lauren laughs

I love this story—both for what it says and what it doesn’t say.  We’re told that Jesus saw the man lying near the pool, and knew that he had been there a long time.  We don’t know how he knew—if someone told him (there’s no mention of the disciples), if the man just had a “look” about him, or if Jesus’ own divine wisdom let him see the truth.  But Jesus knew he had been there for a long time. 

Knowing this, Jesus asks: Do you want to be made well?

This is, I think, a very good and useful question to ask—not just in this story, but in our daily lives.  Do you want to be made well? 

For while it may seem obvious that wellness and wholeness is something to be desired and hoped for, it’s also true that sometimes we choose other things.  Sometimes the familiarity of our infirmity is too comforting to let go of.  Asking the question: do you want to be made well—invites us to pause and consider our heart’s desire. 

And then the man responds, not with a simple or exuberant YES! But with his own story: I have no one.  I have no one.  Sometimes the loneliness of our infirmity is the biggest burden of all.

So Jesus says to him: Stand up, take up your mat, and walk.  Jesus asks him to do the impossible, which he does, and in standing up, he is healed.  It’s helpful for me to notice that Jesus invites the man to participate in his own healing.  This man who had no one, and felt he could do nothing on his own, is invited to partner with Jesus by responding to Jesus.  Jesus could have just said: be healed!  And perhaps that would have allowed the man to walk, but it might not have allowed the man to walk away whole. 

So what does this passage have to teach us?  I think it invites us to slow down and ask ourselves the question—do I wish to be made well?  And then pay attention to our answer.  If it’s no, what about our own illness or brokenness are we clinging to?  And if it’s yes, then say so.  Let your “yes” be your prayer: Jesus, I want to be made whole.  And then pay attention to what Jesus might invite you to do—how Jesus might invite you to partner in your own healing, acknowledging that you are not alone.

As followers of Jesus, I think this passage also invites us to pay attention to who might be sitting by the pool, seemingly alone, hoping for healing.  This person didn’t call out to Jesus, Jesus noticed him.  So even as we pray for healing in our own lives, we pray for the eyes to see others in search of healing.  We pray that we would have the courage to ask the people we encounter—do you wish to be made well?  And that we would be equipped to accompany them in their healing.

It is in asking the question—of ourselves and of those around us—that healing begins.

Preached at The Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta

Maundy Thursday

I am so, so glad we are celebrating this Maundy Thursday service together in this space.  The past two years, Maundy Thursday has been filmed in my house—both in my kitchen and at our dining table.  The first year was, I’ll admit, pretty moving.  We were all new in the Pandemic, exploring different ways to bring church home.  In pulling the service together from my home, I spent a lot of time remembering what we did in this space on Maundy Thursday, and how it made me feel.  Remembering is an important faith practice.  I also remembered that this service recalls the last supper Jesus had with some of his closest friends.  So my family and I sat together and ate dinner, all on film, but with the conversation muted. 

If we had not muted the conversation at dinner that first year, you would have heard my children discussing the seven plagues, pharaoh’s hard heart, and the Hebrews’ escape from slavery.  They were talking about these things because they attended a Jewish school, and at school they were doing the faithful work of remembering the Exodus story.  I can still hear their preschool voices singing “Da-Daynu” meaning: it would have been enough.  God’s love for us is always enough.

At the end of the meal, we washed each other’s feet—my children’s favorite part of the service.  And then we came back to the dinner table to share the Holy Eucharist, each of us naming where we remembered seeing God’s presence in our lives.  Finally—the most poignant part for me—we cleared the table.  Just as we will clear the altar later this evening, my children helped me clear everything off the table.  When I handed my son the cup of wine to take away, he peered down into it and said: Mommy, it’s just like the Red Sea!  He was remembering.  We turned down the lights.  Then I wiped down the table, just as Sam and I had wiped down the altar the year before, remembering all of you, remembering what we share in this space, remembering Jesus’ presence with each of us no matter where we are.  My dinner table has felt like a profoundly sacred space ever since.

If there’s one thing I pray you’ll take away from this service, it’s the ancient faith practice of remembering.  Remember the story of Jesus.  Remember God’s love for you.  Remember how Jesus shows up in our love for one another.

But there’s one other thing I hope you’ll carry with you in the rest of this service and the rest of this Holy Week, and that’s Jesus’ constant invitation: Let me love you.

Jesus took off his robe, tied a towel around his waist, knelt down before his best friends, and began to wash their feet.  One of his friends, Peter, tried to resist.  Peter loved Jesus so much, he couldn’t imagine letting this teacher and friend wash his dirty feed.  But Jesus loved Peter so much, he insisted—let me love you, Peter.  Let me share myself with you in this way.

Now it’s our turn to remember Jesus’ love for us in the washing of feet and in the breaking of bread.  Let God love you.  Remember.  And let God love you.  Amen.

Preached at The Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta

Lent 2, Year C

When reflecting on our lectionary for this week, two things jumped off the page and lodged themselves in my heart and mind.  The first was not even one of our readings, but the collect for today—the opening prayer.  “O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy…”

Glory and mercy are of course words and characteristics we often attribute to God and God’s way of being in the world.  No surprise there.  But for God’s glory to be defined by having mercy… that’s a slightly different take, isn’t it?  What do we think of when we think of glory?  Perhaps greatness, power, might—strong things.  And what do we think of when we think of mercy?  Perhaps gentleness, forgiveness, compassion. 

But here in this prayer, we are reminded that God’s glory is not just found in God’s greatness.  “O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy.” God’s glory is found in the mercy God extends to us when we come forward with our bumps and bruises, with our sin and hardness of heart, with our mistakes and misgivings.  And God’s glory is found in our seeking and receiving that mercy.  God’s glory is found in the relationship born out of turning to God, asking for help, and receiving the mercy of God’s unfathomable love.

This juxtaposition of glory and mercy seems almost paradoxical.  Not unlike the coupling of vulnerability and strength.  You know, how the idea of being vulnerable immediately implies weakness—when we think of vulnerable populations or vulnerable species, we think of beings in need of protection and care.  But to be vulnerable—to express vulnerable truths about yourself or to open yourself up to transformation—that kind of vulnerability takes courage and strength.  It is not for the weak. 

To name our weaknesses before God requires strength, and to always have mercy is God’s glory: “O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus.”

Alongside this glory of mercy, what calls to me in this week’s lectionary is God’s invitation to Abram: “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.”  If we are all descendants of Abram, then surely this is the is the mark of our shared inheritance: that we are from a very young age a people who marvels at the stars.  Truly!  I think my daughter’s first word after “Mama and Da-da-da” was “MOON.”  We cannot help but look at the sky and ponder our place in the universe. 

And what is it you feel when you look to the sky?  Is it merely a vague recognition that the sky is there, or the sky is big, or the sky is beautiful?  Or have you ever felt overwhelmed by the sky.  I hope you have at some point in your life laid on the ground with arms stretched wide beside you, and imagined this world turned upside down… so that the ground pressed against your back is the top, and the sky above is actually below… and you imagine yourself falling into the vastness of sky and stars and universe and infinity.  Have you?  If not, you have your homework assignment for this week. 

This week, I invite you to practice AWE.  As we reflect on our mortality during the season of Lent, the weight of our shortcomings and failures and mortal bodies with all their ailments, it can feel especially heavy.  But when we practice awe, when we contemplate our mortality alongside the glory of God’s mercy, when we look to the sky and try to count the stars, suddenly our failures become as light and weightless as the ash on our heads. 

Count the stars, if you are able to count them.  God’s mercy is vast.  God’s love is unfathomable. 

Now I realize that not everything can be solved by looking at the stars and singing, “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea…” For some, today’s reading can beg the question: But why not me, God?  Why do I continue childless?  Or why am I denied the longings of my heart: a companion, a cure, a call, an answer, a way forward.  I have prayed and I have believed—why not me?  For some, today’s reading can ask: If God’s mercy is so vast and God’s love so unfathomable, where is God in Ukraine?

These are honest questions.  These are faithful questions.  They are questions that need to be asked if we are to be in honest relationship with God.

As I have brought my own questions before God this week, I will share with you the response articulated within my own heart: Love is not the absence of suffering.

Love is not the absence of suffering.  To suffer, or to witness suffering, is not to be absent from God or to be absent from Love.  Indeed, the word compassion means “to suffer with” or “to suffer together.”  Like a mother hen gathering her brood under her wings in the midst of a storm, we are covered in our suffering.  We are held.  We are not alone.

How many times I have wanted to shield others from suffering, to suffer on behalf of another or stop the suffering all together.  I feel powerless in the face of brokenness and unanswered prayer.  My mortality is ever before me, my weakness and doubt laid bare.  And yet, I am never alone.  And you are never alone.   I am held in love, and you are held in love. 

“For the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind.”

There are some really big things going on in our world right now—big scary things.  And practicing awe won’t end wars.  Counting stars won’t put an end to evil and it won’t answer all our questions.  But practicing awe will remind you who you are and whose you are.  It will remind you of the vastness of the One who suffers with you and covers you with the down of her wing. 

Jesus is at work in the world.  Even now, Jesus is casting out demons and performing cures.  Jesus is on the move.  Go outside.  Look to the sky, or look to the budding branches that were brown and bare a week ago, or look to the brave souls defending their loved ones from the forces of evil, or look to the kind eyes of a stranger.  Or close your eyes and listen for that first bird of the morning, or the breath of your beloved, or your own heart beating within your chest.  Practice awe this week.  So that even in your suffering, or in the suffering you see, you know that God’s glory is mercy, that God is with you, and God is still at work in this world.

Amen.

Preached at The Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta

Epiphany 6, Year C

I have enjoyed sitting with the today’s lectionary over the past week—particularly our readings from Psalms and Jeremiah.  I love their use of the image of a tree planted by water—that we are called to be like those trees.  But before we can get to the trees, we need to talk about the doom, curses and woes. 

Our Psalm ends with the word “Doomed,” Jeremiah begins with the word “Cursed,” and then Luke finishes up with a list of “Woe’s.”  And once upon a time in my faith journey, I would have read these as warnings or even fear tactics.  Delight in the God’s law, or you’re doomed.  Trust in the Lord, or be cursed.  And be careful about how much money, food or fun you have, or your life will be full of woe and mourning.  I can remember a time in life when doing good had less to do with trusting God, and more to do with avoiding the doom, curses and woes.  It was a backwards kind of motivation—to be running away from what’s bad rather than turning to what’s good.

I don’t think that’s a helpful reading of today’s scripture.  I don’t think this is a vengeful God trying to scare us into right action and faith.

Instead I hear these words as an outpouring of love.  I hear God pointing to the truth that meditating on God’s law really does sustain us, and turning our hearts to God does keep us upright and OK when the storms come.

God invites us to trust in God’s love and provision. 

Now, think about the people in your life you trust the most—the people you know have your best interest at heart because they love you when you are at your best and when you are at your worst.  Think of the people who can tell you when you’re out of line, or working too late, or neglecting yourself, or neglecting your friendship.  That doesn’t just happen overnight.  That kind of trust is built up over time in loving relationship.  It’s not blind faith.  It’s faith that knows something about you.

Well that’s what God is inviting us into.  A loving relationship that builds over time so that we come to trust in God’s love and provision and law and goodness and mercy.  And this loving relationship doesn’t protect us from hardships. But it does protect us in the storms that will come—the heartaches and the disappointments and the loss—the trust gained in that loving relationship over the year allows us to be rooted and grounded in the love of God so that we can stand upright in the full knowledge of who we are and whose we are. 

And when we don’t have that, then yeah, it can feel like we’re in parched places of the wilderness… even when things seem to be going great on the outside, we can feel hollow and untethered on the inside, longing for love to ground us.

So friends, hear these words of doom, curse and woe.  But hear them as a recognition of what you’ve been through or perhaps where you are.  And then hear this invitation to let love wash over you—to let love seep up through your toes—to taste and see that the Lord is good, that God’s love is for you… especially for you.  And having felt that love, reach out for more, until you our rooted and grounded in God’s abiding love for you.  What springs forth from your branches and from your life just might surprise you.

Amen.

A Good Friday meditation on Jesus’ words in Luke 23:39-43, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us!”  But the other rebuked him saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?  And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.”  Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

It is never too late for us, and it is never too late for God.  The collect we just read together points to the truth that Jesus is still loving, still teaching, still promising to be present to the sinner hanging on the cross beside him—even at the hour of death.  It is never too late for us, and it is never too late for God.

You might be surprised to find that some of the most precious moments of a priest’s life are spent at the bedside of those nearing death and dying.  This truth is not borne out of a morbid fascination, but out of the realness and vulnerability present at death, creating an intimacy that is difficult to articulate beyond the moment itself.

Four years ago, I experienced a particularly poignant week of death during Lent.  Three people who were dear to me died in the span of seven days.  First, Henry—a 10-month old baby who we had been praying for since before his birth.  Henry was a twin, born with only half a functioning heart.  His parents and the doctors knew before he was born that his first moments of life would be risky moments of surgery and hope.  The first pictures we saw of Henry were of a tiny, beautiful boy, breathing tubes in his nose and a vertical scar across his chest.  Those preliminary surgeries were just a temporary fix until his could receive a heart transplant.  At four months, Henry received the gift of life through the heart of a toddler girl who had died in a car accident.  It was a painful rejoicing.  An answer to prayers difficult to pray.  Eventually he came home to his family and his twin sister, finally strong enough to live without the assistance of machinery.  And then one day, his body rejected his heart.  He had given life all that he could, given us all that he could.  Ten months may not seem like much, but I can tell you as the mother of a ten-month old right now that ten months is a lifetime.  Henry, in his dying, taught us how to always live on the precipice of life—on the very edge of hope.  He taught us how to inspire love without words.  He taught us the ministry of presence, for that is all he had, and it was more than enough.

Henry’s funeral was on a Saturday morning.  From his funeral I drove to the home of my friend Aimee, dying of colon cancer.  Aimee was lying in a hospital bed in her living room, unconscious and surrounded by family.  She would die the next day—a Sunday.  Two years earlier, Aimee’s husband and I had sat down with their two daughters to tell them their mom had cancer.  You see, Aimee was one of my closest friends, but she was also my colleague on staff at church, which meant that I was a youth minister to both her girls.  It was hard for all of us on staff to grieve the loss of our friend while also ministering to the parish we cared for.  That first night after Aimee died, her husband handed each of their daughters a box of sealed letters.  Each envelope was labeled with a certain occasion Aimee knew she might miss: Graduation, Your first heartbreak, Your first time having sex, When your dad falls in love again, Your wedding, Your first child.  One of her daughters ripped every envelope open, pouring over the words of her mother all at once.  Her other daughter opened only one envelope labeled: When I die.  Aimee, in her dying, taught us about selflessness.  She died her death in the same way she lived her life—mindful of what others might need and how she could best serve them.  Her death was like an exclamation point on an already loud life full of loud love.

From Aimee’s funeral, I went to the bedside of my friend Milton.  Milton was the father of my best friend, and he was dying of brain cancer.  Milton’s nick-name was “Magic.”  He was well beloved in the community for his contribution to the arts, but he was well beloved to me for his thoughtful and challenging conversations about faith.  Milton was an atheist.  Not an angry atheist, but a clever and caring one.  And really, I don’t think ‘atheist’ is an appropriate term to describe him—he talked way too much about faith not to espouse it himself.  He was a lifelong learner, always open to teaching and being taught, a truth that shined through in our conversations.  Not many people got to sit with Milton in his dying, but I did.  And when I asked him if I could pray with and for him, he nodded his head, yes.  He knew it was my language of love, and he let it wash over him as a loving recipient.  Milton, in his dying, taught us how to depart in dignity.  He helped us to find beauty in his death, even commissioning pottery pieces to be glazed and fired with his ashes—vibrant red candlesticks and vessels.  And he taught me the grace of letting love come in whatever form it will.

Before Jesus was resurrected, he was dead.  And before Jesus was dead, he was dying.  Jesus, in his dying, tells the penitent sinner, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  And the implications of his response are this: You are forgiven, you are loved, death cannot separate you from me or my love, I am with you now and will be with you to the end and beyond.

Nothing is too much for Jesus—not the brokenness of the sinner hanging beside him, not the brokenness of his own body nailed to a cross, not the brokenness of the world that put him there.

It is never too late for us, and it is never too late for God.

We do not get to sit at the bedside of a dying Jesus, we do not get to hold his hand and wait for the kind of wisdom only death can impart.  Instead we wait at the foot of the cross.  It is a gruesome and uncomfortable place to wait.  It is, for me, the most uncomfortable time of Holy Week.

And yet Jesus, in this most excruciating moment, speaks of paradise.  Jesus, in the midst of torture and wrongful death, meets us with love and invitation.  Jesus, ever the teacher, spends his last words on us, that his dying may teach us how to live.

My brothers and sisters: It is never too late for us, because it is never too late for God.

Amen.