Browsed by
Tag: hope

David Walters: man of faith, husband, father, grandfather, poet, friend

David Walters: man of faith, husband, father, grandfather, poet, friend

Comments 4 comments

My heart is broken. I am devastated to learn today of the sudden death of my friend, David Walters. He and his wife, Debbie, were members of our church in Waterloo, Iowa, faithful and engaged members, careful and honest practitioners of their faith, both of them highly intelligent and introspective, unparalleled in their commitment not merely to mouth the values of the gospel, but to live them.

David WaltersDavid was a poet, sharing his poems with me during my tenure at the church and still as we have both lived in retirement half a country apart. His poems are sometimes hard to read, because they expose the world as it is in all its cruelty and hypocrisy and injustice, but never, never despairing, always holding up the bright light of hope, hope rooted in a compassionate and faithful God, for all to see.

I grieve for a world without David’s voice, his voice that will not let us look away from the hurt and need around us, his voice that prods our consciences and pricks our apathy, his voice that invites us to rest, to believe and to rest and to live, within the loving embrace of the Lord.

As a tribute to David, and as avenue to permit his voice to be heard still, I intend to publish here in my online journal in these days before Christmas some of the poems David has shared with me. I begin with a poem especially dear to me because it was written during a sojourn shared by David and Debbie and me and other dear friends from the First Congregational United Church of Christ to Scotland and the Isle of Iona. Here is his poem …

finding Iona

Soon, the moment will pass and Iona will be a memory.
But the pictures we colored in our minds each day,
Of Scotland’s undomesticated beauty and perfect symmetry,
Will long remain etched beyond what words can say.
Yet I believe that the heart of Iona is not in what we see.
It lies at the center of where we feel
The love of One who lived and died without asking a fee.
And now dances laughing with anyone who would be free.
The vision of Iona reminds us of what we forgot,
Of two people who walk side by side willing to accept the cost.
They are you and me, broken and lost,
Until by faith we joined hands and became one with Him
whom we sought.

david walters
May 2015,
Isle of Iona, Scotland

Chastened, humbled, wiser, better

Chastened, humbled, wiser, better

Comments 2 comments

There is nothing good about this global coronavirus pandemic. There is nothing good about people dying. There is nothing good about people losing their jobs. There is nothing good about cherished cultural institutions being put in jeopardy.

And yet, I pray that good may come out of it, that when the disease has run its course, when social distancing is no longer required, when we return to offices and schools and theaters and restaurants and sporting arenas and concert halls, we will not be the same, we will not simply return to business as usual.

I pray we may be changed: chastened, humbled, wiser, better.

May we be chastened, newly conscious of our vulnerability, recognizing that we cannot bend this world to suit our own purpose and pleasure no matter how smart or powerful or wealthy we fancy ourselves.

May we be humbled, acknowledging the limitations of our capacity to take care of ourselves, the frailty of our most prized institutions, whether governmental, economic, technological, or medical. May we be simply and profoundly grateful for life at all, for each moment, for each breath.

May we be wiser, cognizant of the frivolity of so many of our passions and pursuits, not abandoning ambition or aspiration, but keeping all these in perspective, remembering what it is that does matter: faith and hope and love.

May we be better, fully comprehending, not merely in our minds, but in our hearts and bodies, too, that we and our fellow human beings, near and far, are not competitors in a zero-sum game, but colleagues, companions, housemates, siblings, we and they children of God alike, we in need of them, they in need of us.

As we face this ordeal together, may we be patient, kind and generous, hopeful, faithful, grateful, and eager … eager for the dawning of the day when this pandemic will be a threat no more, but eager too for the dawning of a new goodness, in us and among us.

Dancing to the music

Dancing to the music

Comments 1 comment

From Steven Hayward’s sermon this morning at St. Francis by the Sea Episcopal Church, quoting a friend and colleague …

Hope is like hearing the music of the future … and faith is dancing to the music.

Hear the good news!

Hear the good news!

Comments 1 comment

I just listened to the sermon preached by Nadia Bolz-Weber at the funeral service for Rachel Held Evans. It is powerful, moving, authentic, faithful, hopeful, and, above all, full of glory, the glory of God’s gracious love … for us. It is in receiving and embodying and witnessing to this love that we are most human, most ourselves. This sermon is very much worth a listen. You may find the link to the funeral service here. The sermon begins at about 50:20 and ends at 1:03:50.

May it not be long

May it not be long

Comments 2 comments

A prayer from John Bell …

May it not be long, Lord.

May it not be long
before there are no more beggars at the door
waiting for crumbs from the tables of the rich.

May it not be long
before northern exploitation
of the southern economies
is a fact of history,
not a fact of life.

May it not be long
before poor economies
cease to be havens for sex tourism,
child labor and experimental genetic farming.

May it not be long
before those nations we once evangelized
show us the larger Christ
whom we, too often, have forgotten.

May it not be long
before the governments of our nations
legislate against commercial avarice
and over-consumption which hurts the poor
and indebts them.

May it not be long
before Christians in this land
examine their economic priorities
in the light of the Gospel,
rather than in its shadow.

May it not be long
before we respond out of love,
not out of guilt.

May it not be long
before we find wells of hope
deeper than the shallow pools of optimism
in which we sometimes paddle.

May it not be long
before we feel as liberated and addressed
by your word
as those first folk did
who heard you summon the oddest of people
to fulfill the oddest of callings.

May it not be long, Lord.

Amen.

(From This Is the Day: Readings and Meditations from the Iona Community, edited by Neil Paynter, ©2002, Wild Goose Publications, Fourth Floor, Savoy House, 140 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3DH, UK)

holding on to hope and compassion

holding on to hope and compassion

Comments 0 Comment

A New Year’s reflection from Rachel Held Evans: 2016 and the Risk of Birth

An excerpt …

For me, the dissonance of this strange year is compounded by the fact that motherhood turned my bleeding heart into a hemorrhage. It’s as though I’ve become porous, my skin absorbing the pain of others, particularly other mamas and babies. (Speaking of which, why did all the good shows this year involve children in peril? I’m looking at you, “Stranger Things”!) Every night, as I nurse my boy in that cozy armchair in his nursery, I think of the Syrian mama nursing her baby in a raft adrift in the Mediterranean Sea. I think of the shell-shocked boy from Aleppo. I think of how every Latino kid taunted by classmates, every soldier sent to war, every autistic kid who will lose his therapy when ACA is repealed, every black man shot by police is somebody else’s baby boy, somebody else’s most important person in the world. I still, almost every day, think of Sandy Hook.

“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin,” writes Frederick Buechner. “It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”

Motherhood invited me into other people’s skin in a way I’ve never experienced before. So my joy is big and real and consuming, but also incomplete. I am overwhelmed by the conviction that every mother should be able to feed her baby like this, in safety and contentedness, and I am haunted by the reality that this is still far from the case.

In 2016, I became more aware than ever of the darkness around us, and more invested than ever in lighting the path.

ash wednesday

ash wednesday

Comments 1 comment

Lenten bannerToday is Ash Wednesday, the first day in another season of Lent. This banner will hang in our sanctuary tonight as begin our Lent together with an evensong service, Marty Haugen’s Holden Evening Prayer, and it will remained displayed throughout the season.

I very much like the artistry of the banner: the twisting, sharp-edged, thorny strands winding around and overlapping the cross; the cross itself placed starkly and simply in the foreground; and the path, the path receding into the distance at the upper right corner of the banner.

It speaks of pain and of suffering, the cross and thorny strands draw the eye first. And the cross stands at the head of the path. You cannot take the path without going through the cross!

But the path does not end at the cross. The cross stands at its beginning. You must go through the cross, you must pass through suffering, but the path leads somewhere else, to the place of hope, to the place of life, to the place where the One who hung from the cross now is, a place not yet seen, but surely promised!

on earth as it is in heaven

on earth as it is in heaven

Comments 0 Comment

N. T. Wright is right! The separation of religion from “real life,” the separation of faith from politics, from the push and pull of the everyday decisions that impact the lives of persons and communities of persons, is artificial and contrary to the “way” to which Jesus calls his followers. Faith is not just about “then,” but about now, not just about “there,” but about here. Hope is not just about “waiting it out” until we go to “a better place,” but about believing God can and will make this world a better place, with us and through us. The following quote comes from an interview Wright did last year with Christianity Today. You can read the transcript of the entire interview here.
.

For generations the church has been polarized between those who see the main task being the saving of souls for heaven and the nurturing of those souls through the valley of this dark world, on the one hand, and on the other hand those who see the task of improving the lot of human beings and the world, rescuing the poor from their misery.

The longer that I’ve gone on as a New Testament scholar and wrestled with what the early Christians were actually talking about, the more it’s been borne in on me that that distinction is one that we modern Westerners bring to the text rather than finding in the text. Because the great emphasis in the New Testament is that the gospel is not how to escape the world; the gospel is that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. And that his death and Resurrection transform the world, and that transformation can happen to you. You, in turn, can be part of the transforming work. That draws together what we traditionally called evangelism, bringing people to the point where they come to know God in Christ for themselves, with working for God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. That has always been at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer, and how we’ve managed for years to say the Lord’s Prayer without realizing that Jesus really meant it is very curious. Our Western culture since the 18th century has made a virtue of separating out religion from real life, or faith from politics. When I lecture about this, people will pop up and say, “Surely Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world.” And the answer is no, what Jesus said in John 18 is, “My kingdom is not from this world.” That’s ek tou kosmoutoutou. It’s quite clear in the text that Jesus’ kingdom doesn’t start with this world. It isn’t a worldly kingdom, but it is for this world. It’s from somewhere else, but it’s for this world.