Month: June 2024

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Mark 4:26-34.

---

Most of you know that I hunt elk and deer. But that’s not all. I hunt squirrels and doves, too. Doves are an entirely different form of hunting because you shoot them as they are flying by. It’s a very active experience. I’m not a very good shooter, so I average two or three doves per box of 25 shotgun shells. To have any chance at all, you need a reasonably sized field with appropriate food for them, and multiple hunters to keep things moving.

A typical dove field is at least two acres, sometimes five or ten or even larger. Sunflowers are the most common crop, but I’ve seen corn, millet, and buckwheat. The idea is for the crop to mature to the point of producing seeds a couple of weeks before the season opens on September 1, so that the doves have time to find the field. Actually, it takes a couple of years before the doves reliably come back to the field, but they’ll only start coming if you do things right in the first place. Anyway, when the time is right, you bush-hog the field in strips so that there is food on the ground for the doves, then hope for the best.

Several times, I have gone hunting on public land in Missouri. The last couple of years, though, Missouri Department of Conservation hasn’t had funding to plant, so I haven’t been able to go here. Instead, I’ve gone up to my father-in-law’s house near Effingham. Ron has been trying for a few years now to get a dove field going, with little to show for it so far.

First off, his field is just a little too small. It’s more like one-and-a-half acres instead of two. He’s also in the middle of farmland, so his field needs to be extremely attractive to really draw doves in.

Secondly, he has tried different crops and different planting schemes. One year, he used too much seed for the space. The seeds all sprouted, but they didn’t mature and produce a good harvest. Another year, he got the crop planted too late for it to mature in time. Yet another year, his crops matured too early, so the doves had come and gone before the season started.

This year, he’s going to try again one last time to see if he can get it right. As I mentioned, doves actually take a few years to reliably return to a given field. So perhaps he has done enough over the past few years that if he gets a good crop with the right timing, he’ll have success.

I’m not much of a farmer myself. I’m not even much of a gardener, but Rhonda is. It’s too hard for her to get down to plants on the ground, so I built her a couple of containers like the church used to have. We have had varying levels of success with them. Like her dad sowing too much seed in his dove field, Rhonda sometimes plants too many plants in a single container. Also, we have had to experiment with different kinds of plants. Tomatoes seem to do pretty well, as long as you keep them watered. You would think that pepper plants would be about like tomatoes, but you would be wrong. We haven’t had any success growing peppers of any kind in containers, so this year, I planted some down on the ground. Similarly, cucumbers need to be planted in the ground and need a lot of space and the right conditions. Last year, we tried them in a spot that isn’t really sunny enough, and only harvested a few small, misshapen cucumbers. We moved to a different area this year, and so far things look OK, but we have a long way to go.

Jesus was talking to an audience who was intimately familiar with all of this and much, much more. Many of them would have been subsistence farmers, whose life depended on knowing as much as possible about growing crops. They had to know when to plant, what kinds of crops thrived on the land that they could use, how to prepare the soil, how to care for the seedlings, and more. Yet Jesus said, “The seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” As much as ancient farmers knew, they were still ignorant of many of the most basic agricultural concepts that have enabled modern society to enjoy plentiful food.

If someone mentions a parable about sowing seeds, your first thought is probably a totally different parable that Jesus told about different kinds of soil where the seeds landed—on the path, rocky soil, among weeds, and good soil that produced a hundredfold. In that parable, Jesus was talking about evangelism. If you want to spread the Gospel, your best bet is to sow love as broadly as possible. Love is a limitless resource, and in fact, the more you give, the more you have to give. Especially if you let God’s love channel through you, to continually renew you.

But we have other limits that we need to be aware of. Time, first and foremost. Ming alluded to that last week during our informational meeting—how can I possibly have time to do more? Well, I’ll just need to be efficient. But even at maximum efficiency, there are only so many hours in the day, so there’s only so much that I personally can do. Each one of us has limits on our time, and commitments that we cannot avoid or abandon. Plus, there are only so many people who are available to serve our church right now.

Energy is another one. As we age, we have less and less energy and can’t accomplish everything we used to. Oh, we gain wisdom, so that we can work smarter, but that only partially compensates for the fact that our muscles and joints are declining. Another aspect is that some activities revive us, and some drain us. I am naturally an introvert, so spending time in a crowd is sometimes very draining for me. Other people are extraverts and are energized by spending time with friends. Everyone has tasks in their lives that drain them spiritually or emotionally, much more than just the physical effort. And sometimes it’s not the task itself, but the amount. If I volunteer at the Mission to serve one meal a week, I leave feeling energized from having accomplished a good deed. If I do two meals in a week, or try to serve in some other way, it drains me. It shifts from being a joy to being an obligation. It’s important to be cognizant of those things that bring you joy and energy and those things that drain you, and manage your energy level accordingly.

Money is another limitation. It would be wonderful if we could replace our sanctuary doors, upgrade our sound system, and make many other improvements to our church building. It would be wonderful if we could hire a full-time pastor plus a full-time youth or campus minister. Give me a few minutes and I’ll think of lots of ways we could spend more money. But the reality is that we have limited financial resources that we need to manage and allocate for our operations and for new ministries.

So given all of these limitations, we need to be strategic. We cannot be all things to all people, but we can meet some people where they are and help them enter the kingdom of God. We should never turn anyone away, but if we try to do everything, we’ll accomplish nothing.

For example, Fort Leonard Wood is a substantial mission field for Rolla area churches. I don’t know how many people come through the fort on an annual basis, but I know it’s a lot. Some are only here for a few weeks, others for months or years, and still others retire from the military and stay around for decades, working as civilians. These are people who are hungry for interpersonal connections, since each time they move, their lives are disrupted. We could figure out how to reach them and invite them into our Christian fellowship.

It’s a great idea—not mine, one that came up in a discussion with session. But the question is, how do we make it happen? Who has the burning desire to serve that population, enough so that they will learn their needs, determine the best way to connect with them, and coordinate a group of our members to surround them with love? If we do it half-heartedly, we can do more harm than good. Growing the kingdom of God is not the work of a month or a season, but of a lifetime. If we start some outreach and then fade away, people at the fort who stick around will remember us as a flaky church that can’t be trusted.

So, maybe that’s a great idea that we don’t have the bandwidth for. Or, maybe it’s a great idea that we need to talk about more broadly and find a little group who has the passion to make it happen. The effort needs to grow from a sincere, heartfelt desire.

Assuming that all goes well with my commissioning process, my plan is to start learning all of the great ideas that I know are lingering out there in the congregation, and then try to find some commonalities. I’ll try to find two or three or four people who have a shared vision, and then try to give them the tools and support they need to succeed. That’s something that I think I have learned how to do over the past four years of leadership on campus and in the community—not so much to execute my own vision, but to enable other people to pursue their vision. To provide behind-the-scenes support so that others can do the work that suits their particular skills the best.

As we go, there’s another important agricultural practice we need to keep on our list: pruning. If you are growing grapes or berries, it’s important to prune the vine so that the plant has enough resources to produce good fruit. If you don’t prune it, the plant needs to put too much of its energy into growing the vine and not enough into the fruit. In fact, Rhonda has been doing this with her tomato plants. She prunes off some of the branches so that the remaining branches are stronger and healthier.

Pruning your life or the life of a church or other organization is much harder. Pruning a church’s ministries means ending something that you care deeply about, but that has become more of a drain on your resources than a source of life. My friend Sharon starts Vacation Bible School tomorrow. Her church is part of a coalition that works together on several activities, VBS chief among them. They have struggled just a bit since the pandemic, but they still have the people and the energy to make VBS happen. We stopped doing VBS even before the pandemic because it became just too much work, falling on too few people, for the limited impact that we had. Of course, now, it would be hard to have VBS without severely disrupting the preschool’s operations. None of this means that VBS is a bad thing to do in the abstract; it was just something that we needed to prune so that we could put our time, energy, and other resources to work elsewhere for the good of the kingdom of God. It was something that didn’t work during this season of the church’s life.

Fired Up! falls into that category, too. I dearly loved leading Fired Up! and valued the time we spent in that form of worship with a smaller, more intimate group. But there’s NO WAY that I could lead Fired Up! and be preaching here today, or doing any of the myriad other things I do for the church. So, it had to be pruned.

As we move forward, there will likely be other things that we have to prune away. We may start some things that don’t work out. We may start something that ends up crowding out something else that we’re doing. We may find that some things that we thought were essential, are actually vestiges of a different era that are no longer life-giving.

The promise of the Gospel, though, is that the kingdom of God is at hand! If we follow the Spirit’s leading, if we plant the right seeds, if we commit ourselves to channeling God’s love, Jesus taught that God will give the growth. A spiritual advisor once told me that God does 98% of the work. We have to do our 2%—we have to sow the right seeds in the right soil—but if we do, God will do the rest. We have limited time, energy, money, and people, but our infinite Lord will give us the growth. With that growth will come more resources, more ideas, more love to share, more abundant life. Now may God bless us with the wisdom to choose the right seeds and the energy and courage to do our part in growing God’s kingdom. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sermon preached June 9, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Mark 3:20-35.

---

A few times in the Gospel of Mark, and a few other places in the Bible, we encounter a rhetorical figure known as an inclusio. One of the most famous examples is the story about the woman who had a hemorrhage. In that story, Jesus starts off towards the home of Jairus, a leader of the synagogue whose daughter is dying. On the way, a woman with a hemorrhage touches his garment and is healed. Then Jesus gets to Jairus’s home and heals the daughter. So an inclusio is where one story is inserted in the middle of another one, like meat in a sandwich.

In today’s lesson, we start out with Jesus going into a house that was extremely crowded, so much that his family was worried about him. Then we have some interchange between Jesus and the scribes about casting out demons. Finally, we wrap up the story about Jesus and his family.

Whenever you encounter an inclusio, you should ask yourself, what do these two stories have to do with one another? I mean, Mark could have told the story in a totally different way. He could have told the story about Jesus’s family, and then told the story of the exchange with the scribes. You might say, Well, Mark was just telling things in the order that they happened. Wrong. That’s not how ancient authors told stories, or modern authors for that matter. When I’m telling a hunting story or a story about my childhood or college or whatever, the details are mostly correct, but seldom in the right order. I arrange the details to suit the purposes of the moment. In the same way, Mark constructs these inclusios to point us towards the connections between the two interwoven stories.

So first, let’s talk about the meat. The scribes are so incensed at what Jesus is doing that they travel from Jerusalem to wherever Jesus is calling home right now, probably Capernaum. They were upset at what Jesus was preaching, and at the signs he was performing, so they made up a story that he was himself possessed by a demon. Jesus points out the foolishness of this assertion. If he were working by the power of Beelzebul, wouldn’t he want his demons to keep causing mischief and misery? Why would he be casting them out from the people they had possessed?

In our post-Enlightenment way of thinking, we imagine that the people that Jesus healed were epileptic or had schizophrenia or something like that. But to the people that Jesus spoke to, the demons were very real. This was spiritual warfare, and Jesus was winning. The scribes were proposing that Jesus wasn’t on God’s side and defeating evil, but instead was like a general on the devil’s side telling his demonic troops to retreat. How ridiculous! A house divided cannot stand. If Beelzebul is telling his demons to retreat, then he has lost already. But if Jesus was who he said he was, he had Beelzebul on the run.

There is a larger message here, though. Not only is Jesus defending himself against ridiculous accusations, but also, he is telling us how important unity is. A kingdom divided cannot stand, and neither can the Church, which is Christ’s body. If Christ’s body is divided, where is its strength?

The last time the Jesus movement was really unified was probably during the Last Supper. Then Judas slipped out and splintered off from the movement, Jesus and the rest of the disciples went to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was arrested, and everyone scattered. After his resurrection, the movement lived on and there was apparent unity in the early part of Acts, but we can see signs of disunity later in Acts, in Paul’s letters, and in other New Testament writings. In the two millennia since then, the situation has gotten worse and worse: we have perhaps 200 denominations in America and 45,000 worldwide. At first, the divisions were largely about whether Christians needed to be Jews, too. Then there were a bunch of theological divisions, for example, Marcion’s followers being cast out, and Gnosticism being declared heretical. At some point, the Oriental Orthodox Church split off from the Chalcedonian church, and then later the Roman Catholic Church split from the Eastern Orthodox Church, partly over theological disputes and partly over power and authority.

In the centuries that followed, some of the controversies that led to division were about theology, some were about power, and some were about social issues. Often, all three were at work, such as a theological justification for what was really a power struggle between two groups with different cultural backgrounds. Lately, it seems that most of the splits are related to social issues. There is a great sorting going on, where denominations are becoming increasingly extreme—the liberal churches are getting more liberal while the conservative churches are getting more conservative. Few have managed to maintain a middle position. Most of the time, theological or social moderates simply opt out altogether.

We are all the worse for it. We are all better off when we recognize that each of us is just trying to follow God as best we understand.

Most of the differences among churches come down to orthodoxy: we believe different things about God, salvation, relationships, authority, the Bible, and so forth. Orthodoxy is a great way to sow division, since so much of theology is so difficult to understand anyway and it can be twisted to appear to support almost any position. I think it’s more important to focus on orthopraxy, which is to say, we should focus on how we act, not what we think. CrossRoads is an excellent example of a church built on orthopraxy. That’s the congregation that meets above the Mission, where the Vineyard used to be. CrossRoads is clearly Christian, but they have no faith statement that one member could use against another or that they could use against outsiders. Instead, they have core values: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, love, unity. These aren’t exactly the same as Paul’s list of fruits of the spirit, but there is some overlap. What I want to highlight, though, is that while their pastor, Patrick, preaches the Gospel, none of these core values rest on believing in, say, an inerrant Bible or a particular understanding of the Trinity. None of them rest on saying the sinner’s prayer or reciting the Nicene Creed, as we will do shortly. Yet all of them are core attributes of the kingdom of God. All of them are ways that we should treat each other if we desire to live as one big family, God’s family, God’s kin.

Which brings us back to the “bread” of the inclusio sandwich. The passage today starts with people saying that Jesus is out of his mind and asking his family to come talk to him about it. This is classic triangulation. Do you remember John Oerter talking about triangulation? That’s where person A has a problem with person B, but instead of going to person B, they tell person C to “do something.” Here the scribes enlist Jesus’s family to “do something” about this crazy guy who is messing up their plans. What does the family actually think? We don’t know. It appears to me that the family has been manipulated by gossip to serve as tools of the scribes. The scribes couldn’t get to Jesus any other way, so they use his family against him.

We don’t really know much about Jesus’s family or their relationships with him during his ministry. We know that after his resurrection and ascension, his brother James became a central figure in the early church. We know that his mother Mary was around at the start of his ministry, the wedding at Cana, and she appears periodically throughout the story, including at the foot of the cross. But we don’t know if they followed him during his lifetime. In fact, their absence from the narrative speaks volumes. Here he is, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, with a dozen close companions and perhaps thousands of followers, but his own family isn’t among them. In Luke, when Jesus makes his first speech in his hometown of Nazareth, did his family step up to protect him from the crowd? No.

It seems to me that Jesus had kind of a difficult relationship with his family. In that way, he was quintessentially human. Many people have strained relationships with their family of origin. Some of us are blessed to have positive relationships with at least some portion of our family, but there is always a little bit of pain, too. Relationships are hard and people are inflexible at times, so the people who we love the most are the most likely to hurt us in some way. This is no criticism of anyone; this is just the way human relationships work.

We all bear the marks of our families of origin, good or bad. My mom always says, “We are destined to be like our parents,” and I definitely see both of my parents in myself and in my siblings. I definitely see both Rhonda and me in both of our kids. For good or for bad, families leave their marks on us. They form us into who we are, in ways that we can never truly transcend.

But then Jesus closes this scene by saying, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” I will always be a part of the family that raised me, but I can also choose to become part of God’s family. Jesus has given us an invitation. We are already welcome in God’s family, just as we are. All that Jesus asks is that we choose to join it.

In a sense, the traditions that say you must invite Jesus into your heart are right about something: Jesus is ready to enter each person’s life, to transform each person’s heart, but he won’t force his way in. Just as soon as we choose to do the will of God, we become an active part of Christ’s family. We don’t have to change who we are, but we do have to change our actions, our attitudes, our behaviors. We do have to practice compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, love, and unity.

In so doing, we become a part of Christ’s family, and more than that, we become a part of Christ’s body, which is the Church. Whether we call ourselves Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Catholic or Christian or none of the above, if we do God’s will, we become a part of Christ’s family. And what is God’s will? To spread the message of love, peace, and reconciliation that is at the heart of the Gospel. To spread this message in words and deeds. To spread this message through healing—healing the sick, healing the brokenhearted, healing the community, healing relationships.

As the Spirit works through us, healing the world, spreading God’s love, we become a part of Christ’s family, the kin-dom of God. We become an exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world. We continue the process of transformation that has been at work for thousands of years and that begins anew as each generation once again seeks the unity of the Holy Spirit that is at the root of a healthy community.

Who is my family? You. Each one of you, who are all striving to do God’s will. We all fall short, and yet Christ’s continual forgiveness enables us to remain connected to Him throughout our spiritual journey. Now may Christ continue to walk with each of us and with all of us together as we strive to build Christ’s family throughout the community and around the world. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sermon preached June 2, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on 2 Corinthians 4:1-12. If you listen to the podcast, the meditation begins at 20:24.

---

We have this treasure in jars of clay. Hmmm. What exactly is meant by “jars of clay”? Well, in Paul’s time, clay jars were the most common storage unit. Anything that had to be ceremonially clean, like water for the mikveh, used stone jars since clay jars could have unclean residue. Most of the vessels used at the Temple were gold, silver, or bronze. But for day-to-day use, clay jars were the common choice. Fragile, common, unassuming.

When I read this passage, I thought of this teapot. (bring it out) Rhonda has had this teapot longer than I’ve known her. It originally belonged to her great-grandmother. She said that almost immediately, she broke the lid, but then repaired it. Clay pottery is fragile like that! She started putting coins in it, and eventually, it became a repository for lots of interesting money. (Pull out a few coins/bills/etc.)

Then the other day, I noticed this on the dresser. This is a clay jar that one of our kids made in elementary school. Rhonda uses it to store jewelry. Now, anything really valuable, we keep in a safe or in the bank. But for general storage, for items of curiosity or items we might use regularly, this pot or this jar are perfectly fine.

If Paul were writing to modern Americans, instead of clay jars, he might say that we have this treasure in Tupperware. Can you imagine keeping your most prized possessions in some cheap Walmart Tupperware?

Yet that’s exactly what Paul is likening us to. We are just simple clay jars or Tupperware, or maybe old margarine containers, but we are entrusted with the most valuable treasure in the universe: God’s love. Modern spirituality focuses mainly on self-improvement and connecting with God, which is to say, it focuses mainly on either making ourselves into fancier clay jars or filling ourselves with more treasure.

Each summer—well, I’ve done it twice now, and I’m signed up to go again this year—each summer, I go on retreat at the White House Retreat Center. Over the course of three days of silence, I listen to preaching, I pray, I read, I go on spiritual walks, that sort of thing. It’s a Jesuit center, so of course the worship is Roman Catholic, but that’s OK. We all pray to the same God. Anyway, the purpose of the retreat is spiritual formation. I come home refreshed, renewed, re-connected to God, and with a new perspective. I’m filled with the Spirit. The treasure in my clay jar has been topped off.

Other people meditate, or go on nature walks, or otherwise try to step away from the world. Now, this is great! As far as it goes. In fact, I remember encouraging spiritual practices on several occasions, things like reading the Bible, or prayer, or whatever. All of these practices and experiences help to make us better pottery or fill us with more spiritual treasure. But at the end of the day, we still hold this treasure in jars of clay. Making ourselves better people is a good thing, but is not truly the Gospel.

What is the Gospel? The kingdom of God is at hand! We go forth into the world spreading this good news, not to draw attention to ourselves, but to direct attention to God. Once, Mary properly chastised me for wearing beard ornaments in the pulpit. I like to be festive, but when I’m preaching, the focus should not be on me, not even on the words that I say, but on the Word Made Flesh that my words point to. In the same way, each time we proclaim the Gospel, we should point not to ourselves, but to the kingdom of God.

Evangelism is kind of a dirty word to many people, largely because of the awful ways some people do it. The very worst are the people who come to campus and shout at students about how terrible and sinful they are. But there are plenty of other examples of bad evangelism. Usually, the end goal of the evangelizer is to make you join them. They want you to believe exactly what they believe, pray exactly as they pray, and so forth. I’ve seen memes about “winning souls.” They want to conquer you and make you a part of their team.

Paul’s message here, though, is that we should not be proclaiming ourselves, but Christ. Now, I do appreciate being recognized on the street, and being connected to the message that I strive to proclaim. The other day, when I was running, I passed a guy I’ve never met but who I’ve seen on the street before. We said hello, and then he said, “I really appreciate your articles in the paper!” I take that as a good sign that my words are reaching beyond this congregation and maybe helping people connect with the God I know and love. The fact that he recognizes me and connects me with my writing means that someday, perhaps, we can have a more substantial conversation than a cordial “Good morning!” Perhaps someday, he’ll share his perspective with me as well, and we can learn from each other.

I would love it if he were to also connect my message with this congregation and come worship with us, but that’s not really the point. Our task is not so much to build this congregation as it is to build the kingdom of God. I believe that if we keep our focus on preaching Christ, preaching a loving God, preaching about a world of universal human flourishing, that other people will want to be a part of what we’re doing here. That’s how we will grow—by being a church that is doing something that people want to participate in.

But as Paul said, we proclaim not ourselves, but Christ. If people join us in worship, it won’t be because of who we are, but because this is a place where they can encounter God. In modern America, people are hungry for connection and for being a part of something bigger than themselves. There is nothing bigger than the kingdom of God! We should strive to make our congregation a visible manifestation of God’s realm, just one among many.

In our creeds, especially the Nicene and Apostles Creeds, we confess to one holy, catholic, apostolic Church. Holy: we are set apart to belong to God. Catholic: not in the sense that Jesuits are Roman Catholics, but universal. We are one Church who worship one God. We should pursue unity in the Church, while recognizing diversity.

We are also an apostolic Church. An apostle is one who is sent out into the world. A disciple is a follower of a teacher, such as Jesus of Nazareth. An apostle is one who is sent out to carry the teacher’s message to others. We are like ambassadors of God’s kingdom, striving to establish diplomatic relations with the world and encourage others to join in.

Indeed, being an apostle, or an evangelizer, encompasses roughly half of the Great Ends of the Church, which are: The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; The shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; The maintenance of divine worship; The preservation of the truth; The promotion of social righteousness; and The exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world. As the Church, we are called to proclaim the gospel, promote social righteousness, and exhibit the kingdom of heaven. These are apostolic callings. We have this treasure from God, and are called to put it to good use in the world.

Being an apostle, or an evangelizer, is hard. Look at Paul: afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed. Why was he able to endure? Because he had Christ to support him. He knew that the treasure he had received only had value if he shared it, and he knew that Christ’s love is an endless fountain of blessing welling up within him.

I’d like to share a couple of practices with you, ways that you can be strengthened and emboldened to continue proclaiming the Gospel and exhibiting the kingdom of heaven. The first comes to me from Lindy Hardwick. Many of you know Lindy; among other things, she has preached here a few times. She has spent a lot of her career as a chaplain. When I mentioned that I struggle sometimes with pastoral care, this is what she told me to do. Imagine that there is a hole in the top of your head and that light from God is flowing down through it into you. Then imagine that there is a hole in your chest that channels that light out to the person you are speaking to, who is hurting and needs to feel God’s love. At the same time, if they are pouring out their pain, their anxiety, their anger, or their fear on you, imagine taking it in through your chest and passing it straight up to God.

In this way, instead of trying to store up the treasure of God’s love and dole it out, you become a conduit for love. Instead of relying on yourself and your own wisdom and strength to care for someone, rely on God through the power of the Holy Spirit flowing in and through you to be their ultimate Comforter.

Now, before we turn to the Lord’s Table for holy spiritual sustenance, I’d like to do an exercise with you. I receive a daily message from the Center for Action and Contemplation, and a couple of months ago, they had this exercise led by Brian McLaren and Carmen Acevedo Butcher, which I have edited just slightly. As a background, this “Peace and Light” meditation came at the conclusion of a week reviewing seven stories. The first six stories are ways that community fails to work for everyone: the domination story, the revolution story, the isolation story, the purification story, the accumulation story, and the victimization story. The seventh story is the story of reconciliation. In the Seventh Story, human beings are not the protagonists of the world. Love is.

So now, the practice. You may be a jar of clay, but you are capable of being a conduit, a vessel, for the glorious treasure of the Light of the World. Take a few deep breaths, and let your body come to rest for a moment. Imagine the seventh story, the story of reconciliation, as a tiny point of light. The story comes through your ears or you see it lived out in someone’s life. It enters who you are. It’s a story of peace, whose hero is love. It’s a story of justice and equity and safety and joy. Imagine that story as a little point of light that comes to rest in the center of your being. Then imagine that little point of light becoming a pool of light and a spring or a fountain of light. Just for the next few moments, picture that point of light growing within you.

Imagine yourself becoming full of that light. Now imagine that light filling you and that light shining out through you. Imagine now that this light coming out from you touches those around you, those in your pew, everyone else in the sanctuary, those in your family, your neighbors, others in your neighborhood, those in your workplace, people throughout Rolla and Phelps County, and all others you meet. Imagine that this light embraces them and also that it fills them.

We all know that there are many other stories at work in the world, stories that are wounding people, stories that maybe wounded each of us. Let’s realize that we can be tempted to respond to those stories that wound in a way that continues that wounding story. For a few moments, let’s hold in our heart a prayer, a request, a plea for help, that our lives would not be sucked into the stories that wound, but that we would live on a steady course of a story that heals.

Holy God, May I live in the story of peace, whose hero is love. May that story live in me. May the story of Your peace bring healing to us and to the world. And may the story of Your love bring healing to us and to the world. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download