Angels we have heard on high

Singing sweetly o'er the plains

And the mountains in reply

Echoing their joyous strains!

Merry Christmas from snow-covered Nebraska! The weekend held a lot of firsts for me: my first Christmas as a priest, my first Christmas away from my family, and my first real blizzard (as it turns out, the blizzard that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago was a pathetic, wheezy, snow shower compared that the weather we've been having). We were able to have Christmas Eve services, but Christmas morning was cancelled due to the weather. My dinner plans on Christmas were cancelled for the same reason, which means that I spent the evening eating casserole and watching re-runs of "Friends." I had great dreams of hosting a dinner for all of my snowed-in neighbors, but as it turns out I was actually the only one home...everyone else went out of town for the holiday! 

While this may not have been an ideal Christmas, it was one that I will surely never forget. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to take some picture of the blizzard so you can all see what I am talking about. Wishing you and yours a blessed Christmas and New Year. Here's to 2010!

image/brick testament

I have driven between Seattle and Omaha—in one direction or the other—five times now. I’ve flown many more times than that, but it’s the road trips that remain in my memory as among the most important journeys that I’ve ever taken. The first time that I drove here was in 2005, having just graduated from college and just received my driver’s license, I came to Omaha to begin a year-long internship at Resurrection House. At the time, I had never driver farther East than Spokane, so each mile of the journey provided a kind of geographical revelation.

From the Cascades and through the Rockies, I watched as the landscape changed. By the time that I entered Wyoming, with its enormous sky and flat, wide horizon, I could tell that I was someplace new. The level expanse of the Great Plains delivered a different kind of America, and by the time that I reached Nebraska, my destination, I was physically aware of how far I had come. The journey, the slow passage of miles and the total metamorphosis of the land around me, heralded a new time in my life, a new beginning.  I don’t think that just landing at Epply Airfield in one afternoon could do that for me.

The famous preacher Fred Craddock once said, “If one does not walk the road, the destination is reduced to half its meaning.” He was talking about Advent, the road that leads to the Nativity—to God born in a manger.

The destination, of course, is very familiar to us. Some of us can even recite it from memory: “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered…” We can see Mary and Joseph, rejected at the inn. We can see the Christ child, wrapped in bands of cloth and visited by shepherds and angels. We see the Gold, the Frankincense, and Myrrh.

The Feast of the Nativity, as Christmas is sometimes called, is a familiar landscape to us. We encounter it yearly and have come to know it well. But without walking the road to get there, the Nativity itself loses half its meaning.

The road, the plodding weeks of this season, is populated with desert prophets and pregnant women, with locusts and honey and timeless songs sung to God. While the world around us may be telling us that Christmas is already here, that the bands of cloth are wrapped snugly around the infant Jesus on the most silent of nights, the road that we are on continues…for two more weeks…as we watch our landscape change and marvel at a new geography.

John the Baptist is a mile marker along the way. Last week, we met him in the desert, crying in the wilderness, and proclaiming a baptism of repentance. He quoted the prophet Isaiah to the small band of pilgrims gathered around him: Prepare the way of the Lord! Today, we meet him again, picking up where he left off. John shouts harsh words and difficult prophesies to everyone in earshot: You brood of vipers! He says. One more powerful than I is coming…he  will baptize you will the Holy Spirit and with fire. 

Those around John are frightened and pleading. They want to know what they should do to be right with God, to be in a good place when the Messiah comes. John’s advice is practical but intense. If you have two coats, give one away. Do the same with your food. Be ethical in the way you carry out your job. Be satisfied with what you have. In helping those around him prepare the way for the Lord, John illustrates that receiving the Messiah requires a turning around in one’s life—a tangible re-focusing on what is important in God’s eyes.

The road through Advent transforms us. What we meet at the destination is the fruit of our conversion.

I imagine the manger where Mary, a new teenage mother, laid Jesus in bands of cloth. By worldly standards, it is a pretty pathetic scene. A young family, denied access to an inn, hunker down in a stable and labor through the night. When their child arrives—their first child—they lay him in the same hay that the animals surrounding them have been eating. They are on a journey themselves, to register with the emperor, they are part of a captive and watched people. And then the visitors arrive.

I am always amazed by the shepherds who were visited by angels directing them toward Bethlehem. And the wise men who followed a star in the same direction. Would I be able leave everything and travel to a small town in the middle of nowhere, expecting to find a Messiah there, I wonder? And if I did, would I have the courage to not just turn around and go home when I realized the great leader I was told about was actually a baby in a stable? How strong those shepherds and wise men must have been…how prepared for mystery.

In a few weeks the secular calendar will change and it will be 2010. Many of us—despite ourselves, sometimes—will begin the year with resolutions, with promises to better ourselves, to break habits, to embrace change. But in our Church calendar, the New Year has already come, and it will be marked with a special feast on Christmas Day, when we meet the Incarnate God—the baby in the manger—who embodies the greatest thing God has ever done for us: becoming human, becoming one of us.

John the Baptist calls us to new resolutions. His place on the journey is one of self-examination and preparation. He knows that in order for the destination to contain its full meaning—in order for Christmas to be for us everything that it is intended to be—we must travel the road all the way there. Each mile is important. The resolutions that he called people to make were practical, yet completely transformative. God requires nothing less than total self-examination.

I invite you to imagine yourself on a road for these next two weeks. The destination glows on the horizon and you know that you will find something remarkable there. But you cannot arrive at it quickly. Each mile marker that you pass represents a step closer to your destination and a step farther away from where you started. The distance between places frees you to examine your life without distraction.

You will meet God when you get there, and you will be surprised.

“What then should we do?” The pilgrims asked John.

What then should you do?

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria’s?

Respite, Refuge, and Holy Friendship in the Story of the Visitation

Like many of us, I have especially enjoyed opening my mailbox in the last few days. Christmas cards have been coming in, and with them the occasional Christmas letter—those yearly updates from friends and relatives that seek to paint in broad strokes the picture of a year in the life of a family. I love seeing photos of how children have grown and reading stories about significant changes, celebrations, and growth experienced in the course of a year.

Sometimes, however, Christmas letters can be a little awkward, or even sad. Written for a large audience of varying degrees of intimacy, some letters are striking not in what they say, but in what they leave out. How many of us have received a copy of an annual letter from a close friend with whom we have shared a great deal? The letter paints a picture much different from the life that we have witnessed, as personal struggles are glossed over or hidden between the lines. All of the dimensions of their lives—the dimensions that make them who they are; the dimensions that we love—are obscured into a single plain, an attractive and completely “together” plain. If we judged ourselves in relation to our friends and used only their Christmas letters as evidence of their lives, we could easily get discouraged.

Imagine receiving this letter in the mail:

Dear Friends and Family: It’s hard to believe that another year has passed! Life has sure been keeping me busy out here! As most of you know, I am engaged to be married to a wonderful man in my hometown. We are so ready to start our lives together that we have decided to push up the wedding by a few months. It will be a small event—just our closest family members. We are sure that next year will bring even more exciting news! Looking forward to hearing from all of you. Love, Mary. 

Of course, Mary had no occasion to write a Christmas letter—the impending birth of her son would herald the very first Christmas ever. But imagine how difficult it would have been to have to share all of her news: First, she got engaged. Then, an angel visited her in the middle of the night and asked her to be the mother of the incarnate God. As soon as she said yes, she was pregnant. She had to tell her fiancé, who would have had the right—in their culture at that time—to have her publically executed for her promiscuity. Instead, he decided to divorce her quietly, only to change his mind after being visited by an angel himself.

There she was, pregnant with the Messiah and pregnant with secrets. How could she begin to tell the people around her of her miraculous gift—of the miracle growing inside of her? When the whole world saw her as a poor, unmarried, pregnant teenager, how could Mary even begin to share the Truth with the people that she loved?

Facing this problem, she set out walking to the hill country.

It was probably a three-day journey, and not an easy one. Most likely travelling by foot on roads peppered with bandits and thieves, Mary longed to tell her secret to a trusted relative, a woman much older than her who was also expecting a child. Did she go so that she could get away from the stares, the pointing, the whispered gossip about her pregnancy and the benevolence of her fiancé? Or, did she go because the Good News needed sharing, and God led her to the one woman who would understand?

The story of the visitation, as this gospel passage is often called, is one of my favorites in scripture, probably because of how earthy and honest it is. The encounter between Mary and Elizabeth is at once ordinary and spectacular. Two pregnant women meet to share their joy. A baby kicks inside the womb. It is so natural that we can picture it, almost experience it ourselves. But these are not ordinary pregnancies. One woman is carrying the messenger, and the other is carrying the message.

In a tiny hill town in a captive region of Judea, two women contain within themselves the future of humanity, the promises of God, the redemption of the world.

Pregnancy is actually an apt metaphor for Advent. While our Church season only lasts for four weeks, Mary’s own personal Advent was nine months long. Mary would have experienced the spiritual aspects of pregnancy that other women know—the excitement, the concern, the preparation, the hope. But she also had to grapple with the promises of God given to her by an angel: Her child will be called the Son of the Most High, the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever.

The angel neglected to tell her that her son would leave her to preach a new message in the countryside, that she will wonder for years about his mental health, that he will eventually be arrested, tried, and killed.

The Good News that Mary bore into the world would contain years of very bad news for her and Joseph. But the angel didn’t say anything about the Resurrection, either. The glorious moment when the Son of God defeated death and rose to eternal life. Mary did not know that in the end, God would redeem it all.

If Advent is like pregnancy, I wonder what will be delivered into the world through us? What does God have in store for the work that is going on in our lives? What are we quietly, maybe secretly, nurturing until it is ready to be birthed? What gift is God calling us to bear?

Of course, just like Mary, we will never know the full implications of what it means to say “Yes” to God. The call that we may be on the fence of accepting, carries with it a whole host of unknowns. Saying yes to a deeper or new relationship holds the fear of deeper or new hurt. Saying yes to a new project holds the anxiety of new pressures. Saying yes to giving more of ourselves holds the concern being left with less. But God’s promise in Advent is the promise of redemption, the promise of God’s plan that everything will be made new, that the world will be righted.

Our lives are more than the Christmas letters that we write. Between the lines of the story that we tell is the story that actually happened. No one’s life is perfect. But God works in the imperfections, and God calls us as we are known.

Is God calling you for an answer?

Will you say “yes”? 

(the storm was not this bad) 

Anyway, I thought I'd take advantage of the cozy silence by updating you on my otherwise un-updated life, using the form from the Simple Woman's Daybook.

Outside my window...snow is covering everything. The strong wind turned the yard and parking lot into a tundra of white dunes, and very few people have ventured outside to disrupt the cold beauty. 

I am thinking...about John the Baptist, who takes some of the fun out of Christmas but puts all of the drama into the first few weeks of Advent. 

I am thankful...for safety and warmth, and for hot chocolate with marshmallows. 

I am wearing...a pink thermal shirt and jeans. 

I am remembering...how important it is to challenge myself and not get comfortable. This is a lesson I've learned in the past but seem to want to forget.

I am going...nowhere! 

I am currently reading...The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie...for the third time. It is a "simultaneous biography" of Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, and Flannery O'Connor. These four Catholic writers were contemporaries who emerged on the scene independently. This book always inspires my creativity and my imagination. It also highlights, rather starkly, how much American religion has changed in the past thirty or forty years. 

I am hoping...for safe driving tomorrow. Or for another snow day.

I am creating...a lot, actually. I have finally recommitted to the discipline of "free writing," something that I was obsessive about in college and have since managed to let slip away. Although my writing isn't entirely "free"--I am trying to focus on a couple of topics/themes--lots of ideas are flowing. 

Around the house...it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. I decorated an adorable little three-foot tree, which is full of bird ornaments which nest in the branches. I wish I had a Christmas tree all year round. 

How is your winter going so far?

image/etsy
 

In any event, what follows is my Thanksgiving sermon, preached on the Tuesday before Turkey day. You can read it after the jump!

Considering Lilies:

Reordering our Thanksgivings

Consider the lilies of the field.

Right now, it is late November. The lilies and most of the other wild flowers died with the first frost, and the birds of the air—which Jesus also asks us to consider—have begun their cold migration. The pattern of life and death, of growth and withering, is known to us in the changing of the seasons, just like it always is when we are surprised by the early darkness, the frost on the grass, the hibernation of life.

So we celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday that is both specific to us as Americans, and also universally known in its own way to our brothers and sisters in different cultures around the world. It is a holiday that celebrates a single, historical, shared meal somewhere in Plymouth, and the meals that we all share, now, with those people whose lives touch ours.

The timing is right: November, autumn, when the harvest is finished, the food collected, its life-giving, sustaining, properties celebrated. Before we settle into winter we enjoy the bounty of the fields, the cycle of nature. We give thanks for what God has given us, the way that God has cared for us. And then we plunge into a colder season.

For many of us, this Thanksgiving holiday might be a little different than ones we have known in the past. As our whole nation has travelled together into the unknown of a down economy, we have all—to one degree or another—experienced the painful restructuring of our own thanksgivings.  

While I was still in seminary, gearing up for graduation and imagining what life might be like in my new city, Omaha, I did a little research about Nebraska in hopes of learning as much as I could before heading out here. One piece of information came my way that I found particularly delightful: In April of 2009, a website called mainstreet-dot-com created what they called “a Happiness Index,” where they sought to rank the happiness of every state in America. Well, their ultimate findings were very good news to me: Nebraska won the top slot as happiest state in the union! (Did you know that?)

Now, this type of news makes for a really good sound bite. In fact, I bragged about it a lot to my classmates. I am moving to the happiest state in the country! I would say. Take that, California! The evidence was in my favor, as well—in all my visits to Omaha over the years I have always been impressed and a little humbled by the good-natured, friendly, generally optimistic people that I have met here. So, I had no reason to doubt the Happiness Index.

But upon further investigation, I was a little surprised, even troubled, to learn about the criteria upon which the Index was based. Mainstreet-dot-com gave Nebraska top ranking for three reasons: our state enjoys a low unemployment rate, a low foreclosure rate, and a low incidence of non-mortgage debt. As it turns out, the Happiness Index is basically a “financial solvency index,” and while I have no doubt that Nebraska could truly be the happiest state in the union, I am a little troubled by the assumptions made in the study.

Does money really make us happy?

Consider the lilies of the fields.

Despite the beautiful, plain, agrarian imagery in today’s gospel passage, there is nothing simplistic about Jesus’ message. Jesus was just as aware as we are about the difficulty of economic instability, and because his audience was mostly made up of regular people—working people, poor people—he was a witness to the way that money and wealth really did affect the lived experience of the people in his community.

“Do not worry about your life…” he said, because people were worrying.

What I love most about this gospel passage is how well it still translates to today. It always will, because Jesus was preaching about human nature, human community, human economy. He gives good advice: “How can any of you by worrying add as single hour to the span of your life?” Don’t we know it. “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” It is; we know that it is.

But amid this good advice, this incredible wisdom, Jesus holds the tension of knowing that this is all much harder than it looks.

Money cannot buy happiness. But the absence of money, or the significant change of one’s financial situation, can certainly add to our stress, to our anxiety. If there is anything that we have learned this year, it is that the things that really matter in our lives—our relationships, our time—do not cost money. And yet, the recent change in the economy has affected all of us to one degree or another, and we experience real grief, real pain, when a loved one loses a job, when a recent graduate cannot find a job, when the companies we work for move closer and closer to an edge that we have never seen before. Our own happiness, our own priorities, are ambiguous, we find, and that can make it all the more difficult to consider the lilies of the field.

The Greek word for “consider” means “look carefully,” or “closely examine.” I imagine Jesus, in the middle of his sermon, picking a wild lily from the ground beneath him. Examining it in his hands, twirling it around, considering all of its petals. In that moment, consumed in adoration of that flower, Jesus must have been enamored of God, seeing the lily as God sees it, clothed more beautifully than Solomon in all his glory, a miracle of creation.

Even the strongest faith is not void of anxieties. We all have real concerns tugging at our attention, real fears threatening to upend our already tenuous peace of mind. Jesus knows this, his advice is not trite or dismissive. In telling us to seek first the kingdom of God, in reminding us to marvel at that lily, Jesus is advising us to radically reorient our perspective in such a way that it lines up with God’s.

This Thanksgiving, I invite you to consider your holiday table the way that God does. Examine it closely. Marvel at each person sitting around it, the perfection of creation that God achieved when making them. Consider the food that feeds you, the bounty of the harvest before you. If you are spending the day serving at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter, consider the men and women alongside you as God does, as the bearers of God’s own image. And if you are spending the holiday alone this year, consider yourself. The perfection of you. The you that God knows, the you that God made.

And give thanks.

image/Vanity Fair

Well, it seems that Pope Benedict XVI and some other top Vatican officials are not as smitten with Edward Cullen as I am (big surprise!). The Vatican recently released a statement slamming "New Moon" and calling it a "deviant moral vaccuum." Uh-oh! Monsignor Franco Perazzolo, of the Pontifical Council on Culture, had this to say about the blockbusting movie:

'Men and women are transformed with horrible masks and it is once again that age-old trick or ideal formula of using extremes to make an impact at the box office. This film is nothing more than a moral vacuum with a deviant message and as such should be of concern.' Source.

Six years ago, the Vatican famously criticized the Harry Potter franchise for similar reasons. I am always surprised by how religious cultural critics (Roman Catholic, Evangelical, or otherwise) seem completely unable to grasp the importance of metaphor in popular media. The Twilight Saga is certainly not overtly religious, but like Harry Potter, it contains important messages about the triumph of good over evil, the struggle between one's best intention and one's fallen nature, and the meaning of friendship. And you'd think that the Vatican would applaud the books' emphasis on teenage abstinence--the Pope loves abstinence!

A parishioner at my church recently asked me if I thought it was appropriate for her teenage daughter to read the Twilight books. I paused for a moment, not because of my religious interests, but because of my feminist ones. I told her that as long as her daughter is able to discern the difference between fantasy and reality, and as long as she understands that the super-controlling elements of vampire-human relationships do not translate in a healthy way to human-human relationships, then she is good to go. 

Ultimately, Twilight is another vehicle for young women to experience the joy of reading and to exercise their imaginations--what can be wrong with that?

CDSP asked me to write a blog entry about my transition from seminary to parish ministry and I happily obliged. You can read it here. 

Well, imagine my surprise when a friend sent me this link the other day. Apparantly San Francisco has an Ikon now, only I have nothing to do with it and the spelling is reminiscent of copy machines rather than Christianity.

Granted. Ikon and icon are not exactly the same concept, but the similarity is striking. I'm not saying that they stole our idea, but...it sure is a coincidence! The main difference between the two ventures is, of course, an important one. Ikon seems to be non-denominational or, to use Emerging Church parlance, "post-denominational," while icon would/will be thoroughly Episcopal and intentionally Anglo-Catholic. I still believe really strongly that historically grounded Christian tradition is, at its heart, evangelical, and that the Anglo-Catholic tradition is an excellent way to experience and live the Christian faith in a community. We'll see if it happens one day!

If any of you in SF have checked out Ikon, let me know! I'd love to hear more about it. 

I know that I have written about my interest in Lewis and Clark in the past, but I don't think I have shared how my move to Omaha has turned my cocktail party-style nowledge into full-blown armchair historian obsession. So needless to say, I spent a lot of time in the "Corps of Discovery" section of the museum, learning about the Nebraska that Lewis and Clark saw as they blazed their way west. Obviously, my favorite exhibit was the big stuffed buffalo named Scout, pictured above. Although several signs told me not to touch him, I had to fight a serious urge to reach out and give him a good pet. 

The Durham is on my list of Omaha must-sees, so be sure to stop by if you're in the neighborhood!

Anyway, I was really excited on Sunday morning when a parishioner at my church told me that a friend of hers--a 25 year-old priest in Mossouri--was selected to be on TLC's What Not to Wear. Now, I really love this show and I often hear the voices of its hosts, Clinton Kelly and Stacy London, echoing in my ears when I go shopping. Their "rules" for clothing selection have been an enormous help for me as I've transitioned to professional life. Just thinking of them doing a show on a female priest delights me! My mom has always thought that a priest would make a good candidate on the show and she's totally right. Clinton and Stacy will have a lot to work with as they deal with the inherant fasion illiteracy of clergy, the peculiar problem of the clerical collar, and maybe some style resistance. Oh, I can't wait!

The show probably won't air until sometime next year, but I'll keep you posted!