Planting Grief

Lost another friend. He was someone I've known my whole life, fairly well for the last several years. This is his 14-year-old dog, who is now lodging with us:

This will be her third night with us after spending more than three weeks alone in her house while her man was in the hospital in his last stages. A neighbor saw that she was fed and all, but she was obviously in shock when I showed up to take her away on Friday. She came right up to me... something she'd never done before. She willingly walked right out the door without looking back. She had always been a one man dog, and I think she must have figured out her man wasn't coming home. She now follows me around the house. She's at my feet right now as I write this. Hello, old girl.

Anyway, tonight she seemed to wake up from her daze. We found her sitting in the middle of our living room, just kind of looking around with a furrowed brow... sort of the doggie version of what the heck is this place and how did I get here? I know the feeling.

As a pastor, I dive into death a lot. It is almost always someone else's family, and it is my job to keep my head to guide survivors who lose theirs. I guess I am sort of like a grief fire-jumper.

But after nearly 14 years serving the church in which I was long ago born and raised, I am, often as not, a sort of second-ring survivor myself. In these cases, it is important for me to find some way to channel my churning into some sort of constructive, reflective activity. About five years ago I found it: I plant trees.

When a death hits close to home, soon after the memorial services have been completed, my family knows they can find me out on the property somewhere with shovel, pickaxe, wheel barrow and peat moss, preparing the ground for a new arrival. The clay soil makes for tough work, which makes it all the better for my heart, soul and mind.

I focus intently on digging a pit that will not be a grave, but a cradle of life. As I experience flashes of my own mortality, I enjoy starting something that will live and strive and grow far beyond me. A complaining back, dirt under finger nails and sweat soaked clothing demand that I acknowledge the gift of living that is still mine.

It is not selfish to love and relish one's life all the more for watching someone else lose theirs. It is a rather healthy response, and probably one of the very best ways to honor the dead.

Anyway, I'm thinking of breaking with my standard solitary practice for the next tree I plant. I'm thinking I might invite this old dog along. I'm pretty sure she won't insist on empty, distracting conversation. Since she is evidence of death invited into my home, I think I might need her to share in my conversion of an ending into a new beginning. I also like the thought of her having a moment in her own fading life to rest once again in the shade of her man's shadow.

How have you processed grief? I'd love to have you share.

Jennifer Knapp

That's Jennifer Knapp. She was really big in Christian music between 1998 and 2003, when she just disappeared.


Here are the words to one of my favorite songs. She composed it. I've used it in worship:



HOLD ME NOW


From glass alabaster she poured out the depth of her soul
O foot of Christ would you wait if her harlotry's known?
Falls a tear to darken the dirt
Of humblest offerings to forgive the hurt
She is strong enough to stand in your love
I can hear her say....

I'm weak
I'm poor
I'm broken, Lord
But I'm your's
Hold me now, hold me now

"Let he without sin cast the first stone if you will
To say that my bride isn't worth half the blood that I've spilled
Point your finger and laugh if you choose
To say my beloved is borrowed and used
She is strong enough to stand in My love
I can hear her say...."

I'm weak
I'm poor
I'm broken, Lord
But I'm your's
Hold me now, hold me now


Jennifer resurfaced recently, complete with a new album (her first in many years) and the statement that she was living in a committed, same-sex relationship. She is now under attack by one segment of Christians. She is finding her music banned from Christian radio. She is attacked in reviews on iTunes and amazon.com. 


I tried to come to her rescue on amazon, and am now referred to by some on a particular message board as a "Christian pastor," the quotation marks being necessary because I can't possibly be a Christian pastor and celebrate the art, gift and soul of this woman because of who she loves.


I gave up on it. I have also pre-ordered her new album on iTunes. The video clip above is a song from that album, due for release in early May.


The song "Hold Me Now" has frequently moved me and others in my congregation to tears. There are times when you hear an artist singing his/her work that you can immediately sense just how deeply they have lived what they are singing. I strongly recommend you go to iTunes and download the song "Hold Me Now" right now -- the live version is most emotive and moving.


I also strongly recommend you speak out for those who might otherwise be shouted down. God does beautiful things in our lives. What a shame that some would rather be blind, deaf and quite DUMB (in the more modern sense of the word) than even consider the fact that they can neither predict nor control who God will love and through whom the Spirit will work.

Corey Gives Up On Christianity?

If you want to serve the age, betray it.  -- Brendan Kennelly


I think maybe I can't call myself Christian anymore.


I'm sitting here in my church office as I write this. It is a wonderful place, this building and campus. It is  full of promise and prayer, faith and challenge. It widens my horizons and takes me deep along paths I otherwise wouldn't think to follow.


My faith serves me well, and inspires me to serve the One and creation. It is Jesus, this church, its people, and my God as I experience God that compel me to break my simmering silence.

I am tired.

• I am tired of new acquaintances assuming that, because I am a CHRISTIAN pastor, I must also be a fellow-denier of scientific process. No, I don't believe the earth was created in six days and is only 6000 years old. Yes, I do think evolutionary theory is sound. No, this doesn't make me any less a believer than you.
• I am tired of reading that no CHRISTIAN can accept the "homosexual lifestyle." Yes, I do accept as Godly any loving, supportive, inspiring relationship between equal parties. No, I don't believe the government should step in and bar some people from sanctifying relationships in the faith communities that embrace and encourage them. Yes, I realize some Biblical texts are quite clear in forbidding tattoos, shellfish consumption, mixed-material garments and homosexuality. No, I don't read and respond to the Bible the same way you do.
• I am tired of those lazy news commentators who accept CHRISTIAN as some sort behemoth voting block to be played like a harp by particular candidates for political office. I vote my convictions, not my church! We do not all move in lock-step.
• I am tired of bejeweled, self-serving leaders of CHRISTIAN churches lording it over their flocks with perverse indifference to the Gospel message.  Preservation of power, prestige, buildings and bank accounts must never take precedence over the faith and well-being of any child of God.
• I am tired of the commentators and bloggers of the world who consider human CHRISTIAN stupidity to be some sort of proof of the non-existence of God. God is not a Christian. Jesus is not a Christian. Neither should be mocked because of the occasional clueless idiocy of believers.

CHRISTIAN wasn't a term used by Jesus and his followers. They were first "People of the Way." I am striving to be a Person of Jesus' Way. I'm thinking that following Jesus as closely as possible might mean I can no longer call myself CHRISTIAN.

What do you think?


I didn't expect change to come so slow, so agonizingly slow. I didn't realize that the biggest obstacle to political and social progress wasn't the Free Masons, or the Establishment, or the boot heel of whatever you consider "the Man" to be. It was something much more subtle... a combination of our own indifference and the Kafka-esque labyrinth of "no's" you encounter as people vanish down the corridors of bureaucracy. -- Bono

All in a Day's Work

 What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.  – Ecclesiastes 3:1-14

If there is a mean old nasty brute named Satan, I’m pretty sure such an individual would find that, rather than encouraging us to do evil, it would be far more efficient and successful to merely convince us to do nothing. Entropy is easy to slide into and hard to overcome. If we believe the insidious lie “I am powerless,” great potential goes unrealized, and the world persists in not being as blessed a place as it might be.

But I think an even smoother Evil One would find a way to take all our joy out of work by making it obligatory. Just think if we turned all of the good we ever did into a price we have to pay to earn our way into paradise, soon, rather than the Kingdom, we’d be building resentments toward our God and the people God forces us to reach out and help.

But I think the smoothest One Who Opposes of all would jump on the cheap-grace/sloppy-agape bandwagon and try to lead us to believe that social and economic justice efforts were unnecessary, even undesirable traits of an immature faith. “We’ve received this gift through pure grace,” the thinking goes. “To fight for the cause of the destitute orphan and the hopeless widow is somehow less than faithful.”

The problem in all of this is simple: We mess up when we place God off somewhere away from us, up on some cloud swatting at those persistent little cherubs buzzing around his head, peering down from afar to see if we pass the test and will be allowed into the celestial party.

Jesus told us so many times that the “Kingdom of God” was a party about to get started right nearby, among us. He was all about doing the right thing because we like it, accepting and forgiving others because we love them, and seeing God’s work in every scrap of society and creation. Why else would Jesus, when asked about paradise, tell stories about sheep and wheat and housewives and flowers?

“Wherever two or more are gather in my name…” is a promise of presence among us. What if, instead of seeing our day’s work as buying a ticket to visit some far off deity once we’ve bit the big one, we recognized God moving through our hands and tongues. What if we saw ourselves as extensions of a very present God, reaching out to other extensions of that same God? What if God lives and loves in the open space between and within us?

In the story of the rich young man, this eager kid has implicitly followed all the ten commandments all his life, but is dying to find what else he must do to buy himself eternal life. Jesus recognizes the flawed thinking: that God’s love must be earned, achieved and owned through our own power and skill. He therefore tells the young man to remove the one obstacle between him and fully recognizing that God is already swimming all around him. “Your wealth seems to be blocking your view. Get rid of it and come with me.”

And the man turns and leaves, unwilling to surrender who he has become to become who he most wants to be. I see no evidence that Jesus told every rich man to give it all away. He is not fighting wealth, but a spiritual myopia that makes us blind to God and godliness all around us.

God can be in every breakroom conversation. Angels can sing through every chance meeting and simple gesture. If you want holy bliss, it is all in a day’s work.

It's Academic -- And a Matter of Life and Death

It happens over and over again.

Fairly often I cross paths with some shell-shocked Christian spouse (almost always a wife) who is running for her life without leaving her house. She’s continually torn to shreds emotionally, sleeps with her eyes open if at all, can’t bear the sound of the car in the driveway, and now the beatings have begun. She is bruised strategically in places that won’t show. She is wracked with shame, pain, fear and confusion…and she can’t leave because Jesus, the Bible and her pastor tell her God will be angry with her and hold it against her if she abandons her marriage.

Mark 10 is almost always quoted…Matthew and Luke as well.  And misguided fools convolute Paul’s concept of being a prisoner for the Gospel into the Gospel is a prison.

It is at times like these that I thank God for my academic training.  Dr. Hermann Gunkel and Sitz im Leben save lives. Dr. Gunkel, the son of a Lutheran pastor, really got the ball rolling with some of his colleagues when he insisted on digging for history in and around Biblical texts, and developed the concept of form criticism as well. He was instrumental in our looking at where a text “sits in life.” What were the day-to-day realities of the writer and speaker? What social, political and theological realities of the day are shaping and spurring the incidents and actions described and how they are described? How do they compare to our social, political and theological realities?

It is all marvelously academic, but the practical application of his work is such that I can confidently, faithfully tell abused and abuser alike that Jesus railed against divorce to all these heartless men questioning him because in those days women had no rights at all, and their husbands were their only protection from poverty, depravity and an ugly death. Jesus, in so firm an answer, was doing his best to intervene to save women from abuse! That being the case, why would Jesus suddenly support injustice and fight against peace 2000 years later? Whatever happened to “the same yesterday, today and forever?!?”

 Ah, the same yesterday, today and forever, to some means attempting to lock us into primitive societal standards of thousands of years ago, as if those standards are somehow Godly because they happened to be prevalent in the time of Christ. Some of those standards killed Christ and caused much of the great suffering he had worked to alleviate. It is perverse to suggest preserving those standards somehow serves him.

Trust me. I don’t go all academic on people in crisis. I go all academic in my own studies that I might be prepared to do Jesus’ bidding in the face of the same sort of stupid, persistent crap that passed for authoritative teaching in his day. Jesus is about human evolution, not man-made institutions. All the evidence of this fact is laid out for us right there in the big book, for those who have eyes to see and minds to think.

And for those who insist on a supposed “literal” interpretation of scripture that flies in the face of compassion and justice in a world so far advanced from that of Jesus’ day: In striving to be fools for Christ, there is always the danger of falling a bit short and succeeding only in being fools.

Bird of Pray

‘Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them…

… ‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward…

                                                            -- Jesus on prayer, Matthew 6

In my private prayers these days, often as not, there are no words involved, but an awareness of vibration in me and in the room, on the plain, under the stars…wherever it is I find myself opening to the One. It is good.

In my private prayers of other days, and quite possibly those of days to come, it was more of a conversation with God. I’d listen. I’d speak my mind. I’d listen again. It is good.

This Sunday I am preaching on prayer. This is a unique challenge in a congregation as varied as mine. There will be some listening who barely pray at all, and others who have full, rich prayer lives beyond anything I can imagine. Some no doubt prattle to God like they’re sitting on Santa’s knee, some confide over coffee at the kitchen table, others will be mindful of chakras and life energy. And there will be many others at myriad points on that circle. It is good.

I will try to impress upon all gathered that effective prayer changes things. Of course, it changes us, and how we relate in God to the world around us. It also changes that world.

Jesus warns us not to turn prayer into a public spectacle in which we crave outward approval more than inner communication with God. At the same time, as a pastor, I am often called to public prayer. How do I reconcile these potentially divergent realities?

Poet Andrea Gibson, in her piece Say Yes, sites a phenomenon: When there are two fine violins in a room, and one is strummed or bowed, the second will hum in sympathetic vibration.

Yesterday I prayed at the hospital bed of a dear friend who has suffered a stroke. Her daughter, husband, a close friend and I gathered around her. She was worn out from a day of re-learning how to talk and use her right arm and leg. She is all there, but is locked in a great struggle to find words and shape them. We all closed our eyes and I simply acknowledged God and shared love there among us. I prayed for courage, strength and continued progress. I prayed in gratitude for the miracle of medical science.  Then, after a moment's silence, I started up the Lord’s Prayer, which she has known since childhood. I opened my eyes to watch her and saw that the other three did the same. Only my slowly recovering friend kept her eyes firmly shut, and sure enough, her lips were moving along with us.

Now, for all I know, she may have been saying “Our flounder who’s sparks with Kevin,” but the cadence was there, the vibration was sympathetic in all of us. The words themselves ceased to matter. We all felt the presence and the lift, and it was good.

That is what I like public prayer to be: intimate for five or 500.  I like it to resonate not with my words, but with Presence and Love and any other name we have for God.

For a bird to fly, the air above its wing must move on more quickly than the air beneath. In doing so, the air thins out so there is less of it. For prayer to work, there must be more raising us up than there is holding us down.

When I tell you now that I want to be a bird of pray, this is what I mean.

Go Away, Little God

Isaiah 6:1-8 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.
And one called to another and said: "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory."
The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.
And I said: "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out."
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send me!"


Luke 5:1-11 Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.
He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.
When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch."
Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets."
When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break.
So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.
But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!"
For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people."
When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.


In the year that Judah's earthly king dies, Isaiah is called from his ordinary life to that of a prophet, and the semi-hallucinatory experience is fraught with bold, subversive sentiment:
1.The immortal Lord is seen on a kingly throne at a time when the Judean monarchy has once again shown its frail, mortal nature.


2.Solomon's temple, in all its massive glory, can barely fit the hem of God's robe. Even this giant religious wonder of the world will not contain God.


3.God's attending angels take a hot coal from the altar and fly past high priest, attending clergy and ranking officials to recruit some punk kid as prophet.

We religious folks often fall into the mindset that our churches are something like God-dispensers. The intended effect of all this glorious architecture at such massive scale is to somehow communicate loft of concept and enormity of God. But instead, we often see it as a pinpoint location for holiness: a holy post-and-tether to keep God properly in the yard, and not digging in the neighbor's garden or wandering off into town.

Isaiah's message is not simply that the Temple is too small to hold God, but that it is also too small to hold God's will and wisdom. Those impossible seraphs flit past all those priests and politicians for a reason: God will do what God will do, and choose whom God will choose. So not only might it be better to worship under the stars of the night sky, at some precipice of the Grand Canyon, or at land's end facing out into the ocean if we want to experience the enormity of God. We also might better fall to our knees at the maternity ward or morgue with our prayers of intercession. We might better lift our voices in hymns of praise at the soup kitchen or on the shop floor. We might better offer our sacrifices to strangers on cold sidewalks and in hushed late-night conversations, staring at the bedroom ceiling with those most intimate.

So I say “Go away, little God.” I yearn beyond a God that demands only a 7th of my mornings. I hear beyond the voices of Reverend and Doctor. I see the horizon beyond the steeple, and the possibilities beyond even our most rarefied, incense-saturated air. A cathedral god seems too fixed and petty for me. I like a good show, but I prefer a good impulse. I enjoy ancient ritual, but thrive on a profoundly present Is.

Doesn't it all come down to what we learned in Mrs. Lewis' 2nd grade Sunday School class? God is everywhere – truly a revolutionary concept! God is not merely huge. God is ever-present and implicit. God is right at the tip of our tongues and at the core of our better natures; in both our grandest gesture and our smallest kindness. We are not simply of use to God, we can be most-favored conduits of holiness.

Jesus proves the point as he recruits his disciples. His prophetic ministry visited temple and synagogue, yes, but was most definitely of the streets. His was a holiness that played across children's faces and swam in widow's tears. Shouts of acclamation and songs of praise sprang best from leprous lips and hungry mouths.

The typical pictures of Jesus with his Pepsodent smile, anglo-saxon nose, and Tide-sanitized, blindingly white robes does us a grave disservice. Ours is a messiah who was no doubt caked in the dust of the road and the filth of his followers. Ours is a face-to-face Christ. Ours is a face-to-face faith.

And isn't that the core of the prophetic message? The Holy One is not limited to large buildings and the big picture, but is liquid and rampant, ready, willing and able to flow through all we say and do with each other, if only we would allow the flood gates to open and the blessings to pour out. If only we had the gall and the guts amid so much glory and grandeur to simply say: “here am I, send me!”