Dear Friends,
For someone who rarely leaves the house, I’ve sure felt busy lately. Since last I wrote you a week ago, four baby kittens were born in my bathroom, two older kittens arrived as fosters - and then departed again, I signed up for a lay preaching course, and probably dealt with a dozen other things I’ve forgotten about besides doing my usual job. And, at the same time, I feel like I’ve been bombarded with so much useful information I don’t know what to do with it all. Here’s just a (relevant) snippet of what’s come my way this week:
Some research on Gen Z’s worship habits and beliefs (for reference, I’m part of that mostly missing bloc of Millennials in the Church).
This excellent blog on important reports from the Episcopal Church and education from Sharon Ely Pearson.
The Corner Room has this relatively new children’s album that’s also sort of memory verses - though, personally, I’ve been tuned in to their short album “Love Never Ends,” which is a setting of 1 Corinthians 13 in three movements that makes these verses feel new and refreshing.
Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints is working on curriculum materials to go with their book! It’s not done yet, but I can’t imagine it will be anything other than incredible.
Pile all that and more church material in with brainstorming projects for my own congregation, and news of the world, and like everyone else, I’m doing by best to digest a lot of media. And when it all gets to be too much, I sing. I sing the movements from “Love Never Ends.” I sing traditional hymns. I’ve been singing CityAlight’s “Your Will Be Done”
This song keys in on one of my favorite verses, the center of my usual Lenten devotion, but also the verse I try to keep at the forefront of my mind always, “Father, not my will but yours be done.” But obedience doesn’t come easily. To the most famed figures in the Bible (Jonah could have avoided that whale), to me, to any of us. But it might help to rethink obedience.
As I learned from Jo Luehmann, a powerhouse thinker on deconstructing some of the more harmful elements of fundamentalist faith, the words translated at obey, whether we look at the ancient Greek or the Hebrew, are actually words that mean to listen intelligently, to carefully pay attention or observe. Obedience in English, on the other hand, suggests the imposition of force, of another’s will. These older words, though, require our wisdom and engagement to meet with that of others. It is a conversation.
So what does it mean to tie myself to a piece of scripture “Father, not my will but yours be done,” a phrase taken from Jesus’s death on the cross, from the ultimate giving over of the self? It certainly doesn’t mean any of this will be easy.
Jesus looked for another way. Moses led the people into the wilderness, only for them to complain that they would die wandering without food. We all resist in dozens of ways, and yet when we don’t open ourselves to God’s will, it will just keep showing up in front of us. When Jonah got out of that whale, he still had to go to Nineveh. He could have just say down and not moved. The Israelites could have broken off from Moses. (Jesus was out of options, but he still asked to be relieved of His suffering, despite knowing what the scripture foretold.)
What God wants from us will keep showing up, and we have to figure out how to use our own skills and wisdom to fulfill that calling. I know I run crash bang into the situations all the time. It means confronting the reality that, as Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber put it in one of her recent newsletters, "I don’t get to choose what strangers come into my life and say what I need to hear. There’s never been an Angel Catalogue. Because if we got to choose our messengers, I’m pretty sure we’d get it wrong."
Each day, I try to be judicious about where I choose to put my energy. I try to be clear about what is God’s will and what is the world’s demand that I keep busy. I’m not great at it, but I’m trying. So like last week I want to encourage you to keep slowing down, but this time, slow down to make sure you can listen to the world more closely. God is speaking. What will you hear? What have you been drowning out?
Be well, be still (for as long as you can),
A. Bird