I have benefited profoundly from women in positions of leadership.  I have heard brilliant sermons, sat in deeply provocative and insightful lectures, and been in awe of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual breadth and depth of some incredible women.  My faith has been nourished and strengthened by competent, sensitive, thoughtful, and kind women occupying positions of leadership.  I am married to a woman whose leadership skills far outweigh mine.  These are facts (again, not particularly unique ones).  It seems to me that those saying that Christianity should only have male leaders are rather limited in their options when presented with stories like this.

Don Scrooby ponders the relationship between God and suffering from a Process Theology perspective.

But what if God is “within” already sharing in it [suffering],  feeling it and working with it? What if God is that life-giving presence permeating us all, holding us all together and who also suffers the pain and anguish as that union is fractured and broken. A great theologian, Jurgen Moltman, spoke at length of the God who suffers with us, who not only suffers, but who with love beyond our comprehension, works to restore, in other words, the God of Process Theology.

Rachel Hackenberg compares God to an inchworm.

The inchworm, though it measures a daffodil’s stem meticulously,
does not know the season or dance of the flower as you do;
no one can begin to understand the breadth of your wisdom
or comprehend your knowledge of life’s intricacies.

And this from Martin Luther touched my heart.

Imagine that two people each have a hundred dollars.  One person carries it in a paper bag.  The other keeps it in an iron chest.  Both have the same treasure no matter where they put it.  Similarly, we all have the same Christ.  It doesn’t matter if one person has a stronger or weaker faith than another.  Both of them still believe in the same Christ and have everything through him.

My faith is more the paper bag variety, but apparently that is enough.

What’s more, we had human parents who disciplined us, and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live? Our human parents disciplined us for a little while, as it seemed best to them, but God does it for our benefit so that we can share his holiness.

Hebrews 12:9-10 CEB

I don’t know what hardships the readers of this letter faced, but the writer tells them to view their trials as a divine discipline intended to purify them and train them in right living.  Parents discipline their children; God disciplines us — so the reasoning goes.  This is a difficult idea because it is easy to take it in the sense that God deliberately sends us pain, hardship, and suffering to teach us some larger lesson.  I don’t believe that at all.  In the Gospels, Jesus didn’t cause people pain; rather, he sought to alleviate it and ultimately endured it on the cross himself.  I see the trials people face as a place where God is most present, inviting them to deeper trust and wholeness.  This is how hardship is a divine training ground, as this passage teaches.  I love the little phrase ‘submit to the Father of spirits and live.’  Not submission in a servile, groveling form.  No, the image that comes to mind is a little girl climbing into her father’s lap, trusting in his love, wisdom and protection for her.  How to climb into the lap?  Prayer.  So Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, “The right and proper attitude of a human being toward God is to entreat God with outstretched hands, knowing that God has the heart of a loving parent.”

(image by Ezra Katz)

Most of the trendy approaches to revitalization of the church are inherently conditional—meaning people are valued as long as they advance the agenda of someone in power. That just doesn’t sound like the gospel… Only by living with abandon for the Lord of unconditional affirmation will we grow. The fixation on outcomes, metrics and measurement distorts our theology and gives it a very conditional quality. In an attempt to grow the church, we risk losing the truth our world craves. By losing ourselves in unconditional love, we will find a church bursting with people and grace.

Read the whole article here.

Over the years I developed a protective shell, a thick covering around the heart.  The years at Princeton were hard.  The year of hospital chaplaincy in Philadelphia was hard.  The first parish was so hard I had to resign.  Lots of people face harder things, I know, but hard is still hard for each of us.  Slowly my shell developed.  You do that to get through.

I came to this church ten years ago.  It’s been a place of healing, a place to ‘increase in wisdom and stature’ (Lk 2.52).  I am a different pastor now.  This congregation loves me, and I love them.  Over time my hardened shell got thinner.  It wasn’t as necessary.  And now, with all that’s been going on in my congregation, the shell has cracked open.

Frederick Buechner says tears are grace.  Your heart cracks open and grace flows out with your tears.  I am still scared.  But God is love.  I keep saying it.  And when the ground disappears under foot, the love is there to hold you up.

(image by Kim Pardi)

It must be hard to minister as a hospice chaplain, as my friend does.  Your whole vocation is caring for the dying.  But visiting the ill or aged in a congregational setting is hard in its own way.  These are not people who come into your life for a few weeks or months — you have known them for years. Your love for them has had time to root and mature, so it is harder to keep a distance from things.

Fortunately in congregations there is also the presence of children to bring balance and perspective.  Since my wife and I have no children of our own, we have found opportunities to have children in our lives in other ways.  I cherish the children in my church.  I love sitting down each Wednesday dinner to a table full of laughing children in our midweek program.  Children teach you about the art of living.  Perhaps this is one reason Jesus told us to become like children to enter the kingdom of God.

The art of living and the art of dying — two poles in the Christian life.

Later in the day, news from the surgeon was good and bad.  It was hard to hear.  There were lots of tears.  I prayed for them all through my tears, and I held onto a string of prayer beads.  Afterward, I thought about a quote from Frederick Buechner, “Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless.”  So what does that say about God, since God is love?  Pain and suffering make you wonder what God can and cannot do.

My ministry today was mainly praying through tears.  I trust that God puts all of our tears in his bottle. (Ps 56.8)

Later, during worship, I offered a prayer that borrows imagery from our recent snowfall:

You blanket the earth with snow, God.  Your snow covers the ground, rests on tree limbs.  The beauty of snow reminds us of your beauty.  The sight of it awakens praise in us.  We thank you for the loveliness of your creation, for the beauty of each season.

Yet what we see is only a sliver of all that you have made.  You have set stars and galaxies in motion.  The whole universe, immensely old, is full of your handiwork, with you yourself older still.  Before all things, before all time, you are God.

The thing about you, God, that most astonishes us is that you know us.  You know each of us, even though we are so tiny and vulnerable compared to the vastness of all that you have made.  You know us, you care about us, you watch over us, you stay with us. This is the mind boggling thing, your knowledge of us.

You know when we sit, when we stand, when we lie down.  You know our thinking even before it appears in our minds.  All the days set out for us are written in your book before they even come to pass.  When we are perplexed, at our wit’s end, you know it. When we are in physical pain, you know it.  When we are scared, you know it.  When we are dancing for joy, you know it.  Our laughter, our tears, our smiles are all known to you.

Come to us afresh today, O God, with your beauty, your love, and your great strength. Fill our limbs and our lives with your healing presence.  Let us rest easily in your knowledge of us, your care for each of us.

There are echoes of Psalm 139 in this prayer, as well as 1 Corinthians 8:3, “If someone loves God, then they are known by God.” The latter was part of the morning scripture that the senior pastor preached on.

Abraham was 99 years old when he circumcised the flesh of his foreskin, and his son Ishmael was 13 years old when the flesh of his foreskin was circumcised. That same day Abraham and his son Ishmael were circumcised. All the men of his household, those born in his household and those purchased with silver from foreigners, were circumcised with him.

Genesis 17.24-27 CEB

I imagine a conversation among Abraham’s men over this little development in their lives.

Eliezer:  “The master is going to circumcise us tomorrow.”

Asher:  “What is circumcision?”

Eliezer:  “He will take a knife and cut off that flap of skin on your penis.”

Asher:  “What!?  That will hurt.”

Eliezer:  “I know.”

Asher:  “Knife and penis do not belong together.”

Eliezer:  “True.”

Asher:  “Why is he going to do this?”

Eliezer:  “He had another of his visions.”

Asher:  “I wish God would stop talking to him.”

The benefit of circumcision as a symbol of the covenant is that it was a permanent mark in the body itself — like a tattoo, although that can be removed with some effort.  The disadvantage is that one half of all Jews could not take part in the ritual that made you a Jew.  So circumcision contributed to a segregation of the sexes in Judaism, which continued on in Christianity (in spite of Galatians 3.28).  Even today, at the Western Wall of Temple Mount in Jerusalem, men pray on the left, and women on the right.  I have prayed at that wall.  Men get the larger share of the wall, no doubt because we had to endure the knife and penis thing.

The point was to fit the human form inside a circle and a square

Ancient thinkers had long invested the circle and the square with symbolic powers. The circle represented the cosmic and the divine; the square, the earthly and the secular. Anyone proposing that a man could be made to fit inside both shapes was making a metaphysical proposition: The human body wasn’t just designed according to the principles that governed the world; it was the world, in miniature. This was the theory of the microcosm, and Leonardo hitched himself to it early in his career. “By the ancients,” he wrote around 1492, “man was termed a lesser world, and certainly the use of this name is well bestowed, because …his body is an analogue for the world.”

But what should this microcosmic man look like? Vitruvius hadn’t provided illustrations. Artists in medieval Europe, loosely echoing Vitruvius, had come up with visions of their ideal man: Christ on the cross, representing both the human and the divine. But until the late 1400s, nobody had tried to work out exactly how a man with Vitruvian proportions might be inscribed inside a circle and a square. This was the challenge that prompted Leonardo to draw Vitruvian Man.

Vitruvius was a Roman architect who proposed the idea.  Leonardo wasn’t the first to try.

I drew a picture of myself, naked, in the pose above.  I call it Flabuvian Man.  But it is too scary to look at, so I won’t post it.