Eyes to see

Hey Bro
Yesterday was quite typical... moments of routine, moments of laughter, moments of fear, and work and love and food and disagreements and stress and...

After working, picking up kids, celebrating Clayton joining Davis on the Presidential Fitness list, a quick run on the treadmill, and driving back and forth across Lubbock for the guys practices, Holly and I met at Rosa's out on Milwaukee with them for dinner.

As Clayton and Davis road home with me from Rosa's, Davis asked to hear the CD with the drum line in it (Worship In Every Direction from Mars Hill). We listened to a few songs on the way home. As I pulled into the driveway, Holly and Eli were pulling in and I saw her stop at the trash can. I thought she was going to have Eli pull the can up for the first time (usually Clayton's and Davey's chore) and decided it might be worth catching on video. I think the music in the car ended up being a pretty good soundtrack.

Some of it is dark, especially when Davis tries to show his King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table book, but I think you can get the gist.

I thought I would let you see what I saw last evening.

Jesus (or The Black Keys) at Davey's Drum lesson

Hey Bro,
So many thoughts going through my heart the past few days... do I share about my view (or lack of view) of the two sides of Easter, or how awesome it was to watch The Masters and Bubba Watson, or one of the highlights of the weekend...watching We Bought a Zoo with the family? Too Much goes unsaid between us!


I guess to be predictable, I'll start with music related ideas. I think I mentioned recently that Davis has restarted drum lessons, and he is loving it. It is amazing to see him pick it up so quickly and enjoy it so much. One of the things that has been fun is to watch him learn a rhythm and then play it along to a song. His electronic drum kit allows you to plug in an iPod and play with it.  He thinks it totally awesome, and I have to admit it is pretty cool. He learns a new rhythm and old Dad says, "hey that sounds like..." and off we go looking for songs on iTunes. His first song was New Sensation by INXS, which I absolutely love.


But last week he learned a slightly different rhythm at a slightly slower speed. The second he started playing this rhythm in his drum teacher's garage, I heard these lyrics (and like usual, started to tear up a bit)...

Let me be your everlasting light
Your sun when there is none
I'm a shepherd for you
And I'll guide you through
Let me be your everlasting light

Let me be your everlasting light
I'll hold and never scold
In me you can confide 
When no one's by your side
Let me be your everlasting light

Oh baby, can't you see
It's shining just for you
Loneliness is over
Dog days are through
They're through

Let me be your everlasting light
Your train going away from pain
Love is the coal that makes this train roll
Let me be your everlasting light

Yeah, let me be your everlasting light
Let me be your everlasting light
Be your everlasting light


I thought of these words again as I read the lyrics and listened to Mike Scott yesterday. It may be risky theology to put the words of The Black Keys in red letters... but I can't do much better these days than to hear this song that way. And I realize, it isn't an easy ask. I am not even sure what it means. As a matter of fact, I haven't been willing or able to let him be my everlasting light... I don't like the darkness and try to make my own light when it is here. Does letting him be my light mean being willing to live with the darkness, and the uncertainty that comes with letting someone else be the light? But oh, how I welcome the words "love is the coal that makes this train roll." Can the dog days be through, really?


Fittingly, this song is the first track on their CD, Brothers. This is how it goes... (I like the studio version better, but couldn't find it viewable on mobile devices. This is a live version from MSG, complete with disco ball).

Easter Sermon

I figured I would post this for you to read.  I would love to get your feedback.  I was trying to bring together the two sides of the story of Easter and to see what it meant for folks who wake up two days past Easter back in the "stinking darkness" of the everyday.  I riffed at the end quite a bit and so this is more of the track I was on.

3 posts in less than 24 hours - dude.....

Easter Evening

St. Edwards King and Martyr

April 8, 2012

Easter is the height of all Christian celebrations.  It is the supreme festival for the church.  Our houses of worship are decorated we ring the bells with vigor, our songs are ones of triumph and gladness and we shout, preach sing and proclaim that Christ is risen.  It is a proclamation that has cosmic repercussions; it is not just about human kind it is about the entire world – the whole of the created order.  All that heals, unites and creates has overcome all that separates, all that injures, all that would destroy.  Death has been swallowed up by life.  

And as Harry Williams says, ‘It is a magnificently compelling vision – while it lasts’ – while we can hang on to it.  Some people can seemingly hang on to it all the time. Other people feel deeply moved while the hope of God’s power is being proclaimed.  But once they get back in their cars, once on the way home – well life recedes into what Robin Green calls “the stinking darkness of everyday life.” 

In the Southern Culture that I grew up in there was the blackness of Good Friday and then the Joy, the ruckus celebration that almost turned Easter into a Basketball half-time show – it felt like a pep rally where the passions were wound out and the production value was through the roof.  But sometimes the narrative can be so triupmphalistic, the jubilant celebration so loud that it leaves little room for actual people who were dealing with persistent problems in life.

We have the tendency to place the resurrection into the past 2000 years ago or into the future after physical death.  And when we do that, Christ can easily become a cult-idol – and the thing about idols is that they are powerless.  “Eyes, but they see not, mouths but they speak not.”   They are impotent, powerless and ineffective to transform.

You and I come here tonight in need of more than religious idols and relics.  We need more than – the title of the Tom Wait song that we heard at On the Edge this week called “chocolate Jesus” - something that is easy to unwrap, tastes sweet in the moment but cannot sustain, cannot reach into the depths of us.  We need more than the vacuous jubilance that turns Easter into a basketball celebration.

And the question that often emerges and persistently sits within us, the question that meets us as we wake tomorrow within the jaggedness of our own lives is “what on earth does this event mean for people like you and me?”   What does this event hold for we who struggle with anxiety, fear and depression, we who travel the inside road of grief, who live many days within the black veil of the limits of life.  Wanting to find places that expand, needing and desperately hungry for new life, but are unable to manufacture it on our own.   What does the resurrection hold for us ?

The hope for me is that the story that we read tonight seems much closer to actual life - it tells our story.  I was reminded on Good Friday that Jesus hung in total solidarity with the pain of the world and the far too many lives on this planet that have been "nasty, lonely, brutish, and short.”  It is the reality that God is not aloof watching human pain, nor apparently always stopping human pain, as much as God is found hanging with us alongside all human pain. Jesus forever tells us that God is found wherever the pain is, which leaves God on both sides of every war, in sympathy with both the pain of the perpetrator and the pain of the victim, with the excluded, the tortured, the abandoned, and the oppressed since the beginning of time.  Jesus was not, as Malcolm and Fraser continue to teach us, some kind of heavenly transaction, or "paying a price" to God, as much as a cosmic communion with all that humanity has ever loved and ever suffered. If he was paying any price, as Richard Rohr says, it was for the hard and resistant skin around our souls.

That is why when we turn back to the gospel on Easter evening we notice that it connects much better with people in pain than the Pep Rally Easter, the Basketball , Half-time show Easter.   When we turn back to the gospel it reveals itself as a story of human trauma. Each of those we encounter in these resurrections stories are traumatized in their own particular way.  Mary weeps uncontrollably in a graveyard the- love that had begun to restore her ripped violently away; Jesus’ friends are hidden away in a locked room devastated.  The bottom of their lives had dropped out.  And they are in a state of despair, grief and panic.  Judas has committed suicide; Peter in a run from the authorities has cursed his name and denied him, all of them fled as it all came down on them.  Joanna Calicut suggests that what is central this kind of pain is the threat it poses to the person’s core beliefs about the way the world is.  It shatters comfortable personal assumptions relating to love, security, meaning and self-worth.  It forces us into altered states where we see the world altered  - the world as dangerous, chaotic, set against us and that we lack the resources to cope with it.

And this is the place that we meet the disciples that we encounter Mary.  Each of them locked away in their own rooms of fear, lacking the resources to move past – traumatized, disoriented and paralyzed.  This is where we live our lives many times.

On Thursday Michele and I visited Coventry Cathedral.  Over the past 6 months the story of this community has taken up an important place within my own life. And as I stood among the ruins of that church I was deeply moved and in my own tears began to see that this structure in it’s hollowed rubble represents so much of our own personal history and the history of humankind.  We will all stand in the middle of dreams and hopes that fall apart, that are taken from us - like fire falling from enemies above and below which reduce our lives in so many ways.

And then John says the most inconceivable thing - that Jesus “Came and stood within their midst”.  That the resurrected Jesus stood among them, around them, next to them – in their midst. Still smelling like hell – because that is where he had been.  And from the place of utter human anguish and misery he spoke freedom to those at the farthest distance.  And God raised him up, put breath in his lungs.  And now he stands in their midst resurrected, alive.   With the power to do the same for them. This one who was himself who was traumatized is now a survivor, this one who was dead is now living and among them.  And the emerging wisdom Joanna Cullicut says brings this insight, “that if the trauma of Jesus has been transformed then there is no situation that is irredeemable.”  There is no situation that is irredeemable.  Your situation is not irredeemable– Paul was so taken with this so convinced of this that he said: neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers nor height nor depth nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  The very presence of God as resurrection stands among us, finds us, comes to us in our alienation and isolation – he walks through walls to get to us and he stands among us alive – to give life.

 And Jesus is among them with his wounds.  The resurrection does not displace his wounds – He does not show up with baby fresh skin, as if it did not happen – as if it had all been a bad dream – as if the credits could roll and the story could end happily ever after.  No far from it.   No he stands among them with his wounds, showing them – they are now central to who he is, central to the way of life  - incorporating his painful reality within the promise and possibility of growth.  And so it is with us.  The resurrection does not take away the dark memories and painful experiences.  It does not act as a force field against the pain that is to come.  But the very presence of life is now among us, even amid our wounds, amid these rooms of fear. Life is here- Jesus is here.  And his very presence begins to tell us that things will be different, things can change, that our own failings and fear will not have the last word.

  Part of the way that the resurrection unfolds in this community is when we allow the painful, traumatic and unspeakable to assume a central place, when we incorporate it into the life of the community, when we are able to incorporate it into our life story and not to camouflage it or to burry it in the back yards of our life.  But to let it occupy the relationships that constitute this place.  And when we do this – when we share these experiences with each other, when we open our mouths and our lives – the very mystery of God Stands in our midst and begins to unravel the darkness of the dead-end. And it is here that we can find that a bomb out Cathedral with it’s shattered structure and scared edifice can in fact become a place of reconciliation, a place where anger is given to peace, where revenge is given to friendship, where despair is given to hope, where fear is given to joy.  And surely this will take time – surely it will take a lifetime – surly these things are bound up together - but the very life of God is in our midst – among us to led us.  

 And then the resurrected One speaks a word – and of the infinite number of words that could have been spoken – he speaks a word that begins to disrupt all of the striving, all of the fear, all of terror and trauma and depression.  It is a small word – but like bacteria it will begin to eat away at the darkness –showing His disciples another way.   He utters the word Peace – Shalom.  This is a word that does not mean the absence of conflict and pain, but the peace of God that emerges in the midst of trauma and pain, the shalom of God that grows amid life’s unalterable experiences.  It is a word that Jesus spoke when the storm raged on the Sea of Galilee and they were all but lost – he stood amid the hollowing, amid the furry and spoke peace.  Peace came to the Sea – to this symbol of the primordial chaos, the deep where the sea creatures dwell, the deep - where the chaos lives and builds its strength.  And he speaks peace  -  Peace, I leave with you, my peace I give unto you not as the worlds gives do I give, let not your heart be troubled nor be afraid.    This peace that God gives does not relieve us from the unevenness, the turmoil of out life - .  In fact this is where the resurrection meets us – in the everyday, in the routine, in the aftermath.  

And finally he says receive the Holy Spirit and he breaths on them.  This second Adam who receives the Spirit and breath of God in his own lungs now breaths on those gathered there.  Malcolm on Friday suggested that his was a new creation story.  This is the God who takes humanity in his arms breathing life into their very being, the very life that has come through death into their lives now.   Into those lives who have been isolated, into the lungs of those who live constricted.  Breath- the very breath of God.  God is now as close as the air that you breath.

May we gathered here find him unexplainably among us, Resurrected - and may his wounds heal our wounds and may you hear him say “peace” receive the Holy Spirit.  And may this very next breath begin to bring you into his resurrected life.  

Hold Swiftly

I came across this song Everlasting Arms of Mike Scott's yesterday and I can feel the breeze of the Spirit in it.  The Fear is not all there is, I will live, I will be carried, God's great boundary crossing love is irrepressible.  It's a crack in it all and today this is enough.

May you find yourself in the embrace of God and the Truth of who you are.  I love you my friend.  


Lord hold me
In Your everlasting arms
Enfold me
In Your everlasting arms

Let striving cease
That I may come to rest
In perfect peace
Renewed and truly blessed

Lord bathe me
In Your everlasting light
Lord raise me
In Your everlasting light

Awake my mind
That I may understand
And come to find
The truth of who I am

Above the silvery bay
A bird rose on the breeze
Then swooped as if to say
You too may fly with ease

Lord lift me
In Your everlasting love
Home swiftly
In Your everlasting love

I'll go to where
A temple stands upon a hill
In silence there
I'll wait upon Your will

Lord lift me
In Your everlasting arms
In Your everlasting arms
Everlasting arms
Everlasting arms

In Your everlasting
Everlasting arms

One Day

I hold our friendship very close.  It continues to be a source of love, courage and strength in me.  I understand looking for the other to see if the light is left 'online'.  Let's not give up on these impulses, give up on these ways of connecting and being connected.

The last few weeks have been a bit dark in my heart.  The black birds have returned again and sit above me on the wire. But I know the pattern, the cycle of life, death and resurrection and I know that they will take flight again.  I just have to wait.  I talked to Ted yesterday and that was wonderful.  I can be led to a space with him where love feels more expansive than the constriction for a moment. It is good to be reminded today that Jesus' friends were locked into a small room in terror and that he "came and stood within their midst".

I miss you Pat, miss our lunches our runs our railing at the injustice of the world, the laughter we were able to find in our messy parenting and messy living.  Know that I love you and in all the online 'near misses' that my hand is still extended to you, my heart still pointed west.

No Foolin' ...

There is this powerful combination of thoughts and emotions that exists in me, everyday. They are life as I experience it, though I have thankfully begun to learn that they are not all there is to life. One of the things that I experience with them is a desire to share them with you and to hear what you have been thinking and feeling. Everyday. One huge gift of our friendship was the freedom I felt to do so, and it has caused me to consider it may be possible with others. These thoughts and emotions seem frequently to exist just outside of my ability to put them into words on a screen, or on paper. In fact I have spent more time on these few sentences this morning than I had planned for this entire post to take.

Everyday, I check Skype and you are not available (just as you do), and then seven more things happen that make me afraid, joyful, angry, ashamed, aware, excited, lose my breath, or laugh ... and I want to connect again. And the scenario repeats, somehow slowly making it easier to live without the connection I want, than to face the frustration of lack of connection and to try to overcome it. And I wonder if this isn't the same thing that happens everyday with other people in my life... friends near and far, parents, brothers, Holly and the boys. Maybe there is a desire to connect so great it takes day after day after day of life to give it another go, one more chance, another run at it...or not.

So I keep trying, with them. Everyday, though some days get a better go than others.

And the same with trying to connect with you.
Occasionally I even hit the "Send" or "Publish" button.

And somehow, I believe you get it. I think you experience something so similar you know what I mean. There is something that transcends my ability, or my inability, to create and maintain connection, or at least I hope there is.


I am wide awake. I love you. I am so grateful for life. And I miss you. Everyday.