Month: March 2014

As a minister every now and then I receive an invitation to come along and offer a prayer.  Usually the invitation sounds something like, “Pastor, I was wondering if you’d be willing to say a little prayer.”  It’s important to understand that it doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re standing inside or outside the church’s four walls when the question is asked, the intent of those asking it seems to be the same.  “Just a little prayer — could you say one?”

Inside the church it can come just as easily before a potluck dinner as before some major decision to drop $50,000 to renovate the sanctuary, like these are both somehow similar acts of humanity before God.  Granted, I don’t necessarily see these two things as being very different from each other.  Our prayer should be no less with one over the other.  They sound very different, I know.  $50,000 to hire a construction crew and get a building permit sounds like a lot more capital than $8.00 for a box of macaroni and a large jar of Ragu.  But it’s not.  In fact, if we had to say that one is a weightier decision in need of prayer, it should be the prayer we offer before the potluck (and if you’ve ever been to a church potluck then you know why)!  Simple daily gratitude for the profound gift of food can never be overdone.  We can’t think too much about our gratitude and how best to express it.  In Jewish homes, before any meal, snack, or morsel is consumed the family prays, “Blessed are you God, our Lord, King of the Universe.”  From this follows a list of whatever is being eaten.  “Blessed are you God, our Lord, King of the Universe for the barley, the oats, the water that made them grow, and the dirt that warmly and safely nurtured them to life.  Blessed are you God, our Lord, King of the Universe for the fruit of the vine.”

There is a story about an eighteenth-century Jew whose daily work was to slaughter animals.  Each morning he said a tearful goodbye to his wife and children before setting off to meet his destiny.  He felt, every morning, that he might never see them again, that as he stood, knife in hand and prayer on lips, “Blessed are you God, our Lord, King of the Universe,” that God might notice and destroy him before he had time also to utter, “Have mercy.”

The fact is, this is not a little prayer.  This is an earth-shattering prayer.  One can’t just say this prayer on a whim.  If you’re going to make your gratitude count you have to think long and hard about what ultimately makes your gratitude even possible.  “For the food we are about to eat and the drink we are about to drink, we didn’t do anything to make it appear.  It comes from you, the King of the Universe, who obviously loves and cares about us.”  Yes, we have a part to play in its distribution.  Have we walked the earth carefully, making sure not to trample on the cabbage and to kick up the apple seeds?  For there are hungry people.  Have we made sure to sell the food at a fair and honorable price?  For there are poor people.  In this we also honor the King of the Universe, for without the King we’d all be poor and hungry.  It’s not a little potluck prayer.

Author Annie Dillard once observed that, “Outside of the catacombs, Christians are not sufficiently sensible to the conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may awake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

It’s not a little prayer.  Indeed, it is never a little thing to pray.  And yet when the question was asked of me one day last week, “Pastor, I was wondering if you’d be willing to come and say a little prayer?” I so blithely said yes.  It was to be an annual meeting for a local charitable organization.  Most, if not all, of their benefactors and beneficiaries would be there and breakfast was going to be served.

On the day prior to the meeting I sat down to consider my prayer and that’s when it hit me: I had no idea what I was doing.  What was I supposed to pray?  No one had told me.  For that matter, why were we going to pray at all?  It didn’t seem like a bad idea to me.  I suppose we can pray with a dirt-filled heart of mean motives and selfish pursuits.  I suppose we can pray stupidly.  We can pray an “I don’t really care let’s just get it over with” kind of prayer.  We can pray in such a way that it may, and probably should, get us struck down by lightning.  We can pray without ever saying, “God, have mercy,” but it doesn’t change the fact that God will.  So it didn’t seem like a bad idea to me that we would pray.  But what was I to pray for a  gathering of benefactors and beneficiaries?  Our whole reason for showing up was to make known what we had already done.  This one sheltered the homeless for 250 nights.  That one ran a free clinic for battered women and children.  This one gave all the money for the clinic.  That one gave enough for a clinic and 20 new beds at the shelter.  What more could we stand to give and receive?  Let’s say a little prayer and eat!  The eggs are getting cold.

Tragically, this is more or less how it all went.  I stood to pray, sat down, and a circus of self-congratulations began.  One by one each group sent their president forward to receive a plaque and to have their picture taken with the mayor while the audience went ooh and ah.  We clapped so much that after a while I found myself clapping before the names were even announced.  When, after a while, there were no more names to call, it was decided that we all could leave.  But first, “Pastor, would you come back up and close us with a little prayer?”

I got up and fumbled my way back to the microphone.  I wasn’t sure if I didn’t hear some rumblings still, not of the crowd but of thunder.  What was I supposed to pray again?  Not even “God, have mercy” seemed right.  How do we pray for mercy and not come off like we’re praying for everyone but ourselves, when the truth is, the need for mercy starts with me.

“Let us pray,” I invited.  For about a minute all was silent. No one said anything. We just sat there doing the one thing that makes us all the same: breathing.  Finally it sounded like we were praying.

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Great God, some would call what we are doing a strange thing — praying.  We are not gathered here to be religious.  This is not a church or a synagogue or a mosque or a place for quiet meditation.  Is it because of where live that we pray?  Is it because we’ve heard it’s the thing conservatives do, or maybe it’s liberals?  Do we just want to be known as upstanding, morally good citizens?  Why do we pray?  We don’t even all believe in the same God or believe in the same way about God.  We don’t all call you by the same name.  Why do we pray?  Could it be because we see how divided we’ve become, that we see how easily we slap labels on one another and pass unfair judgment, but we are yearning for unity?  Is it that we are desperate to see each other differently, as brothers ,sisters, neighbors, and we pray because we believe this is how you see us and we need you to help us be more like you?  Why do we pray?  Could it be that we share a common concern for our world and its needs and we know the concerns are big and the needs greater than what any one of us, and maybe even all of us together, can meet?   Could it be that we know our world has become so troubled and the only explanation for it lies beyond this world?  So we pray.  We place our hope and faith on the line and we proclaim with one voice that things can be better and we are united to make it so.  We look beyond ourselves while also looking around ourselves.  We see how much we have and how much we have to give and we say thank you for both.  Great God, in this world there are some who have love but no food and some who have food but no love.  Open our eyes to see how easily both have come to us in this moment and give us the courage and wisdom to want less so others may have more.  We ask all of this for the sake of love and in the name of the One who is love, amen.

 

In our house a cup of water is a big deal.  Around bedtime a cup of water, and how we handle it, can actually be a deal breaker–the difference between a bedtime story and just lights out.  One night last week it was just lights out.  For the record, I would like to say that giving someone a cup of water is an act too simple and kind to refuse.  I’ve heard stories and seen pictures of soldiers who after capturing or mortally wounding each other, offer each other a canteen of water.  (If you’re wondering how things might have played out differently had they only offered each other the water first, so am I.)  So I ask you: what reason have we in heaven or on earth to withhold a cup of water, a little chug, a slight sip?  If enemies can get this right on the field of battle, how hard can it be for a daddy and daughter at bedtime?  Very.

It all began with a routine question.  “Hey, aren’t we going to read a story?”  She was sitting on her bed, her paisley comforter pulled back, her polka-dot flannel sheets looking ever so inviting.  On most nights we cuddle up together, side-by-side to hear what Sophia the Princess or Amelia Bedelia has to say to us.  Tonight I just stood in the doorway to her bedroom, one foot in and one foot out.  A new episode of Modern Family was due on any minute.  

“Not tonight sweetheart.  It’s late,” I told her.

“It’s not that late.  We always read a story.”

Honestly, she was right on both accounts, but she doesn’t know how to tell time.

“Not tonight,” I said again.  “It’s late.”

“Well then get me some water.”  This is how she said it: it wasn’t a question: it was a sassy statement.

“Excuse me,” I snapped.  “You don’t get a cup of water when you ask for it that way.  We’re done for today,” I ordered.  “You can try again in the morning for a cup of water.”  I just turned and walked away.  No goodnight kiss, no “I love you.”

I stood in the kitchen, my elbows resting on the edge of the sink.  My hands, as if folded in prayer (I don’t know, maybe they were) hovered just under the faucet, which was dripping.  We had pancakes for dinner.  My two-year old son wanted to help flip them on the griddle.  It felt a little too suicidal, if not for him than for me.  I convinced him to wash some sippy cups in the sink instead.  He obviously hadn’t turned the water off completely.  Two full hours of droplet drippings had now collected in the Mickey Mouse cup.  I couldn’t help but notice it was overflowing.

  From around the corner and down the hallway came a still sob for water.  It  had a note of pathetic to it.  “I won’t survive until morning!  I’m crying!  Don’t you care?”   I was at a classic impasse.  I knew she would make it till morning and yet I didn’t know if I would make it 10 more seconds.  She wanted water.  I’m quite sure a sip would have satisfied her deepest thirst at that point.  I peered down at Mickey.  For a moment I thought evil, like maybe he had a few droplets to spare.  I picked him up thinking about how sassy, sassy-mean, she had been.  I knew she didn’t mean to be.  I knew she’d been awake for 14 hours, which is a really long time when you’re 4.  I knew she had her Valentine’s Day party at pre-school that day.  That it had been canceled twice on account of harassing snow and that she had handed out over 20 homemade cards, each one made out of two pieces of construction paper that had been sown together with yarn, cut into the shape of a heart, stuffed with a Tootsie Roll, and exquisitely decorated, and she and she alone made it happen.  I knew she was getting in the car tomorrow morning to drive 5 hours to visit her Grampy who is still in rehab, who is still not at home where she would like him to be, pushing her on her swing, dragging her around the neighborhood in her wagon.  That she doesn’t really get how someone can lose their arms but how it really doesn’t matter to her.  By combining ridiculous jokes involving Pu Pu Platters with a bowl of spoon-fed ice cream, she makes it look like the world is just the way it’s supposed to be.  I knew that had she known it was going to make me look so mean in return, she would have asked for water by saying “please” first.  I knew I was taking advantage of her inability to read a clock.  I knew, and I know still, that I wanted her to have a cup of water (a whole gallon straight out of Poland Springs!) and that the real reason she still wasn’t going to get one was, I didn’t know how to give it to her.

We had both been mean and it had caused me to forget just how easily certain things come to us.  Maybe we had both forgotten, or just not yet realized it.

I tipped Mickey over and walked back down the hallway to her bedroom.  I passed through the doorway without stopping and sat down on the edge of her bed.  Downstairs the washing machine was filling up for the third time in four hours.  Outside her window I could see a few icicles dripping winter’s glory to the ground.  The weather man says it’s supposed to be 50 degrees tomorrow and that we ought to watch out for puddles.  Yet I’ve read that a woman in Africa walks 4 miles a day on bare feet through the desert to collect water from a well.  She gets up early to get there early, lest the well be emptied before she has her chance.  Her jugs are dirty from also having been used to mix a batch of cement, which her family uses to build their house.  If the well is riding low today than a decision will have to be made about the water: drink it or mix it?  For now she just fills the jugs as much as she can, slings them on her shoulders, and hikes home.  She’ll need a couple Tylenol in the morning.  Good luck swallowing them without…you know…

I don’t blame my daughter for not knowing this.  I don’t really want her to know this, at least not yet.  And I never want her to come to realize it–what it’s like to walk so far without water to get water only to not have water.  She doesn’t need a lesson in water purification either.  For now we can just be glad that tomorrow she’ll want to put her purple-flower rain boots on to splash about the very puddles from which her brother may risk a drink, because all he knows is, water is water.  In no particular order you can mix it with sand to build castles, mix it with cement to build a house, carry it around in a jug, carry it around in your shoes, drink it.  The great and terrible truth of course is that water really isn’t water, that there is a world of difference between having no water to drink and not being given water, and that for better or for worse, we’re going to have to learn this.

I once heard it said that truth is like water, it always finds it way.  I take this to mean that on its way to wherever it’s going, water, like truth, can often wreak havoc and chaos.  Indeed, for truth to be truth, it must leave a little rupture in its wake.

Some say that God created out of chaos.  That before there was any oak trees, any slugs or aardvarks or any saints or sinners roaming the earth, the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  If there was chaos, it must have been one ballistic spirit at work, stirring up a perfect storm of grade 5 proportions.  But then, as the story goes, God, the same spirited God who brewed chaos over water, stills the water to a perfect calm.  “Let there be light!  Be still!”  God orders it, but not like us.  There is no sass.  Just the hope that if we would only step into the light, we might see each other for who we are: a daddy, a daughter, being warmed by polka-dot flannel sheets, with closets full of shoes.

I slipped my hand onto her back and slowly rubbed her to sleep.  “Sweet dreams, be still.”  I was still whispering it as I clamored downstairs to change the laundry over.

At the coffee shop where I go to write is a group of women who gather every Tuesday to play cards.  They remind me of my grandmothers.  In their obvious love to be out and away from whatever else they could be doing and whatever else someone else might tell them they should be doing, they remind me of Nana.  In my childhood I played cards with Nana in the afternoons.  We started out playing “Old Maid” and a rather obscure one called, “Authors.”

“Do you have any Henry David Thoreau’s?”

“No, but I have a Longfellow.”

“I’ll take it.”    

I honestly don’t recall how the game ended or how you got to win, but it was from these afternoon escapades around the dining room table that I first wandered upstairs to pull Upton Sinclair’s, “The Jungle” book, from the shelf in the guestroom.  The day Nana discovered me reading it was the day she declared victory once and for all.  It was also the day I remember her pulling the board game, “Know-Your-America,” off the shelf.  “Let’s play this one now.”  Like having mastered Charles Dickens and “A Tale of Two Cities”, I was now ready to tackle Alexander Hamilton and Topeka.

I think Nana would fit nicely around the table with these women at the coffee shop, except she probably wouldn’t dare.  For one thing, they’re not near excited enough about Jane Austen.  Secondly, among the pile of cards in the middle of the table is a pile of coins and one-dollar bills.  There might even be a $5 thrown in there.  I’m pretty sure these women could be arrested for running a game of Craps in a public place, but who’s going to do that?  From the look of them, a night in the slammer would be their pride and joy, and upon discharge they’d have the police raiding every backroom in every gas station from here to California for the next 20 years.  In this they remind me of my Gram, whom I think would have loved playing Bonnie and Clyde with them.  Most of all it’s their demeanor around the tables that reminds me of my grandmothers.  Trying to pretend like no one–not even they–know the power of the hand they’ve been dealt.

Some Tuesdays I show up and their game has already begun.  I sit in a corner, in eye and earshot, and I take in just a few hands before things break up.  Someone has to go pick up their pills or get home to take their pills.

Today I got there early.  I was already a few paragraphs into my Sunday sermon when they pounced in.  They pushed the tables around and together, removing the salt and peppershakers and the miniature plastic tent cards that read, “Please don’t rearrange the furniture.”  In a corner, huddled around the trash barrels, two young waitresses looked on.  You could tell they weren’t going to step away from their trash barrels.

I note that in order to play with these card sharks you have to put $3 down up front, a little something to build the pot and to show that when it comes to winning, you’re willing to risk at least a large cup of coffee.  For several hours the game goes on.  Every now and then they get up and switch seats.  I’m not sure why they do this.  They all seem to know one another fairly well.  Maybe Ethel wants a chance to stare down Edie and to not have to spend all her chips on Myrtle?  At no point does anyone ever pause to ask for clarification over the directions.  On several occasions, however, it is necessary to provide correction.

“We’re dealing with diamonds, not hearts.”

“I threw a diamond.”

“No, you threw a heart.”

“Oh, well it looked like a diamond.  These damn cards.  They should make them so that they talk and tell you what they are.”

No one bothers to point out the obscenity behind such a thought.  I smile to think that this is because everyone is quietly agreeing to how great and helpful talking cards would be.

After a while the game is over and everyone gets up to push the tables and chairs back to where they belong.  It’s hard to tell who won.  Someone does pick up the pile of coins and bills, but only to count it all up and then evenly distribute it among all the sharks.

“There, now we can all come back and play again next week.”

“Oh, I can’t make it next week,” someone says.  “Bob has a doctors appointment.”

“Is that next week?” another asks.  “How is he feeling?”

“He’s doing ok.  Good days and bad days.”

“Do you want someone else to come along to the appointment with you and Bob?”

“No, we’ll be fine.  I’ll see you again in two weeks.  Besides, I wouldn’t want you to have to miss this.”

For sure, I think to myself.  We’re definitely dealing in hearts.