Feel the Burn

It’s a bright and sunny August Sunday. The weather forecast for this week is HOT: Sunday 104, Monday 103, Tuesday 101, Wednesday 101, and Thursday 102…and if that isn’t bad enough, the lectionary readings for today seem to be conspiring with the weather to turn up the heat as well. Lots of talk about fire; lots of uncomfortable words in the scriptures and in the worship guide, too – “swords, division, crises, unsettle, conflicts, difficulties, bloodstained, nervous, unsafe, broken, dangers”…. All of this seems to say to us today that, in case we were thinking otherwise, Christianity is not an insulation from pain – that our God isn’t just asking us to be nice and to enjoy a life of ease and comfort. The Christ is calling us to awaken – to feel the burn – it’s the fire that creates that edge where change is possible – and so you are invited to bring your scars and your woundedness – to feel the rawness of that, and to open yourselves to God’s consuming, fiery presence – and to be transformed.

A New Year

From the worship service at DaySpring Baptist Church
January 3, 2010

This is a part of our service that we call the “Call to Worship,” and I’d like to call us to worship on the first Sunday of this new year with a few thoughts about how God calls us to this community, to this sanctuary.

Around here, we sometimes talk about the spiritual journey as a journey of awakening and we use words like "dying to self" to describe that journey. I’m sure all of you here have had moments over the past year in which you were awakened in some small way -- awakened to the love of God…miracles clothed in the commonplace -- and probably, too, over the past year, parts of you have died along the way.

For me, and maybe for others of you, the past year has been an awakening to the fact that I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT ANYTHING! It has been an awakening to that small, ugly part of me that is, in the words of George Bernard Shaw “a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making me happy.” Yeah, I’m not really all that perfect, but don’t tell Terry…he doesn’t know yet.

And there has been a lot of dying over the past year, too -- every time a friend was hurting, I died a little death; when my child was in pain, a part of me died then; and when I was the cause of the pain of my husband, my child, my friends, it was like a nail in my coffin; and… a part of me died every single time I entered this sanctuary. I love the word sanctuary -- a place of refuge -- because wherever you are in your journey of awakening, you are welcome here. And because there is something else that echoes back to me from the past year -- something our pastor said to a beautiful friend who was surely dying inside…he said, “My grace is sufficient for you…my grace is sufficient for you.”

This isn’t a place where you have to pretend. You can bring all of yourself into this sanctuary. In this season of Christmas, know this: that God, the creator of all, the great mystery, has come into the world as one of us. Emmanuel - God with us - LOVE with us. Love with us here in this sanctuary holding us together - in all of our weakness, in our joys and sorrows, in our belief and in our doubt, in our dying and in our waking. And this is my prayer for myself for the new year: May I decrease so that Christ may increase. And for DaySpring: May we decrease so that Christ may increase. Amen.