pastor at Trinity Cathedral Sacramento where Lori and I spent 18 wonderful years, just returned from her summer vacation. She wrote this for the Trinity e-newsletter, and so I pass it along to you for a summer's day reflection:

A Summer's Reflection

Pat and I have just returned from a wonderful trip touring parts of the Oregon coast. The change in climate, pace and exposure to the stunning cliffs and seacoast provided a wonderful time of rest and refreshment. It doesn't take much to reset my life. While away, I reread Henri Nouwen's bookThe Return of the Prodigal Son.  It's based on his meditations of Rembrandt's depiction of the familiar gospel parable found in Luke 15:11-32. Nouwen had been invited by friends to join them on a trip to the Soviet Union to see the original portrait located at a Hermitage in St. Petersburg and he seized the opportunity with great joy. He had encountered the image in a poster some time before and it had haunted his heart and imagination. Now he would get a chance to experience the painting as the artist had expressed it.

While camping, I downloaded the Rembrandt sketches and final portrait to my phone and went back and forth between Nouwen's interpretation of the story and the paintings that had so moved his heart. I have read this book twice before and never caught, until this read, that imbedded in the parable resides the invitation to become the father - generous with all that he had, and ever checking the horizon for a glimpse of the son he loved and missed so deeply. I had always seen it as a story of reconciliation but never as an invitation to become the reconciler. I'm grateful for vacant times that give the heart time to ponder.

I hope this summer gives you time to pursue something that once captivated your heart. Take time to remember. Was it a piece of music, a work of art, a place forgotten, an old friend? May you find joy in discovering the many ways that God's Spirit naturally reveals itself during this summer season of re-creation.

Blessings,

Lynell+

The Rev. Lynell Walker

Canon Pastor

The sacredness of friendship, the blessings of compassion

On Saturday I will be preaching a homily at a memorial service for a young man, Jeremy Pinkerton, who was killed in an car accident last weekend. The service will be held at a Baptist Church which has graciously opened its doors to accommodate the large number of people expected to come.

Jeremy did not go to my church, and I never knew him. I just met his parents on Wednesday when they came to ask me to conduct this service for their son. They did not know me, but they came to my office because they were brought by close friends who are members of St. Paul's. I am honored to be a part of this for them, and I am honored their friends brought them to me.

This tragic event has me reflecting once again on the importance of friendship. Not just importance, but the sacredness of friendship. True friends are there with us in the joyful moments and the times of great pain. They know how we feel without asking. They are there for us, not with unsolicited advice but with their presence, their laughter, their tears. Friends are truly the reflection of God's boundless love, no-strings-attached. True friendship has no strings attached.

We don't do anywhere near enough in the Church to bless and honor friendships.

In this morning's Daily Office reading, from the Book of Job, three friends hear of Job's terrible suffering. His children have been killed in an inexplicable accident, and he is has a physically painful disease. The three friends -- Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite -- do the greatest thing they can do for Job. They show up:

"When the saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him in the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great."

-- Job 2:12-13

No one spoke a word. No one needed to. The friends lived with Job in his pain, and that was the greatest gift of friendship imaginable. Yet it is so hard to do. Later in the Book of Job, the friends start offering all sorts of trite advice and become a burden to Job. But for now they sit with him and suffer with him. That kind of friendship, I believe, comes only as a gift from God.

I came across this quote yesterday from Henri J.M. Nouwen that I think captures this well, and I share it with you:

"Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it."

Maybe the best prayer we can say for our friends who are suffering is ask for the strength to set aside our need to control so that we can be there with our friends no matter how painful or awkward it becomes for us. And may each of us accept the blessings of our friends in our own times of joy and pain, for when we do we will be looking into the eyes of God.

A Collect for Fridays

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but
first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he
was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way
of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and
peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Farewell to Pam Lamb

Yesterday evening, we bid farewell to Pam Lamb, a courageous member of our congregation who died of cancer a couple of weeks ago.

It is hard to describe Pam; she had a developmental disability but she somehow never missed a beat and she possessed an incomparable sense of humor. She lived with a group of people with similar disabilities and many came to her service yesterday along with several of caregivers.

Pam was especially fond of stuffed animals. She had dozens of teddy bears, and all of them had names and stories. We filled the front pew with her stuffed bears, and all were wearing nametags (thankfully, someone wrote down the names before she died). St. Paul's people also came with teddy bears, and I had one in the pulpit.

I don't usually post my sermons from memorial services, but this one I will:

Homily for Pamela Lamb

I have a few things I want to tell you tonight. First, Pam is Ok. Pam is healed. Everything that harmed and hurt and wounded her in her life on earth is wiped away. Gone.

If anyone is sitting at the right hand of Jesus, it is Pam Lamb.

There are times in our life when we meet someone who, by the standards of the world, is overlooked, or worse, pitied.

But if we are lucky enough to notice, we will meet someone who by the standards of heaven bring to us, in some mysterious way, to a sense of what it means to be touched and loved by the joyful presence of God.

Pam Lamb was one of those people.

You are here because you were lucky enough to be blessed by her.

I met Pam at a Shrine Mont weekend two years ago, the first time that Lori and I met this parish as a big group. For those of you not familiar with this parish, Shrine Mont is a rustic church retreat center in the northern Shenandoah Valley, and this parish goes there for a weekend every July.

We met many of you that weekend, and two years later, I must confess it was a blur.
But I remember Pam sitting on a rocking chair with a stuffed Teddy bear. She greeted me with a smile and talked with me as if she had known me her whole life.
The next time I saw her was here in this church. She sat over in the front pew every Sunday, and as soon as the sermon was done, she was up and gone. She would head on to the parish hall during the Creed and that was that.

Pam gave me a very real gift. She made real for me this fact: God is present in all of us, and God works infinitely through all of us, and God wishes only for us to have joy and mirth no matter our adversity, no matter our challenges.

It doesn’t matter how well you understand the creeds, or whether you have read and understood the tomes of Karl Barth. God’s work is done with us and through us in spite of all that stuff we carry around. Pam was proof of that.

Since Pam died, I’ve had a chance to re-read a small book by Henri Nouwen entitled “Adam: God’s Beloved.” It is Nouwen’s chronicle of being the caregiver to Adam, a man who shared many of the same disabilities as Pam.

Like Pam, Adam also died relatively young. Nouwen wrote this about Adam after he died – and Nouwen could have been writing about Pam: “I was struck by the mystery of this man’s life and death. In a flash I knew in my heart that this very disabled human being was loved by God from all eternity and sent into the world with a unique mission of healing.”

Nouwen went on to say that Adam had become the image of Christ for him. I think I know why: because grace comes to us not through strength, but though moments of vulnerability; God comes to us in many shapes, in many ways, and especially through people like Pam.

We so much need people like Pam because it is too easy to reduce God and grace to an abstraction, to an idea in a book or an argument on the Internet. Pam reminds us that our present is filled with grace too, that we need to be gentle with each other, to slow down and be present with each other because in those moments we will touch the heart of God.

Pam’s smile, her greeting and all of her stuffed animals were gifts from God to us – God gave her many gifts, and she gave us gifts of grace, faith, dignity, courage, and in the end, gifts of healing. May we always see them as so, and may we always hold her dear in our hearts. Amen.