Keep Awake!

Pentecost 22A 2011

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11                                                                                 

Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape! But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness.

So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.

Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing. 

It didn’t take long for two crises to emerge in the early Christian Church.  Whenever you get worried about some misunderstanding or difference of opinion or even some scandal in the Christian Church today, take heart:  we’re just like the church of the apostles in the first century.  When you read the New Testament, you discover attempted bribery, sexual immorality, arguments between leaders leading to the breakup of mission teams, organizational chaos, a shortage of funds, and jealousies.  They were muddling through in 50 AD just like we’re muddling through two millennia later.

But there are two deep spiritual/theological crises in the first century.  The first centers around the relationship between Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus.  For whom had Jesus come, and for whom had he died?  He was a Jew, and the whole concept of Messiah was a Jewish idea.  More specifically, to follow Jesus, did you first have to become Jewish?  The Apostle James, Jesus’ brother, clearly thought so.  St. Paul, who was Jewish, thought not.  And you and I are disciples of Jesus because Paul won that argument.

The second deep crisis was how believers were to understand the delay in Jesus’ return to defeat evil and establish the Kingdom of God.  At Pentecost, Peter explained the descent of the Holy Spirit as the beginning of the end of the world.  The church delayed organizing itself and discouraged marriage because they thought the world was going to end at any moment.  There’s a new movie that is coming out about how life on Earth is about to end because of its impending collision with another planet called Melancholia, which is also the name of the movie.  One character in the movie who is chronically depressed finds herself much better equipped to face the end of the world than her happy go lucky, optimistic friend:  the first was right about things getting worse, and the second was wrong about things getting better.  For the early church, what did it mean that Jesus had not returned?  Did they misunderstand?  Was Jesus coming back at all?  Or – as thought the church in Thessalonica – maybe it had happened and they had missed it and were left behind.  Does that sound familiar, with this year’s proclamation by Harold Camping that the world was ending?

Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians was written around AD 51 – eighteen years or so after Jesus’ death and resurrection, and the founding of the church.  The people who had actually known Jesus were dying off.  What was the fate of believers who died before Jesus’ return?  Our belief about what happens when we die – that we go to be with God in eternity – was not universally understood or believed in the first century.  So, in chapter 4, Paul assures the Christians in Thessalonica that when Christ returns – Paul still thinks any day now – that there will first be a resurrection of the dead, and then the living will join the resurrected to live with Christ for ever.  That passage was the heart of John Nelson Darby’s -- a 19^th century English clergyman – invention of the word rapture, to describe his new interpretation of the end of history.  Some other time I’ll explain why Darby’s dispensationalism and theories about the rapture -- which have become so hugely popular among conservative Christians that they think this is what the faith has always believed – are bunk.  For the moment, what Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4 is to reassure the church that their dead loved ones have not missed eternal life with Christ.

In the meantime, Paul asks, how shall we live as we wait for the end of the world?  Do we just go about business as usual?  Do we drop everything and go sit on a hill, scanning the skies?  Do we, as did Harold Camping’s followers, put our life savings into billboards telling people that the end is near?  What do we do while we wait?

We’re all waiting, you know.  That’s the theme of Samuel Beckett’s famous play, Waiting for Godot, in which Godot never arrives.  And, if the world doesn’t end in our lifetimes either with a bang or with a whimper, our worlds end when we close our eyes in death.  The central question of life is how to live while we’re waiting for the end.

Here’s Paul’s answer: But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness.

So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.

The great temptation, Paul is telling us, is not to pay attention.  Few of us die in our sleep at 95:  while modern medicine and the food and drug administration and living in a safe country and safe community and airbags and seat belts have extended our lifespan, accident, illness, evil, and genetics still wreak havoc.  But even the best and luckiest of us, dying at 95, realize how much they missed along the way, because they didn’t pay attention.  They slept through it, or they were just numb.

I hate to ruin the reputation of the University of Virginia, but I actually made it through college without getting high or drunk.  That’s not because I was or am some great saint, but because I am the world’s biggest coward.  I’ve still never been drunk or high on illegal drugs.  But the first time I was prescribed a heavy dose of codeine because I was sick, I had a revelation.  Suddenly I completely understood drug addiction:  not only did I feel no pain, I didn’t feel anything.  I simply didn’t care.  The world could have ended in front of me, and it would have made no difference whatsoever.  And, as Psychiatrist John Bulette says, many people are in such emotional and spiritual pain in their lives that when they abuse drugs, most of which, like alcohol and cocaine and heroin, are actually depressants, the freedom from pain they experience feels like a high, even though it’s actually a low.

You don’t have to use drugs to be numbed and to lose attention.  Last week I talked about how multi-tasking keeps us from paying attention and makes us numb.  This morning I want to talk about a different kind of sleepy numbness that prevents us from seeing where God is at work in the world.

It will come for most of us in eleven days.  Sometime in the middle of the afternoon or maybe a little later, we will push back from the Thanksgiving table and groan that we can’t possibly eat another bite.  In many households, the men folk will stagger off to collapse in front of a television, and pretend to watch a football game.  But they won’t.  They’ll go to sleep.  I realized this week that’s the reason why the Detroit Lions always play on Thanksgiving Day – because nobody cares whether they win or not.  Of course this year, they’re doing really well for the first time in thirty years, and this may produce a major crisis in American family life if people miss their naps and actually watch the game.  This may finally be the crisis that forces Jesus to return and end the world.

Paul warns believers to be sober.  What is drunkenness but overindulgence?  We take things that are fine in moderation – not just food and drink, but everything else – and assume if a little bit is good, than a whole lot must be better.  A friend of mine who has studied American Indian religion says that Indians only used tobacco for special ceremonial purposes.  They never used it the way smokers use it now, and look what happened when people overindulged.

More is not more.  More, it turns out, is usually less.  And more – more food, more money, more house, more toys, more clothes, more activity, more entertainment, more sex, more whatever – becomes so overwhelming that we become numb.  We just want to go lie down and take a nap.  And so we miss everything.

The ancients knew better.  They created the season of Advent before Christmas.  They created a season of penance, fasting, self-denial, prayer, and humiliation before the great festival.  That season of denial was to sharpen people’s focus so they could notice what was happening around them.  What do we do?  We fill the four weeks before Christmas with an orgy of activity, of food, of noise, of shopping – and then can’t figure out on Christmas evening why we feel so numb, and why we feel like we missed something important.

We’re all waiting.  So, what do we do while we wait, all our lives long or short?  Paul says:

1.    pay attention.  Don’t get so overwhelmed and overindulged that you sleep through the miracles.  Self-denial sharpens all the senses, especially the spiritual ones.

2.   put on the breastplate of faith and love, and the helmet of salvation.  In the wonderful baseball film (not Field of Dreams!) Bull Durham, the veteran catcher Crash Davis is challenged to a fight by young pitcher Nuke LaLoosh.  Crash tosses him a baseball and tells Nuke to hit him in the chest from ten feet away.  Nuke refuses, saying it would kill Crash.  Crash tells him he can’t hit the broadside of a barn.  Nuke rears back in anger and throws, missing Crash and breaking a window instead.  Crash knew that Nuke was out of control and would do him no harm, which was the problem with his pitching, too.  When we put on the breastplate of love and faith and the helmet of salvation, we don’t have to put any energy into self-preservation.  Our constant and doomed efforts to save ourselves are precisely what exhaust us.  But when we trust our lives to God, then we’re free to pay attention to the miracles all around us.

We’re all waiting.  That’s what we do.  It’s what we do while we’re waiting that makes all the difference.  So, keep awake.  Don’t overindulge.  And don’t keep trying to save yourself.  There are miracles leaning on every lamppost, if we’ll just look.

Life in the Wilderness: Make Gods For Us

Exodus 32:1-14                                                                                       

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. He took the gold from them, formed it in a mold, and cast an image of a calf; and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.” They rose early the next day, and offered burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.

The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!  The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.” But Moses implored the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’“ And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.

One of my mother’s stories about me – and, you must understand that as my mother grew older her memory became very creative – was about a time when my parents took me to dinner at a Howard Johnson’s.  Do Howard Johnson’s still exist, with their orange roofs and fried clams?  That restaurant’s great claim to fame back in the day was that they offered twenty-eight flavors of ice cream.  So, after the main course, the waitress asked us if we would like some dessert, and my parents extolled the wonders of twenty-eight flavors of ice cream.  “Go ahead,” my mother insisted, “get some ice cream!”  So, I asked the waitress what flavors they had.  She went through the entire twenty-eight item list, and said, “So, what would you like?”  After a long pause, I answered “Vanilla.”

Sometimes, when we are confronted with too many choices, or when we’re in unfamiliar territory and have no idea where to turn, all we can do is pull out something familiar.  How else do you explain McDonald’s restaurants in downtown Paris or New York or San Francisco – or even Carytown, where there are hundreds of amazing places to eat?   We complain about elected officials, but over the years the average rate of re-election of incumbents is well over 80%[1].  The average American household receives 130 TV channels, but only watches 15 per week.[2]  In 1980, the average American supermarket stocked 15,000 different items.  Now the average number is 50,000.[3]  How many new and different items do you buy every week?  When we feel like we have lost our way and are overwhelmed by the choices, we turn to what we know, to what is familiar, to what seemed valuable in the past.

Moses had been up on Mount Sinai talking to God, according to Exodus 24, for forty days and nights.  As if that’s not long enough, remember that in the Bible, forty means a lot.  Maybe it really was six weeks, maybe it was even longer, but the Hebrews were left at the foot of the mountain without their leader, in hostile territory, without any instructions.  It’s pretty much the way those of us who are Apple Computer fans feel this week after the death of Steve Jobs.  When you’re lost in the wilderness and your leader disappears, you need some comfort, some direction, and some certainty in your life.  So, the Hebrews went to Moses’ brother and second-in-command, Aaron, and demanded that he make some gods for them to worship.  Maybe this mountain God Moses had led them away from their homes and jobs and all that was familiar was just a hoax.  Maybe Moses was dead, or had skipped town.  Let’s go back to something we can see, something we can touch, something that’s familiar and certain.  Make us some gods, Aaron.

Aaron, politician that he is, reads the polls of a hostile electorate and gives the people what all good politicians give – not what they need, but what they want.  This, of course, requires a contribution from the people, so Moses asks them for their gold.  They surrender their gold to their leader, who makes a mold in the shape of a calf, melts the gold and pours it in the mold, then opens the mold and presents this thing made he has made from the people’s jewelry as a divinity:  These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!

A thousand years later, the prophet Isaiah would ridicule the whole process of idolatry.  In Isaiah 44, he talks about a man who plants a tree and watches it grow, then cuts it down, and with half of it he makes a fire to warm himself while he carves the other half into an idol and then bows down and worships this thing he knows is anything but eternal and divine.  But it’s familiar.  And, of course, being something that he has made, it’s less than himself.  Which is ever so much the point.

When we’re in the wilderness, when life seems out of control, when everything that once seemed safe and secure and familiar has disappeared, it’s a natural thing for us to want some small sense of certainty and control in our lives.  A child takes a favorite toy or stuffed animal on a trip.  We put pictures of our families on our desks or in our suitcases or wallets when we travel.  When we are ill, we want comfort food that is familiar and soothing.  In crises, we want to be surrounded by our home and family and friends.

Or, when we feels as though life is out of control, we want some small sign, somewhere, that we are still in control of something, anything.  This is why sometimes people whose lives are falling apart become obsessive about some small thing that seems to make no sense, except that it’s still something they can control.  I remember a woman who was dying of lung cancer probably caused by her lifelong cigarette habit, who insisted to the day she died that she was going to continue to smoke.  It wasn’t just that she was addicted; it was that even if it killed her, this was something she was going to do because she could.  It was the last thing left in her life over which she had any control, even though, ironically, it was controlling her.  But that’s not the way it seemed to her.

We all have sources of familiarity and comfort that we turn to when everything seems out of control.  But if, as was the case with the Hebrews at the foot of Mount Sinai, we attach ultimate meaning to something we have made with our own hands or minds or hearts, then that thing separates us from the new world that God is trying to bring us to on the other side of the Wilderness.  In the Bible, that’s always the purpose of Wilderness, whether Abraham’s journeys, or Isaac’s, or Jacob’s; or the flood for Noah and his family; or the Babylonian captivity for the Jews; or the temptations in the desert for Jesus:  on the other side there’s a new identity, a new relationship with God, a new and better reality waiting.  In the wilderness, in the desert, in the trials and tribulations and confusion, God’s people have to leave their old values, their old ways of thinking and being and understanding behind before they can receive the new life, new call, new identity waiting for them on the other side.  When they take their old values and turn them into idols and worship them, giving them ultimate meaning and purpose, it is impossible for the people to be free to enter the new world into which God is bringing them.  That is why very few who crossed the Red Sea crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land forty years later.

Our world seems to be in a wilderness.  Our nation seems to be in a wilderness.  The church seems to be in a wilderness.  And many of us, insecure about jobs and health and family and meaning and purpose, feel as if we’re lost in a wilderness.  It’s uncharted territory, and we’re not certain about our leaders.  But the story of the golden calf tells us that while it may be the most tempting thing to do, the worst thing we can do when we feel lost is to invent our own securities, just so we have something we can understand and control.  The worst thing we can do is go back to Egypt. 

Instead, we have to live in this uncomfortable place, holding tightly to each other and to the word from the mountain.  God is taking us to a new place, a place we’ve never been before.  There are some new instructions coming from the mountain, and we have to wait for them, not invent our own.  And, when we follow the fire and the smoke, when we eat the manna God has given us just for today, when we keep the instructions we have and not invent new ones for ourselves, then miracles happen, and new worlds open before our eyes.

We all want to make our own gods, whether they look like calves, or more likely, like mirrors.  But the God who is beyond our control has something planned for us so much greater than all our schemings.

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[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php

[2] http://www.buzzsugar.com/How-Many-TV-Channels-Do-You-Watch-182485

[3] http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=762490

Life in the Wilderness: The Ten Descriptions

Pentecost 16A 2011

Exodus 20:1-20                                                                                        

Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work.

Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance, and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.”

The story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis tells us that, right from the beginning, we human beings were a perverse lot.  There’s something in us that, when we are told we have to do this or not to do that, we dig in our heels and mutter, “Nobody’s going to tell me what I can or can’t do.”  Dick and Kathy Harris and I have a shared loved for Chesapeake Bay Retrievers.  I was raised, literally, by one when I was a baby and little boy.  Chesapeakes are wonderful but stubborn dogs, and every one I’ve ever known, when told to do something he doesn’t want to do, lowers his head and looks at you with an expression that says, “I know what you’re saying, but I’m not going to do it.”  Sadly, that’s not a trait limited to smelly big brown dogs.

So, when we hear the phrase ten commandments, the Chesapeake in us says, Commandments!  What do you mean – commandments?  And even for the most faithful of us, these orders from on high set up a black and white relationship with God.  Either you keep a commandment or you don’t.   And as soon as you don’t, you’re at a distance from God.  So we develop sophisticated shadings of interpretation:  keeping the sabbath means sometime during the week don’t go to work.  Not committing adultery doesn’t apply if you’re not married, or to anything other than intercourse.  Not stealing doesn’t apply to our taxes or to how we pay others.  Not taking the Lord’s name in vain only applies to cussing.  And so, like our ancestors Adam and Eve, we find ways to turn God’s desire for us to live in harmony with each other and with God into justification for doing things exactly the way we want to do them.

Some years ago I heard a teacher of Biblical Studies – and I honestly can’t remember who it was – say that it’s more helpful and accurate to understand the Decalogue less as decrees handed down from on high and more as a description of what life lived in love with God and with other people looks like.  Here are ten images of the world God created in the beginning, and towards which God is drawing us.  Sports psychologists work with athletes to visualize the perfect jump shot, the perfect dive, the perfect golf swing, so they can act out that picture.  We have images in us of the perfect house, the perfect vacation, the perfect party, the perfect job.  And, every now and then, we get it right.  We know we get it right because the reality matches the image.

So, let’s walk, briskly, through these ten descriptions of the life God wants us to live:

·      I am the Lord your God:  you shall have no other Gods before me.  The picture begins with a relationship:  I am your God.  God has made us for relationship with him and with each other.  Everything that follows from here is only possible when we are in right relationship with God, the heart of which is you shall have no other Gods before me.  This is a jealous, monogamous God.  We cannot have two masters.  Faithful life is a life with one object of worship.  Mind you, gods aren’t just in the sky:  they are anything to which we attach ultimate, saving importance.  Philosophies, loyalties, economies, desires and values to which we give ultimate authority are incompatible with right relationship with this God.

·      You shall not make an idol.  I suspect that few of us have statues of pagan goddesses in our homes, to which we offer sacrifice.  But there are all kinds of ways in which we make the Almighty Creator of the Universe over in our own image.  The purpose of an idol in ancient times was to assert that human beings were bigger than the gods that they made.  Here’s a test for idolatry:  if there’s anything in this world that you believe can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, then you have made of that thing an idol.

·      You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord.  This is not about cussing.  In the Bible, names, including the name of the Lord, represent a person’s character.  We preserve that when we talk about something giving us a good or a bad name.  You and I are marked with the name of Christ – Christians – little Christs.  When our lives are inconsistent with the character of Christ, we make wrongful use of God’s name.  People really are watching us to see whether we walk the talk.  I believe God is far more hurt by the slander of his character with our lives that he is by people cussing.

·      Remember the sabbath day, and keep it separated for special use.  Jesus taught that the sabbath was made for people, not people for the sabbath.  Faithful life together in God is not frantic, exhausted activity leading to a collapse in front of a football game on the weekend.  The picture of a godly community demonstrates that the world can get on just fine without our hyperactivity.  Faithful life says no to the world, so we can say yes to God and to each other.  Our church leadership, trying to help families, moved the bulk of our church activities to Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, so people could enjoy sabbath time.  It’s not going well, because too many of us are not saying no to the frenzy of the world.   I am more and more convinced that the answer to the mess the world is in is not to work harder:  it’s sabbath.

·      Honor your father and mother.  One of the curious benefits of the collapse of our economy may be that multiple generations are going to have to live together again, they way they have for millions of years.  Honoring the ancestors means to learn from them and value what they – living and dead – have to teach us.  The Book of Ecclesiastes said two and a half millennia ago that there was nothing new under the sun.  Everything we’re going through now spiritually, financially, politically, socially, intellectually can be found in our history.  Yes, we have new technologies to deliver the crises of modernity, but the content is shockingly familiar to history.  That’s why the Bible is eternally relevant:  people were going through the same struggles four thousand years ago we are now.  Faithful life with God and with each other learns from the past and lives in context.

·      You shall not murder.  You shall not commit adultery.  You shall not steal.  You shall not bear false witness.  You shall not covet what belongs to your neighbor.  These are all about taking what does not belong to us, whether it be a life, a relationship, the truth, or a piece of property.  Life is not at our disposal – we belong to each other.  People are not objects to be used or manipulated or thrown away at our convenience.  The picture of faithful life together, with God, is one in which people cherish each other as sacred children of a common Father.

We’ve been talking about Life in the Wilderness this fall.  We live in a world where it seems all the boundaries, all the rules, all the expectations are breaking down and so one solution is to impose commandments written in stone on the mountaintop.  That does work for some people, who need hard and clear rules.  Last week I talked about the different stages of cognitive, moral, and faith development, and how there are people stuck in that stage where if you’re good you get rewarded and if you’re bad you get punished.  But I suspect that most of here are in a different place – the same place as all our ancestors who found pretty creative ways to get around the commandments for their own convenience.

So, what would it look like if we began pursuing a vision of our life together where all our values and loyalties depend on God, a God so much bigger than all our attempts to mold and define him?  What if every moment of our lives were consistent with the character of that God?  What if we trusted God to run the world without our hyperactivity, and just pulled the plug one day a week?  What if we really honored our parents by learning the lessons they have to teach us?  What if we stopped living lives of appetite, consumption, and manipulation, and were thankful for what we had and who we have, loving and respecting and cherishing each other as gifts?  Maybe – just maybe – it would look like the Promised Land.

Life in the Wilderness: Traveling By Stages

Pentecost 15A 2011 

Exodus 17:1-17                                                                                                

        From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Friday night a satellite fell out of orbit and burned up on re-entry, except for a few pieces that landed wherever they landed.  This week the news carried stories about whether it was at all likely that any of us would get hit by a piece of satellite.  NASA calculated that the odds of a person being hit was 1 in 3200, but, because there are 6 billion of us on the planet, that means that the likelihood of you being hit was 1 in 3200 times 6 million, which is something like 1 in 2 quadrillion.  We had far better odds, NASA said, of winning the lottery, which is 1 in 175 million.

And yet, people play the lottery.  Maybe some of you were out in your yards Friday trying to catch a piece of satellite, but I think you’re smarter than that (plus, it was raining).  What makes the lottery so attractive is the remote possibility that we can become instantly rich, without having to work for it for years and years.  That’s not the only lottery people would like to win – wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a pill we could take that would make all our fat vanish overnight, or a process that would instantly implant all the knowledge we needed so we didn’t have to go to school for twelve or sixteen or twenty years?  How many of us would like to have an instant cure for cancer, or heart disease, or fibromyalgia, or lupus, or arthritis, so we wouldn’t have to go through surgeries and treatments and therapy?  I can’t count the times over the years when I have stood by a hospital bed, or said to a family grieving the death of a loved one, or said to struggling parents or to people whose marriage is dissolving, “I wish I had a magic wand to make all this better.”  And I wish that thirty-eight years ago when I was appointed to those three little churches in Madison County, I had known the little bit I know now about myself and life and God and ministry.  We all want to win the lottery.  But that’s not how it works.

From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded.  When you look at a map of the Exodus, like the one on the front of your bulletin today, the route makes no sense.  Why didn’t Moses and the Hebrews make a beeline along the coast of the Mediterranean for Canaan?  Why did they wander around the Sinai peninsula, taking forty years to travel the same distance as from here to Baltimore?

The Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded.  Not stages from the old West, mind you.  They traveled by fits and starts.  They wandered, sometimes in circles.  They would travel a few miles, and then camp for months or for years.  And, amazingly, the Bible says all this was as the Lord commanded.  Why? 

In Margery Williams’ fairy tale too wonderful just for children, The Velveteen Rabbit, the rabbit is a toy largely ignored by the little boy who owns him, and he is kept in the nursery cupboard with the other toys.  He is befriended by the Skin Horse, an ancient and battered toy who once belonged to the boy’s uncle.  Other toys in the cupboard, especially the mechanical ones and the tin soldiers, make fun of the horse and the rabbit, because they aren’t real.  

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."[1]

The Hebrews needed to become real before they entered the Promised Land.  They had to leave behind their old ways of believing and acting, they had to be loved by God for a long, long time, and they had to learn a new way of thinking and being before they could live into the promise that God had for them.  And, the Bible tells us, some of them never made it.  Many died in the Wilderness.  Some wandered off on their own.  Some probably went back to Egypt.  They traveled slowly, starting and stopping, in stages, because that’s how God designed them.  And us.

Those of you who were trained to be teachers learned, somewhere along the way, about the work of a psychologist named Jean Piaget.  Piaget said that children pass through stages of intellectual development.  From birth to about age two, children learn through the motions they make and the sensations that result from those movements.  Our granddaughter, at fifteen months, has just learned to walk, and is learning to talk by experimenting with sounds she makes with her mouth.  The next stage, Piaget said, about to age seven, is when children learn that words and objects can stand for something else, but they are still very self-centered and assume that everyone sees things from their point of view.

From about seven to eleven, children learn that others don’t always see things the way they do.  They begin to imagine things outside their own experience.  Then, from about age eleven on, children can begin to reason in abstract ways, and think about possibilities and ideologies.

About fifty years ago a psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg said that there are stages of moral reasoning that parallel what Piaget said about intellectual development.  Very young children behave so they won’t be punished.  Then they begin to see that other people have different points of view, so they begin to negotiate:  “what’s in this for me?”  The next stage focuses on social conformity:  “But Mom, everybody has a cell phone!”  Or, this is what good people do.  Then, Kohlberg said, young adults realize that there are different ideas about right and wrong, so they negotiate an agreement with each other so they can live with each other.  That’s the basis of a functioning society.

Now, developing intellectually or morally doesn’t come automatically on a third or seventh or twenty-first birthday.  Some people get stuck:  there are adults, for example, who steadfastly maintain that if a car is in front of you, even if you’re staying the same distance behind them, they’re traveling faster than you are.  There are adults who insist that God rewards you for being good and punishes you for being bad, and there’s only one way of looking at life and that’s from their own eyes -- which is what a three-year old believes.  This is why sometimes it’s so hard for us to discuss moral issues with each other:  people are operating at such different stages of their intellectual and moral development.

About forty years ago a young theologian named Jim Fowler took Piaget and Kohlberg’s stages of development and said there were corresponding stages of faith development.  Small children live in a wonderful world of fantasy and magic, and receive stories about God with trust from parents and others.  When children are school-age, they become much more logical and literal about their beliefs.  If the Bible says Jonah was swallowed by a big fish, then he was.  When children become teenagers, they are most influenced by the beliefs of their peers, and they have a hard time seeing out of their own box.  Young adults begin seeing outside their own boxes, and become disillusioned with their former faith.  That’s why there are so few young adults in church – they’ve outgrown their old faith, and are in the process of deciding what they do believe.  In midlife, people realize the limits of their logic and begin to embrace paradox and mystery, outside the boxes.  Lastly, said Fowler, a few people come to a place where they see a great oneness in diversity, and abandon themselves to serve others without concern for themselves.

I was blessed to have studied with Jim Fowler when I was in seminary.  His work has become hugely important in Christian education and faith development.  Fowler was trying to teach us that we all travel through the wilderness in stages.   We don’t get there – become real – all at once, like winning the lottery.  That’s a lie that was promised by generations of revival preachers who told their congregations that if they would just come down to the altar rail and give their lives to Jesus, then all their problems would be instantly solved.  I wish!  I believe in coming down to the altar rail and giving your life to Jesus.  I’ve done it.  I did for the first time at age seventeen, and it did change my life.  But it wasn’t winning the lottery.  I’ve had to grow and change and develop, much too slowly, and I’ve learned that I have to go to that altar rail every day and surrender my life to Jesus and let God change what God can that day.  And I expect that to go on, not just until I die, but for eternity.  We journey by stages, as the Lord commanded.

This is why if you still believe as you did when you were three, or seven, or seventeen, or twenty-seven, or as you did yesterday, you’re never going to make it to the Promised Land.  This is why all of you who come to worship but skip Sunday School, or our weekday Bible studies, or fellowship groups, aren’t on the journey.  If you can’t look back at the way you believed or thought or acted or felt a year ago and see some difference in who you are now, you’re stuck.  A friend of mine said some years ago that he measures his journey with God by asking himself the question, “Who do you love today that you didn’t love a year ago?”  If he can’t answer that question, he says he’s not following God.

Thirty-two years ago, when I was about to be ordained an Elder, Bishop Goodson lined up all of us who were being ordained in front of the Annual Conference, and asked us the same questions that have been asked all Methodist preachers since John Wesley formulated the questions in the 1700’s.  Goodson liked to do a little sermon between each question.  One of the questions is:  “Are you going on to perfection?”  Before we could answer, the Bishop said, “If you’re not going on to perfection, where are you going?  If you’re going on to imperfection, you’ve already arrived.”

We travel to the Promised Land by stages, as the Lord commanded.  This is how God made us.  There’s no lottery, no pill, no magic wand to bring us to the fullness of God’s design for us.  It’s long, hard work that literally takes an eternity.  And if you’re in the same place you were at seventeen, or last year, or yesterday, you’re in a rut.  And, as another preacher friend of mine used to say, a rut is just a grave with both ends knocked out.

We journey by stages. "It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."[2]

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[1] Williams, Margery, The Velveteen Rabbit, New Your, Bantam Doubleday, 1922

[2] Ibid.

Life in the Wilderness: Quit Your Whining

Pentecost 14A 2011

Exodus 16:2-15                                                                                             
The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.” So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, “In the evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your complaining against the Lord. For what are we, that you complain against us?” And Moses said, “When the Lord gives you meat to eat in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning, because the Lord has heard the complaining that you utter against him—what are we? Your complaining is not against us but” against the Lord. Then Moses said to Aaron, “Say to the whole congregation of the Israelites, ‘Draw near to the Lord, for he has heard your complaining.’“ And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked toward the wilderness, and the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. The Lord spoke to Moses and said, “I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, ‘At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.’“

In the evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. 

One of the persistent themes of conversations I’ve had with people this past week, as we begin to genuinely recover from Hurricane Irene and examine how we felt during and after the storm, has been how stressed everyone felt after the worst was over.  Of course, as the wind was howling and trees were crashing down around – and sometimes on – our homes in our powerless dark, our stress levels were off the scale.  But two weeks later, so many people have shared with me that they still feel tired and anxious and on edge, as though they continue to carry a great burden.  These are people who came through the storm relatively unscathed.  Vicki and I, for example, only lost power for three days and had one significant limb come down from a tree in our back yard, but we’ve been aware that our baseline stress level – not counting parishioner emergencies or crises at Hallmark or the Orioles edging towards losing 100 games – is higher than normal.  I think we’re still recovering from the storm.

But, it seems to me and to almost everyone I ask, we all seem to feel on edge.  The stock market roller coasters up and down, and we wonder if we’ll be able to eat in retirement.  The news celebrates yet another governmental impasse, the debt continues to climb, people continue to search in vain for work, the weather gets weirder and weirder, loved ones fall in front yards and parking lots or get sick for no clear reason.  We are uncertain people who live in uncertain times with uncertain leaders.  Is it any wonder that the best of us feel numb in our souls, while the worst of us numb ourselves with drugs or destructive behavior or with the brain-destroying fare displayed on our television screens and video games?

The Hebrews had participated in the most miraculous display of God’s salvation in history.  God had sent seven plagues upon Egypt, culminating with the death of firstborn Egyptian children and the sparing of Hebrew children.  They had crossed the Red Sea as God drove back the waters with a strong wind, and then watched as Pharaoh and his army had been drowned behind them.  A cloud of smoke and pillar of fire had led them into the Wilderness with the promise that a new land filled with milk and honey lay before them.  And what was their response to these stunning signs of God’s love and power?  We should have stayed behind in Egypt where we had food to eat, instead of coming out here to die in the desert.

The Hebrews in the wilderness remind me of the skits years ago on Saturday Night live featuring Doug and Wendy Whiner, who managed to drive everyone around them insane with their nasal complaining about everything.  They go to a fancy French restaurant and whine that they can’t eat anything on the menu because they have diverticulitis, and want the chef to make them macaroni and cheese.  They get on an airliner and whine about everything so much that when the flight attendant announces that the flight is overbooked and they need some passengers to volunteer to give up their seats, the entire cabin rushes for the door.  Yes, the Hebrews are in a place they’ve never been before.  Yes, they are surrounded by uncertainty and confusion.  Yes, there is not a Food Sphinx around every bend where they can get food.  But wouldn’t you think that they might get a clue that a God who can create a universe, bring plagues, save children, roll back the waters of the Red Sea, and defeat the mightiest king and army on the face of the planet might be able to find them some food and water?  No.  Better a known evil than an unknown good.  We should have stayed home in Egypt and died building pyramids rather than pursue freedom.

The Hebrews, of course, are us.  So how might we stop our whining about what we don’t have and begin to open our minds and hearts and lives to the God who not only has blessed us over and over and over in the past, but who wants us to live futures overflowing with grace and mercy?

Listen to the people who are more attuned to where God is that where God isn’t.  The Hebrews, no doubt roused by the most cynical and trouble-making in their number, take their complaints to Moses and Aaron, who are God’s agents and witnesses.  Moses and Aaron listen to God, and point out what God is doing in the world.  Pointing out where God is at work in the world is the primary mission of the church, says theologian David Harned.[1]  What everyone else is doing is to point out all the places where they don’t see God.  I haven’t watched television news for many, many years, so on those rare occasions that I do watch it, I am astounded at its utterly sensationalistic focus.  Why is a murder in Utah a story on Richmond television news?  Because there weren’t enough rapes, robberies, and murders locally to fill twenty-two minutes of programming.  If it bleeds, it leads says the old aphorism.  Seriously, church:  stop watching and listening to news – with the possible exception of the weather.  Stop listening to talking heads on TV or radio.  Read news that is a week or a month old instead, news that has been seasoned by thought and deliberation and time.   The twenty-four hour news and opinion cycle feeds on sensation, violence, disaster, and fear.  It is a primary source of emotional and spiritual stress in us all, which is its objective, so it can sell us alcohol, lust, drugs, toys, vacations, and entertainment to numb or distract our dis-ease.

Where are the Moses and Aarons of our day?  Look around you:  we are surrounded by people who have amazing stories of God sightings (which is the focus of Julie Martin’s Wednesday night class).  I’ve heard some of you tell astounding tales of near-misses during the hurricane.  Yes, Margaret Boyle had a terrible fall and concussion this week, but it happened when she was surrounded by church members who loved her and cared for her until the Rescue Squad came:  it could have happened when she was home alone.  Mary Lou Frassmann fell this week in her front yard and broke her arm, but she told me that before she went outside, she put her cordless phone in the pocket of her robe – something she never does.  We just celebrated the tenth anniversary of the horrible events of 9/11, but for every tragic story of lost loved ones there are two stories of miraculous sacrifice and courage and healing.  At lunch last week Bishop Kammerer told me a postscript to the story in her sermon about the United Methodist churches that opened their doors after 9/11 for prayer while other churches were padlocking theirs. After 9/11 Muslim women in Charlotte were afraid to go out to grocery stores to buy food for their families.  United Methodist women in town wrapped scarves around their heads and accompanied their Muslim neighbors shopping as a sign of love.  In the midst of terrible anger and fear, God’s people could see where God was at work to save and to heal.

Amazingly, instead of letting these whining amnesiac Hebrews starve as they deserved, God fed them with quail and manna.  They weren’t fed because of anything they had done to deserve it:  on the contrary, it was so much more than they deserved.  But God loved them in spite of them forgetting the miracles that had just happened and their whining about the slavery they had left behind.  Nothing, St. Paul would say two thousand years later, can separate us from God’s love.

The Trappist monk and spiritual giant Thomas Merton was once asked how he could believe in God, given all the evil and ugliness and injustice in the world.  “You’re asking the wrong question,” Merton replied.  “Given the unlimited capacity of human beings to destroy the world, hurt each other, and reject the image of God within themselves, that there’s any love and hope and beauty left in the world, how can you not believe in God?”

Let’s quit our griping.  Yes, there are plenty of things wrong with the world, and we’re responsible for most, if not all, of them.  But, as I like to say, we are so much better than we deserve.  And in a world that uses hate and darkness and violence and fear to sell us what can never heal, let’s be Moses and Aarons, pointing out where God is still feeding his children, still forgiving their forgetfulness, and still listening in love through the whining.

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[1] Harned, David Baily, The Ambiguity of Religion, Westminster, 1968

Life in the Wilderness: Signed in Blood

Pentecost 12A 2011

Exodus 12:1-14                                                                                                

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbor in obtaining one; the lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs. You shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the Lord. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals; on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.

Lillian Daniel, a United Church of Christ pastor, recently wrote:

On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is "spiritual but not religious." Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo. 

Next thing you know, he's telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets.  And in walks on the beach.  Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking trails and . . . did I mention the beach at sunset yet? 
           

Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself. 




Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person . . .  Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community?  Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church. [1]


This fall – except next Sunday, when the Bishop preaches, and I have no clue what she’s going to preach about – we’re going to look at the story of the Exodus of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, through the Wilderness, and into the Promised Land.  While these are the appointed readings for this fall in the Revised Common Lectionary, I thought they were particularly appropriate as sermon material, because it seems to me that we are people caught between a familiar past and an uncertain future, following a dream but not sure where we’re going or if we’ll ever get there.  In so many ways, doesn’t it feel as though we’re wandering in our own Wilderness, especially this last week as the winds howled, the trees fell, our modern conveniences became useless, and we had no clue when rescue would ever come?

Hebrew faith really begins here with this story of the first Passover – an act of ritual observance that comes before the miracle, not as a memorial invented afterwards.  Passover is the central act of Hebrew worship:  the family gathers, clothed for a quick getaway, to eat a meal of a freshly killed lamb whose blood has been smeared on the outside doorframe of the house.  That night, as God passes through the land, God will spare the life of the firstborn child in houses marked with blood.  In all other homes – especially those of the Egyptians, even Pharaoh’s palace, there will be death.

Not exactly “spiritual, but not religious,” is it?  This is no walk on the beach, no apprehension of the beauty of Creation when the sun is on the horizon.  This is hard-edged stuff:  butcher a lamb, smear the blood, get ready to run, because people are going to die where there has been no sacrifice.

As we approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I’ve been thinking a lot about sacrifice.  The whole world was moved by the extraordinary sacrifice of the police and firefighters and other first responders in New York City and Washington, by the sacrifice of the passengers on Flight 93 who prevented that plane from being crashed into whatever its target was, and, of course, the sacrifice of the men and women who went to the Middle East to fight terrorism.  Next Sunday, I want us to spend some significant prayer time remembering those people.  But I’ve also been thinking about the sacrifices that weren’t made – how we embarked upon two wars without paying for them; how we were not asked to make sacrifices in our lifestyles or in our finances as Americans were in the first and second World Wars.  Now we are bearing the cost, with interest, of having avoided sacrifice when it was most needed.

One of the seven great evils in the world, said the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, is worship without sacrifice:  the essence of being “spiritual but not religious.”  Right from the start, the Bible requires sacrifice:  Adam and Eve are asked to sacrifice their wills for the sake of obedience; Abram sacrifices his home and security to follow God’s call; Moses forgoes a safe life herding sheep to confront the greatest king on earth; and in this morning’s lesson, the path to freedom begins with the death of a choice lamb, with the abandonment of all that is familiar, and with the sacrifice of personal choice to the call for radical obedience.  The Bible records the death of Pharaoh’s son and the death of thousands of Egyptian children, but surely there were Hebrew households that night who, “spiritual but not religious,” communing with God in the sunset over the Pyramids, elected to not sacrifice their best lamb, not ruin their doorposts, not leave their new granite countertops or plasma high-definition widescreen hieroglyphic tablets behind.  Odds are, there were dead Hebrew children that awful night too, because their parents did not want to sacrifice.

Blood, in the Bible, is the sacred sign of life.  But the blood on the Passover doorposts is a sign of life sacrificed.  Salvation from slavery and death only comes where people have followed God’s commandment to sacrifice.  It’s the same story in the New Testament:  Jesus’ shed blood on the cross does nothing to save us from our slaveries and our deaths if we do not follow his commandment to take up our own crosses, sacrifice our wills and commitments and priorities and our very lives to God.  Jesus dies for us so we can die for him.  Salvation is signed in blood – Jesus’, and ours.

Isn’t that why we find the stories about 9/11 so compelling?  Something in us is drawn, like a moth to a flame, to those stories about people giving their lives to save the lives of others.  That something is the deeply buried image of God, calling us to the life-giving blood-sign on the doorpost, on the cross, in charred wreckage in New York and Washington and a field in Pennsylvania, in Flanders’ Field and Normandy and Kandahar and Baghdad. 

There is no salvation where there is no flesh and blood – in being “spiritual without religious.”  This is hard, bloody work, that requires life and death and sacrifice, not happy thoughts and pretty pictures. Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church.

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[1] http://www.ucc.org/feed-your-spirit/daily-devotional/spiritual-but-not- religious