Mother’s Day

My first preaching professor taught us that Mother’s Day is not a Christian holiday but a conspiracy of the greeting card companies. He insisted that we should never preach a Mother’s Day sermon.

The first few years I was a pastor, I took his advice. On Mother’s Day I followed the lectionary and preached on the assigned text for the day. If I were following this pattern now, here are the suggested texts for May 12, 2013. You can see what a stretch it would be to connect Mother’s Day with any of these suggested passages.

As a young preacher, it didn’t take me long to figure out that I was swimming against the current. The 2nd Sunday in May would find me talking about Paul and Silas’ famous jailbreak while everyone’s mind was on mothers.

Year after year I found myself wanting to explain: “But my preaching professor said….”

Greg Sutton tried to help me out a decade ago. Greg was a botanist by trade who worked for the Commonwealth of Virginia most of his life traveling all over South America promoting agricultural trade. Greg and Liz were longtime Northminster members, deeply spiritual people, and a childless couple. Greg had painful memories of past Mother’s Days in church that had left his wife feeling discouraged.

One afternoon as we sat on his back porch, Greg shared his idea for how a preacher should handle Mother’s Day.

“Every living thing has a belly button,” he informed me.

While I flipped through my mental file cards of living things to decide if he was right, he elaborated, “Humans, horses, vegetables, fruits. They all have a navel.”

When I protested that a stem wasn’t exactly a navel, he explained that they serve the same purpose. “Every living thing begins life connected to a mother,” he explained. “So there’s your Mother’s Day sermon. The day shouldn’t really be a celebration of the oldest mother or youngest mother or the mother with the most children. The day should be about everybody who has or had a mother and what our mothers gave us. And you might even want to mention the Great Divine Mother to whom we are all connected,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

I admit that I’m a slow learner. But this year, I’m going to try Greg Sutton’s approach.

I plan to preach a Mother’s Day message aimed at everyone who has or had a mother. We’re going to look at 5 scenes from the life of Jesus’ mother to see what she taught him. And what she is teaching us.

You can check out how I did HERE .

Resurrection Garden

Easter happened in a garden.

The details that the empty tomb was located in a beautiful garden and that the risen Christ was mistaken for the gardener are not-so-subtle reminders that God intends to restore a broken creation that began in, that’s right, a garden (John 20:1-18, Genesis 2-3).

And God is inviting us to partner in this great restoration project—which means that you and I get to practice resurrection here and now.

Here’s one of the ways my church stumbled upon to practice resurrection.

Five years ago a handful of Northminster members who had served in our food pantry felt that fresh vegetables would be a loving addition to the bags of food they would distribute in the hot months of summer. I remember talking with two of our would-be gardeners and asking a basic question, “So, do you have any gardening experience?” “No,” they replied matter-of-factly, “we’ve never had a garden.” “So then,” I asked, “how are you going to know how to plant and tend a garden?” They looked at me like I was the densest man on the planet and answered, “The internet of course.”

And so it came to pass in the spring of 2008 the Northminster Community Garden was born. I left on a summer-long sabbatical promising to pray for their efforts, and while I was away that Internet Garden produced in epic proportions. Neighbors enjoyed tomatoes and squash all summer long. When I returned in August our Internet Gardeners showed me a refrigerator filled with squash–the garden was producing more than they could give away.

I did wonder how it had continued to produce so bountifully during the July and August draught. But it had. God’s miracle community garden.

Shortly after I returned from sabbatical, Northminster was visited by someone from the department of public works, wondering what we were doing differently around here. They apparently were not surprised that baptists would be using more water than other churches, and in the summer many people try to keep their grass alive. But they couldn’t believe the increase in our water consumption. (note: when a representative of the water department comes by to check on your water usage, you’re using a lot of H2O.)

A month of investigation turned up a broken pipe related to our heating system. It was spilling 1,000 gallons of water a day directly under the community garden. Think of it as a reverse parting of the Red Sea—God providing what the garden needed to produce bountifully while a group Internet Gardeners gained experience.

This year we are giving more Northminster members than ever the opportunity to participate in the garden. On March 10th we distributed soil and seeds during worship, asking our church family to lovingly grow some plants to be transplanted in May.

I picked up 3 packs of seeds and here’s how they’re doing:

Plants at 3 weeks (taking over the dining room)

Two rows of tomatoes, broccoli, squash (at one week)

I Love This Poem

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

~ Wendell Berry ~

(Collected Poems)

Unhealed History

We had a big weekend at Northminster. In celebration of Martin Luther King weekend, Tiont Williams and I preached together. You can find the sermon, called Living the Dream, here. I’m going to add a few words about race relations below.

My friend Ben Campbell has written a marvelous book called Richmond’s Unhealed History. I know, a book with history in the title probably doesn’t get your blood pumping, but Ben is a very good writer and he tells an important, long-hidden story in a compelling way.

Ben explains how Europeans literally stole land from Native Americans to establish the city of Richmond; how Richmond was built on the backs of slave labor; how Richmond became the second largest slave market in the country (with good, white citizens blissfully ignorant of slavery’s significance to the local economy); how emancipated blacks were “kept in their place” by organized efforts to refuse them the right to vote, to shut them out of business and commerce, to deny them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; how the interstate highways were routed to destroy the most prominent black neighborhood in the city.

Ben argues, rightly I believe, that until whites are willing to confess these sins, repent and receive forgiveness, Richmond’s progress will be stunted. I absolutely agree.

The most accurate definition of racism I’ve encountered is this formula: Racism = Power + Prejudice.

Denial runs very deep among white Southerners. We never see ourselves as having either power or prejudice. As an expert on the subject, I can tell you that racism in the minds of white Southerners is never about race. 

Schools, housing, the path of an interstate highway, intelligence tests for voters, it was never about race, they would say.

Neither was the decision in 1945 to relocate the Northninster congregation, they have said.

Ah, but each of these was about race above all else.

And until we recognize the sins of the past, confess them, repent and receive forgiveness, our growth as humans, as Christians, as a city will forever be stunted.

Do You Know of a Good Church?

Last week I bought a chair off Craigslist. The price was right, the owners were cordial, so I drove across town to pick it up.

As the former owner and I were carrying it out to my car, I asked if he had known a couple who used to live in his complex.

“Nope, I don’t know them.” “Well, they moved from here probably four years ago.” “Yeah, we’ve only been here since last year.” We get the chair in the car and he asks, “How did you know those folks you mentioned?” “We were in church together,” I told him.

Which led to me confessing that I’m a pastor and him confessing that he and his wife were very active in a church in their former city but since moving to Richmond they hadn’t connected with a congregation.

So—surprise, surprise—I told him about Northminster and a sister congregation in his neighborhood.

When I got home, I had an email from him asking, “What was the name of your church again?”

All of this to say, there are a lot of people who have made a New Year’s resolution to find a church. And they are just waiting for you or me to point them toward one.

I found myself thinking about some Northminster members who came to us early in the year—a woman who asked her personal trainer about getting the spiritual dimension of her life in shape; another woman who told a friend-of-a-friend who was helping her move that she had made a resolution to find a church and wondered if he knew of one.

It happens a lot in January. So be ready to invite some seemingly random person to come to church with you. It won’t be random. And they may thank you for a long, long time.

New Year Reflection

Years ago Elizabeth O’Connor developed some questions to help the members of her church reflect on the year that was concluding. If you’re willing to spend a few minutes, her questions can help you prepare for the new year by reviewing the old one.

How did the year begin? What were the events of winter? of spring? of summer? of fall?

What took place in your home relations? your church relations? What events in the larger community of city, country and world most captured your attention?

Who were the significant people in your life? What books and art instructed your mind and heart?

Did you create anything this year? Did you make any new discoveries about yourself? How were you gift last year to a person, a community or an institution?

What was your greatest joy in this year gone? What was your greatest sorrow? What caused you the most disappointment? What caused you the most sadness?

In what areas of your life did you grow? Were these areas related to your joy or your pain?

What are your regrets? How would you do things differently, if you could live the year again? What did you learn?

Did you have a recurring dream? What theme or themes ran through the year?

Did you grow in your capacity to be a person in community—to bear your own burdens, to let others bear theirs? Did you have sufficient time apart with yourself?

Did you root your life more firmly in Scripture? Did you grow in your understanding of yourself? What was your most important insight? Did God seem near or far off?

What do you feel is the message of the year? What do you think and feel God might be saying to you?

When Father Alfred Delp was in a Nazi prison the mock trial that announced his execution, he wrote in his journal: “…This year now ending leaves behind us a rich legacy of tasks, and we must seriously consider how to tackle them. Above all else, one thing is necessary—religious-minded people must become more devout; their dedication must be extended and intensified.” What are the tasks that the old year leaves to you? How can you increase your devotion and dedication?

How do you want to create the new year? What kind of commitment do you want to make to yourself? Your community? To the oppressed people of the world? How do the questions about commitment make you feel? Angry? Challenged? Hopeful? What are your feelings?

Who are the people with whom you would like to deepen your relationships in the year to come? Do you have relationships that need to be healed? What can you do to heal your own heart? What can others do to assist in your healing? In Scripture it is written, “Ask and you shall receive.” How can you ask God for what you need? How can you ask God’s people for what you need?

Is there a special piece of inward work that you would like to accomplish? Is there a special outward work? What are the goals that seem important to you? What are your hopes? What are your fears? What are the immediate first steps that you can take toward the goals that seem important to you?

[After journaling your reflections, you]  might have a time of prayer in which to give thanks for all the events of the year gone, and to ask that the God through whose fingers they were filtered will continue to bless them to [y]our use. They are now the bread of our life—part of all that we have to share with another when we share what is ours to give away. Our journal writing can help us to ring out the old year with our tears and gratitude, and to ring in the new year with praise and prayers of petition.

(From Elizabeth O’Connor’s Letters to Scattered Pilgrims, 61-62.)

Darkness into Light

Here is the meditation I offered at Northminster’s Christmas Eve worship service.

If you look around the room tonight and see all these different people, you might imagine there are lots of different reasons why we are here. Someone in some family decided that it would be a good idea for the whole family to dress up and sit together in church.  A few of you have been attending this Christmas Eve service for as long as I can remember. For some of you, this is your first year. You can look around and imagine lots of different reasons why we have gathered, but I want to be sure you know why we are really here: we are here to celebrate our participation in the great story of the darkness and the light.

The story goes back to the beginning “when God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness God called night. And there was the first day of creation.” We are here to celebrate our participation in the great story of the darkness and the light.

Almost from that first day of creation people have seen darkness and light struggling with each other, the way every evening darkness pushes the sun over the edge of the horizon and takes over.

Last Friday morning at 6:14 AM the Winter Solstice occurred. This is the moment at which the sun has gone as far as it will travel in that direction and it begins to come back, ever so slowly, bringing with it longer days and increasing warmth. The Winter Solstice proclaims that darkness is being banished and light is taking over. This is something citizens of earth have celebrated for a long time.

Hundreds of years ago Christians recognized a marketing opportunity in this Winter Solstice celebration, and they began to explain to neighbors what the light versus darkness story is really about. “The true light that enlightens all people was coming into the world,” they explained. “In him was life and the life was the light of all people. This light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.” And so we get Christmas, the great story of the light taking over the darkness. And you are here tonight to participate in this story.

I don’t know about you, but the last 10 days have felt to me like darkness is winning. And I suspect that most of us have dragged the sickening feeling of defeat into this room with us. When twenty children in an elementary school are savagely gunned down, it feels like darkness is winning. When we hear this knucklehead spokesman for the most powerful political lobby in the land say that what we now need is armed guards in every school, it feels like darkness is winning. This morning about 2:00 AM there was a fire in New York state and when the first responders arrived a home-grown terrorist gunned them down (with the same model assault rifle used to kill the first graders). It certainly feels like darkness is winning.

But we are here to celebrate our participation in the great story of light and darkness.

You see, the true light came into the world “and the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.” He enlightened the world for about 33 years until the forces of darkness decided to snuff him out. In the words of the creed he was crucified, dead, and buried.

There has never been a darkness on this earth as deep and impenetrable as when the stone was rolled across the opening to his tomb and sealed.

But on the third day, the great story goes, God raised him from the dead, and in doing so the Creator proclaimed this is the true light that enlightens all people, and there is no darkness—not even death—that can extinguish this one true light. And the time will come when darkness will be no more.

In the meantime you and I are living within this story of darkness and light. When it feels like darkness is winning, we hold up our tiny, flickering light. And when we do, we reflect the Light and we become in this often-dark world “lighthouses of sacred light” (to borrow Anne Lamott’s wonderful phrase).

Tonight we sit in this darkened room, candles in our hand, living reminders that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not, cannot, will not ever overcome it.