Vulnerable to being a loved child of God

Gwynn Crichton

I am not preaching today. Instead, I would like to give you a homily given by our own Gwynn Crichton last Wednesday at Evening Prayer. Let me warn you this is personal but very powerful. I am grateful to Gwynn for so many things at St. Paul's but I am especially grateful for her willingness to be vulnerable.

I hope in her example, others can be vulnerable and then open to the healing that can come with inviting others into our journey. You may want to read Psalm 139 before reading this. With her permission to post this, here is Gwynn's homily:

+ + + 

Living into God's Love
By Gwynn Crichton

In a literal sense, Psalm 139 paints a portrait of an omniscient, all-knowing, all-powerful God who knows our every thought, motivation and intention. This notion of God is like a story my mother used to read to me as a child called “The Runaway Bunny” in which the baby rabbit tries to elude this mother who says she will find him wherever he goes:

Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”

“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”

“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.”

“If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said his mother, “I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”

“If you become a fisherman,” said the little bunny, “I will become a rock on the mountain, high above you.”

“If you become a rock on the mountain high above me,” said his mother, “I will become a mountain climber, and I will climb to where you are.”

And so on and so forth.... The mama bunny is very much like the depiction of God in the psalm: the all-powerful great protector and parent in the sky that knows all of our thoughts, schemes, hopes, secret desires, and petty grievances. This God has us all figured out and there is no deceiving or outsmarting him—he always knows and can see right through us. Yes, this is no doubt true, but the relationship between God and the psalmist is much deeper and complex than this initial interpretation.

Upon further reflection, this psalm affirms that God is not simply omniscient but that God is omnipresent in our lives, that God is within us and that God cares deeply for us. The God portrayed in this psalm is a personal God who wants to be known to us intimately in all times and in all places. This God is compassionate, attentive and tender and accepting us exactly as we are and wherever we are....in our journeys and resting places, during the day and night, in heaven and on earth, in our inmost parts to the uttermost parts of the sea. Truly believing that God loves and accepts me as I am has been one the greatest spiritual challenges of my life while the realization of God’s love in my life has yielded the most profound transformation I could have possibly imagined.

I come from a southern, blue-blood family hailing from Nashville, Tennessee and was born and bred in the Episcopal church. Our family has been afflicted by a garden variety of dysfunction: alcoholism and addiction, mental illness, severe depression, adultery, divorce, suicide, punctuated with tragic events and peppered with our fair share southern gothic quirks and eccentricities. I suppose we really got off quite lucky.

Growing up, I learned many unhealthy behaviors to cope and survive with craziness of my family life. These included overachieving, emotionally care taking my parents, people pleasing, playing the family hero and keeping things under control at all costs. Experiencing God’s unconditional love was not part of my survival manual. Fear ruled the roost. I always thought I had to work hard and perform well to earn my keep on this earth to be worthy and to be loved. I have struggled all my life with an over-developed sense of responsibility fueled by the guilt and shame of never being good enough.

I have often tried to win over people’s love and approval to the detriment of my own self- respect and worth, thinking if only this person loved me, then I would be okay. Even worse, I have tried to force, control, manipulate and change people--often those closest to me--to ensure my needs are met and I am “safe”. While these behaviors were appropriate responses to the traumas I experienced growing up, they became and in some cases still are major impediments in my adult life. They have enabled me to construct a false self or ego based on what I perceive others want or expect from me and have led me down the road of making my happiness often dependent on others’ expectations and behavior or worse yet, hurting people I love with my unrealistic expectations and judgment, critical attitudes.

Such fear-based behavior and deep insecurities have separated me from the love of God and have caused me inevitable suffering, despair and depression. As Thomas Merton says: “My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love--outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.”

I am so grateful that I was led to Al-Anon--a 12-step program for friends and families of alcoholics--at age 17 where I was introduced to a spiritual approach to dealing with my problems and coping with my relationships, family and life in which I made and continue to make the conscious decision to turn my will and life over to God’s care and love, asking repeatedly for God’s help to accept the things I can’t change, to have the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Over these past 22 years in Al-Anon I have learned the hard way through many painful experiences that God truly loves me unconditionally.

Yet years I believed this intellectually, I didn’t see God’s love as essential to my existence—it was more of luxury item, optional, a last resort. So I continued to find myself in situations where I perpetuated these deep seated beliefs about myself as unworthy and unlovable and unable to relinquish my self- will. I finally hit a very low point in my life around the time I turned 30, struggling in a very sick and destructive relationship that ended badly--several times.

The worst part of it was how I betrayed and abandoned myself to such an unsafe person—that truly thought I deserved to be treated so badly. Yet by hitting this rock hard bottom and extreme despair, I had an incredible epiphany that God did not want me to feel this way anymore. God truly wanted me to be happy, free of the demons from my past, and that God truly loved me without condition—and that accepting God’s love was essential to my continued existence. Being left to my own devises and self-will was going to be a dead end, literally, if I kept going as I had been.

This was the great turning point of my life that made me willing to change, get really honest about my motivations and behavior, to allow God to heal many of the wounds of my childhood that caused me to repeat self-destructive patterns. Through God’s grace, I was free to finally consciously choose a safe and loving partner and build a meaningful and fulfilling life here in Charlottesville and at St. Paul’s.

In my experience true change has only taken place through radical surrender to God’s will—which I interpret as infinite love. Jesus says: “Abide in me as I in you....As the Father has loved me so have I loved you; abide in my love.” It is such a simple request and in it lies our salvation.

But I forget this so easily—I suffer from spiritual amnesia. Like the runaway bunny, I’m always looking for ways to seize control, exact my will, do things my way and fufill the desires of my ego for external approval which inevitably leads to trouble and pain and separates me from the love of God. I must be reminded on a daily basis through meditation, readings, worship, praying or attending an Al-Anon meeting to once again relinquish my will to God’s love and care--even when I don’t feel like I need to or things are going well.

And when that doesn’t work, inevitably, a crisis, a loss, a disappointment or stressful circumstance arises—what I refer to as a another bleeping spiritual growth opportunity—and makes me once again realize how dependent I am on God’s grace and how available and inviting God is to me any time or place no matter what state I am in, in my journeys and resting places, during the day and night, in heaven and on earth, in my inmost parts to the uttermost parts of the sea. 

But here is the punch line, folks. Realizing and coming to believe that I am a loved child of God is not just about trying to heal the wounds and trauma of my childhood and improve my self-esteem and be happy.

Receiving and experiencing God’s extravagant love for me is the necessary prerequisite for me to love my neighbor as myself and be able to give back to and serve the world from a wellspring of love, gratitude and faith rather than a place of resentment, martyrdom, or fear.

If I truly want to seek and serve Christ in all persons, be an instrument of God’s peace and minister to those in need, God requires that I also take the time to get my inner spiritual, emotional and psychological house in order so that I can be effective, so that I can love others as he loves me. I am not useful to God if I remain afflicted, angst-ridden, wracked by self- loathing, fear and doubt, if I remain separate and broken--this makes me deaf to God’s call to witness to Christ’s love in the world.

The whole purpose of the 12 steps it to reach step 12 which says: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. This is why we recover.

Barbara Crafton puts this very well in one of her books. She says:

“This is the curious forgetting of self that has to happen if we are to walk boldly into the destiny God has prepared for each of us. We must know ourselves, tell the truth about ourselves, love ourselves, we must do all of these things--and then we must set ourselves gently aside and commit everything to God’s love and power. If we skip the first part, if we think we can serve God without self-knowledge and self-regard, we will be turned away. Such people cannot serve. We are children of God, in the image of God. First we must come to see this in ourselves. But we cannot stop there. The purpose of faith is not to become a self-satisfied little puddle of self-love. It is, rather, to become a river, a fast-moving, powerful stream of love that flows outward toward the whole world.”

This is certainly a highly iterative and non-linear process. I will always be trying to balance nurturing my interior spiritual landscape with fulfilling God’s calling to me to serve others in the outside world—one is not possible without the other and vice versa—this is the healthy tension of being a Christian and an authentic spiritual person.

Sometimes I will be fully conscious of the fact that I swim in the river of God’s love and and other times I will feel that I am instead face down in a mud puddle. But that mud puddle is an illusion. I am always in the river of God’s love, I can’t escape and run away from it. Regardless of my circumstances, my state of mind, my inconstancy, my limitations, my willingness or unwillingness to let go and surrender, God is here, God is there, God is within, God is in those around me, God is everywhere, at all times and at all places, always available to all of us. This is so miraculous that it defies my ability to express the depths of my gratitude. Let us bless the Lord and give thanks to him.

The Lord be with you, let us pray:

That wisdom was born with me in the womb thanks be to you, O God. That your ways have been written into the human body and soul
there to be read and reverenced thanks be to you. Let me be attentive to the truths of these living texts. Let me learn
of the law etched into the whole of creation that gave birth to the mystery of life and feeds and renews it day by day. Let me discern the law of love in my own heart and in knowing it
obey it. Let me be set free by love, O God. Let me be set free to love. 

--from Celtic Benediction by J. Philip Newell

The way of followership

My sermon today touches on all of the lessons appointed for the day: 1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20), Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17, 1 Corinthians 6:12-20  and John 1:43-51.

+ + +

Today we come to a very open-ended story:

Jesus goes to the Sea of Galilee. When Phillip, Peter, Andrew, and Nathanael see him, they drop everything and follow Jesus. 

Just like that. 

What did they see that so compelled them? And what was inside themselves that made them follow? 

Many of have speculated over centuries about why the first disciples followed. Had they known Jesus since childhood? Were they waiting for a signal from him for when this great project would begin? Or did they just happen into this like Nathanael?

None of the gospels tell us. 

Maybe we are to find these answers in how we ourselves choose to follow.
We get a common thread lacing through all of the biblical stories we hear today. 

The thread is followership. 

The young Samuel hears the voice of God in the night and he follows the voice wherever it leads. 

The psalm declares God is always with us and knows us better than we know ourselves.
The apostle Paul dishes up hard medicine for followers about their harmful behaviors. 

And the Gospel John gives this story of how the first followers of Jesus begin their followership with no real idea of what would happen or where they were going, but they went anyway. 

The topic of followership is not one we hear much about in our world today. We would rather talk about leadership.This great university across the street devotes enormous resources and intellectual power to the training of leaders, and don’t get me wrong – this world needs great leaders. 

Yet, our society doesn’t place much value on followership. I checked Amazon.com yesterday, and it is currently selling 71,136 books on leadership. 

There are only 187 titles with the word “followership.” 

We would rather look up to great leaders and dissect what it takes to be a great leader. 

We are in the throes of a presidential election that, at some level, is a debate about the nature and quality of leadership. 

We rightly celebrate the leadership of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this weekend.
But what of being a follower? 

There is no holiday for followers. 

Dr. King would be the first to tell you that without followers who stood their ground…
without followers who withstood the taunts; without followers who withstood the fire hoses and the jail cells, and the beatings and death itself; without followers, Dr. King’s leadership would have been absolutely worthless. 

Dr. King would be the first to tell you that followers make the difference. Followers always make the difference. 

You and I make the difference. 

In a very real sense, our parish is embarking on a new season of followership, or to use the church term: discipleship.

This winter, we are engaged in a season of discernment and listening so that we can become clearer about the path that God would have us follow as a faith community. 

We may not be faced with fire hoses and jail cells, but we are no less faced with challenges in our personal lives, and in the life of our congregation that require courage and strength, and especially require deep listening for the presence of God in our midst and within ourselves.

I hope you will pick up one of these. It summarizes a year of work by our Vestry and a task force that has examined the context and challenges facing us as a parish. 

And I hope you will sign up for a listening group. There is information about them in this.
Everyone can participate because everyone has something to contribute from your life experience and your experience of being in this church. 

This season of listening to God’s call in our parish can be extraordinary of we are open to it.
Yet some may find the concept of discernment uncomfortable, or risky, or even fraught with peril – and in it is. 

After all, haven’t we met or heard about mentally unstable people who claim they are speaking for God? Shouldn’t we question whether we are hearing “God” or just our own voices? 

Yes. 

That is why we do this together. 

All of the biblical lessons today underline this theme as well: that God is with us, but God is not easy to hear or see, and you should never blindly follow. 

We are human, we are not God. We make mistakes. Everyone in these stories questions.
The lessons today also provide a map for authentic listening and discernment. Let tell you what I hear in these lessons that can help us: 

Discernment begins with open-mindedness. Nathanael was open to Phillip bringing him to meet this unknown Jewish rabbi, Jesus, and Nathanael was open to what he experienced.

Nathanael had many pre-conceived ideas about who the messiah would be, but he was open to a new epiphany that would turn his previous notions upside down. 

Listening takes perseverance. 

Listening may take more than one try, as it did for Samuel in the Old Testament today.
Samuel and Nathanael both make mistakes, but they keep at it – they keep coming back – and that is another reason why discernment should be done in community. 

We need each other to do this. 

We can only know if our discernment is legitimate if we test it with other people. We need to always be open to the possibility that we’ve heard things wrong, that we didn’t get it right, that we heard only our prejudices speaking. 

From that springs humility, a word rarely heard in our culture. Our epiphanies will come not out of our arrogance or the certainty of being right, but from a sense of confidence that the Spirit dwells in us as individuals and as a community. 

Look for the surprising. 

The Spirit may be speaking to us from unexpected corners, and that often takes a whole community to see and hear. 

Psalm 139 proclaims that the One who knows us more deeply than we know ourselves will find a way to speak to us in a way that that is unique to each of us. 

You may hear God in a physics equation or in the soaring notes of a Mozart concerto. 

That also means the Spirit can reach the person sitting next to you in ways unique to him or her. When you honor the next person, especially when it is hardest, you honor the Spirit, and that is the definition of humility living in community. 

Next comes healing. 

We need to ask whether our followership brings about healing to the whole community, or brings about harm. Healing starts with healing for each of us. 

It is exactly what the apostle Paul is driving at in his letter today. He asks us to take a hard look at what corrodes our relationship with God and corrodes our relationship with each other. 

For us, what gets in the way? Possessions? Addictions? Callousness? In what ways do we abuse our bodies, this great gift from God? 

Heal yourself and we will go a long way to healing our community. 

Then we must ask: Who around us needs healing? Who is poor and neglected, lonely and forgotten? Do we hear their voices? When we do, we are close to hearing God. 

Next comes resolve, and with it, courage. 

We need to put one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, just like Samuel and just like Nathanael. We are called to do something and do it well, and not be hamstrung by endless analysis. 

Our actions will bring new insights, new epiphanies, new inspiration, new discernment.
Our path of discernment will have many turns and surprises, and there will be rocks along the way. True followership – true discipleship – is not easy. 

We will be transformed as individuals and as a community – and we will change the world by our followership. 

Dr. King’s followers changed everything in our world, nothing was ever the same again because they listened with openness, they spoke with humility, and they acted with resolve.
They knew how to follow with courage. 

And you know what else? Those are same qualities great leaders have as well: listening, openness, humility, resolve and courage. 

May it always be so with us here at St. Paul’s.
AMEN.

Art by He Qi

Why pray?

This Lent, quite a number of churches are offering daily reflections written by members of their congregations (and I hope you've seen the daily reflections written by members of St. Paul's; you can reach it by clicking the purple cross to the left).

Among those that have touched me the most is by my dear friend Carolyn Foland, at Trinity Cathedral in Sacramento. Her reflection is based on my favorite psalm.

Here is her reflection:

Psalm 139 

O LORD, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

Then why pray? God knows everything anyway.

I don’t pray for God to understand what I need. I pray to understand what I need. Okay, what’s the problem I need help with? Well, it’s this . . . . no, wait, the more I think about it, it’s more this. What did I do to get here? Why did this happen again? What help do I need to get out of here? What action do I need to take?

This inner dialog, I believe, is the process of being in relationship with God. It’s rather like guided meditation. I’m trusting the process to lead me to understand what I need from God and to be open to receiving it. It is a process of learning what to let go of and what I should be doing for myself. I can learn, if I am honest, what there is in the situation in which I find myself that I can affect and what is beyond my control.

There are times, of course, when there is no time for inner dialog. Times for instant surrender. These prayers are spontaneous utterances, usually in the form of four letter expletives. They are also likely to be the most heartfelt requests for deliverance from what’s happening that I am capable of articulating. The one I remember most is when I rolled my MG after encountering black ice in Wyoming. God and I knew exactly what I meant.

Intercessory prayer is a reminder that I need to think of others. I need to remember that there are others with problems. I ask God to help those of my friends in trouble, to heal those who are ill. I could say “this is Your will, God, not mine,” but because I believe that God knows what I want – those I love to be well and free from hardships or danger – it’s less than honest to pretend that I’m cool with whatever happens. I care. I may later pray to understand why something happened or to accept the final outcome, but as long as the future is uncertain, God and I are both clear with what I want. Because whether I say it or not, he knows.

Psalm 139:23 Search me, O God, and know my heart.

Carolyn Foland

Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day

The phone jangled me awake at 4 am a few mornings ago. I fumbled around, picked up the receiver. A parishioner was having a medical emergency. Could I go to the hospital? Of course, and so I headed off into the dark pre-dawn morning.

I stayed with our parishioner while nurses and doctors did their work. She was stable, out of danger. We prayed, and she looked in need of rest. I walked outside the hospital to get some air at 6 am.

The sky was a rich dark royal blue, and a crescent moon hovered a few degrees above the horizon. The dark part of the moon was as visible as the shining crescent. Venus hung nearby, just above the moon.

The words of Psalm 139:11 came rushing through my mind: "Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike."

I did not have a camera, so I found the photo above on the internet that someone else took the other morning. It is a close approximation, but only an approximation. Here is the psalm. Blessings on your day. . .

Psalm 139 Domine, probasti

1 LORD, you have searched me out and known me; *
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.

2 You trace my journeys and my resting-places *
and are acquainted with all my ways.

3 Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, *
but you, O LORD, know it altogether.

4 You press upon me behind and before *
and lay your hand upon me.

5 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; *
it is so high that I cannot attain to it.

6 Where can I go then from your Spirit? *
where can I flee from your presence?

7 If I climb up to heaven, you are there; *
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.

8 If I take the wings of the morning *
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

9 Even there your hand will lead me *
and your right hand hold me fast.

10 If I say, "Surely the darkness will cover me, *
and the light around me turn to night,"

11 Darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day; *
darkness and light to you are both alike.

12 For you yourself created my inmost parts; *
you knit me together in my mother's womb.

13 I will thank you because I am marvelously made; *
your works are wonderful, and I know it well.

14 My body was not hidden from you, *
while I was being made in secret
and woven in the depths of the earth.

15 Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb;
all of them were written in your book; *
they were fashioned day by day,
when as yet there was none of them.

16 How deep I find your thoughts, O God! *
how great is the sum of them!

17 If I were to count them, they would be more in number
than the sand; *
to count them all, my life span would need to
be like yours.

Jesus and the hard way of discipleship

My sermon today is based on Jeremiah 18:1-11, Psalm 139:1-5, 13-17, Philemon 1-21, and Luke 14:25-33.

Tribes

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children cannot be my disciple.”

What?

Yes, you heard that right.

And if you feel like you just heard this not long ago, you are correct. We heard a very similar passage three weeks ago.

We could turn to the other lessons today, but they don’t seem much better, and let me remind you again that I don’t pick the lessons.

It is tempting to avoid them – this one from Luke is known as one of the “hard sayings” of Jesus, and with good reason.

But let’s see what we can do here. First, I want to underline an obvious truth: How we tell our stories says a great deal about how we view ourselves, and how we view our relationship with God.

Second, I want to underline another truth that is less obvious: How we listen to stories – how we hear each other – also says a great about us and how we view our relationship with God.

I make those two observations to further point out that how we hear these ancient biblical stories says a great deal about us and how we view our relationship with God.

We can hear these stories at least two ways.

Here is one way: From the Prophet Jeremiah, we are told that God will bring evil against you unless you “amend your ways.”

From Psalm 139: “Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!”

You didn’t actually hear those words this morning because the drafters of the lectionary edited that part out. But, trust me, the slaying of the wicked is in the psalm.

Then to Paul’s Letter to Philemon: it doesn’t seem to fit much of anything, so we are going to leave aide for now and go straight to the Gospel of Luke:

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother…”

Then take up your cross and get ready to be crucified.

The image we get is of a wrathful, vengeful God who only allows a tiny number of worthy people to be admitted into his holy club. If you mess up, even a little, you are out.

That is the way much of our culture – and much of the religious world in general – hears these biblical passages, and then uses these passages to build religious social structures that divide people into the worthy and the unworthy, the elect and the non-elect.

But maybe there is another way of hearing these biblical passages that get closer to how Jesus intends us to hear them.

But be forewarned: this way of hearing the gospel might prove even more unsettling than the other way because it might push us out of our comfort zones.

From Jeremiah, we hear how we are like a piece of clay. God is the potter molding us into a beautiful jar. We are shaped, but we are not the shapers.

Then from Psalm 139 we hear about God who is with us from the time we are in our mother’s womb, who knows us in our sitting down and our rising up, in our journeys and in our resting places.

We hear about God who never gives up on us.

Then we get this extraordinary – and brief – letter from Paul to Philemon. The letter has no outward theological content, but don’t let outward appearances fool you. Paul is writing to a slave owner, Philemon, pleading with him to legally free his slave, Onesimus, who has escaped.

Paul sends Onesimus back to his owner, and Paul asks the owner see his slave as a “beloved brother” – to treat his slave as an equal – and then free him. Paul wants both slave and owner to be liberated from the brutal economy of humans owning other humans.

By the way, it is thought that this letter was kept and cherished by the early church because Onesimus was, in fact, freed from slavery, and went on to become a bishop.
And then we come to Jesus and his teaching to “hate mother and father.”

This really is not a recipe guide for creating a dysfunctional family. Rather, Jesus is attacking head-on the most violent social structure of his time – the allegiances of tribe and family that lead to blood feuds and endless cycles of retribution.

Think of the present-day tribal violence of Iraq and Afghanistan, and you get the idea. Jesus implores his people – his tribe – to abandon this way of thinking because it possesses them, strangling them.

You can’t be my disciple if you are going to keep living that way.

Such social structures are not so far removed from our own world, though sometimes they are more subtle.

Last Sunday, we heard University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, in this pulpit, talking about how “humans take differences among people and translate those differences into enduring inequalities.”

In our daily life, we deal with social distinctions created by race and class, educational degrees, family connections, religious affiliations, gender, sexual orientation, just to name a few. Some of these social distinctions help us to maneuver through a complicated world.

But some of these social distinctions are unhealthy. There one distinction I particularly want to talk about today: the anti-Muslim fervor loose in our land.
We’ve seen a number of flash points recently, for example, in the debate over a proposed Islamic Center a few blocks away from “Ground Zero” in New York.

Or in Florida, there is a supposedly Christian pastor promoting the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks as a day for mass burnings of the Quran.

And my email burns with proclamations that President Obama is really a Muslim, and was not really born in the United States, and wants to impose Islamic law on the United States.

Let me be clear: I am not going to suggest to you how to vote, nor am I going to suggest how to write an immigration law or a zoning law in New York, or an arson law for that matter.

But I want to tell you that these are not just political issues; they are spiritual issues because they place us onto the uncomfortable ground of social distinctions based on religion.

And when we get onto that uncomfortable ground, we again hear Jesus telling us to upend social structures that lead to hatred and violence. Let them go; don’t let them possess you.

As Christians, we need to understand that there are people in this world who understand God very differently than we do.

What makes us think God can’t reach all people everywhere, in every language, and every culture? Are we so arrogant as to think only we hear God’s voice?

To be a follower of Jesus Christ requires setting aside our own tribal prejudices, and embracing all people with compassion, especially the poor, the immigrants, the weak, and the people who are not like us.

You can’t be a follower of Jesus while embracing religious and racial bigotry.

To be truly a disciple is to take the hard path of the Cross, to sacrifice for others, to live in community with people you may not like, and to commit daring acts of kindness, service, and humility, and then to worship together every week.

There are questions that should come out of this for each of us today: Can we free ourselves from the captivity of our human distinctions so that we might truly see each other as beloved children of God?

And can we trust God enough to trust each other? Can we see in each other the face of Christ, no matter our differences, our arguments, our politics, our outward appearances, and truly become the One body of the Living God in Christ?

What kind of disciples will we be?

We get a lifetime to answer. AMEN.

Prayer is a gift of the Spirit: "Speak to your heart upon your bed."

The readings from yesterday's Daily Office spoke to me, and so I'd like to share some of my meditation from yesterday.

First, there was Paul Letter to the Romans 8:26-30:

"The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words."

There are many times I do not know how to pray, when the words don't come, when my mind wanders to my To-Do list and my church tasks for the day.

It helps me to know that prayer is a gift, and the words -- the insights -- of prayer are truly from God's grace. It helps me to know all that so that I don't worry that my prayer is somehow not good enough.

There are people who seem so great at prayer, and I can feel inadequate by comparison. Thomas Merton and Julian of Norwich I am not. But if prayer is a gift of the Spirit, then prayer is not a competition. I don't have to be Thomas or Julian. I can fret about many things, but prayer should not be one them.

Yet, that brings me to a related question: How honest am I allowed to be in my prayer? Yes, I pray for others, but may I pray for myself? How do I pray for myself? Do I put my selfish desires and my deepest anxieties on the table with God? Do I say what I really want? Should I be bothering God at all with any of this?

I am helped by Psalm 4 from Evening Prayer last night: "Speak to your heart in silence upon your bed."

"Answer me when I call, O God, defender of my cause; you set me free when I am hard-pressed; have mercy on me and hear my prayer..."

One other thought came to me in yesterday's meditations, and it is more implicit than explicit within the readings of the day. Many passages of the Bible seem to suggest God is the cause of both good and evil, like when God "hardened the heart of Pharaoh" so that plagues would be unleashed and so proving God's might. That is not an image that sets well with me about God; this image of God is not anyone I would want to trust.

There is another way to see this:

If prayer itself is a gift of the Spirit, as Saint Paul teaches, that suggests to me that God is present everywhere and in everything; in every word and action, in every person, in every molecule of the universe, in every moment both good and evil. God is present in every prayer no matter how flawed I am in my prayer.

That also suggests to me that God is dwelling with me in both the good times and the bad; is with me when I am noble and when I am selfish, when I am strong and when I am weak. God is with me in the joyful and the bleakest moments, at the dawn and at the dusk; and God reaches each one of us even into the depths of hell itself.

God is especially with me in my prayers; God brings me the words I cannot quite find for myself. The question for me is whether I can sit still long enough to hear the prayers that come from my heart upon my bed.

That also suggests that God is capable of hearing every prayer, in every language, from every heart, from every religion. Prayer can come with words, or in art and music, in every sense of our being -- or in pure silence.

Humans have limits and religions have limits. But God has no limits; there can be no limits to the prayer God can hear. God can perfectly well read Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags and hear the chants of a Muslim imam or a Jewish cantor, or see the illuminations of a Bible transcribed by a Cistercian monk, or hear the inspiration of "inner light" by a Quaker, or listen to the "Prayers of the People" from an Episcopalian. God can sort it out.

I always seem to arrive back at my favorite psalm. Even though it is not assigned for the day,

I leave you with this:

Psalm 139

Domine, probasti

1 LORD, you have searched me out and known me; *
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.

2 You trace my journeys and my resting-places *
and are acquainted with all my ways.

3 Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, *
but you, O LORD, know it altogether.

4 You press upon me behind and before *
and lay your hand upon me.

5 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; *
it is so high that I cannot attain to it.

6 Where can I go then from your Spirit? *
where can I flee from your presence?

7 If I climb up to heaven, you are there; *
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.

8 If I take the wings of the morning *
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

9 Even there your hand will lead me *
and your right hand hold me fast.

10 If I say, "Surely the darkness will cover me, *
and the light around me turn to night,"

11 Darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day; *
darkness and light to you are both alike.

Top, Islamic calligraphy, "Meditations on the Veil," by Nazar Yahya (1963-); middle, Tibetan prayer flags; bottom, Psalm 79, from illuminated Jewish Haggadah, German, 14th century.