A Howie Thurman Thanksgiving Prayer

Last Sunday, Dean Hill asked me to read this during the sermon.  It's a really awesome message of thanksgiving and I thought I'd repost it here, since anything I say on this particular day would pretty much pale in comparison.

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Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.

I begin with the simple things of my days:

Fresh air to breathe,

Cool water to drink,

The taste of food,

The protection of houses and clothes,

The comforts of home.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!

I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:

My mother’s arms,

The strength of my father

The playmates of my childhood,

The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives

Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies

And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;

The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;

The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the

Eye with its reminder that life is good.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day

I finger one by one the messages of hope that awaited me at the crossroads:

The smile of approval from those who held in their hands the reins of my security;

The tightening of the grip in a simple handshake when I

Feared the step before me in darkness;

The whisper in my heart when the temptation was fiercest

And the claims of appetite were not to be denied;

The crucial word said, the simple sentence from an open

Page when my decision hung in the balance.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

I pass before me the main springs of my heritage:

The fruits of labors of countless generations who lived before me,

Without whom my own life would have no meaning;

The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams;

The prophets who sensed a truth greater than the mind could grasp

And whose words would only find fulfillment

In the years which they would never see;

The workers whose sweat has watered the trees,

The leaves of which are for the healing of the nations;

The pilgrims who set their sails for lands beyond all horizons,

Whose courage made paths into new worlds and far off places;

The saviors whose blood was shed with a recklessness that only a dream

Could inspire and God could command.

For all this I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

I linger over the meaning of my own life and the commitment

To which I give the loyalty of my heart and mind:

The little purposes in which I have shared my loves,

My desires, my gifts;

The restlessness which bottoms all I do with its stark insistence

That I have never done my best, I have never dared

To reach for the highest;

The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind

Will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the

inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the

children of God as the waters cover the sea.

All these and more than mind can think and heart can feel,

I make as my sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee,

Our Father, in humbleness of mind and simplicity of heart.

I Sound Weird...

Woah, what's this???

That's right, the sermon transcript I posted the other week can now be accompanied by an audio file of me speaking right into your beautiful ears!  Take a listen!

When the Question is Asked (Yes I Am That Nerdy)

A reading,

Ecclesiastes six-eleven.

 “The more the words,

The less the meaning,

And how does that profit anyone?”

The Word of God, for the People of God…

Thanks be to God.

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What do you read, my Lord?

Supralapsarianism, Transubstantiation…

Ontological, Teleological, Eschatological…

Hypostasis, Kenosis, Johannine…

Salvation, Baptism, Eucharist…

Grace.  Faith.  Hope.

Love.

What do you read, my Lord?

Words, words, words…

Full of sound and fury and signifying… something.

Ah, but brevity is the soul of wit!

Do you see what I did there?

The irony is not lost on me.

We gather today to celebrate words,

Or, more accurately, The Word.

And here I stand, in hipster glasses,

Head shaved, rockin' beard,

Hilarious shirt and ratty jeans...

Railing against words.

Just me and Qoheleth…

Versus the world.

Oh, we love Ecclesiastes, sure,

When he’s quoting The Byrds:

To everything, turn, turn, turn,

There is a season, turn, turn turn...

Or forming unbreakable cords.

But when he speaks unspeakable things,

No lectionary for you!

“Meaningless, vanity, hebel…

Death and folly…”

We’ll have none of this!

There may be nothing new under the sun,

But the layers of dust have hidden a treasure

So old, it’s new all the same.

But I digress.  Another day, perhaps.

This is not a defense of Ecclesiastes.

This is not an attack on words.

This is my support… of silence.

Silence is not the opposite of sound.

It has a density and an effect.

Words and silence,

They are two sides of the same coin.

They are tools, but they are fragile things.

Over-used, they become dull,

Meaningless, one might even say.

Why say it in fifteen minutes,

When you can say it in ten?

In five?

In a minute?

A second?

An instant?

In silence…?

Silence has power!

It makes WALL-E and EVE

More believable than Jack and Rose.

It can chill the spine

When it’s quiet – too quiet.

It can make you weepy.

“Why didn’t she call me back?”

“He should have texted me by now!”

Words may have dulled,

But silence remains sharp.

So sharp, in fact, that we fear it.

Nowhere is this clearer than right here.

Not so much during worship,

Not in the quiet meditation,

Or the over-long breaths between takes.

It is the silence of God we fear most of all.

We read it over and over in the Bible.

Someone wakes up one day,

And they’ve got a direct line to The Name.

God speaks, they hear, we act.

Pretty straightforward.

So what’s the deal, God?

Where you at?!?

We wait, and we listen

And we long for your Voice!

And we’re left with this instead…

This… this silence…

It’s so big… and it scares us.

But not empty like you’d think.

It’s weighty and cumbersome,

And that’s so much worse!

We sit and we wait for

Answers,

Comfort,

Something…

Anything.

And it never comes.

All we have some days is the silence,

Your Silence.

When all the noise of the city washes away,

And the last note of the hymn stops reverberating,

And the whisper of the prayer is gone,

All we really have is Silence.

So much silence we drown in it.

So much silence it begins to permeate us.

It is so terrifying, and we beg and plead

For God to make the silence go away.

Another hymn,

Another prayer,

Another homily.

Because we have forgotten.

Yes, God is in the hymn.

Yes, God is in the prayer.

Yes, God is in the homily.

God is in me, and you.

God is in the words.

And God… is in the silence.

We have become disembodied.

We know how to hear with our ears.

When was the last time you listened?

With your hands?

With your feet?

With your heart?

With your soul?

Prophets weren’t lucky, hand-picked individuals.

It was not something special that let them audibly hear.

No, they just knew how to listen:

How to listen to a God who still speaks.

A God who speaks through silence to our very core.

A God who speaks in the spaces between words,

In the subtext below words.

A God who does not need our ears,

Who knows how to address something so primal.

So let yourself drown once in a while.

Let the silence fill your every pore.

Because God is there.

…Just… don’t expect words.

Because God knows, just like Qoheleth knew:

“The more the words, the less the meaning.”

And you two have some very big things to talk about.

Well…

You know what I mean.

Amen.

No Surprise There

Can't believe I never posted this!  I'm in the midst of working on a new sermon as we speak, and I went back to look this over when I realized that only a small handful of people got to hear it at the sunrise service last year at Marsh Chapel on Easter morning. 

I wrote this in response to Matt Schmidt's sermon about being surprised by Christ.  It was a fun little point-counterpoint thing.

Enjoy.

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There is truth in fiction.  In the novel Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett, a prophet enters a cave to encounter the divine, and following his revelation, emerges from the cave a new man, telling his young disciple of the wisdom bestowed upon him:  “There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past.  Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them.  Therefore the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise.  The only appropriate state of the heart is joy.  The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now.  Be glad of it.”  My associate Matt has told you that we ought to be surprised by Jesus Christ, and he is absolutely right.  I say this to preface the rest of my sermon, so that it doesn’t sound like I am outright disagreeing with him.

You see, we serve a Lord of paradox.  The Creator God comes to earth in the form of a carpenter’s son, born in a stable surrounded by livestock.  As a kid, he ditches his parents, like any good delinquent youth, only to go to the temple and school some learned scholars.  His closest allies and disciples were everyday joes, fishermen, tax collectors, etc., and his greatest antagonists the scribes and Pharisees.  He heals afflictions in plain sight, yet in other accounts, he pulls the Messianic Secret card, asking that they tell no one.  He rides into Jerusalem like a king, but replaces key elements with a donkey and palm leaves.  The Messiah himself is willingly put to death in the most shameful way possible.  In his final moments, he grants entry into paradise to a common thief. 

What I’m getting at is that Jesus was unpredictable, enigmatic, confusing.  One of my all-time favorite books, Lamb, tells the story of Jesus’ life from the point of view of his fictional best friend, Biff.  In one particular scene, Jesus is trying to help the disciples understand what it is he’s always going on about, and in a fit of frustration starts talking about coins and sheep and mustard seeds.  And the disciples, thick as mud, just don’t seem to get it.  We see this throughout the gospels as well – Jesus says something and the disciples have no clue what he means or, worse, are too afraid to ask him to clarify.

But hindsight is 20/20, right?  Jesus warned he would die, and so he did.  And he promised he would come back, and he did.  Surely they must get it now!  As we see in our reading from Acts today, Peter is attempting to put the pieces together, but what we don’t see is the rest of the story.  He is preaching to a group of Gentiles following a vision a few days before, in which God tries to tell him – three times, mind you – that he is not to call something God has made pure “unclean”.  He goes to the house of a man called Caesarea, and is a little put off by the idea of eating with Gentiles while he himself is a Jew.  Not until he gets going and actually interacts with them does the lightbulb go off over his head:  Oh!  These are good people, people of God, they aren’t unclean at all!  Even Cephas, the Rock himself, doesn’t always get it on the first go.

But now it’s Easter 2012, and as they say, we stand on the shoulders of giants.  We can look behind us and see the long train of prophets, disciples, saints, theologians, and Christians bringing us to this very moment.  I blink, and see the sunrise.  I blink, and I am surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.  I blink, but I…  I am not surprised.  I am not surprised to see you all here, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, having rolled out of bed at such an ungodly hour, if you’ll pardon my French.  I am not surprised to hear you singing along, praying along, and listening intently as I ramble along.  And I, with respect to my brother Matt, am not surprised to find the tomb empty, the stone rolled away.

I should pause here and say that this is not the lack of surprise experienced by a cynical youngster, though I suppose realistically that’s a part of it.  When I was in the youth choir at my home church, we did a musical called “Celebrate Life”.  Following a kind of mock-Passion narrative, there was a song we did that involved flooding into the church and going right up to congregants and saying an enthusiastic “He is alive!” over and over.  When you’re fourteen years old, this is incredibly hard to do with a straight face, never mind keeping yourself from over-exaggerating the enthusiasm, which we did occasionally joke about during rehearsals.

This is not that.  This is the lightbulb experience before the bomb drops.  This is the theological “spider-senses tingling!” that comes from dedicated study and truly understanding Christ Jesus.  This is choosing not to huddle in our homes in fear, but to come out at sunrise, watching the stone roll away before our eyes.

The term Christian was not always a positive thing.  Depending on who you ask, it still isn’t.  But at one time, it is believed that, it was an epithet, a slur, for those zany people who chose to follow and worship a man who died the embarrassing death of the cross.  Little Christs, that’s what we were once called.  I say we co-opt that.  I kinda like it.  We’re not just followers, we’re emulators.  Imitation is the grandest form of flattery.

Having studied theatre in college, I had Stanislavski and method acting jammed down my throat for four years.  Don’t believe the hype, method acting is not what we think of today.  It is a much more intense system, beyond simply getting in a character’s head and thinking what they think.  It’s all about movement and belief, truly becoming the character you’re portraying.  And hey, that sounds kind of familiar.  Word and deed, grace and works.  We are not just a people of belief, but of action.  Being a Christian, a Little Christ, is as much about doing as it is sitting in church and praying.  Ministry in its purest form is holistic, incorporating mind, soul, and body.  And when you start to do that, you become a little more like Jesus every day.

In so doing, Jesus’ methodology for ministry starts to make sense.  We move from surprise to understanding, from expectation to experience.  Were I in Jesus’ shoes, I don’t know that I would have rode humbly into Jerusalem on a donkey.  I would have kicked in the doors of the temple and demanded that they start acting like proper religious leaders.  I’m mature like that.  But as I move ever on to perfection, like a good United Methodist… yeah, I get why he did it.

Yes, we should be surprised by Jesus.  Don’t get me wrong, it still happens to me.  Last semester, while I was in theology class having my every belief examined under a microscope and questioning everything, I had a revelation about Jesus’ final days.  He could have walked away.  Now that would have been surprising!  He spends three years teaching, preaching, healing, helping, and predicting his own demise.  Then, there in the garden of Gethsemene, crying his eyes out and praying God take the cup from him, he could very well have said “No, I will not drink”.  He could have gotten up, walked out, moved far away, and died an old man, working as a carpenter in some far-off country.  He was as human as he was divine, and that was ultimately an option.  But it was not in his character.  The option was there, but as far as he was concerned, there was only one path.

On May 21, 2011, I sat with my brothers in their apartment, watching as the appointed time hit every time zone, laughing as absolutely nothing happened, the capital-E-End never coming; no Jesus for you.  Harold Camping, much like the Millerites a century and a half before him, was lampooned for the rollicking amusement of all. I had my fun, but I must admit that there is a part of me that respects those who try so hard to predict the end, who refuse to be surprised by Jesus.  Yes, they ignored the message that no one would know the hour, that coming like a thief in the night kind of implies a surprise.  But there is a difference between prediction and expectation.  We should expect Jesus; and specifically, we should expect Jesus to be Jesus.  As we read in Hebrews, he is the same “Yesterday and today and forever”.  If he says he’s going to be betrayed, if he says he is going to die, and most importantly, if he says he’s going to come back a few days later, you had best believe it’s going to happen.  There is no need to be surprised.

There’s bacon back inside the chapel, so let me wrangle this sermon back to some kind of cohesive finish.    As I said, we serve a Lord of paradox.  Jesus was God born a man, fully human, fully divine.  He died, and yet is alive.  He clearly said that it is finished, and yet it is never truly done.  We must not be surprised by him, and yet we find ourselves surprised at every turn.  The tomb is empty, the stone rolled away, he is not here.  And yet, here he is, among us, within us, all us diminutive Jesuses, right here, right now.  We have faith.  We have actions.  We have purity laws.  We have bacon.  We’re surprised.  We’re not surprised.  The mystery of faith, brothers and sisters, the mystery of faith.

So Let's Talk

Let me begin with an apology. It is as much for me as it is for you. I like to believe I have a skill with words, but it’s far easier to point at something and say “This”.

The thing I love about this video is that he is not saying “Man, there are some truly awful Christians out there. But not me! I’m great and my friends are great and we’re totally different!” No. We are one church, divided all to hell (pun intended?).

And so I’m sorry too. I’m sorry for Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blaming 9/11 and hurricane Katrina on “the gays and the abortionists”. I’m sorry for Fred Phelps and the WBC saying even worse things still about the gay community and soldiers. I’m sorry for Rick Perry’s “Strong” ad and the belief that Christianity is under attack despite having a strong presence in the political sphere. I’m sorry for my silence and my inaction. And I’m truly sorry that we suck so bad at listening.

A few years ago, I was out to dinner with a friend on New Year’s Eve in downtown Richmond, VA. As we wandered up and down the street people-watching, enjoying the festive atmosphere, I couldn’t help but notice the plethora of preachers on big stands shouting what might roughly be considered sermons at the passers-by. These men of God had various messages, but to a casual observer, most of them amounted to a version of “You are in some way, shape, or form wrong, and we can fix you!” Even having grown up in the church, I was turned off. But moreso now than ever before, my reaction to this memory is becoming more visceral, more outright frustrated, even embarrassed. Because, again, I am one of them. Sure, different theologies and denominations and all that, but at our core we worship the same God, the same Lord, regardless of the names and labels. And if my brothers and sisters are so set in their ways that they would rather shout it from the mountaintops than talk it over a pint in the pub, then that’s as much my bad as it is theirs.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the cynicism. Again, those much more skilled than I have already gotten the ball rolling, so I won’t waste time trying to hunt down every instance, significant or insignificant, that exemplifies our inept handling of the world. Instead, see Exhibit A again before taking a gander here at Exhibit B.

I caught this Bo Burnham comedy special on “The Netflix” last summer and have since become more than a little enamored by it. This particular bit was most intriguing to me. The catchy little ditty, simply titled “Rant,” regardless of its focus on Catholicism, serves as a reminder that we are not the golden city on the hill, we are not beloved by the entire world, and we are not living in a purely Christianized world with a few other religions sprinkled here and there.

But here I am going on and on about organized religion. What I really care about are beliefs. Beliefs are at the heart of this discussion. After all, organized religion is just systemized belief. And it’s unrealistic to expect that, as a Christian, I believe whole-heartedly what every other Christian says (mainly because this is almost impossible). So what do I believe? You guessed it, it’s time for Exhibit C:

“I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen — I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

----Neil Gaiman – American Gods

EDIT: How very sloppy of me to include noting of my own theology but simply posting a quote! It occurs to me that while I agree wholehearted with the above (for the most part, anyway), this needs more of a personal touch or this blog post will equate to little more than a collection of stuff I find interesting. So for at least some small thing I can put forward, I present a personalized version of what is known as the Nicene Creed. My personal statement of faith, for whatever that might mean:

I believe in God, the Lord of Love, Creator and Sustainer, ineffable and, consequently, often misunderstood, Head of the Triune, without whom nothing exists.

And in Jesus Christ, Messiah, one and only Son of God, and yet One with God; who was born a human to Mary, lived a human life, taught many, suffered and died; yet who performed miracles and was buried only three days, before returning to earth, and finally ascending to heaven to join the Creator God and the Holy Spirit in Heaven.

And I believe in the Holy Spirit, Inspiration to the prophets and Healer of souls, who fills our hearts and minds with the Glory of the Lord; who reigns co-eternally and co-equally with God and Jesus as the One Lord of Heaven.

I believe in the church, in both its varied incarnations and the one, universal Church, in which all God’s people are tasked with creating a mirror of Heaven on Earth.

I am lucky to be learning in a theology school with such an open atmosphere, that I can feel free to include a quote like this on what is ostensibly a class project (though I want it to become something much more). But the heart of what I think and feel is there – that it’s important to know what you believe, and to hold it loosely enough that new ideas don’t shake the absolute foundation of your very soul. I love theology, and I love learning new theologies, whether or not I agree with them. Mythology and religion have always fascinated me, and I’d like to think I come at them with as much of an open mind as I possibly can. I love learning about what it is that really matters to someone, what their hearts and minds tell them, whether it’s that a man died and came back three days later, or that Odin gave up his eye for knowledge, or that Anubis will someday weigh our hearts against a feather, or simply that space is infinite. Beliefs fascinate me, and they challenge me, and if we can’t encounter a little challenge now and then in our daily lives, then what’s the point?

All this is to say that I just want to talk. I’m not looking to convert, and I’m not even really looking for debate. What I want, and what I think is severely lacking these days, is honest conversation. This is not an invitation for a point-counterpoint battle. This is not an invitation for flaming, though I’m sure some will take this as an opportunity for just that in the coming days and weeks. This is an invitation for dialogue, a space to say “Maybe I’m crazy, but here goes…” I want to know, and to talk, and to learn, and to teach.

Comment below or send me an e-mail (confusedbilliam@gmail.com) and let’s get this thing going!