The Feast Day of the Visitation and the Reminder that So Much More Is Possible

Today is the Feast Day of the Visitation, the feast day that celebrates Mary, pregnant with Jesus, going to be with Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist.  We could celebrate this feast day in any number of ways:  we could celebrate intergenerational support for each other, the ways that God doesn't abandon women who are on the margins of society, the ways that improbable situations can be harnessed for hope, and the hospitality that is evident on so many levels (the wombs of the women, Elizabeth welcoming Mary).

The story in Luke leaves questions, of course.  Did Mary travel alone?  How did she stay safe?  What did Mary and Elizabeth talk about in the month (months?) that she was there?  Why did she leave before Elizabeth gave birth?  What did Joseph think about all of this?  Was Joseph even part of this narrative?

We get more of Joseph's perspective in the gospel of Matthew.  What I love about this feast day, however, is that it's focused on the women.  We don't have much celebration of women in the Christian tradition.  We should hold on to what's here, in addition to looking for ways to add more women to our celebrations.

I love this story because it reminds us that God doesn't choose those who are already ready and waiting for the call.  Imagine how many lives could have been changed if the earliest Church had emphasized this aspect of a call, this being worthy in God’s eyes even if one is not worthy in the world’s eyes. Imagine if we had centuries of the message that God loves us before we’ve done anything special at all, and even if we never live into our full potential in the eye’s of our society, God will see our value. 

Imagine if the church had given emphasis to Elizabeth, along with Mary.  I love the message that we're not too old, that our hopes and dreams might be answered after all.  We're not cast away if we're not a young woman, like Mary, with years ahead of her to be of service to God.  The definition of fertility enlarges.  

On Sunday, we heard that God doesn't call the equipped, but God equips those that God calls.  There's a bit of troubling theology here.  I believe we're all called, over and over again, a wide variety of calls.  God offers us invitations, and even if we say no, God will return with more invitations.  And when we say yes, God has resources, even if we don't.  We might even discover that we have all that we need.  God may not need to equip us at all.  Our weaknesses might turn out to be strengths.

It's a great day to celebrate those possibilities.  And even if we've been feeling like our time is passed, that it's too late for us, it's great to remember that God doesn't see us that way.  If we feel like we're too inexperienced, that we don't know what we're doing, it's great to remember that God doesn't see us that way.

It's great to remember Elizabeth's blessing:  "Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill the Lord's promises to her!” (Luke 1:  45, NIV, gendered language corrected).  Elizabeth gave Mary this blessing, but I believe it extends to us all, if we're open to the idea that with God and community, so much more can be possible than if we rely on our solitary selves.

Camp Counselors, the Young and the Old

On this past Sunday of interesting juxtapositions, our regular church service was a celebration of Pentecost and a blessing of/introduction to counselors from the nearby camp, Lutheridge, where I have a house in the residential section.  

The church sanctuary was full, even fuller than it had been the week before, when we celebrated 60 years of the church's existence.  Part of that was the presence of all of the counselors, about 60 in all.  Some of the people at church seemed to be visiting--it is a holiday week-end, after all, the 3 day week-end kind of holiday.

Some of us in the congregation had worked at Lutheridge, and many of us have supported Lutheridge in a number of ways.  Given that, I was surprised by how many people in attendance on Sunday hadn't been involved with Lutheridge, even though the entrance to the camp is less than a mile than the entrance to the church.  Not for the first time have I thought about how all the various types of church work live in siloes that never interact and how sad that is, how those siloes never communicate except for asking for money.  Sigh.

But today, let me not unpack that idea further.  No, today, let me celebrate these camp counselors.  I am awed that there are still people who make the decision to spend a summer at camp, living in such very different circumstances than their peers (eating camp food, sleeping in tents, hiking all day, going up and down and up and down the hill, working/living with children).  When I was young, my dream was to work at Lutheridge--back then, there weren't enough counselor spots for all the people who had those dreams.  Now the situation is different.

I found a counselor job at a Girl Scout camp, Camp Congaree, which gave me similar but different opportunities.  I got to be a backpacking counselor.  I spent the summer with mostly women and girls, which is a kind of community that works for me, although I didn't realize it then in the way that I do now--and to be fair, we weren't living in that community in the best ways that we could, not living it in the ways I idealize now.  

Maybe no community is living its best self--that's probably the lesson I should remember from all of my years of studying and creating intentional community.

But camp counselors have a head start, in that they're a self-selected group.  And the group that we blessed on Sunday has an additional motive--they're here at Lutheridge to help with the spiritual formation of children, in addition to all the other kinds of formation that they will do.

They look so young to me, and yet, at the same time, in my head, I'm closer to their age than my own.  In real life, I am the same age as their parents, many of whom were also camp counselors.  Those camp counselors are just starting life as adult selves (adult-ish?).  I am having a hard time believing I am as old as I am, but I am much closer to my senior years than my childhood years.  Time in my head wrinkles and crunches and has a few rips here and there.

This summer, I will do more at summer camp than attend a week as an adult or a camper.  I'll deliver mail, lead middle schoolers in a week of Bible study, and perhaps assist in the camp store.  It's going to be an interesting summer, a mix of a seminary class that I'm taking, online classes that I'm teaching, and camp life.  It will be the first summer where I won't be suffocating in the intense heat.  Hopefully, it will be the first of many magnificent mountain summers.

Sacrifice and Memorial Day

Today I am thinking about Memorial Day, about sacrifices, about what is worth the sacrifice and what is not.  I am thinking of U.S. soldiers, of course, as this day is designed to have us do.  I am thinking of people fighting in Ukraine, where the stakes must feel higher if one is Ukrainian.  Why would Ukrainians settle with Putin?  They must know that they would only have to fight again.

This morning I was thinking about Christianity, about a God who makes the sacrifice of taking on human flesh, who comes to be with us to show us how to live a God soaked human life.  I'm thinking of crucifixion, not as a required sacrifice, not in the substitutionary atonement theology kind of sacrifice, but as the price of taking on the Roman empire and the power structures they sanctioned.

I am thinking about sacrifices, the kind we make for each other, the kind we make for our larger communities, the kind of sacrifices we might feel compelled to make for a country.  I'm thinking about Christian martyrs, from Christ onward, and I'm wondering what martyrdom looks like in the 21st century (Christian martyrdom or other types).

I'm also thinking of our current year in the U.S., how so few seem willing to sacrifice anything.  I'm also thinking about the fact that the U.S. is such a death denying culture.  We don't want to think about death, we don't want to think about what might be required of us, unless we could be super heroic somehow and still live to tell the tale.

It's a good day for gratitude, for people who have been willing to do what must be done, for those who have done their part in preserving freedoms that we currently enjoy, and for those who thought they were honoring their country, even when their sacrifice seems futile or worse (idiotic or delusional) to future generations.

Here's a prayer I wrote for Memorial Day:

God of comfort, on this Memorial Day, we remember those souls whom we have lost to war. We pray for those who mourn. We pray for military members who have died and been forgotten. We pray for all those sites where human blood has soaked the soil. God of Peace, on this Memorial Day, please renew in us the determination to be peacemakers. On this Memorial Day, we offer a prayer of hope that military people across the world will find themselves with no warmaking jobs to do. We offer our pleading prayers that you would plant in our leaders the seeds that will sprout into saplings of peace.

Pentecost Promises

The third great church holiday is upon us, although many of us don't think about Pentecost that way.  We don't give Pentecost gifts.  We don't go out to buy our special, new Pentecost outfits--although we may pull out our red clothes.  We don't have food that we only eat on Pentecost.

Perhaps, though, we'll have a birthday cake for the church at coffee hour.  Perhaps there will be confirmands.  Maybe we've decorated the church in special ways.  Will there be streamer sticks or fans or something else to remind us of the great rush of wind?

Lately, I've wondered if we're taking some of the power out of Pentecost.  Are we cheapening the festival by these efforts?

I worry that we get lost in our decorating and art projects, as fun as they are.  I worry that we forget about the message of Pentecost.  It's not about transforming the surfaces of our worship spaces, much as they might need that.  It's about getting us out of our worship spaces to go out to transform the world.  No wonder we throw ourselves into our decorating projects.  The true mission of Pentecost makes us too uncomfortable to bear.

Pentecost is the holiday designed for discomfort, a celebration that should stir us to get up off the couch to go out and do great things. We learn about Pentecost in the book of Acts, after all, not the book of Sleeping Late. Perhaps that’s why so many of us approach Pentecost with a bit of apprehension. Throughout church history, we’ve seen what the presence of the Holy Spirit can do, even in the most improbable settings.

If we let the Holy Spirit loose in our home churches, what might happen? If we trusted in the transforming power of God, what changes might we see, both in our individual lives and in the lives of our church bodies? How might our local society and the larger world be different? The answers to those questions might scare us.

Maybe the answers don't scare us, so much as the thought of the effort involved makes us tired before we've even started.  But Pentecost assures us that it's OK.  God comes to us where we are.  We don't already need to be perfect believers.  In fact, the Bible is full of the wonders that God creates with the most imperfect people.  You likely wouldn't choose the 12 disciples if you were choosing a team to transform your church or business.  But Jesus showed us what was possible from a ragtag group of unlikely leaders.

Pentecost reassures us with the mystical promise of the Spirit. We do not have to know what we are doing; we just need to be open to the movement of the Spirit. Pentecost promises daring visions; we don’t have to know how we’re going to accomplish them. God will take care of that.

God became incarnate to prepare humans to carry on the work of Kingdom creation. And Pentecost reminds us of our job description, to let the Holy Spirit blow into our hollowed out spaces and to fill us with the fire to dream and the resources to bring our visions to life.

Pentecost Eve

Tomorrow is Pentecost, which means today is Pentecost Eve.  My holiday combining side wants to ask what treats we'll leave out for the Holy Spirit.  My cynical side says that most of us don't want to invite the Holy Spirit into our lives for fear of all that will need to change.

I've often thought that the imagery we use for Pentecost makes it hard for us--wind and fire are change agents to be sure, but few of us welcome their intrusion into our lives.  I'll spend this Pentecost Eve thinking of a different set of metaphors.  A few years ago, I wrote an article for Gather magazine that imagined God as quilt group, Holy Trinity as quilt group, and I said this about the Holy Spirit:  "The Holy Spirit is a quilt group member, too. The Spirit is the one who comes to us with support and information about the quilt shows that the Spirit calls us to enter. The Holy Spirit, an encourager, believes in our creative powers, even when we’re less sure ourselves."

Next Sunday I'll be preaching for the first time at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Trinity Sunday.  Let me remember to return to that article as I prepare my sermon.

But before next Sunday comes tomorrow, Pentecost.  And today is a good day to return to the Pentecost narrative, the end of Luke, the beginning of Acts.  On the eve of Pentecost, those believers didn't know what was about to happen. I imagine that they felt at loose ends. Christ was with them, then crucified, then with them again, then gone. What now?

Many of us may feel like those disciples--we've experienced a time of exhausting change, from the pandemic, from political shifts, from a war in Europe, from collapses of various sorts.  It's no wonder that we have no patience for this story about wind and fire and upheaval.  We've had quite enough of that.  

Maybe we have been feeling that we're in a post-Ascension, pre-Pentecost time. Maybe one mission has come to an end, and we're not sure what to do next. Maybe we're still recovering from a time of grief and loss. Maybe our favorite leader has left. Maybe we're casting about for a project that could set our hearts on fire.

Pentecost promises us that we won't be adrift forever. At some point the Holy Spirit will come, brimming with suggestions and opportunities, and we'll be able to do more than we ever dreamed possible.

The American Popular Song

Last night, my mom and dad took me to the Williamsburg Symphony Orchestra--what a treat!  They have season tickets, and I happened to be visiting during the time of the last concert of the season, so they got me a ticket, even though it meant they had to shift seats.  Luckily, it wasn't a huge shift, since it was from one side of the balcony to the other.  I'd have felt bad if they had to give up front row seats for me.

Michael Butterman, the conductor/music director, put together works that went together exceptionally well from composers Alberto Ginastera, Maurice Ravel, Aaron Copland, and George Gershwin.  The Ginastera and Copland pieces were from dances, with four pieces each.  The Gershwin piece was "Rhapsody in Blue," which I'm guessing is a popular choice this year, as the piece approaches its 100th birthday.  It's a piece that is so popular that some have called it the most famous piece of classical music ever (see this episode of the 1A show for more information on the piece and the composer).

Much of it is familiar, in part because it's used in advertising, from airlines to beef (one of the Copland pieces was "Hoe-Down" which made me think of the "It's what's for dinner" campaign, which always made my mouth water, even when I was a vegetarian).  I also realize that this kind of program is aimed at people like me, people who grew up hearing classical music from a variety of sources, from my parents' collection, in church, and the background music of TV shows (cheaper than hiring a team to write original music).  The house was packed in part because it was the last offering of the season, but in part because people like me have heard of these composers (except for Ginastera perhaps) and knew that we'd have an enjoyable evening.

As if to prove my point, when the guest pianist Jon Nakamatsu came out to play an encore, he played "The Entertainer" from the 1970's movie The Sting.  Almost everyone in the audience was old enough to recognize it, and there was a laugh as he began.  As he played, I remembered learning the piece in elementary school, where we would have contests to see who could play it faster.  When we did that at church, we got some strange looks for playing such secular music on church pianos or perhaps it's because we played it at such breakneck speed to show off.

It was a marvelous evening, full of great music and interesting instruments, in a space small enough to see what was happening on the stage, but modern enough to have great acoustics.  It was also the day after Tina Turner died, and it was interesting to read retrospectives and tributes on the same day that we went to the symphony, interesting to think about the American popular song, how we've expanded the idea of American and song and popular, interesting to think about what makes good music accessible to a wide variety of people.

A Walk on the Virginia Capital Trail

 Yesterday, my dad and I went out for a walk.  On the face of it, it's not a remarkable statement:  my dad and I have exercised together through the years, usually with a walk or a run, and we're both able to move right now, to walk but not run (I have arthritic feet, and he has an Achilles heel injury that persists and persists).  The weather was beautiful, somewhat rare for late May in Virginia in a time of global climate change:  warm but not too hot, not humid at all, a slight breeze. 

We went to the Virginia Capital Trail that runs right outside of their house.  We could have walked all the way from to Richmond, if we had energy enough and time.  Instead, we walked a few miles towards Jamestown and then back.  We shared the road with bicycles and a few other walkers.  The paved trail was wide enough for us all.

I can imagine that if a Saturday had gorgeous weather, the trail might get crowded, but it's a trail for everyone, regardless of the speed they're going, the people and pets with them, the types of vehicles they might use (bicycles, skateboards, rollerblades, etc.).

It covers 55 miles, so it goes through various municipalities.  I asked my dad if all the various governments support the trail, and he said yes.  As we walked, debt ceiling negotiations raged (or were they stalled) in D.C., not very far to our north.  We seem to be in an age where many people go into government not to make the world better, not to make government more efficient, but to make government come to a crashing halt.

There's also a lot of citizen support for the trail, people who volunteer to keep an eye on parts of the trail, people who show up to clean up parts of the trail.  It runs along a state road, 5, and I was surprised by the lack of litter.  Some of that is the volunteer force, but some of it might be because State Route 5 doesn't have much development beside it--no fast food places to give people food wrapped in future trash.

I know this, because I traveled on State Route 5 on Tuesday, and I saw the trail that ran beside it, back before I knew that the trail had a name and an infrastructure.  That afternoon, too, was beautiful, and I was not surprised to see lots of bicycles.

We stopped along the way to look at fallen trees, to look at a creek where a turtle sunned, to look at my dad's health statistics on his smart watch.  We walked at a decent pace but not enough to leave us breathless or aching.

 Part of the joy of yesterday's walk was knowing that we won't always have these near-perfect conditions, both in our bodies and in our surroundings.  Part of the joy was in the visible reminder that people can come together to create and protect a beautiful thing like a trail or a bridge.  Part of the joy was realizing that although the world is changing, and will always change, we might be able to muddle through.