The Work of the People

Liturgy is the work of the people. I've always wanted to write an unflinchingly honest liturgy, in which people are forced to bare their souls to God and to each other, and do the hard work of admitting the truth. I'm not sure that kind of liturgy is practical in a real worship service. But I still want to try it. Bare with me. 
Liturgist: Holy God, we have strayed far from your paths.
Congregation: The road was straight, and we made it crooked. Your voice was clear, and we drowned it out with our own.
L: We are afraid to confess authentically.
C: If we admit that we are wretched sinners, who will love us? Who will rejoice in us? And from where will our pride and glory come?
L: Hear and believe the good news.
C: But we are not listening, to hear the herald of God's word. We are not believing, to trust in the goodness of our God.
L: But the Holy Spirit will enlighten the eyes of our hearts, if only we let him in.
C: We ask the Holy Spirit to open us up, though we are afraid and do not know what this request could bring.
L: From God comes abundant life, life everlasting.
C: We must give up our pet peeves for joy, our grumpiness for trust, and mourning for holy laughter.
L: You must take up your cross and follow Jesus.
C: We must trade our smiles for godly sorrow, and empty mirth for the agony of the crucified Christ.
L: Repentance requires much.
C: A new teaching, with authority! We have never been asked to give much.
L: The kingdom of God needs you, if only you would come. And your God longs for you, if only you would love him.
C: We do not know to what we are agreeing. We do not know why we were chosen.
L: Give thanks and praise to God the Father! For only in the doubts and questions, the places we do not know, can he meet us.
C: This far we know and trust.
L: Give thanks and praise to God the Son! For he willingly laid down his life for poor sinners and wretches like us.
C: This far we know and trust.
L: Give thanks and praise to God the Holy Spirit! For he stands lovingly and boldly in our midst.
C: This far we know and trust. Amen. 

The Faux Leather Purse

Well, it's almost time to register for classes. And I have no clue what I'm going to do. Drop the English major to a minor? Add a history major? History minor? Psych minor? Folklore minor? Sociology minor? The choices seem literally endless. 
A couple weeks ago I went to the church rummage sale and bought a communion chalice, a piece of wood with a picture of my church decorated for Christmas back in the 80's, and a big faux leather purse, all for a dollar and sixty five cents. It was a transcendent moment. Seriously. I kept asking God what I needed to do with my life and I end up with a picture of a church and a communion chalice. That rainy, cold Friday afternoon, I almost decided I was going to turn my back on the idea of becoming a pastor. Pull the plug on the long drawn out process. And then here I end up with a church picture and a communion chalice. 
"Calling" is such a confusing word. Biblically, I think it's something that God does and we do back. Grace is not something we passively receive. It goes back to the Wesleyan version of Arminianism: We have free will, and we can reject grace or receive it. But God is inside of you, prompting you to do the right thing. You can tune him out, but no way can you say "yes" without the grace that goes before (prevenient grace) every good thing we do.
I bought the communion chalice, church picture, and faux leather purse with my own change from my own change purse. But God whispered, drew me, called me, claimed me at the rummage sale down in fellowship hall.
Isn't it wonderful that God uses the mundane stuff of life to speak to us, to shape us? Who knew that a rummage sale would become a sacrament, where God meets us in the everyday? Life is full of sacraments. Baptismal founts, chalices, holy bread and wine are everywhere. Beware: a bike ride might be a baptism, the local diner a sacred altar.  
My fake leather purse is a reminder that God is calling me to be a grown-up lady with a grown-up purse. One day soon I'll be pumping gas in a car I bought. I'll be paying electric bills, buying pantsuits. And that's as God wills it.
My grandmother used to say, "You can't eat something you like for dinner everyday." If you're a bad cook like me, or if you're living on campus, also like me, that saying is true. You can't create the perfect schedule, either. You can't major in Religion, Philosophy, English, Sociology, Psychology, and History. Life happens: lines get crooked, toes get stepped on, feet get lodged firmly in mouth. Love slips away, tears well up. The icky dinners and boring classes become sacramental-- God meets us and claims us there-- God redeems time.
It's time to accept it, thank God for it, throw the faux leather purse over the shoulder, and move on. 

Texts of Terror Tuesday: Noah's Ark

Welcome to Texts of Terror Tuesday, the day where we look at a scary Bible passage and wrestle with it. "It's not Tuesday," you say? Well, that's how these texts of terror are. They confuse, they seem to lie, they seem to describe a God different from the God we meet in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore, it's only appropriate to have Texts of Terror Tuesday on Wednesday.
That, and I was really busy yesterday. But I digress.
I want to start by looking at Noah. Quick summary: God creates a flood that wipes out the whole world, because they are all sinners, except for Noah and his family. They're supposed to put two animals on the ark and for forty days and forty nights, they hang out on the ark until God makes the flood go away. (Genesis 6-9, New Abridged Jessica Version). 
Most people have heard this story, but if you stop to really think about it, it's scary. Why does God kill everybody? Does God only love "good" people like Noah? Why all the animals on the ark? Is this story only for those crazy creationist folk? Why is this even in the Bible?!
I want to start by saying I don't think this passage is for little kids, who are just learning to meet God, who think in black and white terms and can't grapple with the complex character of God. This is for grown-ups. And I'm not sure I'm quite grown-up enough to understand, let alone explain, this Noah story. But I'll give it a shot.
Genesis 6:5-7 says, "The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry he had made humankind in the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, 'I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created-- people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.'"
My Bible's commentary says the word "grieved" is the same word used for the pain of childbirth, and that a more appropriate translation might be "anguished." God is really, really hurting here. The pride of his life-- humanity-- has totally turned away from him. And it's killing him. I think it's something like when a parent watches their child grow up and turn away from them and get into self-destructive behaviors, only multiplied across God's thousands of children, raised exponentially because his love for each lost child is greater than any mother's love we can imagine. 
And God is regretful, too. Have you ever worked really hard on a project only to see it fail? That paper you wrote got lost in cyberspace, or nobody showed up to the big event you spent weeks planning. Well, God's big project of creation failed. And God's miserable about it. 
Because really, it's hopeless. "Every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was evil continually." They've made their choice. They don't want God in their lives, they don't want to love others, and they never will. God knows it, and he's in agony. Clinically depressed, a psychologist might say.
But God has Noah and his family. So he has Noah make an ark and put the animals in it. Why not just take Noah and his family up to heaven? Humans have been just terrible, after all. But God wants to start over. He wants to give humans another shot, because as wayward and self-destructive as humans are, God loves them. A lot. And he's willing to start over, risk the pain again, because he just wants to be in relationship with humanity. Even if he has to go through a lot of crap to get there.
Notice, too, that Noah has to actually build an ark. If I were Noah, I might have been tempted to say (and definitely would have thought), "Lord, if you can make a great flood, why can't you save me some work and build this ark for me?" But it doesn't work like that. God wants partners, not pets, people who will work with him, not just receive from him. So Noah had to build that ark, every last plank. 
And why the animals? Who really cares about them? God can just make new ones, right? Well, no. God wanted Noah to participate in this plan, take care of the animals too. Apparently even animals matter to God. Maybe, in our modern day tendency to ignore nature or bulldoze it over to build out suburbs and skyscrapers, we have grieved the God who wanted to make sure every last species made it on the ark.
Now, I'm no vegetarian, nor do I feel any guilt about killing a spider. But I could definitely appreciate God's natural creations more, since apparently God cares about nature. A lot!
And there Noah waits in that ark, waiting, waiting. Why is this taking so long? he's thinking. God made the world! Why not just get this flood done real quick? I don't know. Cliched as it sounds, Noah had to trust God. When we're in the ark, caught between the past and God's plans for the future, waiting, waiting, and the dove comes back to us... we trust. God will get it done, at the right time.
Fundamentally, I think the story of Noah's Ark is a love story. Yes, it's a warning that judgment will come upon us if we turn away from God. But a few caveats: these people didn't just forget to say their prayers or say a bad word when they stubbed their toe. "The earth is filled with violence because of them"; they were "continually" evil. And furthermore, God didn't like wiping them out. He was agonized, anguished, depressed about it. But he didn't have a choice. They weren't going to change. They literally chose hell for themselves, shook their fists at God and refused his kingdom. And God's not going to force people into heaven. The Flood was the most loving thing he could do, so he could start over and try this humanity thing all over again.
God still stands before us, begging, pleading that we not turn away from him like these people did, because it would break God's heart. And like Noah, he calls us to build arks, to enter these crazy plans of his and wait, wait, wait for his timing to come.
Do I think the Great Flood really happened? No. I think it's an inspired story that challenges all who read it while proclaiming the tortured depths of God's love for every lost child. And that's more real than any literal interpretation could be.
So, thoughts? Do you think I let God off the hook too easily? Is this still a text of terror for you? What are some other texts of terror in the Bible? 

While Breaking Basic Safety Rules

So when I was walking through downtown Kirksville today, listening to music on headphones (which is very bad, by the way; you should never wander around town with one of your most important senses cut off. But shoot, I did it anyway), the song "Piano Man" by Billy Joel came on. I immediately felt inspired. Which is weird because it's a) a bit of a depressing song and b) a weird song to even have. I guess I just like weird songs. 

Anyway, I highly recommend you YouTube this. Great music.
I think "Piano Man" is a kind of parable about church, and God, and calling. My first thought, after "When exactly did I purchase this song?" was "Wouldn't it be great if church were like this bar?" I want to see a congregation with these bar patrons in it. John at the bar, a nice guy who gives Billy free drinks, who can't shake the feeling he'd rather be "a movie star." There's a crowd of businessmen, who "slowly get stoned." And Paul, "a real-estate novelist," walking the fine line between day job and daydream, Davy who will never get out of the navy, the "smiling" manager standing on the periphery, the waitresses who know how to flirt. 
I want that congregation.
All of them ache profoundly. They are unhappy with the way life is turning out, and they don't know how to turn it back around. They are, Jesus says, "the poor in spirit." Do they know that Jesus loves them? Do they know that church is supposed to be the place where the questions that haunt them, the questions they try in vain each nine o'clock on a Saturday to drown out, are addressed to the God who cares? 
If not, it's my damn fault. It's all our damn faults. "Damn" here being used in the religious sense-- God damns our failure to take to the streets and compel them to come in.
I pray that one day God will make me half the pastor Billy Joel is. (If, indeed, God is calling me to be a pastor-- that's a whole other story for a whole other time.) They talk to him, really talk to him, about the gashes on their souls. "Bill, I believe this is killing me," says John at the bar, and he knows Billy Joel won't laugh. Best of all, they ask him to sing them songs. Billy Joel takes their agony and turns it to song, so they can understand things about themselves they never knew before. And so they see God in the mess of their lives where they never knew God was, that God is redeeming them, and bartending and real estate and waitressing and the navy become high holy callings where the Lord is present!
I am not Catholic. But there's something sort of right about their understanding of priesthood: The pastor connects the people to God. The pastor stands between them, showing God all the ways his people suffer, showing the people all the ways God has been in their midst. The pastor must become the Piano Man. Or Piano Woman. And so must we all to each other-- this is not a distinctly pastoral calling, but for some reason tonight I can't help but see Billy Joel as an ordained elder. 
It might seem like the Piano Man is the main event, but really the stars of the show are the ragtag parishoners/patrons, for whom every song is written. The Psalms are addressed to God and to Davy, who's still in the navy. 
Liturgy is the work of the people. The pastor just gets to tag along. 
"And the piano, it sounds like a carnival!" The kingdom of God is like a carnival, where we escape this dreary life of failed careers and negligent lovers, and find a new jubilant reality where, like children full of cotton candy, we smile at our Father who gave it all to us. 
"And the microphone smells like a beer." Does it? Do the songs of the churches smell like beer-- familiar to Paul, the real-estate novelist, and comforting, yet full of grace he has never known? If not, it's my damn fault. It's all our damn faults.
Sing us a song! You're the Piano Man.
Here I am, Lord. Send me.