Making Room

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For Tim

Dining Room Folding Dining Table For Small Spaces With Unpolished pertaining to Dining Table Small Kitchen

Steeped as I was in the fiction
of knights and castles and maidens
idly brushing their hair in some tower
I was unprepared
when you arrived at my door.

Where’s your armor? I said.
What, no steed?
Jeans are more my style, you said.
And you can’t beat a Chevy Nova.

Not sure how I felt
about this accidental prince
leaning on my doorbell, I invited you in.
Don’t rearrange anything, I said.
And keep your coat on.

Nice tree, you said, nodding
at the Ansel Adams. How about
some music?
Okay, I said
but I choose the album.

It’s hard to sweep a girl off her feet
when she’s wearing lead boots.
Undeterred, you didn’t mind
my cautious steps, even as you
performed your own
unconventional dance.
It’s fun, you said. Just give it a go.
I’m fine right here, I said.

It took time to make room
for you in the vigilant
house of myself.
Until one day Love laid
another cup and plate
on my precise table for one
and I knew
I was done for.

Pull up a chair,
I said.
Don’t mind if I do,
you said.

July 9, 2018 (30th)

Welcoming the Stranger

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Refugees-La-Sagrada-Familia“The Lord your God is the God of all gods and Lord of all lords, the great, mighty, and awesome God who doesn’t play favorites and doesn’t take bribes. He enacts justice for orphans and widows, and he loves immigrants, giving them food and clothing. That means you must also love immigrants because you were immigrants in Egypt.”
~ Deuteronomy 10:17-19

I was a stranger and you welcomed me.
~ Matthew 25:35

When the Trump Administration announced in April a “zero tolerance” policy at the U.S.-Mexico border leading to the separation of children from parents, the response of the global religious community was swift and emphatic. Interfaith groups from all points along the theological spectrum, including Orthodox Jews, the Islamic Society of North America, The U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention (among many Baptist groups) condemned the practice, and faith leaders from Pope Francis to Franklin Graham repudiated attempts to justify such actions from Scripture.

Anyone who thinks the immigration issue is simple is not paying attention. Addressing the complications of migration is undoubtably complex because the issues are ever evolving, and the politics of immigration make things even trickier.  As Duncan Lawrence, executive director of Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab, points out: when it comes to immigration policy, people tend to rely on anecdotes and ideology rather than evidence.

The United Nations reports 65.6 million displaced people worldwide, including more than 25 million refugees. An estimated 44,000 people per day are forced to flee their homes. Our country is filled with of people of boundless imagination and towering compassion and yet, as a nation, we are in danger of losing our capacity for empathy, especially toward “foreigners”. Even Christians, who at the moment are rightly denouncing the separation of immigrant families at the border, offer a surprisingly tepid response when it comes to welcoming even the world’s most vulnerable ones—refugees who are fleeing danger and persecution and are seeking asylum within our borders.

According to the Pew Research Center, only 51% of Americans agree we have a responsibility to accept refugees. The group least supportive of welcoming refugees is white evangelical Christians (only 25% affirm). But surprisingly, even progressive Christians appear to be hesitant. A mere 43% percent of white mainline Protestants and just 50% of Catholics agree the U.S. should embrace refugees. (The most welcoming of all Christian groups is black Protestants at 63%.)

And this, to me, is the most cringeworthy statistic in the Pew report: at 65%, the religiously unaffiliated outpace Christians of every category in affirming of America’s responsibility to welcome refugees seeking safety within our borders.

How we treat the foreigner and the stranger says a lot about our understanding of God. The Bible has a lot to say about immigrants and immigration. The Hebrew word ger, the closest word to our concept of an immigrant, appears 92 times in the Old Testament alone. The Israelites were “illegal aliens” when they arrived in the Promised Land. It was famine and death (read: economic hardship) that compelled “undocumented” Ruth to migrate with her mother-in-law Naomi. Notably, Boaz didn’t deport her back to Moab. And Jesus himself tells us in Matthew 25: Every stranger you see, especially the least of these, is really me. He promised that one day we’d hear him say these words: Whenever you welcomed the stranger you were welcoming me. Whenever you turned away from a stranger you were turning away from me.

When considering the issue of immigration, Christians must begin by asking what our faith teaches us. What happens in our minds and hearts when we consider the issue in the spirit of Jesus? How does our perspective shift when we see the immigrants and refugees not as statistics but as children of God?

What is the Spirit saying here? How will the Church respond?

Artwork above: “Refugees la Sagrada Familia” by Kelly Latimore. Used by permission.

I’ll be somewhere else for Christmas

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In December of 1998 my father made an unusual holiday journey. Less than a year earlier he’d been diagnosed with melanoma which eventually laid siege to his brain… Read more on the Baptist News Global website.

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Earthquakes and Elections: Discovering the Unshakable

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“In 1952, at the threshold of the Cold War, Harry Emerson Fosdick…spoke these now-famous words: ‘The highest use of a shaken time is to discover the unshakable.’” 

My November 9 blog for Baptist News Global is posted on their website here.

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Beginner’s Mind

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i-QK5Vx7L-1636x1152Tomorrow morning I’m going to slip a clerical robe over my shoulders and drape a green liturgical stole around my neck. I will line up behind the choir, along with the other pastors and liturgists, process up an impossibly long center aisle in a neo-Gothic sanctuary and take my assigned seat in the divided chancel. Later in worship I’ll climb a circular set of stairs into a pulpit as high as Rapunzel’s tower.

This is new for me.

And I love that.

I’m crazy about this new adventure because, for one thing, it’s grounding me in the reality that the gospel is true and transformative in every culture—including worship cultures. The heart of God beats in country churches and cathedrals, in darkened theaters and beachside pavilions. The Spirit of Christ is at home among hand-clappers and genuflectors; the Good News sings through guitar amps and organ pipes.

I also love this moment because it offers me a chance to experience again the childlike delight and curiosity of a beginner’s mind. Nothing blocks the spiritual path like the assumption that we already know, or that we have nothing more to learn. Yesterday one of the other pastors at our church kindly led me through the considerable choreography of a worship service at First Baptist Church of Washington DC. My awkwardness reminded me of the ballroom dance lessons Tim and I took years ago: “Step here…turn here…cross the floor and pause.” I imagine there’ll be some missteps tomorrow, but what fun it is to learn!

Mostly, by taking a chance on the unfamiliar, I’m invited again to rely on that which is most true—to rest in the essence of faith. I love the way Richard Rohr puts it: “God’s life of love is being lived within you, and you must simply learn how to say yes to that life. If you exist on a level where you can see how ‘everything belongs,’ you can trust the flow and trust the life.”

Good and gracious God, let me find you in all people and things…and be found by you in every moment. That is enough.

Ten Atlanta Features I’m Going to Miss

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On December 31st a United moving van will pull into Dunnington Circle and stop at our driveway. By the time the New Year’s ball drops in Times Square later that night, the contents of our house will be on their way to a holding facility somewhere in North Carolina (at some point Tim and I should probably ask where, exactly, in NC), where they will remain for the next four to six months while we get to know our new home city of Washington, D.C. It just feels so right to me that our new adventure should begin on the very first day of a brand new year. I love new beginnings!

As we prepare to take our leave of this great Southern city, here are ten Atlanta features that I’m definitely going to miss:

1. First Baptist Church of Decatur  10854234_10102121348068353_5122813251598199324_o
I love this gifted, welcoming, risk-taking, gospel-focused, Christ-embodying congregation more than I know how to express. It was an honor to walk alongside them for eight years.

2. Living Near Mom IMG_1482
For twenty-five years, my mother and I lived between 1,100 and 3,000 miles from each other. In 2008 she moved from her long-time home in Orlando to a sweet little house just two miles from our place in Atlanta. Having her nearby has been such a treat. Mom volunteered in our church office, tutored Lucy in middle-school, provided transportation for Taylor, showed up at our door with countless home cooked meals and dog-sat for the dear departed Willie Boy. Mostly, it’s just been a comfort having the wonderful Barbara Pennington in my life on a daily basis. Pray for my mama who is embarking on an adventure of her own as she prepares to move back to her old stomping grounds in Florida.

3. The DeKalb Farmers Market dekalb-2
Got a hankering for the taste of dirty gym socks? Look no further than the DFM for a Durian fruit. Or maybe a Horned Melon, Mexican Pitaya or Buddha’s Hand. Don’t panic, they also sell broccoli and bananas. But it’s the exotic stuff that sets them apart—that, and the global community working and shopping there. On my first visit, back in 2007, I stood in the check-out line behind an ancient black woman with tattooed arms and long braids down her back, wearing a Bob Marley t-shirt and reading Jean-Paul Sartre. I knew I’d be coming back.

4. Stone Mountain Version 2
Climbing Stone Mountain expands my soul and kicks my tail—every. single. time. (Read here about my experience of climbing the mountain 50 times in 2010.)

5. Community Q BBQ Mac & Cheese IMG_4002
Mouth-watering, diet-busting heaven on a plate.

6. Wild Oats & Billy GoatsIMG_2675
An eclectic little folk art gallery across from Decatur Square became my guilty pleasure while I served at First Baptist. Whenever I needed a break from the office I’d spend 20 minutes rummaging around Wild Oats & Billy Goats, feeling completely restored afterwards. Tim gave me this cow for Christmas in 2014, painted by Sandy Erickson Wright. I’ve dubbed it “the face of kindness”.

7. The City of Decatur showdocument
“Mayberry meets Berkeley” sums it up perfectly. I’ve loved being surrounded by this progressive, compassionate, mishmash of humans.

8. My Clergy Peer Groups IMG_0218
I’ve been part of two groups. My interfaith clergy peer group met mostly on the picket line. We rallied together around issues of gun violence, Medicaid expansion, living wages for migrant farm workers and religious liberty. These rabbis, imams, priests and pastors inspired me more than they can possibly know.

My Baptist pastor peer group met every month at McAfee School of Theology. We mostly held the ropes for one another and prayed each other through the ups and downs of church life. Once, during a particularly difficult time at my own church, my peer group delivered to my office a bottle of bourbon named for the 17th century Baptist preacher Reverend Elijah Craig. I can report that Rev. Craig ministered faithfully to Tim and me for several months.

9. Siggers Hairdressers Version 2
I have thin, limp, potato-colored hair. Chad Siggers makes it appear less so. Gracias, Chad.

10. Black Bear Mountain Slippers and coffee in the Georgia mountains
Okay, this one’s not in Atlanta. But this mountain retreat just two hours north of the ATL has been a sacred place for Tim and me for six years—thanks to our dear, generous friends, Chuck and Bob.

Thanks for the memories, Atlanta! We’re glad to have known you. Grace and peace, y’all…

Seriously, Everything?

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Grandma Lucy, 1960

I come from church-goers on my mother’s side. (I also come from hell-raisers and Alabama moonshiners on my father’s side, but that’s a different devotional.) For years my great grandmother, Lucy Modenia Spanagel, was a pillar of the Mt. Vernon Methodist Church in Birmingham. In most of the old photos of Grandma Lucy, she’s wearing a simple housedress and apron—her “everyday” clothes. But a few pictures show her dressed to the nines with white cotton gloves and a fancy hat—her “church” clothes. For Grandma Lucy, as for many from her generation, the practice of wearing Sunday Best to worship arose from a genuine desire to honor the Lord.

I have a young friend whose faith inspires me and who, like a growing number of worshipers, is decidedly more casual in his attire. Once, when an older man in the congregation chided him for “disrespecting God,” I overheard my friend’s gentle response: “I’m trying to honor God by offering my real self,” he said. “Not just my Sunday self.”

I wondered later if my young friend had been reading Psalm 103: “Let my whole being bless the Lord. Let everything inside me bless his holy name.”

Everything inside me? Seriously, everything?

This flies in the face of the sacred Southern aphorism: “We may think it, but we do not speak it!” But what if “speaking it” is the very thing God desires most from us? Not the endless (and futile) polishing up of our shiny selves, but the offering up of our whole selves.

Let everything inside me bless God’s holy name. Sure, the happy, thankful parts of me are going to find it easy enough to sing. But what about the other parts—can they also bless the Lord? According to Psalm 103, you bet they can:

~ The exhausted part of us can sing praise to the One who “renews our youth like the eagle’s.”
~ The part that’s angry at injustice can bless the God who “works righteousness and does justice for all who are oppressed.”
~ The part that’s suffering can sing to the God who “heals our sickness.”
~ The part that’s guilty can sing to the God who “forgives…and removes our sin as far as the east is from the west.”
~ The part of us that’s weak can bless the One who “knows our frame and remembers we are dust.”

As Henri Nouwen puts it:

The discipline of the heart makes us stand in the presence of God with all we have and are: our fears and anxieties, our guilt and shame, our sexual fantasies, our greed and anger, our joys, successes, aspirations and hopes, our reflections, dreams and mental wandering, and most of all our people, family, friends and enemies, in short all that makes us who we are….

We tend to present to God only those parts of ourselves with which we feel relatively comfortable and which we think will evoke a positive response. Thus our prayer becomes very selective and narrow. And not just our prayer but also our self-knowledge because by behaving as strangers before God we become strangers to ourselves.

Who can say where God lands in the “white gloves vs. flip-flops” debate in worship? As with most things that really matter to God, I imagine it comes down to the heart—and not just our Sunday heart. Our whole, real, raw, angry, anxious, unpolished heart. This is the best offering of all.

This piece appeared first in a shorter version on September 14, 2015, as a devotional for Baptist Women in Ministry.  http://bwim.info 

Tangible

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Scanned Image2-1I’m reading the One Hundredth Psalm on my patio this morning, coffee in hand, as a splashy redbird nonchalantly strips the needle-like leaves from the rosemary in my herb garden.

For the Lord is good;
God’s steadfast love endures forever,
his faithfulness to all generations.

In a flash, I am whisked away from my patio and am in the backseat of a blue Chevy Bel Air, racing along a two-lane road in the Florida panhandle, my thin blonde hair whipping in the wind, stinging my eyes.

It is the summer of 1968 and from the dashboard radio, Jeanie C. Riley is belting out Harper Valley P.T.A. The acrid stink of a paper mill tells me Panama City Beach is just minutes away. A few miles short of town, my father pulls off the road beside an open-air rest stop. “Everybody out!” he commands with a smile. With a whoop of delight my brother and I leap from the car. My thighs peel away from the vinyl seat, leaving a pattern on the backs of my legs.

For the next ten minutes we stand stock-still beside a roadside picnic table, arms extended like scarecrows while Dad slathers Coppertone on every exposed millimeter of our bodies—even the insides of our ears. He always made sure we were wearing sunscreen before we hit the beach, knowing that the instant we arrived at the motel, my brother and I would bolt for the turquoise water of the Gulf, screaming like banshees across the white talcum sand.

The parental care. The practical love. I still cherish them, all these years later.

The Lord is good . . .
God’s steadfast love endures forever;
his faithfulness to all generations.

We don’t know a whole lot about the writer of Psalm One Hundred. One thing we can surmise with confidence, though, because it’s jumping up and down and waving at us from every line, is that the psalmist has experienced something of God’s love so tangible, it makes him or her bold to declare: The Lord is good.

Sometimes God’s love and goodness show up through nature—a cheeky redbird in your herb garden. Or a welcome wave of cool air in September—God’s way of saying, “Chill, dear, I’ve got you.” Sometimes love is Coppertone in the hands of a caring parent, or a friend who forgives you when she has every reason to hold a grudge. Once, love became as concrete as a cross.

The love of God is the one eternal reality; there is no other. When everything else has passed into shadow, what will remain is Love. The Lord is good; God’s steadfast love endures forever.

This piece appeared first on September 7, 2015, as a devotional for Baptist Women in Ministry.  http://bwim.info 

Easter Fail 2015

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5437335840_6ffbe4d95aSo for starters, there was a veritable Easter parade of technical snafus (microphones not working, video issues, missed cues, etc.). In our second service we had to stop mid-way through the first stanza of Christ the Lord is Risen Today because there was an entirely different hymn projected on the screens. The audio in the wonderful baptism testimony video was out of sync, like a Godzilla movie.

But all of this pales by comparison with the moment in the 8:45 service when, near the end of my message, as I accelerated toward the mighty Empty Tomb Crescendo, I invited a sanctuary full of pastel-clad worshipers into “everlasting, ever-living, ever-praising DEATH!”

Happy Easter, y’all.

Okay, so I was excited and momentarily lost my train of thought. It happens. I knew I’d committed more than a minor fumble when the congregation, which up to that point had been nodding and supportively amening, did this simultaneous little head-tilt—a collective ruh-roh. A few of them actually gasped. Some laughed out loud. I think even God probably offered down a sympathetic “Bless her heart.”

The Devil’s favorite lie
Later, as I kicked myself in my office, my friend and fellow pastor, Sharyn Dowd, gave me a hug. “Don’t take it too hard,” she said. “All the screw-ups in worship today were because of that swipe you took in your message at the penal substitution theory of atonement.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I’m sure of it,” she said. “Penal substitution is the Devil’s favorite lie for keeping us anxious and ashamed our whole life. We were just getting pushback.”

The crucifixion of Jesus is a great and holy mystery. Because of our genuine need to make sense of this mystery, the Church has offered a number of theories about Christ’s death over the past two thousand years.

In the words of Inigo Montoya: Let me explain. No—there is too much. Let me sum up:

Atonement Theory (sorely abridged)
The New Testament does in fact say, “Christ died for our sins.” (1 Corinthians 14:3b, Galatians 1:4, Romans 4:25) This claim is not up for grabs. The real question for two millennia has been: How do we interpret that claim? Most atonement theories are based on bona fide biblical metaphors for the cross: the “military” metaphor; the “obedience” metaphor; the “ransom” metaphor and the “sacrifice” metaphor.

The “penal substitution” atonement theory, which comes out of the sacrifice metaphor, is not in the New Testament. It’s been around for about 500 years—ever since Martin Luther misinterpreted 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be a sin offering, who knew no sin…” Luther interpreted this verse in terms of punishment rather than sacrifice: God treated Jesus, who knew no sin, as though he were a sinner.

Unfortunately, penal substitution became the prevailing Protestant view of atonement after the Reformation.

Nadia Bolz-Weber, in a recent sermon on John 3:16, takes a hilarious (and harsh)
romp through the penal substitution atonement theory:

“…God had this one little boy – and he loved that little boy so much… but he had to KILL that little boy because you stole a candy bar, or lied to your mom, or felt up your girlfriend or maybe you used swear words or looked at dirty pictures. The important thing to know is that God killed his little boy rather than punishing you, because let’s face it, someone had to pay and you should feel so grateful about all of this that you believe and (most importantly) you behave. But the good news is that if you believe all of this and if you try really hard to be good then when you die you get a special all-inclusive vacation package called Eternal Life.”

Ouch.

Love Wins
Bottom line: The notion that what God mostly is is ANGRY with us is as mistaken today as it was 500 years ago. As Richard Rohr puts it: God loves us, not according to our capacity to be good; God loves us because God is good.

The Love of God is the one eternal reality. When everything else has passed into shadow, what will remain is Love. Love never ends, never fails, never stops, never dies. Fortunately, the news of Easter is so powerfully transcendent, it can bear any of our botched attempts to communicate it.

Happy Easter, y’all.