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Here We Are Again, Lord


Here I am again Lord
Lonely and afraid
Although I know you are with me.
We sit together in this quiet time
Like an old married couple.
Its not necessary to talk
We’re both too tired
And you know what’s on my mind
without me saying a word.

Yet I feel compelled
to remind you
that I’m afraid.
I’m taking a chance.
I’m crossing the lane
Crossing that line
Jumping without a parachute
Flying without being tethered
to anything
but you.

Yeah, yeah you’re here.
Do my speaking
Do my flying
Make my pitch
and come back home
and tell me how it went.

Because I’m tired.
Its been a long life
No one knows
we live like this
in this sort of
relationship.

They wouldn’t believe me
if I told them.

Prayer of Confession 1

Oh my Lord,
My sweet, sweet Lord.
I imagine the disengaged expression on your face
Used to represent an antiquated Jewish carpenter
From the “middle” East,
Yes you, that Jesus;
Please help us.

You see Lord,
We the People,
In order to form a more “perfect union”,
A union of all American men
who are white and strong and good and straight
And ride the white horses
In chasing away those
Evil injuns
And saving the helpless women
In the petticoats and calico dresses,
The “make American great Again” men
Please Jesus,
Please forgive “us”,
The white men that created you.

Deliver us from the
Hate swarm
Group-think
Power hungry
Egomaniacal
Fear filled
Gun toters
Who profess
to believe in a
Guns-and-Roses Moses
And not a brown and homeless
immigrant.

Let me kneel and wash your tired feet
As you wipe the sweat from my
Upturned brow before you
And receive your grace in place of those
Who feel no need, nor understand
Arrogance, bigotry, sexism, xenophobia.
Please forgive us as
Mr. Cleaver forgave the Beave
For doing something so stupid
That we make even those who
Desire to live stupidly
Feel offended.

And dear Lord? My golden calf Lord?
Teach us again how you
Washed the feet of the 12
And probably even more than 12,
If you actually count the women,
And the children
And the stranger
And Elijah;
Elijah who awaits an invitation to
Come to our “open” table
And celebrate with all of us.

Finally.

Amen.

Why do you call Him good?

In Matthew, Mark and Luke, a man approaches Jesus and asks him what he has to do to “inherit eternal life”. He is called “the rich young ruler” and he addresses Jesus as “Good Teacher” and Jesus replies, “Why do you call me ‘good’?” Jesus goes on to tell him to keep the commandments and the guy says he’s done all that. So Jesus tells him to sell all he has & give it to the poor, and then, in addition, follow Jesus. The man goes away sad because he doesn’t want to do that. And that’s the end of his story.

The young man called Jesus “good” and I can imagine Jesus saying, “Who told you that?” or “Where did you get that idea?” or even “What do you mean by ‘good’?”

As a person who is sent to talk to families during emergency situations, I can tell you that people often think that I do not come bearing “good” news but the news about what Jesus came to offer us is called “good news”, the “Gospels”.

So if Jesus has been thought to be, or even misunderstood as a “good” teacher and the news of Jesus is considered “good news” then why is it that in so many places in Christian history that people of this ‘good news” have been everything but good?

I often feel as confused about the Christian faith at 56, having been in ordained ministry for 22 years, as I did as a young teenager at church camp, reflecting on locker room body shame of a 13 year old. It makes no sense.

Since the beginning of the year I’ve witnessed these things – just briefly, and to name these casually:

  • The United Methodist Church (my denominational home) passing church law to ban anyone other than heterosexual celibate singles or married people from ordained ministry
  • The same religious body to put any clergy person on probation without pay for one year should they perform a legal wedding ceremony between same gender couples & then to strip them of their credentials (remove them) if they do it again
  • A Facebook Messenger video in the voice of Donald Trump discussing the importance of Christian faith, the need for prayer & how vital it is in the backbone of the US & that message being shared in all seriousness by evangelicals who believe him to be the “savior for our country”
  • Weekly natural disasters while our administration claims there is no scientific “proof” of climate change
  • Immigrant children living in cages, three having died in US custody & when the infants and young children were separated from their guardians, no system was in place to keep track of where they were being sent
  • A federal investigation that concluded Russia did interfere in the 2016 election & nothing is being done to safeguard the next Presidential election
  • The Attorney General lies under oath & then stands in contempt by refusing to appear before the House Judicial Council AND misrepresenting a two year investigation to the entire country
  • The President attempting executive privilege to block testimony about investigations about his own corruption before Congress where there could and should be a balance or power

I don’t want to seem paranoid or anything but I know I’m not the only person who is noticing these things but NOTHING IS BEING DONE TO STOP THIS.

We can’t stand on the basic tenets of our Constitution. We can’t stand on the tenets of Wesleyan Tradition of using Scripture, tradition, reason and experience in working out our salvation. Further back,  we have distorted Christianity into something I no longer recognize in this country and champion Donald Trump as a Christian leader and even without any religious dogma, Truth itself, decency, respect are all subject to interpretation and/or cannot be trusted.

We have indeed traded the truth for a lie, we have stomped on the necks of our sisters and brothers in order to get an extra teaspoon of sugar for ourselves. No, there is no decency, there is no kindness.

If the people who believe America was once great when others were sorely oppressed (and wanted to “Make America Great Again”) are proud of themselves and the Pharisees are riding high with the Klan, I will be with those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and even those who hunger and thirst for food and drink and medication and education and work with their children in the cages because that’s where I will find the “Good Teacher” and not some Golden Cow.

Here I Stand.

Bedlam

“…God has disposed us with a mushroom shaped cloud …. someone will set the bomb off, and we will all be blown away…”

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Our family sang songs in the car on trips, especially vacations, but I believe we were a little unusual in that we sang a few that were not the usual …

Sweet Rosie O’Grady, she was a blacksmith by birth …
Just a Bowl of Butterbeans…
Three itty fishes and a momma fishy too…
In the Boarding House Where I Lived….
We Live for You, We Die for You, National Embalming School…

There was another song, that is vaguely remembered from a cassette tape recorded by my dad, a couple of his sisters and their husbands, on a trip he took back home a few months before his sudden death, 34 years ago this month. If I could remember it now, it would be a great history lesson, almost as good as Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.

It talked about how the French hate the Germans, the Irish hate the Scots, etc and ended with a line similar to the one I began with “…and we will all be blown away”, followed by a whistle of the sound of a bomb dropping from the skies. It was written post WWII, obviously, and wasn’t one of the more popular Baumgartner tunes, but I listened to the tape, and in the decade following my dad’s death, spent a good deal of time with his little sister (almost a carbon copy – they looked like twins). We sat around playing canasta, with bourbon and coke flowing freely, & sang & drank & smoked & played all night. It was the ‘80s. We were in the middle of the Cold War, and discussions of nuclear weapons were popping up like dandelions around families and churches and social clubs. The US spent (at least) billions of dollars on a bomb that would stop their bomb before it could reach us, and although it failed in every test back then, we poured billions and billions more into it, seemingly with endless funds and voter support.

All along though, the US had enough nuclear war heads to blow up the entire planet several times over. “My stockpile is bigger than your stockpile…” was the US/Soviet dialogue.

How things have changed.

Looking back to those days, no one and no-thing could stop the power of the US with the backing of Ronald Reagan. We were the shining city on the hill, where the poor dreamed of a better life and sought to make their way here. We didn’t fear them. Unless they were Communists, of course. Even then we opened our arms to those who sought political asylum from the Soviet Union in the US, many talented and brilliant people who sought freedom and teetered over the tight wire of Communism, oppression, and poverty to beg for our protection.  We granted them the sanctuary to house them and keep them safe from their enemy states.  (Hmmm, whatever happened to doing that, say, for Syrians?)

Even though I’m a Democrat, I respected all the Presidents, regardless of political party, because they were OUR Presidents. While I became President-elect of the College Democrats following the Mondale/Ferraro attempt to win the White House in 1984 and got to attend wine and cheese parties at Speaker Jim Wright’s home in Fort Worth, I have to grant respect to Reagan (aka the Great Communicator) for coming to a nuclear agreement with the Soviet Union. My side was wanting an elimination of nuclear warheads and even nuclear power plants but that was not to be. But it seemed that by the end of the Cold War, the US/Soviet relations had agreed to disagree. It would have been incomprehensible for Reagan to have had the covert spies or friends of Gorbachev have photo ops in the Oval Office, or would Reagan or Bush or Nixon, for that matter, ever considered the Soviet leaders as people to be admired.

Had there been a question of Russian involvement even giving Mondale a couple of electoral votes in that pitiful Presidential election of 1984, I would bank on Ronald Reagan making a speech and endorsing a full fledged investigation into any interference in our American democratic process. Any American President would, until now.

Half of the Democratic Presidents of my lifetime had mistresses who were either accepted or hated by the media, except Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter; and Jimmy Carter actually acknowledged his sin of “lust in his heart” to Playboy magazine and everyone was aghast that such a thing could be said. JFK had numerous women at his disposal, Bill Clinton did, too. We thought THOSE issues were scandalous?

What has happened? Where did our education of civics, our understanding of American history and our diplomacy go?

Try as I might, I can’t understand this phenomenon of Trump believers. I think it is because they do believe in something of Trump that does not equate with patriotism. Trump himself seems clueless as to how the three branches of government work. I have friends who think that presidents are elected for 8 year terms. Many believe that individual states already have power that outweighs Supreme Court decisions or can manipulate the Court’s decisions to fit their culture. (Look at what’s happened to sanctuary cities, abortion rights, and gay marriage).

Now we have the “good old boys” who have been the backbone of the American south (in my exposure anyway) with whom I shared classes with in all of the schools I attended, who have begun this vitriol over Blue Lives Matter and the Confederate Flag being a symbol of southern history (it was an uprising and we lost …hello????). The NRA has become the 4th Reich; “buy a gun, get one free for the sociopath of your choice”. And coworkers who supported Trump have said to me it was “that transgender thing … the queers … that’s just not Christian” or, more popular still was “I just can’t vote for Hillary Clinton.”

What has happened, America? That sick feeling I had the night of the Presidential election and the days following did not go away; they have been stretched out from having a political flu, to a short remission with the Women’s March, back down to a relapse in the face of White Nationalists organizing in Charlottesville …. which wouldn’t trouble me as much but the swastikas, the white robes and the TORCHES? Seriously, TORCHES?? What the hell? Are these born again cavemen or Klansmen? It’s hard to differentiate.

Here I Stand.

But I cannot finish with the words of John Wesley, “So be it”.

Hey God: What? How? When? Why?

Siri defines “bedlam” as “a scene of uproar and confusion”.

I define God as the great “I AM” and the Creator.

Please, God, re-create us in your image and grant us wisdom to relieve our confusion.

AMEN+

My Mother the Whale

My re-creation of meditation

My Mother the Whale

At some desperate time in my life, another one when I felt alone and needing something  to fill the void; I was befriended or I’d guess, absorbed by another similar blob & I learned from it. It took decades but I learned this very important lesson; how to commune with one of the most giant mothers of our world. It has grown and changed and transformed over the years But it begins like this:

I am alone on a beach on a gray fall day

I lie back on the sand; it’s noIMG_0498t hot; it’s a little cool. I am alone. The tide is rolling in and as I hear this sound come and go, I also let it fill and empty my lungs. Sometimes there are are images I allow to flee from me but usually I focus on my breath. Tide in, breath in. Tide out, breath out. It takes some time to slow it down that much lest I hyperventilate or imagine a tsunami.

When my breathing and the sounds of the tide are in sync, I let the tide roll further and further in, so that it is first at my feet, but getting closer and closer to my head at a steady pace. By the time I fear the salt water in my face, I am relaxed enough to sink further into the sand, and also into the sea just beneath the surface of the sand.

It is there, deep down in the bottom of the ocean that I am initially blinded by the brightness of the white sand on the bottom. As I move around, I see the sand moves too and this feels relaxing and playful. It’s around this time that I remember I’m under water.

It is in just that moment, my mother, the humpback whale, lifts me up to the surface to take a breath of air; which will last me another 15 minutes of total self absorption and play.

I relax deeper and my trust increases. I realize that this magnificent aircraft carrier protecting me overhead from exposure – and danger – is my mother, the humpback. She refers to me only as her “dear one” and we play, she lifts me up for a breath and when I come to rely to on her to do so, she sees that I find my own way.

We have time together, this enormous creature, just the two of us, before we have to journey back north because her life’s purpose has basically been fulfilled.

It’s not an atonement, it’s not a ritual in any of those ways, but she has been genetically programmed to stay behind the herd, eat more, birth me and then escort me back to the northern pacific.

The “cute” orca out there? the killer whales? Kill. They try to get between my mother and me so they can hold me down long enough to suffocate me. The outloud cries and torment of her wanting to stop and “give up” struggle deeply with her recognition that she has to move on or risk dying herself; her life’s purpose stolen in a flash. I can see similar expressions with humans when a loved one dies.

But those thoughts usually flow right on through the water of which I am made; the water of which most of us are created from and filled with; ashes and ashes and dust to dust; why not sand to sand?

Faith has been compared to floating. If you fight, you’ll drown. If you relax, your journey can be magnificent.

My mother the humpback pushes her giant nose under me to lift me to breathe, she journeys right beside me, always watchful for those “cute” orcas who only want my eyes. She protects me. She leads me down an instinctual path that she knows but cannot map out. I know to trust her, without having had therapy with her. She births me. And each day of our journey, she saves me by forcing me to breathe (especially when I am busy at play and want to whine, ”but mom“) and she remains watchful for the enemy.

The ancient Hebrews, they say, were slow in asking directions and thus wandered the desert 40 years. The didn’t wander into the wrong place. They just took a long time getting there because it took THEM a long time to be prepared for where they were going.

My mother the humpback is like that, too. I have no idea if she’s leading me to slaughter, day care or eternal freedom. I only know that she will not leave me except in the case of her death and that if she dies before our journey is complete, most likely, I also will die.

My mother is a humpback whale. I don’t know her name or the name she has given me.  But I would recognize her singing anywhere.whale 2

 

 

One in the Spirit

One in the Spirit

One of my favorite songs on the guitar (that I could play as a teenager) was “We are One in the Spirit, We are One in the Lord”. repeat twice then, “And we pray that all unity will someday be restored”, Closing with, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love…”

“We will walk with each other, we will walk hand in hand” twice, “And we’ll spread the news that God is in our land”, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love…”
“We will work with each other, we will work side by side” twice, “”And together we’ll spend the news that God is on our side” (?) “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love…”
“All praise to the Father from whom all things come, and all praise to Christ Jesus his only son and all praise to the Spirit that makes us one, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love…”

Not sure I remembered it all correctly, but you get the drift. I sang that with great fervor and I played it proudly (and it was only 3 chords C,F,G so I could play it with confidence.)
Oh, how I believed that. I was on the edge of a new beginning in the world, our country, our Church. We were even trying out various Book(s) of Common Prayer and some more contemporary translations of the Bible were being published. We had celebrated our country’s bicentennial. US citizens were feeling pretty proud of ourselves. It felt like the dawn of a new age.

I had a copy of “The Living Bible”, it was green and I think I even had my name on it in gold, but I discovered a verse in 1 Timothy (Chapter 1, verses 10-11) that in reading now (probably close to 40 years later) (OMG) it does not say what I thought it said, but the opposite. Of course, I was reading it in a paraphrase, as I came to understand it, it was not a translation. I also had taken the verse out of context, much like my fundamentalist friends. What I read was: “Yes, these laws are made to identify as sinners all who are immoral and impure: homosexuals, kidnappers, liars, and all others who do things that contradict the glorious Good News of our blessed God, whose messenger I am.”
I have to stop here and admit my immaturity at the time. First I understood word association. I saw these words: laws, identify sinners, immoral, homosexuals with kidnappers, liars and from the previous verse, hate God, attack their fathers and mothers and murder.
I was reading the Bible in a few verses, and on those verses in the Living Bible, I took a ball point pen and marked out the “sins” listed there and I swore that 1 Timothy was the worst book of the Bible and I slammed shut an inner door that has never been really walked through until now.
What I saw in those verses was, it turns out, the opposite of the truth. Paul was writing that the Good News was not for the holy and sinless, it was for those who thought they weren’t good enough or even those who OTHER people deemed were not good enough. A complete turnaround from what I thought I saw that day in my bedroom.
My grandparents had given each of us Bibles one year for Christmas with our names put on them and they were, of course, King James Version and they had some sort of sword and shield (although that could have been a harp) on the front cover. I understood very little of what was actually IN the Bible, but I knew it was “Holy” and I knew I’d better respect it. To have taken a ball point pen and scratched through those verses, even though I completely misunderstood, and even though it was in The Living Bible, not the “real” Bible, the King James, well, I knew I had done something that was bold; something that I could never have been able to answer for, if my grandparents, or the church, or God HIMself found out that I had rejected something in scripture. Rejected something I wouldn’t dare admit to, and ironically believed it said the very opposite of what I thought.
I am also unsure if I knew what it was to be homosexual. I damn sure didn’t understand sodomy. And fornication, I KNOW for damn sure that I didn’t understand that; because, as I understood my role as a female, the word “no” was not a word I was allowed to express when something serious was asked of me. That explains much more of my history and I will return to in a later blog. Not tonight.
Coming back around to this whole unity business… The United Methodist Church rolled out a great slogan, possible created by incredibly expensive marketing agents who had completed test groups: “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors”. Well, la-dee-freaki-da; (I mean no referential harm to my drag queen sister by a similar name.)
The UMC rolled out their great new slogan, at the very least, at the time when ordinands were to have “celibacy in singleness and fidelity in marriage” and somewhat after to the other statement about “homosexuality is incompatible with Christianity”. These denominational decisions were not congruent with other traditional mainline Protestant Churches in the US.  Open (hearts, minds, doors) became a legal reality when the Supreme Court upheld gay marraige. I watched other mainline churches stop prosecuting (and persecuting?), defrocking or flogging, their own Christian clergy, who happened to be gay yet were also BAPTIZED, as well as ORDAINED.

The UMC elected and consecrated our first openly gay bishop whose downfall was begun before the sun rose the next day.  The divide deepened and the chasm imploded across the US with the recent decision of our Judicial Council.

Is it so wrong to draw parallels between the Department of Justice finding police officers not guilty of violating civil rights and our Judicial Council seeing with eyes that miss the point – focusing on the letter and tittle (as Jesus said) of the law and not the heart of it? How is the hatred and fear of young American Black men and the fear of a gay married member of the clergy all that different? Not to dismiss either case but in one the law fails to protect them and takes a physical life of young Black men and in the other, a religious Council takes the religious life from a openly gay woman. Both occur against the words and actions of Jesus Christ, who loved all the Black men with guns, or without, and all women at the altar, gay or straight?

How are we acting as the “Christian nation”? This election cycle brought up, again, the belief of some that our country was founded in the Christian faith. While I can argue that at another time, for now I want to share that I believe neither of these issues are in any way Christian. A gunshot to the chest, or the unprecedented shot in the back and the dismissal of a life of faith and dedication are very similar symptoms of a failing civil and spiritual society.
One in the Spirit? Holy Spirit, yes because she sees no difference between the straight or gay folks, the married or single folks, the black or white or brown folks. But to dare to claim “open hearts, open mind, and open doors” is just load of crap, “United” Methodists.

Here I Stand.

The Way

Disciples. 12. That number worked on many levels, so to keep it simple, I will align with tradition and also say there were 12.

Were they “the little rag-tag army” that Martin Bell spoke of in The Way of the Wolf? He describes a silly group of people, so happy and dancing in a big circle holding hands. It makes us smile and feel good. However, if we look from another perspective, the closed circle means leaving the others out. Bell also described the bunny (Barrington Bunny) who could find no one else like himself and was excluded by all the other animals because they were having their own parties, you know, the squirrels and chipmunks and whoever else. The bunny makes and in the dark of night, delivers gifts to each home, describing it as “a gift, a free gift, with no strings attached”. He finishes delivering the gifts and comes across a lost mouse who will freeze to death. So the bunny invites the mouse to cuddle close. In the morning, when the snow has stopped and the sun has come out, all these little families find their gifts and the family of the mouse find him quite well, under the carcass of a dead bunny.

Hey, I’m not trying to blow the socks off of a pagan recognition of new life in the spring, the Easter bunny, I’m only musing on what Easter has become to so many Americans, most of whom, when asked their religious preference, now say “none”. Yet we still celebrate.

If, in ministry, we followed The Way, like the bunny, we are led to believe we have to give it all. All of it. As if we are strip searched upon ordination and have to relinquish the heirlooms, the treasured photos, the families we were born to. In leaving all this behind and giving all we have we end up dead. Dead as doorknobs. Cold, hardened, with nothing to say and incapable of working in this world as corpses.

That is not Christ-like. But the story was  told as a model of the faith at summer camp.

Count the number of times it is written in the Gospels, how frequently Jesus went away by himself to pray. He needed re-fueling too. Going our “all in all” does not excuse ourselves.

In the Church (and I mean traditional modern Christianity) we have sort of expected this kind of commitment to those in the pulpit. For those in the pews Easter is, well, from Facebook postings, mostly kids in new pastel clothes getting their pictures made for generations to come. It’s sweet.

A contemporary Christian tune that ironically has a child begin it is titled “You Are My All in All” and it praises the Lord for taking all of our “sin, our guilt, our shame”. For many, especially those of us with a penchant toward depression, we do not hear the “good news” because all of the long forgotten and forgiven sins, even past tense, get dragged out again and our own spirits get bruised in the process.

There were more than 12. Several times in the Gospel of Mark, the phrase “because of the crowds” is used. They didn’t arrest him when he cleared the temple, they didn’t arrest him when he came riding into town on a donkey (while at the same time, Pilate was on a stallion, prancing into the city himself). Even when Jesus is arrested, Judas had to tell them where and they went at night. At his arrest Jesus asks why they didn’t arrest him when they had seen him and their fear was “the crowds”. There were more than 12.

These followers were being taught about an entirely different perspective. They were taught to use their ears and mouth and eyes. They knew that The Way was not a “personal relationship” in order to receive the goodie basket when they die. The Way was and is, a direction to live your life, not as a bystander, but as a Christian.

The Way is not a mental exercise, not a psychosocial perspective nor is it a theological discourse.  It is not a doctrine, a credo, a series of answers to all of life’s questions. The Way is life transformed.

The Way is living as the risen dead

Now. Today