Smiles

It's not snow; it's cottonwood fluff. 

When my allergies are irritated, I am a crabass. There's enough pollen flying right now that I'm a crabass field (I kind of thought this was a real word until I realized I was thinking of crabgrass).

My tool for when I get irritated is telling myself jokes. I normally tell them out loud to myself while I'm hiking and I make myself laugh out loud. It's only awkward if people are around or if I admit to people that I do this. 

None of my jokes worked today. So I just talked to myself until I thought of  Dag Hammarskjöld.  There's nothing like a Scandinavian name with all those consonants shoved together to get me giggling and I truly love Dag Hammarskjold.

He was a UN Secretary General and it was only after he died that the public discovered what a deep philosopher and theologian he was. 

I'll go ahead and confess that I might also be irritated because it is hard to yearn for shalom in a culture that's hellbent on being crabasses. 

So I came home and reread some of his famous quotes mostly from his journal Markings and they truly were a salve so I thought I would share:

You wake from dreams of doom and--for a moment--you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love's calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn. 

It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity. It is when we all play safe that fatality (helplessness in the face of fate) will lead us to our doom. It is in the "dark shade of courage" alone that the spell can be broken.

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. 
In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. 

It was when Lucifer first congratulated himself upon his angelic behavior he became the tool of evil.

It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.

I freaking love those quotes. They all seem like conversation starters instead of diatribe igniters. 

So I'm in a good mood now. Thank you Dag Hammarskjold and to the fellow at the store who asked if I'd heard any good jokes recently and then told me the joke, 

"What kind of music do whales like?"    
Orca-stra!!! 

Just As He Was

I’m weary of the labels liberal and conservative. They’ve just become annoying. 

This is going to sound insensitive, but when I hear “liberal” or “conservative” as a way of defining people I immediately think “folks who are so sure of themselves they won’t be much fu

The world would be happier with more front
porch swings

n at a dinner party.” 

If the conversation ends up on guns or abortion or immigration, then we will get a sermon, and I know better than anyone that sermons can be boring. 

Sermons are boring if they are a “moral talk.” I’m pretty sure that any lecture given to people on what they should believe or do will be lovely for the lazy, but everyone else will stop listening and start making grocery lists or dreaming about Hugh Jackman.

I don’t use the term “boring” lightly either. I’d rather say “shit” a million times, than hear the word boring, but there is a certain amount of tedium in the current political atmosphere.

I love conversing about politics, but I’m finding folks tend to lean towards being “hard-hearted” or “open-hearted”. 

I’m not much interested in trying to engage in discussions with folks whose hearts are cemented with certainty, even if I agree with where they end up. Give me some mushy hearts because they tend to have sharp minds. Those who are molded by humble compassion can meet me where I am and help me figure out a faithful way to go.

There was a beautiful line in Sunday’s Gospel reading that I’d never heard before. It was the story of Jesus calming the storm, but it talked about the disciples picking Jesus up in the boat, “just as he was.” That’s a fascinating line. Was Jesus stinky, exhausted, grumpy, overwhelmed . . . ? 

It made me think that maybe meeting folks just as they are with an open heart is the most faithful way to live instead of labeling each other or ourselves with such meaningless categories. 

Hungry

I think I'm normal and then I suddenly rub my head against a strange man's chest. It seemed like the obvious solution to my problem until I looked at the reaction on his face and realized I might have chosen poorly.

So there I am hungry and eating ribs with sauce all over my fingers and the no-see-ums eating my brain, what else could I do?

It was maddening and I didn't want to put the ribs down and he happened to be standing behind me so I used his chest as a scratching post. I apologized once I realized this might have invaded his boundaries and he said it was fine as long as it wasn't lice. Hmm. I just spent the week with over 100 kids hugging and loving on them so I'm going to do a lice check right now.

You'll be happy to know I am lice free; hope that makes you feel better stranger man. 

I also just spent way too long talking about my chickens to the nice man who sells bike helmets in New York. I might even have held the phone up to chickens so he could hear them chatter. 

I think the hard thing for me is I feel really awkward around strangers so my solution is to dig into an intimate relationship immediately. I'm not sure that's overly healthy and I'm far better than I used to be, but still when I show up somewhere new I tend to overshare and ask way too many personal questions.

This is why I love summer lunch and having kids hang out all summer. 

They do the same thing. 

They overshare and ask way too many questions.

Here's a typical day: I sit in the grass while one kid on my right is telling me about his dead brother and the kid on my left is asking a million questions about ants while other kids run up and want me to watch their amazing feats.

One of Jesus' craziest teachings was when he plops a kid down in the middle of an ego battle and says, "Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs."

Kids are not particularly moral or innocent creatures. I hang out with them too much to romanticize them and try to imitate their ethics.

What kids have going for them that we often lose as we age is their ability to show up hungry and needy without being embarrassed about it. 

The things that unite all the kids who show up at noon at the church are:

1. They show up

2. They are hungry (for food, play, connection, a break from home, something that feels real)

I know that doesn't excuse my strange behavior, but if being faithful has something to do with showing up and being hungry then I'm in pretty decent shape.

Donovan Lee

So a Lutheran youth group walks into a bar . . . 

Not the beginning of a joke, but the reality of trying to find a table for 18 people in Whitehorse, Canada on a Friday night. It truly was the only table open and I didn't know it would be in the bar right in front of the live musician who looked like he walked out of the biker gang and onto the stage.

Teresa told him the music was too loud. That won us points. The musician was already thrilled to have a crew of teenagers sitting right in front of him staring at his two toned beard. He made it PG-13 for us, which meant he didn't drop the f-bomb, but everything else was allowed.

So there we are in the bar and I suddenly imagine that this evening is going to go poorly. It's our last night, we're exhausted and emotionally raw and really hungry. The beatdown on TV was about to become a reality.


That's when we lied.

Because every scary biker, two-tone bearded country musician wants a church group of teenagers as his main audience, Kirt and I told him that they were all our children. 

He liked that, but then we confessed that it was a church group. And he told us we were screwed.

That's when he started to tell us that he and Jesus were not doing so well right now. He had a year when nearly everyone he loved died, including his wife. 

And then he sang us a song that made me cry. 

And then he sang us every song he had about Jesus, which was two. One of them was called The Bible or the Bottle. We fell in love with him and the vulnerability of loss and ache he shared with us was a God moment for many in our group that night.

The final song he sang, 
"You gotta love the ones that you got, one day they're here and the next day they're not, you gotta hold 'em tight and keep them near, keep them close to your heart with the things you love so dear, live each day like it was your last, don't live with hate in your heart, dwelling on the past, you gotta love everyone even the ones that done you wrong, and one day when you have kids of your own, I hope you pass this on."

We're thinking about making it the camp song next year. 

When we wrapped up our wild week with our hodgepodge crew of kids, one of the older ones who will be transitioning soon said something like, "That's what we're doing. We're passing the grace and love down to the next crew of kids." 

Maybe the church should hang out in bars a bit more often. 

Sweet Child of Mine

The Holy Spirit rocks my world sometimes. 

What I enjoy about my Lutheran tradition is we put some structure into place and then open the door so the Holy Spirit can mess it all up. 

Here are three of the many Holy Spirit moments from Sunday's celebration of graduations, baptism, confirmation, third grade Bibles, and faith formation leaders (it was a whole lot of celebrating and I'm sure there was some whining about how long church was):

1. Simul Justus et Peccator (simultaneously forgiven and sinning). 
There was a moment in worship I never thought I would experience. A young man played Guns N' Roses as special music. I'm pretty sure Axl Rose never expected his music to be in church and I could feel the moment when those of a certain demographic in the congregation all realized what song was being offered up.

I almost started laughing and then worrying about my job, but it was so amazingly beautiful and holy I didn't do either. 

I love the young man who played the special music dearly. He's brilliant and an amazing artist and has probably been scolded by most of the adults in the congregation. We've had some challenges over the years.

There is no better paradox that captures the love of the Christian community than this particular young man playing Guns N' Roses Sweet Child O' Mine. It was perfect.

I don't know any of the lyrics besides all the "Os" and "sweet child of mine", but that is enough to make me smile. The profane and sacred, the sinning and forgiven all mixed into one bag in the church. Church isn't about putting your holy on, but showing up as a sweet child of God's, giggling as the waters of baptism are poured out, and offering a beautiful gift no one else could have offered.

2. The offering of the crosses

There is a point in the service when parents place into their 8th graders' hands a cross and say, "May the cross keep you strong through all suffering and sorrow." 

As they spoke those words, I saw in more than one parent's face the truth of those words. I witnessed the realization dawn that they can't protect their kids from all the heart breaks and hurts ahead of them. We place the cross into our kids' hands not thinking they will escape suffering, but hoping they won't be alone in it.

3. The postlude

It was a gift this year to hear special music from so many of the 8th graders, but the final song knocked the breath out of me. I'm not sure what it was, but it sounded like a river and a perfect sending for a day when we celebrated so many transitions. The bubbling and swells, the stillness and rapids seemed to capture the flow of our lives. We know we can't hold on to a moment in time; we can only ride the river of God's grace. 

I freaking love my job and this whole crew blessed me in many ways. They added a few gray hairs to my head, but also made my heart and life so much richer. 

Amen. Come Holy Spirit.

Speech

I love being a pastor, but it's been nearly twenty years and I still suck at knowing the right thing to say.

I replayed some of the conversations over the years where I have failed:

"Pastor, I caught my husband with a horse." 

"Eat more green grapes, Pastor, keeps you regular."

"Have you ever had contact with aliens, Pastor?"

I think I just stared at people in response. What does one say?

There's also the more normal stuff. I have no idea what to say to "nice sermon" let alone when folks are wrestling with trauma and death. 

Here's what I came up with today after replaying some flubs I made recently. 

I asked myself, "What would my speech therapy teacher say?"

I spent most of elementary school in speech therapy for not being able to say "s, r, or l." I don't remember anything about the classes other than my teacher loved Ireland and a girl named April laughed so hard snot hung from her nose to the table. 

Speech therapy did nothing for my impediment because I didn't realize I had one. I sounded normal and most of my friends in speech class sounded fine too. It's hard to work on a problem you can't hear.

I even got to do summer speech camp. I've blocked most of that from my mind other than the animal flash cards. I rocked it until we got to the damn squirrel. Do you know how hard "squirrel" is when you can't say "s, r, or l?" I'd see that squirrel coming and I'd get so worked up about saying it right that I'd just sit there exasperated and humiliated screaming "thgaw." 

So how speech therapy help saying the right thing?
1. I can give up on being right and try to be aware of what is wrong. What sounds normal and right to me may sound wrong to another so I need to pay attention to how I'm sounding to the other person. 

2. Don't get so anxious and worked up that I just sit there muttering intelligible sounds because the task of saying something meaningful is too daunting. I know when I'm hurting it is often enough to know I've been heard and everything else sounds like thgaw. 

3. Swear. I'm pretty sure everyone who's struggled with speech has learned to swear. Swearing and singing come from a different part of your brain than formal discourse. Sometimes I need to release that part of my brain and no one wants to hear me sing.

4. If I really mess up and say something I want the other person to forget, I just let snot drip down my face. Those gross memories obliterate everything else. Poor April is still remembered 40 years later as the girl with the hanging snot, but at least I can't remember anything about her speech impediment.

Anarchy

I'm thinking about anarchy. 

Some of it is the sunshine and heat; my brain melts in such conditions.

Some of it is our recent bishop election. Lutherans gather as geographical synods once a year and this year in Alaska we elected a bishop.

When we finished this year's election, someone asked me what I thought. I love our bishop. I think she is a faithful and steady servant so my immediate response was not to critique her or the process, but I did question the nature of hierarchy. I'm just not sure out current leadership structure will see us into the future.

Finally, some of my thoughts come from an article out of the Christian Science Monitor with the sub-heading, 

Spontaneous mass protests in the former Soviet state of Armenia have ended a deceitful power play by a longtime ruler to stay in office. In throwing off their fears, Armenians showed others in repressive countries how to ‘live in the truth.

I'm fascinated by spontaneous gatherings of people who show others how to "live in the truth." 

A leader in Armenia was later raised in the midst of the protests and I want to believe that will be helpful to good order, but I can't say history has many examples of new leadership that doesn't imitate the tyranny of the old leadership.

It also made me think of a story we learned when we visited the DDR museum in Leipzig last summer. A group of students in 1956 in communist East Germany sat in silence for six minutes at the beginning of class after the Soviets crushed the revolt in Budapest. It was a spontaneous act of solidarity with the protestors in Budapest . The principal yelled at them for their silence, the head of the education department yelled at them, and finally the Stasi interrogated the students to find out who the leader was. 

But there was no leader. They all just knew it was the right thing to do. And then they all escaped to the West together. Even when they were interviewed after the threat was over, there was no leadership they could point to.

What creates the sense of trust and fellowship in a group of people that frees them to risk their lives to live in truth?

 I don't know the answer to that question, but I think it's an important one and I'm pretty sure the answer is not hierarchies (it's probably also not anarchies). 

Leadership is important for good order, but I do think in the church (and probably our nation) leaders can repress the creation of spontaneous communities who have a sense of the truth and are willing to risk witnessing to it. Leaders tend to take charge and leave folks feeling impotent and disconnected.

Confirmation youth making stoles for ministry

I'm not sure what that means for pastors. I was taught pretty early on that I'm not in charge and it's not my church, and on my good days I see myself as a trainer, observer, and student of scripture. 

Sometimes, on my not so good days, when my ego butts in, I see myself as "right" and "in charge." 

That's probably the best place for my anarchical tendencies to start dismantling hierarchies and then I'll worry about the rest of the church and world.