He managed to pry his eyes open as the 10:00 sun came blazing through the window. At some point in the middle of the night the thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning had been crossed and sounds of bells ringing all throughout the down town now filled his room and his ears. If it was possible for something to be both pleasant and annoying at the same time, those bells certainly fit the bill.
Peace & Peace: A Reflection on Tragedy
Many don’t know that five and a half years ago, Lesley, 6 months pregnant with Jameson and myself were on the campus of Virginia Tech when a troubled individual entered into Norris Hall, about 100 yards from where we were, and began moving classroom to classroom indiscriminately shooting professors and students before eventually killing himself. Lesley is a PhD candidate attending Virginia Tech and we were living in Blacksburg at the time. We had come onto campus to run a few errands before going to the coffee shop to work on our school work together as was our usual routine. As we got out of the car, a student came towards us to tell us that the whole campus was locked down and that there was a shooter on the loose at which point our flight response arose and we got back in the car and sped off campus and away from the carnage that was unfolding in our rearview mirror.
Building Our True Home
In the past few years I have become enamored with dystopian interpretations of the world—that is a story that is told within an alternate reality often cast well into the future of the time of writing. Some later time in which things are wildly different than they are now—a time that presents the new reality as completely normal. So for instance, think about the world created by the writer George Orwell in his classic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Big Brother the formless leader, who may or may not actually exist, looks over all the inhabitants of London seeking to impart on the minds of every citizen the veracity of the three foundational slogans, "WAR IS PEACE", "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY", "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”
In All Things, Give Thanks
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to spend almost a month in Malawi, a country tucked in the Southeast corner of the continent of Africa in between Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Known as the warm heart of Africa, because of the kindness expressed by many of its inhabitants towards visitors, it is not difficult to fall in love with the people of this tiny country and after a scant few hours on the ground, I became enraptured with it. For, in addition to friendly and beautiful children of God all around, Malawi has breathtaking natural beauty year-round. In the hills to the South of Lilongwe, the capital, are views from high atop mountains that would rival any seen in any other mountainous region of the world. During many of our hikes in the area outside of Nkoma, the village in which we stayed for some time, we saw both animal and nature that could just as easily have been seen in the pages of National Geographic. And to walk back in the trails that ran in between the larger villages was to step back in time to a era when electricity was unheard of, running water was a luxury that no one had, and the most basic of homemade farming equipment was treasured throughout these agrarian communities.
Come Home to Cahaba Springs
As y’all know, I spent last weekend in God’s Country, NC at the blessed wedding of my father to his long-time partner Jeanne. Ms. Jeanne I should say, as my boys call her. And because my father, just as his father before him, and his father before him, and his father before him, have only ever lived outside of Robeson County for mere periods of time, that will always be, regardless of wherever else the Spirit might call any of us, my beloved ancestral home. Moreover, it was my home, home for the better part of my childhood and my roots run exceedingly deep there, just as it is for many who call any geographic location home for the better part of their lives.
The Workers
It was one of those days. You know the kind. The kind where you don’t really want to get out of bed. Maybe your spouse is curled up next to you in that way that only y’all can fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe you had stayed up well into the evening, frolicking, hanging out with friends on the front porch enjoying the last few days of an Indian summer, maybe it was just your own thoughts that had you looking out into the waves of the sea, or the darkness of the sky. Maybe you had seen a shooting star that evening. A huge one, dissecting the whole of the firmament, and you had relived that moment over and over again instead of going to bed. In any case, you didn’t really want to be up this morning, and yet when the first light of the sun began to cause wisps of pink and orange to gradually appear in the eastern sky, you drug yourself out of bed.
Forgiven
My father is a great storyteller. At parties, family gatherings, even just among friends he can keep whole room regaled by tales from his life And one of the best yarns that he spins is about when he was growing up. My Dad was the younger of two sons and his brother, my uncle Alex, is 2 years older than my father. And growing up they were best friends. They hunted and fished together. Explored the miles and miles of woods around their house. When the time came, they even managed to share a car. However, also as is often the case, they had their fair share of brotherly squabbles and even had a few bouts of fisticuffs. Now, my grandmother McLeod, a woman of infinite patience, eventually got pushed to her limit and sent them to where all troubled youth of a certain generation tended to end up, the pastor’s office.
Children of God
None of my children had the easiest entries into the world. My eldest had to be revived. My middle son heart crashed in the midst of labor. But it was, of course the youngest, whose first few months were both terrifying and harrowing. Harrowing because anytime you were in his room, your eyes could not help but be drawn to the monitors above his little house. I will be forever haunted by the sounds of those alarms going of every time his heart rate dropped to zero, every time he pulled a feeding tube out of his nose, every time his O2 level was deemed to be dangerously low and requiring outside intervention. I imagine that most of us take these things for granted. Heart rates, and the ability to eat without having a NG tube stuck down our nasal passage, the ability to breathe.
Grand Reopening
Entering into this creation and really for as long as we are able to hold on to our childhood, the world can be a wondrous and wonderful place, a place that seemingly first forth with the colors of spring and Autumn, the roar of oceans, the constant buzz of cicadas at sunset. Moreover, in the playfulness of our youthful minds, we can see and perceive angels and sprites moving around us, as the evening breeze would tell us stories. The world could be a vast, unexplored wonderland where each day brings something new to be explored. The stand of pines across the street could become a castle or a fort or a camp as the ancient voices of persons, cultures, tribes, long since past who roamed in these exact locations filled your ears and your imagination. To dwell in God’s good creation could mean simply walking outside and into the dew of an early morning, taking time to observe the sunrise as without fail it greeted you each day, or feeling the droplets of a late spring rainstorm replenishing the earth with the necessary ingredients for new growth until whole cycle began again. And in the midst of your childhood, you had no doubt that all of this, all that was alive and around you, was a gift from God—the Glory of God was as visible as the noonday sun and all around you were little reminders of resurrection and grace.
Not Peace, But A Sword
I’m fairly certain that the first time I had ever heard of the album, A Love Supreme, or the artist, John Coltrane, was sitting in the office of my advisor and mentor, Stephen Ray at Louisville Seminary somewhere in the middle of my first year there. And I’m sure that he came up in conversation after I had read something by Martin King or James Cone or Cornel West because I had asked some kind of ridiculous question like, “How can I better understand the black experience?” Looking back there are any number of ways that I could have better phrased that query. But without batting an eye he said to me, “Listen to John Coltrane’s album, A Love Supreme, and try to hear it.”
Hosanna, Loud Hosanna
In your mind’s eye, you have to imagine that the road was long and dusty, perhaps unlike it had ever been before, as Jesus and his followers trudged along towards Jerusalem with each step feeling heavier than the one before. They had, for the previous three years, walked so many steps like this together and yet, these seemed so much more laborious. When they were giving sight to the blind or raising folks from the dead those steps had been easy as the glory of God bursting forth before their eyes, sometimes even from their own hands and mouths, but now came the other side of that coin.
Dry Bones
I have found that, in years past, this Sunday arises about the same time within the Lenten calendar. And in previous years, previous journeys to the cross, to the tomb, it would have arisen at a moment in which the weight of all of our Lenten practices would have grown a burden too great to bear. And in response to this, we would read about the Valley of Dry Bones, about Lazarus, the one, we are told, whom Jesus loved—his friend—dying and being buried only to be called out of the tomb through the tears that wetted the savior’s eyes. In previous years, it would have felt important for me to stand up here and tell you to hold strong, that there was just a little further to go on the road to Maundy Thursday, to Good Friday, to dark Saturday, to Easter morning. All of that would have made sense and made for a good sermon that would have both challenged and uplifted, neither denied the heaviness of the moment, nor the light at the end of the tunnel, and yet, today, none of that makes sense.
Dying to Self
We are told that just as Jesus was done speaking to his disciples, surrounded by the 70 that had just returned from curing illness, casting out demons, and spreading the gospel to the towns and cities that dotted the Galilean countryside, a lawyer steps out of the crowd and poses a question to Jesus, as they so often do. “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
Preparing For Death
As Jesus rose out of the water, feeling each droplet of water run down his face, his hair, his back. As he rose up and saw the sky torn asunder and saw the Spirit of God take the form of a dove and begin to descend to the place in the Jordan River that he was now standing. As he rose up and heard the voice of God arising from the depths of his soul and saying, "this is my beloved, on him my favor rests." As he saw the near speechless reaction of the crowd pointing at him and staring in awe, for a brief moment, he was able to dwell in that place, dwell in that time, dwell in the presence of the Holy and it was as if all time had slowed to just a trickle. Like his life had become a movie and the film was now passing frame-by-frame. And then, just as he had begun to wrap his mind around what had just happened, everything, shifted from a trickle to a gush, and the movie that was passing frame-by-frame now seemed to be moving at double speed, triple speed, and everything, John, the crowds, the water, the dove, the voice, the Spirit, God, all seemed to be bearing down on top of a singular point on his head. It was as if nothing had changed and everything had changed all in a single blink and what had been an otherwise normal day had now been tossed into chaos.
Ash Wednesday Meditation
Tonight, we commence the long and arduous journey of self-discovery and self-awareness that is the Lenten season. It is a time that will demand that we peer deep into our souls and figure out what is truly of God and what needs to be burned away and left scattered like ashes so that we might be made whole and holy in the sight of God once again. And these rituals of confession, of contemplation, of a willingness to leave behind parts of our selves that would have seemed so essential just a mere few hours ago are incredibly difficult as it asks us to make an honest assessment of who we are and whose we are and of all those places wherein we have fallen woefully short in our endeavors to be followers of the living Christ. And in doing so, we find that we are left to humbly repent before God and one another that we will do better, try harder, in the coming year. Yet it is in these moments of our weakness, in which we cast aside the false gods of ego and hubris that we truly see ourselves in the manner in which God does—a children of God, stripped to our very essence, as the Christian mystic Howard Thurman once wrote, before the God who created, redeemed, and sustained us.
Fishin'
There is something that has always been deeply spiritual, prayerful, meditative about the practice of fishing. And, for me, without a doubt, one of the best pieces ever written that captures the relationship between spirituality and fishing comes in Norman MacLean’s poignant novella about his life growing up along the shores of the Big Blackfoot river, aptly titled “A River Runs Through It.” In it, Maclean writes about the experience of his family growing up outside of Missoula, Montana in the early 20th century. And in his writing, Maclean tells of how, for them there was no line that demarcated where their religion ended and the art of fishing commenced. And I have been drawn to this story many times over the years both because of my love of fishing but also because of the manner in which the author’s father, a taciturn Presbyterian pastor, fuses the Calvinism of his faith and the damnable mess that he sees in humanity with the perception of God’s creation as completely and utterly beautiful—a word he uses throughout the story and how that perception is largely gotten through fishing.
A Christmas Eve Meditation
There are many things that I, like most of you, enjoy about the Christmas season. I enjoy the music, something that commenced to be listened to in my house before Thanksgiving had drawn to a close. I love the Christmas specials, with the Charlie Brown Christmas being at the top of the list. I love Christmas movies with the classic National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation topping that list. There are whole swaths of that movie that have long since been an integral part of the shared lexicon between my brothers and I. I love gathering each week with my church family and journeying together to the manger as we have done this last month, lighting candles along the way to shine in the darkness and all these things have been a part of my life since childhood, a lifetime spent journeying with people through the Advent season.
A Light Still Shines: For the People Who Dwell In Darkness
The brilliance of the Christian calendar comes not solely in the little explosions of grace that take place on the highest of holy days scattered throughout the year, the ones that reminds us of God’s presence in a real and unmistakable manner, but also in the periods of preparation that give each of us time to evaluate our lives and to make ready a place for God’s spirit of reconciliation and love to arrive again and anew. Times in which to set aside time to be in prayer, to be watchful, to be calm, to make ourselves ready lest we miss the coming of God and the presence of God. This time of Advent, this time that we commence on this morning, this Sunday, in which we, together, take the first few steps towards the manger, this is the period with which we have been gifted to be silent, to be still, and to wait. 4 weeks where we can take our place outside the Christmas season that will soon engulf us all if it has not yet happened.
Doing the Most with What We Have
We are told that there is a man who is going on a trip, and, almost immediately, Jesus’s followers would have recognized that this was a person of great wealth. In that society and in that time the separation between the wealthy and the rest of the populace was vast and the number of persons who could afford to hire and keep servants was fairly minuscule and those who did were seen as the upper class of within that culture. And because these three persons are servants we know that they are from a different socio-economic status within the population, a class of people who lived much closer to the margins than did their bosses. This isn’t to say that you could not earn a living, feed your family, feel a measure of security as a servant, but when that is your life and existence, you are well aware that your economic security is intimately tied to the wealth possessed by head of the house. So it is that there is a fair amount of fear and trepidation that goes into the lived experience of these three men.
The Place of Honor
I love soccer. I played a little bit growing up and while my team never really got past the strategy of someone kicking the ball and everyone on both teams (including the goalies) chasing after it wherever it went, it at least taught me the basics of the sport. As a parent, I have tried to instill this same love to my children. In fact, somewhere there is grainy cell phone video of me trying to teach the sport to Jameson while living on a British Island and assuming that such knowledge would take him further than would, say, the ability to throw a tight spiral.