The First Blossom of Healing

Three years ago on Easter, I preached about the two little apple trees I'd planted out in my front yard.

I preached about resurrection and the new life, to be fair, just like that day requires. But the framing image changes year by year, and that year, it was about them apples.

Wind back thirty-six months, I was homiletically marveling at the resilience of a dwarf Honeycrisp, one that had been brutally mangled by a stag.   Deer being what they are, my plans for the growth of that recent planting didn't matter a bit.  New antlers itched for their velvet stripped away, and the sapling was the unfortunate recipient of that desire.  It was reduced to nothing more than a branchless stick.

But as that sermon told it, to my surprise and despite it all, the tree was recovering.  The bark healing, and a few tender leaves were making their appearance.  

Go, little tree, go, I thought.  It's the sort of thing that stays with us, those of us who know how hard life can be.  I had good-hearted congregants ask, months later, hey, how's that little apple tree doing?

That was three years ago.  Though it's grown, it's a bit awkward, with irregular branches and a spotty canopy.  It leans a bit to the East, and has grown upwards as fast as it can, a single slender main trunk reaching skyward, as if attempting to depart this wounding earth.  

It has also, traumatized as it was, not once offered up even a single blossom.  Next to it, the squat Fuji I planted at the same time started producing sweet red apples last year, after blooming every single year.  But the Honeycrisp showed no such inclination, year after year.   Not a bud.  Not even a hint of budding.

Even so, I've tended to it, giving it a nice deep watering now and then when drought parched the soil to dust.

This last week, as I puttered about the yard weeding and amending soil, I went to inspect the trees.  The Fuji was a riot of pink-white flower.  And my wounded, struggling Honeycrisp?

There, far up the long snaking main trunk, a little couplet of blossoms high out of reach.

Healing takes its own time, and whenever it comes, it's welcome.  

Lengthening Lent

Lent ended, and nothing changed.

This was a good thing, at least so far as my Lenten disciplines were concerned.  For years, my approach to Lent had been to give up my much beloved hoppy fermented beverages.  It was a nontrivial way to mark the season, and both made every evening 1) a reminder of another commitment and 2) tended to involve me dropping a pound or seven.

But this year, my focus had been a bit different. It had struck me, as the years had gone by, that perhaps celebrating the Risen Christ by banging back some beers on Easter afternoon just didn't mesh with the theology I was endeavoring to live out.

Finally, He is Risen, so I can get back to drinkin'?

Just seemed not quite right, somehow, as if I were celebrating an Easter that fell on 4/20...and in which the primary lectionary reading was drawn from the Fourth Gospel, Twentieth chapter...by lighting up the big ol' doobie I'd been denying myself for 40 days.  It'd be a strange time to be a pastor in Colorado these days.

This last year, I'd already backed way off my modest but regular alcohol consumption.  It was part of a personal discipline to reduce my total body mass, and laying off of what tended to be several hundred empty calories nightly seemed a great way to help cope with that.  That's been good for the self-care, but it's not the primary focus of my Christian walk.

And so, this season, I've made other changes, shifting habits and patterns in ways that I plan to continue.

For example, I committed to a little more frequency and intentionality in my prayer disciplines.  And that change hasn't changed, now that we're out of that liturgical season.  Nor should it change, I think.  It's actually rather important that it not.

Because the entire point of the season of Lent isn't preparing you to not be in the season of Lent.  It shouldn't be a time that leads you back to the place that you've already been, a few pounds lighter.

Easter, and the preparation for the promise that it represents, should go rather deeper into us than that.

The Doves of Easter

Earlier in the week, Tuesday it was, the weather had turned again, turned rough and ugly.  From balmy to sub-freezing, it had plunged over forty degrees.  The winds had howled, and the rains had poured, turning our yard into a flowing wintry bog.

At the head of our bed, there is a window.  On the ivy-covered ledge of that window, a dove hunkered down.  At first, it was just the rain and the wind, but then as that rain turned to hail, then sleet, then snow...dear Lord, snow in mid April...she tucked in more, and her feathers fluffed out huge to create a warming pocket of air for the new life beneath her.

From beneath her, a little head poked, her one child for the spring nest.  It would peer out, slightly damp, and then tuck back in to the mother's breast.

"Do you think the baby will be OK," my soft-hearted wife asked.  "Should we set up a heater or crack the window or something?"  I assured her that we should not.   I'm not quite Picard-hard-core with the Prime Directive when it comes to wild things, but I'm close.  Plus, it's a couple of degrees warmer right by the house, and the ivy and the overhang keep off most of the rain.  They would be fine, I said, and I felt the odds were mostly in their favor.

All day long, the wind gibbered and scratched at the house, and the trees rocked, and rain spattered against the window.

Late that afternoon, I checked in, and the chick was alone and wet in the nest.

I wondered where the mother had gotten to.  The father, well, he hadn't been around for a bit, which is strange for doves.  I had seen them together in the nest in the building of it, but not again for a while.  There are cats and several hawks in the neighborhood, and I wondered if perhaps that might be the cause of that.

And so the mother had left, presumably to get food.  I checked in again at dusk.  Still no mother.

But the next morning, she was there, fluffed plump to warm her storm-bedraggled little one.  I looked up dove parenting techniques, and discovered that the she was a he, as dove parents switch off incubation duties and foraging duties, with the father taking the morning shift, and the mother the night.

I know how that is.

In the morning today, the little one was by the father's side.  Then, mid-morning as I puttered in the house, it was walking the ledge.  It was fully formed now, blossomed from dust into something alive in just days.  It was a small dove in its own right, a new living creature.  It looked ready to test its wings, and the father watched with his calm dark eye as it walked back and forth, back and forth.

As the sun fell in the sky, bringing to an end this day in between Good Friday and Easter morning, I looked again to the ledge of the window.

The nest was empty, a simple circlet of twigs.  The doves had flown.

It felt right, somehow.

Crowds and Mountains

The morning began early early.  I found myself rousing for the first service of the day.  The moon still hung bright and high in the sky, and my mind was semi-functional as I went about the morning preparations, my motions filtered through that slight faint metallic haze that accompanies any early morning wakings.  And by early, I don't mean seven, or six, or five.

It was a sunrise service, the first I've participated in since beginning my ministry.  You need to get up early for those services , and I'm usually up before sunrise anyway.  But this was an hour's drive away from Annandale.  So the alarm went off at four.

Waking at four for a four-thirty departure really does mark a day as different.   And so into the Prius I went, and drove through the dark traffic-less morning.  From the Beltway to 270 and northward I drove, quaffing coffee the whole way, as alertness began to seep into my mind.  From 270, I hopped off onto Route 109, and moved westward, into the Ag Reserve, that sweet expanse of land in the north of DC suburban Montgomery County untainted by sprawl.   The destination was a mountain, although this was hardly Denali or the Eiger.

It was the menacingly named Sugarloaf Mountain, which sits amiably in the Ag Reserve offering up lovely bucolic vistas to any with the courage and stamina required to drive up to the top.   At an overlook facing the sunrise, an amphitheater sits, and there every year in recent memory the pastor of the Presbyterian church in nearby Boyds, Maryland has organized a sunrise service, helping direct the joint effort of a team of congregations.

I arrived in the darkness, and walked over to the overlook, which sat in the faint light of a setting moon.   People milled about like shadows, and I settled into a semi-central position, where I chatted with another pastor for a while.  Cars arrived.  And arrived.  And arrived.  From the overlook you could see them coming, headlights clearly visible on the country roads.  The place began to fill up, and light began to brighten the air around us.

As the scope of the amphitheater became clear, it became equally clear that it would be a challenge to fill it with even my large-venue voice.  Open air is rather unforgiving acoustically, and no matter how good the sermon, it ain't nuthin' if folks can't hear it.

Thankfully, one of the five other pastors helping lead had brought a portable powered lectern and amp.   The light grew brighter, and then brighter still, and I realized that I wouldn't need to read my sermon from my iPhone after all.

And the gathered group grew, and grew, and grew some more.   It was a beautiful, beautiful morning, clear and crisp but not frigid, and the light cast into the sky seeped smooth and gold-blue even into the dark.   When the time came for me to preach...for preaching had been my assignment...I looked out over the gathered faces and realized that this would be the largest crowd I'd ever preached to in my just-over-seven years of small church ministry.  The tally, confirmed by thems who counted later, was somewhere around five hundred.  Five times the capacity of my sweet little church.   Not a wee kirk.  Not a family.  But a crowd.  A throng.

Yikes.

And yet not yikes.  My public speaking anxiety dropped away years ago, worn away to nothing by years of weekly practice.  Whether it's fifteen or five hundred, it's almost the same so long as you're prepared.

Almost.

When you've gotten to know a little church, every face is familiar.  Every face has a name, and a backstory, and you understand the character and interrelation of the community.  But when you bump up over one-fifty, the group is different.  You do not know them, and even those you do know can get lost in the sea of faces.  They do not deeply know each other, not all of them, and while the web of human connectedness weaves them all together through mutual friendships and/or Kevin Bacon, they are a different sort of entity.

But that difference was difference in a good way.  As the organizing pastor put it, every one of them was only there because they wanted to be.  And that made the gathering a church in the real and best sense of the word.  So with the sun rising, we sang, and heard scripture, and when it came time to preach, I did.  

It was fine, in the best sense of fine.

And then we sang some more, and gathered up an offering for a local charity, and prayed, and with alleluias were blessed on our way.

It was a delightful beginning to what would prove to be a really joyful Easter day.

Doing Nothing Special for Easter

As I prepare to transition out of my little congregation, and it tries to figure out what the next stage of it's life will look like, certain things in the life of the church are notably and visibly changing.  As the last of the old stalwarts begin to detach themselves from the congregation they've attended for decades, attendance has dipped a bit.  The transition over to a wholly Christian Contemporary style means that the old beloved hymns are just no longer sung, and the old prayers aren't being said, and the fellowship life is young and mostly monogenerational.  There is no place for the old guard in the life of the new church, something that in moments of unpastorly irritation makes me think of the new church in the same way I think of that boy in Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree."

But then I remember, shoot, this is what folks wanted.  They were exhausted.  They were ready to move on.  It was what they hoped for and needed.  So I smack down that grumpy little meme.

Still, with things in this in-between place, and the relationship with the dying 1.0 Korean church functionally nonexistent, Easter this year will be different. 

In previous years, in fact, every year, Easter worship has been a Big Deal.  But the church is, now, just a seed of what will come.  So there'll be no riotous multilingual smorgasbord of skits and songs and choirs and bell choirs.  There simply aren't enough people.  There will be no lilies, or bright white on the parament, because the folks who are here now really couldn't care less about those things.  No-one even knows what a parament is...which is fine, because honestly, I'm not sure Jesus would have known if you asked him.

For this Sunday, what we're doing liturgically is pretty much exactly what we do every Sunday.

There will be some difference, of course.  The music will be Easter-themed.  The sermon will focus on resurrection.  There will be a scaled-back Easter egg hunt for the handful of little ones, because not to do that would be such a serious bummer.  There will be a potluck.  More folks will be wearing ties.

But it's not going to be a particularly unusual day in the worship life of the church.  And perhaps, as the former moderator of the PCUSA recently suggested on his blog, this might not be a bad thing.   Perhaps having folks show up, and telling them, you know...this is what we do every week...well, it might not be a bad thing. Why raise people's expectations?

Then again, I like the extra effort that goes into the special events in the life of the church.  I like the festivals.  There is a spiritual point, I think, in marking certain days as more significant, and in cranking up the rejoicing a notch.

Which is why there's one more thing we're doing this Sunday, oh, about 15 minutes from now. 

It could happen any day of the year, but we're doing it today.  A half-dozen new members are joining, all young, making their commitment and profession of faith before the church.  There's not a bunch of hoopla.  Just hope, and the promise of new life and new gifts and new things in the ministry.

So I guess we are doing something special.  It's hard not to, on a day like today.

Forgiveness and Connections

Having wrapped up the Jewish High Holy Days with my wife and her family yesterday, I find myself thinking about the depth of connection between the message of Jesus and the core practices of modern Judaism. That connection goes well beyond my support services as a non-fasting and thus adequately caffeinated shabbas goy.

The essence of Christ's teaching in the synoptic Gospels (that's Mark/Matthew/Luke, kids) can be boiled down to one key phrase: "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at Hand." Most of the parables and teachings of Jesus are riffs around that core theme. We are to understand God's authority over us as present, right here, right now. We're asked to respond to God's sovereignty over our lives by turning away from those things that impede our living into a joyous relationship with God and neighbor. Jesus both taught that message and wrapped it up in flesh.

The call to set aside old brokenness, turn to God, and embrace a new commitment to a life lived in grace is the entire point of the most sacred period in the Jewish liturgical year. It's all about a repentant heart and seeking forgiveness and healing. The prayer book is called "Gates of Repentance." Every other prayer is asking for God's mercy and for the strength to do better.

As I sat through the Yom Kippur service yesterday, the parallels between this season and the season of Easter seemed unmistakable. Both seasons present a call to die to sin, and to live new into God's promise. To do that, we must both seek and offer forgiveness.

That ain't easy. Sometimes, the hurts we've experienced seem to go too deep, and tearing them out of ourselves feels impossible. We'd rather hold them close, and cherish the sharp bitter flavor they give our lives. But this is not how we were created to live. We were created to pour out the blessing of forgiveness into the world. Though our darkness snarls and struggles against it, we nonetheless need to open our hearts up and pour out whatever measure of grace God has given us.