Remember

 How many times a day do you think that you are called upon to remember something? You sit down at your desk to do your homework, and you remember what the expectations are that the syllabus articulates. You pick up in the middle of a work project with an impending deadline, and you remember what you have done so that you will know what you need to finish. You run into someone you know, whether by happenstance or expectation, and you remember that person’s name and enough other information about that person to strike up a conversation.

Remembering - we do it all the time. Some remembering is rather second nature. We remember where we put the car keys. Well, sometimes we do! We remember what day it is, how to get to class or work, and that it is a good idea to eat three healthy meals a day.

Other acts of remembering are more existential. We remember who we are and what we are up to on this ride through life. We remember our plans, hopes, dreams. We remember our missteps and our failures. We remember significant chapters in our personal backstory that inform and shape us today.

Still other acts of remembering require a specific, meditative intentionality. We collectively remember events from history, lest we forget and and repeat the same ugly atrocities again. We remember what we never knew - re-examining both familial and cultural myths, peeling back the layers to uncover that which the myth has distorted or rewritten with a deceptively creative pen. We remember what we have intentionally forgotten from our own stories, perhaps out of self-protection and for the sake of survival, but by remembering, we regain the authority to “re-story” our lives. We remember those we have loved and lost.

Remembering - we do it all time, and by remembering we live into a richer depth of our humanity.

This year at Candlelight, our Sunday night worship at 10:00 p.m., we are engaging in an intentional journey of remembering. We are looking again and anew at God’s stories of old, recorded in the Christian scriptures, and finding God’s truth for our lives as it is woven through this holy storytelling. We are remembering who God has been and what God has done so that we can remember who we are and what God is doing in our own lives.

Last night, we gathered under Merlin with stars hanging from its old, gnarled branches, tea lights in the grass and a fire burning brightly on Resurrection Meadow. We lit our candles against the dark night sky, and we remembered God’s promise to Abram and Sarai that their descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the heavens. We remembered that God spoke this promise into a confusing and dark time for Abram and Sarai: they were old. She was barren. There were no children. It seemed impossible. All hope seemed lost.

And yet God said, look to heavens at what will be, and they remembered, and so did we. They remembered that God is God and we are not, and we remembered, too. They remembered that God can be trusted - even when all seems lost, and we claimed anew that promise for ourselves.

In her book, “The Spiritual Practice of Remembering,” Margaret Bendroth says that “remembering is an act with spiritual meaning, pushing us against the unknown.” To remember, as people of faith, pushes us against all of the unknowns of our lives that threaten to overwhelm and overtake us. To remember that God is God pushes against the unknowns of this present age. To remember that God is God pushes against our personal uncertainties and inadequacies. To remember that God is God is to claim with certainty and a holy hope that I can trust God, even when all seems lost.

So, wherever you find yourself today, I invite you to join with the Candlelight community as we joined with Abram and Sarai in the mystical collapse of time and space, and look to the heavens. See the stars - even when they hide behind the bright light of day - see the stars and remember that God was, is and forever will be - God.

May this holy remembering bless you on your journey,

Grace you with goodness,

And fill you with peace.

+Pr. Char

I Saw Jesus

I saw Jesus the other day. She was walking down Calumet Avenue. I was stopped at the stoplight by AutoZone. She was crossing the street in the crosswalk. It was a hot, humid, sticky day. She was wearing a stocking cap. A coat. Maybe layers underneath. The shopping cart she pushed was full, its contents covered with a tarp. Her navy blue polyester pants were long, ragged. Her shoes did not match.

What would it have been like for her if I had carried her cross? What would it have been like for me?

I saw Jesus the other day. When I first saw him he was in his wheelchair in the Walgreens’ parking lot. He wore a baseball cap. His shirt was light yellow, short-sleeved, button down. His pants were brown. His face drooped on the right side, muscles slack, and his right arm sat limp in his lap. He was foot walking his wheelchair across the parking lot. Inch by inch. When I came out of Walgreens, he had just barely made it across the street to the CVS parking lot. About two hours later, I saw him at the front of Town and Country. The sun was scorching hot. The air was thick. A half a block. Two hours.

What would it have been like for him if I had carried his cross? What would it have been like for me?

I saw Jesus the other day night. It was 11:09 p.m. I was on my way home from the first Candlelight of the year, filled with deep joy, profound peace. She was stumbling down Campbell Street. She lurched into the brick retaining wall just past the Boys’ and Girls’ Club. She over corrected and almost fell into the street. She feebly tried to right herself, all the while not losing her grip on the brown paper bag in her hand.

What would it have been like for her if I had carried her cross? What would it have been like for me?

I saw Jesus the other day when I was scrolling through my newsfeed on social media. He was holding tightly to a small child with one hand, and clinging to the edge of a dinghy in the midst of the Mediterranean with the other. Fleeing war. Fearing for their lives. Seeking safety.

She was standing with dignity at the graveside of her murdered son.

They were seven and nine years-old, sitting in a detention center for undocumented immigrants. No one to be their advocates. Expected to navigate an immigration hearing on their own.

What would it have been like for them if I had carried their cross? What would it have been like for me?

In the Gospel of Luke, the first words of public proclamation that Jesus makes in his ministry are these:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.

He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor,

To proclaim release to the captives

To give recovery of sight to the blind,

To let the oppressed go free.

Everything that Jesus does flows from those words. Everything that Jesus says is a deepening of those words. Everything that Jesus is is a fulfillment of those words.

Later on in Luke’s telling of the Jesus story, Jesus tells his would-be-followers what they can do to be a part of that continued fulfillment. Hate father, mother, sister brother. Weigh the cost. Give away all your possessions. Carry the cross.

For centuries the church has theologized those words away. Hate doesn’t really mean hate, we have said. Jesus is simply telling us that we need to like everything or everyone else a little less than him, we have suggested. Give everything away - that’s just Jesus using the rhetorical tool of hyperbole, we have rationalized. And carry the cross, well that is merely a metaphor for discipleship.

But none of that is what the people who heard Jesus say those words would have thought. These words of Jesus were some of the most radical, offensive  words that he ever spoke. After all, family was everything - identity, security, community. Possessions - they were the means by which one made one’s way in the world. And crosses - they meant one thing, and one thing only: a torturous, shameful brutal death at the hands of Rome, just because Rome could.

So, what does Jesus mean? Well, I’m with Richard Swanson who, in his blog, Provoking the Gospel, says unashamedly, “I don’t know.” But then he goes on to say, but let’s imagine that I do know, and he points us toward a real life cross-bearer in the Gospels. Not Jesus, but someone else.

Fast forward in the Jesus story, and when Jesus is weighed down beneath the weight of his own, physical, deathly real cross, we meet Simon. Simon of Cyrene, the North African, freshly into the city from the countryside. Simon is grabbed by the Roman authorities and compelled to carry Jesus’ cross. In those moments, Simon could have only thought one thing: he was going to die, and his family would never know what happened to him.

When Jesus’ cross shifted to Simon, nearly everything about what would happen next was uncertain. Unknown. Everything, that is, but one thing: Simon’s future was inextricably linked, bound up with the poor, unfortunate soul for whom the cross had become too heavy. Simon’s future was bound up with Jesus, and Jesus’ future was bound up with Simon’s.

That is after all, what Jesus’ whole life, death, resurrection, and even ascension are all about. When the weight of creation’s frailty, brokenness, condemnation, when creation’s cross became too heavy to bear, Jesus took that weight fully and completely upon himself. Henceforth, Jesus’ future was bound up with creation’s, and creation's future was bound up with Jesus.

It is true for you too, you know. Jesus has taken the weight of your frailty, your brokenness, your condemnation, the weight of your cross upon himself too. Amid whatever unkowing you live, this much you do know: Jesus’ future is bound up with you. Your future is bound up with Jesus.

That is why, week after week, as often as we are able, we gather around the table. There we feast upon cross-bearer fare. Bread and wine - cross-bearer food. Bread and wine - where cross-bearing becomes life-giving.

There, week after week, as often as we are able, looking out around the table, I see Jesus. I see Jesus in all of you and each of you, cross-bearers every one. Claimed. Called. Named. Cross-marked. Filled with the Holy Spirit

To preach good news to the poor,

To proclaim release to the captives

To give recovery of sight to the blind,

To let the oppressed go free.

AMEN

+Pr. Char

#lightsonforjacob

         

     It was 8:25 on Saturday morning. I was startled by a “ping” on my phone indicating that I had received an incoming message from someone on Facebook. The circular image on the upper right hand corner of my screen let me know that the incoming message was from a woman who had been a confirmation student in the first parish I served as a pastor, 25 years ago. Though we have stayed in touch over the years, our contact has been sporadic and brief. When I tapped her image to open the message, I found these words, “they found Jacob.”

            I knew instantly what she meant: Jacob Wetterling had been found.

In the fall of 1989, 18 months before I was called to serve as a pastor in Brooten, Minnesota, Jacob, an 11 year-old boy was kidnapped at gunpoint on a rural Minnesota road while riding his bike home with his brother and a friend. He disappeared without a trace. The community in which Jacob lived was 50 miles away from my first call. The kids from my parish had been in St. Joseph, Jacob’s hometown, for a band competition on the day that Jacob was kidnapped. It could have been any one of them. It could have been any one of thousands of children for whom the open country was a place of joy, freedom, unrestrained play, and safety.

But all that changed when Jacob disappeared. An innocence was lost. A sense of dis-ease caused parents, and kids alike, to rethink the freedom with which children lived and explored - especially in the country. During the time that I served in Brooten, Jacob’s disappearance - and an enduring hope for his return - was a regular topic of conversation.

            That was true for communities all over Minnesota. Jacob’s kidnapping sent shock waves through an entire state, and thousands upon thousands of people, year after year kept hoping and praying that somehow he would be found and safely returned to his family.

            On Saturday the world learned that such was not to be. Jacob’s body was found buried in a pasture about 25 miles away from where he was taken, 25 miles away from that first place I served as a pastor, 25 miles away from where those kids-now-adults talked in confirmation class about the way that Jacob’s kidnapping had changed their lives.

            We all have stories in our lives that mark us, shape us, change us, stories written with on indelible ink on the fabric of who we are. The kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling is one such story for me. I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember the fear still present in that first community I served as they wondered about the safety and the security of their own children. I remember thinking with thousands upon thousands of others that somebody knows something, and all it would take would be one person to speak up and speak out.

            But amid all of the disbelief, fear, and other complicated emotions that surrounded the hearts of so many with Jacob’s kidnapping, there is something else I remember as well: Jacob’s mother, Patty Wetterling.

Almost immediately after Jacob was kidnapped, Patty became the face of an enduring hope. Patty and the rest of her family urged people in Minnesota everywhere to turn their porch lights on so that Jacob - and any other missing children - would be able to find their way home. Patty chose hope over despair, hope over bitterness, light over darkness.

            People responded by the thousands. Porch lights went on everywhere. People rolled up their sleeves and not only continued to search for Jacob but began to work to both enact and change laws for the protection of children. Because of Patty’s work and those who joined her, sex offender registries are now common realities in communities everywhere. Cases of missing children are treated completely differently by law enforcement than they were before Jacob. Parents of missing children have resources that they never before had, and because of Patty’s tireless work and those who picked up Jacob’s cause, most missing children are returned safely home.

            Out of the Wetterling’s darkest hours, light has shined brightly for countless others.

Hope over despair. Hope over bitterness. Light over darkness.

In the Christian faith we declare with conviction and with certainty that through Jesus, the light shines in the darkness. Because of Jesus, the darkness has not, cannot, and will not overcome the light.

Whatever darkness we face, whatever darkness you face, the light of Jesus will shine into that darkness and transform it with God’s enduring grace, God’s enduring love.

Since Jacob’s body was found on the weekend, thousands upon thousands have once again joined together. Porch lights have been turned on in his memory and in solidarity with his family. In the freshly raw experience of grief, light shines in the darkness. #lightsonforjacob

My own reflections upon Jacob Wetterling and his family have stirred in me anew a renewed passion to seek ways to be the light in someone else’s darkness, a renewed passion to bring hope where there is despair, a renewed passion to choose hope over bitterness.

If we all chose to do that, what difference might it make? How might our corner of the world become a more humane place? How might individual lives become indelibly marked not by sorrow, but by love and light?

Hope over despair. Hope over bitterness. Light over darkness. #lightsonforjacob 

Won’t you join me?

Many Blessings,

+Pr. Char