Monday, February 27, 2012

             This past week I watched a wonderful film called The Way, the Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez movie which honors the Camino de Santiago. The Spanish term for the Way of St. James, this pilgrimage has lasted for over a thousand years and is believed to lead to tomb of St. James the Apostle. As I watched that journey unfold I realized that the journey of our faith is a pilgrimage.
            The movie deals with a man who loses his son who was hiking the Way of St. James, as a testament to his love for his son, he takes the rest of the journey as a pilgrimage to honor and memorialize his loss. Aren’t we all on a journey? Aren’t we all hiking towards a place that leads us to a greater understanding of our God and ourselves?      
            As the protagonist goes along the way, he sees things and images that reminds him of his lost son. God appears a lot like that lost son, in images, moments of time that bring us to the heart of faith. This God is one who comes to us in the hardest parts of our journeys and reassures us, God comes to us as we walk the way of life and says there is grace to be experienced. God comes to us and encourages us to enjoy the journey.
            I looked around at my friends; some of them are going on the journey of life for the laughter, the joy. Some are looking for true happiness, some are looking for answers, but the best friends that I like to keep in my life are simply the friends who are on this journey for the journey itself.
            I have a quote that hangs over my bed, and it says the following, “Fall in love or fall in hate. Get inspired or be depressed. Ace a test or flunk a class. Speak the truth or tell a lie and cheat. Dance on tables or sit in the corner. Life is divine chaos, embrace it, forgive yourself and enjoy the ride.” When we’re enjoying the divine chaos of this journey, look around and smell the flowers. Watch a sunrise with a best friend, or see the stars shoot across the sky. It is in those moments that God truly becomes incarnate.
            One of the great hymns of the church is For the Beauty of the Earth. These words speak out to us this day, “For the beauty of the earth
For the glory of the skies,
for the love which from our birth
over and around us lies. Lord of all, to Thee we raise,
this our hymn of grateful praise. For the beauty of each hour, of the day and of the night,
hill and vale, and tree and flower,
Sun and moon, and stars of light. Lord of all, to Thee we raise, this our hymn of grateful praise.” May we this week take comfort that the Lord is the God of our journeys. May we all find God on this journey of life. Thanks be to God.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Remembering Our Nature is Key to Experiencing God



            This week many churches across our community celebrated Ash Wednesday and the imposition of the ashes. Clergy from many different denominations put ashes on people’s foreheads and said something along the lines of, “remember from dust you were created, and to dust you shall return.” What a powerful statement that was!
            As we all start the journey of this Lenten season, when we prepare for Good Friday and what it has in store, may we all be mindful of what those ashes mean. Have you ever really felt the presence of God pressed up against you? I’m reminded of the Bob Dylan song, Make You Feel My Love that was most recently reprised by the Grammy award-winning singer Adele. It so wonderfully states, “I'd go hungry, I'd go black and blue, I'd go crawling down the avenue. Know there's nothing that I wouldn't do to make you feel my love.”
         You see God is a lot like that song, God took a walk down a street on the way to the cross so that we might be free. One of my favorite memories growing up at Broad Street United Methodist Church was seeing the cross that was an ugly symbol of death on Easter morning being adorned with flowers. Life out of death, out of ugliness came beauty.
            Recently I went to a concert that Appalachian was putting on with my friend and her family; Tim O’Brien is a famous folk music singer and has this wonderful song about a pretty fair maiden in the garden. The song talks about how this lady who is missing her fiancé as he is fighting in the war, a stranger approaches her and asks her to marry him. She replies that her fiancé has been gone seven long years and she misses him so she won’t marry him. The stranger replies that maybe he’s been slain, or hurt or even married to someone else. The pretty fair maiden replies that she is still very much in love and would be willing to wait forever for him. The stranger in an unusual sense of beauty reveals his ring that he was wearing, the same her fiancé had. She realized that he was in fact the fiancé she had waited for.
            People of faith God is amidst our ashes. When life seems it’s darkest God is at work making Easters out of our darkness. So this Lent look for that Easter of unending joy. Look, and you may see God. God may not always be as obvious as we would like God to be, but God is that fiancé who comes home. God is trying to let us feel God’s love. We must be willing to put those ashes on our forehead, remember that we are dust, and let the love in. Thanks be to God, that we are dust, but never forget that God created the dust that formed us!

Friday, February 17, 2012

Opening the Windows and Letting Fresh Air In


One of my favorite stories comes from a 2006 film entitled Amazing Grace that introduced me to the person in history by the name of William Wilberforce. William was a key figure in the abolition of the British slave trade. Wilberforce is accurately portrayed in the movie as putting so much into his work and convictions, that he becomes physically ill.
            It got me to thinking, has your soul ever been tired? I think we all can admit that there are times in our lives that we are spiritually worn out. Our souls become tired, we are physically, mentally, and spiritually worn out and we just want to throw our hands up in disgust at what is going on with our lives.
            How does one deal with their soul being tired? I think the answer lies in the hope of that old hymn, “His oath, His covenant, His blood, 
support me in the whelming flood.
When all around my soul gives way,
 He then is all my hope and stay. On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand.”
            I suffer from a type of clinical depression. Often I find it easy to stay in bed, content with letting life pass me by. There are days my soul is tired and I don’t want to even move. But I am starting to realize that God is at work. This doesn’t explain why things happen to good people or why we suffer, but to take consolation that God is at work is good enough.
            While it would be easy to let the depression I face consume me, I can take consolation that while that whelming flood may overtake my soul, God is there and offering a mother-like hand. I love the line in a song that says, “you take my brokenness and make it beautiful” I may not be able to thank God for that depression I face, but I can thank God for the beauty of the friends and family who support me.
            In life it is finding those little moments of joy, the moments of grace that burst onto the scene of our busy tiring lives. My mom often says that when the sun is peaking through the clouds that God has opened the windows of heaven. What if we looked at those little moments of joy as God opening the windows of our lives and letting fresh air inside?
            John Newton when he penned the hymn Amazing Grace, which takes a prevalent role in the movie I mentioned above, was considering the beauty of God opening the windows in his own life. Newton said in the last verse of that iconic hymn, “The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forbear to shine; but God, who called me here below,
will be forever mine.”  This week be thankful that when the sun doesn’t shine, God still opens a window. 

Sunday, February 5, 2012


                  If you’ve ever seen the Broadway musical, Avenue Q, one of the climactic songs in that play is talking about the fine, fine line of love. The song goes, “there’s a fine, fine line between love and waste of time” that line speaks to the existence of humanity these days. Here at school, my friends often use the phrase gray area, we love a world of black and white, but sometimes we need to live in the gray.
            This week many people will be celebrating a certain type of love. Valentine’s Day is an incredible chance to express love to friends, spouses and partners in a very tangible way. Many of us will celebrate with chocolates, teddy bears, a nice dinner and flowers. Our hearts are full of love and cherishing each other, in a world bent on hate we’d be content to sit and not love our neighbors, friends, spouses and our world.
            I recently went to Discovery Place in Charlotte to see the mummy exhibit that is going on right now. I learned from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, that in the ancient Egyptian religions, it was believed that when you died your soul would go to final judgment before passing onto the Great Beyond. The deceased soul’s heart would be weighed against a feather. If the heart had been good and true it would weigh less than the feather and pass onto paradise. If the heart had been full of hate, it would weigh more than the feather and was condemned to the Egyptian form of Hades. I tell you this because we often feel that it is easier to hate than it is to love, but as my best friend often has to remind me, “the easy road is generally the wrong road.”
            Here is my challenge to you this week. Weigh your heart. Weigh your heart through the lens and context of faith, and see what it looks like. If our lives lived fully are what God intends for them to be, then God in infinite grace and love will welcome us with open arms. We just have to continually search for that meaning, that context in which we should live.
            I have a friend who is leaving the university to return home for the semester. After going through a rough time this friend decided it was best to take a break from the hustle and bustle of the university setting. As I sat with my friend the other night after hearing this, I was reminded of my love for her and her importance in my life. As I weighed my heart like I challenged you to do I realized something that speaks to my friend leaving. The quote came to mind, “Love is not a matter of what happens in life.  It's a matter of what's happening in your heart.”   
            Though my friend may be leaving I know that she has such a special place in my heart. As I stared at those mummies at Discovery Place and read that phrase about the Book of the Dead, I was reminded that God created us through the ages to love, to share and to be loved. So yes, there is a fine, fine line between love and a waste of time. But my question to you is: which side of the line do you fall on?

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Approaching Black History Month Faithfully


As February marks Black History Month, I had the opportunity to see Dr. Angela Davis, famed civil rights activist lecture. Before she took the stage to speak we all joined in singing the hymn that has been dubbed the “African-American National Anthem” the hymn, Lift Every Voice and Sing can be found in many of our church hymnals. The hymn was written at the turn of the 20th century in an effort to subtly speak out against racism and the South’s Jim Crow laws.
            One of the best lines of the hymn comes from the third verse. James H. Johnson penned the following, “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
thou who hast by thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.” It got me thinking about our silent tears. Tears that have rested through the ages on the cheeks of humanity, tears that create division amongst the people God created.
            Tears of despair, depression and anguish have flowed while racism, hatred, war and prejudice take the center stage. The weary years of time spent fighting for equality and justice have brought about change, but as I look to God and what God has in store for humanity, we have miles to go on the path to righteousness.
            I am reminded of what the Buddhist faith speaks of when the Buddha said, “If we were see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change” When we experience the newness of grace in our lives, how them do we translate that to our reality? God calls us to abandon the racism, hatred, and prejudices that have plagued us for too long. When God claims us with grace we are washed away into the newness of life. We are water washed and spirit born in a way that brings about new things, like love, peace and justice.
            There is a legend that during the persecution of Christians by Emperor Decius around 250AD there were seven Christian youths who were set to be executed, before this happened they went to a cave and began to pray. They fell asleep and woke up some 150-200 years later during the reign of Theodosius the Second, where they found crosses openly displayed and Christianity accepted and encouraged. Whenever I hear the story of the Seven Sleepers as they are called, certainly it can be considered miraculous but in reality they slept through the revolution of Christianity. The question we can take from this is, are we going to sleep through a revolution and let it pass us by? Are we going to be a people who change the world or let the world change us?
            People like Martin Luther King Jr., the Tuskegee Airmen, and many others join hands with people like Mother Teresa, John F. Kennedy, along with others to create revolutions. How are we going to respond when God calls us to be the revolution that society needs? How are we going to respond when God calls us to be the change we want to see in the world? Hopefully we will join in singing that wonderful line from that wonderful hymn, “Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of liberty.”

Describing God



In my spare time, I have been reading a book entitled, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of Faith by Father Robert Barron. While I am not Catholic, this book speaks to the depth and height and length of God’s love and grace by trying to describe God. This book is one I highly recommend.
            In the book, Father Barron describes God using an early medieval theologian, St. Anselm of Canterbury. St. Anselm painted a picture of God in a way in which sums up the mystery of the Great Divine. St. Anselm states, “That than which nothing greater can be thought is God” I would also add to my description something St. Augustine said long ago, “if you can understand it, it isn’t God” We live in a world that is set on naming God. We live in a society that doesn’t believe in something unless we can put a name and a face to it.
            I am often fascinated when I walk into churches and see the depictions of the incarnate God, Jesus Christ painted in a light that often mirrors the beliefs, practices and even racial likeness of the congregation. You see in my experience of God, there is something so much more than a painting to describe the likeness of God.  I look into the faces of the people surrounding me, I look into the religions I am studying in school, I look into the nature that surrounds me in the Appalachia region and there, is where I find God.
            One of my favorite descriptions of God comes from the story of Moses, when Moses at the burning bush comes to ask for God’s name. God simply replies, “I am what I am” God is greater than any description we could ever tag God with. There is a certain majesty in knowing we will search our entire lives to find God’s description, and often it was in front of us the entire time. So the next time you’re up in the Appalachian Mountains, walking downtown in Statesville, or on the beautiful outer banks of our state, try for a change looking for God’s existence and try then to experience God. But those are just a few places, how about hospital beds, in the midst of death, in the midst of life? How about in a park, in a church, in a restaurant? Let me put it this way, if I asked you to make a cherry pie, you would say that you bring together cherries, sugar, flour, water, and the skill of the baker. If you’re like me and you can’t cook, you might ask for God’s presence as well. But then I realized something, God’s presence is already there. God is the reason there are all of those elements.
            Think about it in the context of a wonderful hymn, “God, who stretched the spangled heavens
infinite in time and place, flung the suns in burning radiance
through the silent fields of space, 
we, Your children in your likeness, 
share inventive powers with You;
Great Creator, still creating,
show us what we yet may do.” May the God in whom which we can only praise show us the reality of our existence, so that we may in turn come to find the meaning of life and of God.