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Author: Tim

Senior pastor of First Congregational United Church of Christ. Ordained in May, 1983. Called to First Congregational UCC in August, 1994. Retired July 1, 2018.
Fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise

Fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise

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“Make America Great Again.”

Are you familiar with the phrase? Not “Make America Great,” but “Make America Great Again.” The campaign slogan taps into feelings of loss, feelings of grief for a past glory that is gone. It taps into a longing to go back, to recapture the former days that were better than today.

Is that what you believe? Regardless of the politics that accompany the slogan, is that how you feel? That your best days are behind you? That our best days are behind us? Are you confused, distressed, frightened by what this nation, this world, your life are becoming? Do you worry about the world your children and your grandchildren will inherit?

I do. I understand the distress, the confusion, the fear, the melancholy, the wistfulness for days that were less troubled, for a nation that was less divided, for a morality that was clear and universally acknowledged. I understand that sense of loss and longing that makes us want to go back.

But we can’t. We can’t go back. But even if we could, I don’t believe the premise. I don’t believe that the past was better.

Yes, our planet is certainly in worse shape and more threatened than at any time before, but for much of humanity life is better than it has ever been. We live longer and healthier and wealthier and freer. Long entrenched inequalities and injustices are being challenged and, in some cases, even overturned. We have access to a richness and diversity of culture as never before.

Now I know that this is true only for some and not for all, and I know that our globe is still racked by hunger and disease and poverty, by hatred and discrimination and war, but no more and no less than it has ever been. We face the same challenges, the same temptations, the same threats that our ancestors have always faced.

Were days past really less troubled? With world wars, the Great Depression, public lynchings, riots in our cities’ streets?

Was our nation less divided? With hundreds of thousands of Americans killed by fellow Americans in a civil war, with the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society, the ACLU and the Communist Party USA, with rampant anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism?

Was there before a more faithful adherence to a widely accepted moral code? Do you think so? Or is it merely that in our day immorality is on public display instead of hidden?

Regardless, God does not call us to rue the present and pine for the past. God does not call us to long for what was, but in the midst of trouble and confusion and distress to hold fast to hope, to live fully today and to wait eagerly for tomorrow with hope.

The splendor of Jerusalem is a thing of the past.

The author of the collection of poems that make up the book of Lamentations knows about distress. He knows about trouble: empty houses and empty streets and an empty Temple. He knows about the loss of family and community and culture and national pride. He knows about the loss of a way of life that once was and is now gone.

The Lamentations poet writes in the aftermath of the invasion of Jerusalem by the armies of Babylon. Their holy Temple was ransacked and their city walls razed and much of the city’s population forcibly relocated to Babylon to live for three generations far from home, exiles in a foreign land. It was like Russia invading Ukraine, only Jerusalem lost. The people of Jerusalem lost everything, everything that was dear to them. They were left homeless, powerless, destitute, depressed.

The poet is depressed, too. He says so, but he does not succumb to despair. He does not shout “Make Jerusalem Great Again!” He does not dwell on the past, but points to the future, a future that is not tenuous and uncertain, but a future that is sure, because the Lord is here, because the Lord’s love and mercy continue.

The Lord’s unfailing love and mercy still continue. Not resuming after a pause, but continuing. Not again, but still. Because God has never left us. God’s love has never faltered. God has not been absent in the midst of our distress, but God has been present, always and ever present.

So the poet urges the people of Jerusalem to wait. Not despair, but wait. Not long to go back, but wait. Not denigrate this present day, but wait. Wait patiently. Wait patiently for the sunrise. Wait patiently for the Lord who will surely save.

Wait.

Will you wait? It takes courage to wait. It takes strength to wait. It takes faith to wait. But this is our calling as people of God. This is our calling as Christians. To wait.

Waiting does not mean giving up or giving in. Waiting does not mean ceasing to care. Waiting is not merely passive.

We lament our distress, but we wait.

We lament the divisiveness, the envy and greed, the selfishness and licentiousness, yes, the sins of this generation and our own sins, that keep our world from being what God wills it to be, but we wait.
We pray “Thy will be done” and we do all we can to do God’s will. We do justice, we make peace, we love our neighbors and our enemies, but we do not put our hope in what we can do. We put our hope in the Lord and we wait.

As much as anything, I am distressed in these days about that state of the Christian church in America, about the failure of our Christian witness, about Christians who seem bent on seizing power for themselves and bending the world to their own will, instead of humbly seeking God’s will and putting hope and trust where it belongs, in the Lord. Every day I read stories in the national media that make me cringe, supposed Christians saying and doing horrible things in the name of Christ.

A Facebook group calls itself “Christians against the Little Mermaid.” Against the Little Mermaid! Against the actress portraying her, because she is black and certainly Christians cannot tolerate a black mermaid!

A former Senate candidate, also a self-professed Christian, praises Vladimir Putin, saying she “support[s] Putin’s right to protect his people and always put his people first, but also protect their Christian values.” Putin’s war in Ukraine is Christian? Can any war be Christian?

A Christian Senate candidate in Georgia isn’t sure that Jesus will recognize transgender children.

And any number of serving legislators openly espouse Christian nationalism: Christian nationalism, which is, in fact, an oxymoron, and more than that, is blasphemy and idolatry because it puts loyalty to nation on a par with loyalty to God. Shame!

Christians, especially Evangelicals, (which in the public mind are usually one and the same) have earned a bad name in our day, sadly all too often well-deserved. We have lost our way. I say we because Evangelicals are our Christian brothers and sisters, too. I was raised an Evangelical. I am still an Evangelical. Evangelical comes from the word evangel, which means good news, and being evangelical means being marked by “ardent or zealous enthusiasm.” Or would we rather be lukewarm and “meh” about our faith?

We have been seduced by power, thinking we can establish God’s kingdom by imposing our values on others, instead of doing what Jesus told us to do — bring God’s kingdom by serving others. We have become preoccupied with defending our own supposed religious freedoms (which no human being can take from us anyway!) instead of defending the freedom of those who are denied it.

As Evangelicals and progressives alike, we trumpet our Christian faith as a pretext for pursuing our own political agendas. We have looked into the darkness and decided morning will never come unless we bring it. We act as if we do not really believe God that will act … and maybe we don’t. And that’s the problem: not too much faith, but too little.

That’s what our critics get wrong about us. They think that faith itself is the problem, that devotion to God puts us out of touch with the real world and blinds us to the needs of our neighbors. We just need to back off, tone it down, not fill our minds with too much God stuff.

But the truth is just the opposite. It is too little faith, too little filling our minds and hearts with God stuff, that leads to a religiosity that is self-serving and judgmental, unsympathetic and bigoted. Real faith, real Christianity, faithfully following Jesus, shows itself in humility, in kindness, in empathy, in compassion, in love … in love of our neighbors, all our neighbors, and in love of God, with all our heart and all our mind and all our strength! It is a passionate love for God, above all else, that empowers our love for each other, and frees us to live, not to protect ourselves, but to live for the sake of the future God has promised. Real faith trusts God … and waits.

Wait.

Waiting makes room. Room for God and room for each other. Room enough to pay attention to the wonders, as well as the distresses, of this one day. Room enough to remember …

the Lord’s unfailing love and mercy still continue,
fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise.

Dawn is surely coming! Morning is breaking! The Lord will bring it.

Will you wait?

More than a dream

More than a dream

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Victory disguises itself over time
Toil and trouble tarnish the sublime
Duty and drudgery dominate the mind
While once-firm beliefs inexorably unwind
And hopes and dreams are left behind
But what will be is no less certain
We only wait to raise the curtain

The Queen and the French Teacher

The Queen and the French Teacher

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We share a birthday, the queen and I. I was born on April 21, on her twenty-seventh birthday, little more than a year from the day in February she had been crowned after the death of her father. Elizabeth died last Thursday, so we share a birthday no more.

She died a queen, that title both lifting her up and weighing her down; conveying little actual authority, but considerable responsibility; granting her unrivaled access across seven decades to the wealthy, the powerful, and the notorious, but leaving her little time or space or cause to simply be, to simply be Elizabeth.

Her death has unleashed a torrent of public opinion, her title and the unprecedented length of her reign making her a lodestone both of fervent acclamation and vehement denunciation. She is adored for performing her royal duties with decorum and dignity, with grace and humor, and she is reviled for epitomizing Britain’s dubious colonial legacy and for failing to publicly disown it.

I am not sure she deserves either. Yes, she dutifully fulfilled the requirements of her unique office with a style particularly decorous and gentle and humble, but the outsized and undifferentiated adulation she is now garnering speaks more to the human need for heroes and saints than it does her qualification to be the one or the other. And, though she is heir to the burden of Britain’s sins, enchained to a past she cannot escape and constrained by the ongoing obligation to buoy the spirits of the present commonwealth by embodying its honor and dignity and pride, it is her title, her office, her heritage that merits unflinching critique, not her person.

Gloria Jean Pollard died last Thursday, in Scarborough, Maine. She and I do not share a birthday, but she shares with Elizabeth their death day. Ms. Pollard had no title, but she did have an office: French teacher. This daughter of Italian immigrants taught French for thirty years, much of it at Yarmouth High School, earning the honor of State Foreign Language Teacher of the Year in 1996. Her office granted her access to children, to human beings with bodies and minds and spirits still forming, still becoming, supple and elastic, not yet hardened and brittle, but tender and fragile and vulnerable, too. She likewise deserves praise for fulfilling her vital duties with skill and sensitivity, with eagerness and attentiveness.

The queen and the French teacher share a death day, but more, too, much more. Despite personal histories and family legacies and public personas and public perceptions that are literally worlds apart, they both died, not as queen and French teacher, but as mothers, grandmothers, widows, women. They both knew the unparalleled anguish and elation of birthing a child, the delight and heartache of raising a child, the thrill and the tedium, the unready challenges and the unexpected discoveries, the sorrow and the joy, of sharing a bed, a home, a life with a husband for a lifetime, and the unquenchable grief of outliving him.

They were both given life, as it came to them, and the opportunity to live it, as it happened to them: with gratitude or with bitterness, with hope or with despair, selflessly or selfishly, lovingly or callously. This is what matters. This is how we should judge them. This is how we should remember them, not merely or especially because of their offices, for how they performed their duties, not as queen and French teacher, but as Elizabeth and Gloria, Lilibet and Glo, as two women whose distinctive and deeply personal and ultimately simple ways of being, of simply being, are indelibly etched on the spirits of those who loved them and live on, in memory and in tears.

Happiness

Happiness

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A piece written this morning for the Deer Isle Writers Group …

Happiness lives in the space created by all-consuming beauty, all-consuming because in that space, in that moment, the beauty itself, whether perceived by eye or ear or nose or mouth or hand, or somehow, simply, strangely known, is everything. The beauty is, is all the world to me in that moment, and I am happy, though it is not even exactly true to say that I am happy, because, in that place, in that moment, I have no awareness of “I,” the beauty, the overwhelming beauty simply is, and I am somehow gifted with briefly being in the same place and moment as the happiness that is, with or without me.

The stone, the rock, the enormous erratic, perched on the granite ledges extending into the water from McGlathery’s eastern shore, seemingly out of place, is very much in its place. It defines, commands the place, but would be other were it not in that place, that numinous space, surrounded by human activity, but regardless of it, ledges washed by the tides, visited by ermine and gulls, islands emerging near and far from the ever-restless sea. When I turn the corner and see it, when it is not just that I see it, but that in that space and in that moment it becomes the world, all the world, there is happiness.

The frenzied, but careful and ecstatic, interplay of cello and violin and piano, creates its an irresistible gravity that draws me, draws everything, into its orbit. The ears are piqued, are pleased, by the sounds, but it is the heart, the loins, the stuff of being itself, and of my being in so far as I may share being itself, that is moved, deeply stirred, transported, transformed, awash with happiness.

The waters of the creek run clear and cold and powerful, iridescent, translucent, an uncanny green, flowing, rushing, ceaselessly careening down the rock-strewn river bed bearing waters from glaciers high above on the flanks of Mt. Baker into the the ever-burgeoning Skagit River. I watch, I look, I become the looking, there is only the looking, the flowing, the sparkling, the cavorting, the dancing, dancing, dancing of the waters. And there is happiness.

I hold the two broken halves of the crusty bread in my hands and I say the words, “This is my body,” but it is not my body and not my words, and, though it is my hands, it is not my hands that offer this bread. I am, in that space, in that moment, consumed by a giving, an inviting, an all-consuming, but all-creating loving, that is so much beyond what I can give, beyond whom I can invite, beyond what I can create. I am invited into that space, into that moment, along with all who surround me in that sanctuary, and, indeed, with all who surround us in the sanctuary that is the earth. There is in that space, in that moment, a being, a loving, a beauty that fills us and binds us to each other and to the One from whom flows all the beauty and all the love and all being. And there is happiness.

The potter

The potter

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I am of the ground
lumpy and misshapen
not yet beautiful
but in the eye of your imagining

You knead me and you shape me
the image conceived in your mind now birthed in my body
its curves and edges sculpted under the careful caress of your fingers
its form reflecting the wonder of your genius

Like the clay in the potter’s hands
so am I in your hands

Katahdin

Katahdin

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Katahdin looms — imposing, intimidating, unnerving — its implausibly enormous bulk dominating the skyline.  Katahdin is no singularly outstanding feature of this wild landscape; it is the landscape, and all the rest — forest, stream, foothill, me — we all lurk in its shadows.

The enchanting voice of my Maine muse, Carolyn Currie, cantillates from the speakers of my Santa Fe: “Red hawk’s rising on the back of the wind and she’s circling with an answer and I finally understand how to begin.”  Red hawk’s rising.  I play the song again and again as I make my resolute approach to the campground and trailhead at the base of the mountain.  Red hawk’s rising.  It is my mantra, my rallying cry, my anthem, as I steel mind and body for the quest that awaits me.  I will not soar like a hawk on the back of the wind, but I do intend to rise.  If it will allow me, I intend to rise to the top of this fabled mountain.

Fabled, renowned, iconic, Katahdin surely is, but, today, none of that matters to me.  Today, Katahdin is not Pamola’s mountain or Thoreau’s mountain or even the mountain of innumerable Appalachian Trail thru-hikers celebrating the denouement of a two thousand mile odyssey.  Today, it is my mountain.  Even surrounded by dozens and dozens of other hopeful summiteers, I climb alone — not to conquer an adversary or meet a challenge or check off an achievement on some life list.  No, any such motive would demean, demystify, devalue the majesty of this mountain.  I climb not to overcome Katahdin, but to be deemed worthy of meeting it, of learning some of its secrets, of being welcomed for a few unforgettable moments into its numinous space.

The trail begins, beguilingly beautiful, following dazzling Katahdin Stream as it ascends gently among birch and spruce and hemlock until reaching fifty-foot Katahdin Stream Falls cascading over a series of granite ledges.  The impressive cataract is well worth the mile and a quarter hike from the trailhead.  Undoubtedly, many a casual Baxter visitor ends the journey here, contented with traversing this splendid wilderness path and rewarded by the spectacular visage of the falls.

Beyond the falls, the climb begins in earnest, ascending four thousand feet in five miles.  The trail is relentlessly steep, up and up and up, not walking a steady incline, but scrambling over ledges and boulders among scattered glacial erratics.  I feel strong and stronger yet as the path grows steeper, taking some pride as my sixty-something body overtakes more than a few twenty-something or thirty-something bodies along the way.

I emerge from the trees at the base of the Hunt Spur, the crux of a Katahdin ascent via the Hunt Trail which also serves as the terminus of the Appalachian Trail.  Steep and long and difficult, the Hunt Spur is a naked ridge of jumbled boulders — car-sized, bus-sized, boxcar-sized.  Though marked by blue blazes painted on the granite, the way up is not always clear; every step must be carefully puzzled out, clambering over and around and between the massive boulders.  The climb is physically demanding, but even more mentally exhausting.  The immensity of the mountain, the unsettling exposure, the demanding route-finding, and the unrelenting steepness make an ascent of the Hunt Spur a daunting endeavor.

And a profoundly satisfying endeavor.  I crest the top of the ridge and step out onto the Tablelands, a wide, flattish, tundra-like landscape.  I walk steadily, part of the long procession of hikers following the trail roped off on both sides to protect the fragile alpine ecosystem.  We wind our way over the plateau, pass Thoreau Spring, mount the short summit ridge, and we are there.

I am there, standing atop Baxter Peak, surrounded by dozens of other happy climbers, but still very much alone, alone surveying the breathtaking panorama — Pamola and the Knife Edge, Chimney Pond and the Cathedrals, alone steeped in the joy of this moment, alone celebrating this mountain which has now become a part of my story and I a part of its story, Katahdin, my mountain.

blood

blood

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A poem written this morning in response to an image painted by Gebre Kristos Desta, an Ethiopian painter and poet.

Golgotha, painted by Gebre Kristos Desta
Golgotha, by Gebre Kristos Desta

Blood.
Blood red,
battered, scattered, splattered.
Is this what we do best,
build cravenly cruel machines —
crosses and guillotines, gas chambers and nuclear submarines —
to batter and scatter and splatter
blood?
Blood red,
blood of hundreds of Ukrainians and hundreds of thousands of Syrians
blood of a million Cambodians and six million Jews,
blood of three thousand New Yorkers and forty thousand Nagasakians, your
blood.
Blood red,
brightly, brilliantly red,
battered but vibrant,
scattered but brimming with energy,
splattered but pulsating with life.
Blood.
Life blood.
Life is in the blood. Life is in your
blood.

home

home

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As soon as I cleared the last of the spruces and stepped from the needle strewn path out onto the granite ledge and scanned the panorama stretched out before me, green and grey and blue, I knew I was home. There were Cadillac and Newbury Neck, Long Island and Naskeag Point, Isle au Haut and Eggemoggin Reach and the Camden Hills. I could name them all, but it was not the naming that made this home. No, it was this space without edges, beautiful and mysterious, readily seen but not readily known, a space so much bigger than me, so much uncareful of me, yet unquestioningly including me, that made itself home. This is no house built of human hands, no hall or office where I strive to prove myself worthy. No, this is a home so much older, so much wilder, so much truer, a space, a place, where stripped of the need to perform, shorn of the need to prove or to be approved, that I remember, that I remember what I am, that I remember who I am, that I am home.