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Weekly Sermons from Dan – November 6, 2011

“Not a Dry Eye”

Revelation 7:9-17; Matthew 5:1-12

I was sitting, staring at my computer screen yesterday morning, hoping that God has been keeping up with the technology and send me some inspiration through cyberspace. For those of you who have not had this experience, it’s the same thing as sitting with a blank piece of paper in front of you, only you have more options to distract you.

You never know where inspiration is going to come from; which is how I convince myself it is OK to get distracted. One of my favorite options is to see how my friends are doing on Facebook.  I know, I know, there are good things and bad things about Facebook. One of the good things on Facebook, for me, is my good friend - Minnesota Public Radio.   There was a posting that said Andy Rooney had died.  Andy Rooney is no saint of the church; the piece I listened to called him, “the grouch-in-chief.”   Since 1979, he was the curmudgeonly commentator on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” He retired only three weeks ago, and he died at age 92.

Like Facebook, there are those who don’t like Andy Rooney, and those who do. I like Andy Rooney.  I took this posting from my friend, MPR, (Minnesota Public Radio) as the inspiration I was looking for on All Saints’ Sunday.  My thinking was that the death of someone who had so many good things to say about the small, but important things in life would be worth checking out.  After all, the kind of inspiration most of us are looking for, or at least pay attention to, is going to come mostly in the small but important things in life.

I took a chance and clicked on the video of Andy Rooney’s last recorded commentary and watched it.  This led me to listen to Andy Rooney for the next half hour or so.  Here are some of the things I heard:

On the election of our first black President:

“The fact, that the citizens of this country, 80% of whom are white, freely chose to elect a black man as their leader simply because they thought he was the best choice, makes me think we have every right to be proud of ourselves.”

On the death of his close friend Harry Reasoner in the early ‘90’s:

“How does the smartest man I ever knew loose a lung to cancer and still smoke two packs of cigarettes a day?  I’m sad, but I’m angry too. Harry was so careless with our affection for him.”

God does check in with him, from time to time:

“I heard from God just the other night; God always seems to call at night. Andrew, he always calls me Andrew, I like that. You have the eyes and ears of a lot of people

I wish you would tell them that there are a few of you down there who are wackos.”

Turning to him for inspirational final thoughts:

“It would not hurt if we could improve certain parts of our personalities or our behavior. Maybe drug companies could come up with a pill that would cure us of the evil in our nature; things like hate, jealousy, dishonestly and selfishness.

And one more thing, this may be asking too much, I wish there something we could all take to cure us of stupidity.”

I was chuckling to myself, remembering the time I drove my expensive bicycle into the garage while it was still on top of my car rack.  When someone asked me if the insurance was covering it, all I could say was, “I don’t think they cover stupid.” Fortunately they did.

In the middle of these thoughts, through my computer came that familiar tone that said a message had come in for me.  There is something about that tone, once you get use to it.  Sometimes is feels like your mother or boss or something like God calling. “Daniel”….I’m not sure I like it when I hear Daniel. I prefer Dan, but I take what I can get.  I think I was hoping the message would be something so important or so interesting that I would somehow be seen as indispensable to the person calling me over cyberspace. I clicked on the little postage stamp and opened my mail.

There was only one piece of mail; it was from the Annual Conference. It was an obituary; John Davis had died.   My guess is that not many of you know John Davis.  He was a soft-spoken, quick-witted pastor with a dry sense of humor, who spent his life as a counselor. He never lost his West Texas accent or manner. He was tall and reminded me of John Wayne on a different career track.

I first met John in 1980, my first year in Minnesota.  He and Ginger, his wife, attended the church where Katie served.  They took a liking to us and would have us over to dinner.  John would ask me out to lunch. And even though he made it clear he was not going to talk like a counselor at lunch; he was a counselor in the best sense of the word.  John couldn’t help but listen well and always had the right thing to say. Most importantly, he would wait until the right time to say it –which, as only he and a few others in my life knew, was the time I was most ready to hear it.  Maybe that is why I always felt at ease with John.

When I read the email, I was moved. Do you ever have the feeling, upon hearing of the death of someone who at one time in your life was very important to you, is worth a few of your tears?  John is one of these people in my life.  Over the years, every time I’ve heard or read his name, I didn’t exactly smile; it’s more like a grin of reassurance that came to my face.  Something Andy Rooney said gets to the point.  Commenting on the tragedy of the Shuttle Challenger and the deaths of those astronauts and teachers he said, 

“We can all be prouder to be human beings, because that is what they were; they make up for a lot of liars, cheats and terrorists among us.”

When I hear the name John Davis, I feel like a better human being because I have shared time on this planet with him.  All Saints’ Day is a day to remember these people, to risk the tears that may well up or come pouring out; a time to consider how and through whom we are prouder to be human beings. 

This image from the Revelation of St. John has always tugged at my heart.  Every time I read it, I choke up without knowing why or for whom I am weeping. You know, I think I’m as grateful for the grace that I can feel as I am the comfort of believing that someday God will wipe my tears away.  When I remembered John Davis, I wanted to cry for a bit before God wiped anything away. I wanted to cry a bit because of John and what he meant to my life.

I asked John to meet with me professionally a few times.  He was anxious about mixing the friendship/mentoring relationship we had with the specific role of counseling.  But he had just retired, and he was counseling with a few folks at his home.  When he said, “Yes,” I was immediately reassured that whatever it was that was so troubling in my life would be heard. If you ask me, this is what made John such a good man and one fine pastoral counselor. I trusted that when I talked, he was not only listening but that he would hear me.

I remember one day I was telling him about something.  It must have been some moment of frustration or annoyance. It was one of the few times in which he didn’t keep his poker face that he wore most of the time.  He was smiling, like a rancher from West Texas who knows the punch line of a joke but is going to enjoy the laugh anyway. As I finished, he leans over to me, pats me on the knee and speaks with a hint of pain and a great wealth of life. He says something like, “It’ll be all right Dan, you’re a good man.”

Now I don’t know if those were the exact words he said to me, but I’ll tell you this “It’ll be all right Dan, you’re a good man,” is what I keep hearing from John.  And there are days, when as I mourn the sadness that often threatens to overtake this world, I feel helpless to do anything about it; days when the hurts and pains of my life come gushing to the surface of my awareness with a force that surprises and disturbs me; days when I need that pill for stupidity; days when I shed tears as my heart and soul are crying for solace.  It is then that I often hear that strange West Texas drawl; and my tears are wiped away.  At least I heard it yesterday staring at the message on my computer.

Today, this beautiful image in scripture is not so much an etching in stone of how God will do this, but it is a hint of what we might anticipate.  Tears of the kind Revelation summons can be dried only in the heaven that is revealed in the solace of our pain, our need, our hope, our joy, our desire to be heard.

Could it be that heaven is the place where we will all be heard? Heaven is that time, in whatever future, in which we most fully experience God listening.  Today is a day to allow the tears to well up and maybe come pouring out as we remember those who have listened to us here in this life and made us prouder to be human beings. Today is a day where, as we remember and bring forward these tokens of our respect and esteem, there may not be a dry eye in this house.  God, through this wonderful image in scripture, invites our tears of respect and esteem. For these persons now reside, not so much in a different place, but a different time. Today they are waiting not only to provide the solace of being heard, but also the hope in which they now reside, the hope of God forever wiping away every tear from every eye that cries out to him. 

Weekly Sermons from Dan – November 13, 2011

“Vital is Not a Dirty Word”

Matthew 25:14-30 (from “The Message”)

Ten years ago I had one of the biggest scares of my career.  It came from a parent of a Confirmation student. If you can be patient with me for a few minutes, I believe we will get to the core of this sometimes disturbing parable.  If you ask me, it is less about a final eternal judgment and more about how we are held accountable in the lives we have in front of us.

The first thing you need to know is that I’ve always imagined myself in another life – as a High School history teacher and an assistant Jr. High basketball coach.  I’m a better teacher of basketball than I am a player. The Jr. High thing may sound crazy, but I enjoy working with Jr. High kids and I love basketball.  The high school history teacher comes from there being something about the study and interpretation of our past that helps me put the present into perspective – a perspective which I believe can give us clearer choices about how to move toward a positive future.

So, I like to teach the age level of Confirmation, and over the years I’ve given it my best shot.   This is not, for me, what some might call an area of needed growth.  Then ten years ago, this thing happened.  We had combined 7^th, 8th and 9^th grade, and I was teaching the largest Confirmation Class I’d ever had – about 40 students.   This was the year that I decided to focus on Confirmation as less about passing on information and more about building relationships.  I began to do skits, tell stories, show films, interview people from the church and the community and generally have a great time. I gave out these Dum-Dum suckers to everybody; I’d toss them out as kids arrived.  I can still throw a split finger Dum-Dum. (There was one kid who five years after Confirmation came into my office and asked for a Dum-Dum. I didn’t have any, but I was just glad he came into my office.) I think I had finally let go of an outdated model of teaching our faith and realized that the best thing for me to do was to experiment with a way to share my experience with ninth graders and still call it Confirmation.

Now here is what happened.  One day, after church, this parent comes up to me and says she would like to speak with me privately about Confirmation.  She wasn’t a very active church member, and I suspected we would see even less of her after her son, her youngest, finished Confirmation. I begin to think, “Shoot, I thought things were going really well.  Attendance was amazingly consistent. The 45 kids in the class all seemed to me to be engaged for the hour and a half we were together. We were having fun.  I thought I was getting more information across as well as I ever had in my 20 years of teaching Confirmation.”   If my heart would have been a balloon at that moment, you could have heard the air go right out of it.

We went into my office, but this mom couldn’t sit down.  She looked at me and said something like; “I don’t know what you’re doing on Wednesday nights at Confirmation…” I thought, “Oh boy, here it comes...”  And then she said, “But last Wednesday I was just too tired to get up after supper, and I told my son that he could stay home from Confirmation that night.  He looked at me and said, ‘No way Mom, I’m going, let’s go, I don’t want to be late.’”  She said, “I’ve had two other kids go through Confirmation, and, I assure you, I never heard anything close to that.  Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.” 

I laughed and thanked her as she left. It was then, as I was standing alone, that I experienced a moment of panic, a second or two of fear, a minute of terror.

·         It was the moment that comes when you’ve done something right or well, and you realize you need to keep it up.

·         It was the second when you see yourself in the middle of something that you always wanted to be important, and you realize that –it is.  

·         It was the hour when you see that the thing you are doing is engaging, it is vital to this world and you are a part of it.

Here’s the question that the scripture ask all of us today. Have you ever experienced a similar moment of encouragement in your personal faith journey?  Have you known that minute in your life when what you had to offer was needed and you responded?  Have we together, as a community of faith, felt the weight of something like success in an hour of vitality?  What have we done with those moments, those minutes, those hours when we are the healthy, vital body of Christ?

Matthew writes this parable for Christians whose very existence depended on how they answered these questions.  We notice a sense of desperation from this story because most of the time our ancestors of faith did not know if their community or their way of life would last into the next week.  Our ancestors in faith were desperate, not only because they were looking for a cosmic Christ to return and vindicate their suffering, but also, because they never knew when the Roman Empire was going to shut them down. This parable is an attempt at giving instructions for faithful living in extreme times. 

Many interpret this parable from the starting point of judgment and the fear, guilt and shame that often follow.  These are unfortunate byproducts of an attempt to encourage every single one of us to use what it is we have to offer in the time it is needed.  Perhaps we can see this story from the back side.  The backside of judgment is something like accountability, or perhaps it is the hope of glimpsing what is needed. Perhaps we at EPUMC can hear this teaching, not as desperate people who must always worry about some cosmic score card, but as an encouraged people who recognize the urgency of the need that surrounds us.

After I said goodbye to that Mom, I stood in my office doorway for a moment trying to take in what it meant for our Confirmation program, for our church, for me.  It can be scary when something you are hoping will work – does work.  But here is the thing.  The next Wednesday, as I was standing in front of those 40 or so kids, I felt like I was getting more than I was giving.  The investment of time and creativity and even the intimacy that came as I shared the stories of my life was worth the stirring in my soul that God was going to be at work in the hour ahead. 

Have you known that stirring, inspiring moment of vitality when you stopped questioning and doubting yourself and trusted that God will use what it is you have to offer?

Faithful living is not static. Faithful living is found in the risk of claiming our vitality.  But like the third person in the parable, we are good at knowing without doing.  We are proficient at holding on to a talent entrusted, knowing what we should do with it, but not risking the doing. A lot of us bury or hide what is needed. We say no, or we ask the questions of why instead of why not.  We comment that we can’t instead of dreaming out loud.  What if we…. did it this way?  We bury too much of ourselves not only out of a fear of failure, but also out of a fear that if we give it a try it just might work.

Listen to this quote that is often attributed to Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural address. The actual author of the quotation is Marianne Williamson from her 1992 book, “Return to Love.”

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Weekly Sermons from Dan – November 20, 2011

Lunch at Moms:  The Extraordinary Bachelor Farmer Brothers
of South Haven.

Matthew 25:31-46

“Mom’s” is the name of the restaurant in South Haven, MN.  South Haven is 20 miles south and east of St. Cloud. I served at Zion UMC in South Haven and Kimball UMC for six years so, let’s just say, I ate at “Mom’s” a few times.  “Mom’s” was the place where all the folks went to eat after church – mostly because it was the only place in town open at that time on a Sunday.

Zion UMC in South Haven was just about the only community building left in South Haven – besides “Mom’s.”  The 30 or so people who attended church were mostly farmers, folks working another job in St. Cloud or truck drivers.  After working all day, they came home to work on the farm at night. 

Mel and Will Mellin were two Norwegian bachelor brothers.  They farmed; they lived together and came to church together. They had done well. But they were both – and I mean this gently – they were gentle and they needed special attention.  I loved them both.

Mel, the elder one, was very practical but seemed to carry some great weight or pain from life.  Like a shell-shocked veteran, he would often flinch in the presence of an exchange of words that threatened those around him. Sometimes he would smile too quickly to make sure others knew he was getting the joke. Will, the younger, was shorter, stockier and less able.  He was not really quiet, but he was more hesitant to speak. When he did speak, it was with the staccato of a person being sure of each word.   Will often seemed more aware of his incapacity.  Sometimes, when you watched him, it was like you saw someone who knew that others thought he was slow or even stunted.  Mel and Will often helped each other through situations.  It seemed like, together, they made up what we might think of as one normal person.

Mel and Will were a part of the crew of 10 or 12 folks from Zion Church who, after church on Sunday morning, would go to “Mom’s” for lunch.  It was lunch not brunch because well – it was 12 noon when church ended, and it was South Haven. “Mom’s” is the kind of place that serves breakfast, lunch and supper, in that order.  One of the first things I learned, as the Pastor of Zion UMC, was that it was important to get out on time – no later than 12:00 noon. That was because the owner of “Mom’s,” who certainly did not look or act like most moms, would only hold a table for the Methodists for 10 minutes beyond noon.  We called that “reservations” and, believe it or not, you needed them. “Mom’s” often had a line on Sunday morning.

I’ll never forget the day when this need was imbedded into my being.  It had been a very full service with Holy Communion yet to come.  I was standing in the pulpit, preaching, but with that voice in the back of my head saying, “It’s almost noon already - finish up; everybody is going to start worrying about the table at “Mom’s.”  I threw out the last page of my sermon and started the Communion prayer.  Just after the “Amen” of that prayer, Mel’s watch alarm went off. 

Now I know that most everybody at Zion UMC knew that Mel didn’t know that his watch had an alarm setting. Unless you set it for a specific time, it was going to go off at 12 midnight or 12 noon.  Right?  (That is the thought I’m “stickin” with because on that day Mel’s watch alarm went off at 12 noon.)  I can still hear it in that little sanctuary. Beep- Beep, Beep-Beep, Beep-Beep!

I don’t know which it was, but Mel either didn’t hear that watch going off or he pretended it was somebody else’s watch going off.  I can, however, guarantee you of one thing; Mel did not know how to turn off that alarm on his watch.  Finally, I had to walk over to the side of the sanctuary where he was sitting, and I asked, “Mel, can you just press the button on your watch?”  Mel was so embarrassed, so self- conscious that, as I watched, his finger shook and he was unable to reach the watch stem.  It was then that I saw the calm stubby fingers of Will reach over and gently push the stem of Mel’s watch and bring an end to the beeping.  You could say church was over then and there – still we had Communion.

The service went over by about 12 minutes (I had a digital watch, and I looked) and although “Mom’s” is close enough to walk to in about 3 minutes, they all still drove and looked for the best parking place. When the gang got to “Mom’s,” it was too late, the table was taken. While they stood in line, everybody was chuckling about the watch incident. I thought since I had been the cause of losing the table, I should join them.  The first thing I heard was from John, who said, “Are you buying today for getting us out so late, Dan?”  I thought he was serious.

We waited the 20 minutes or so to get the regular table that took up about a fourth of the little restaurant.  At “Mom’s” on a Sunday, you order either the chicken or the special. On that particular Sunday, the special was the chicken, so ordering lunch was quick and easy.  I’ll never forget sitting around that table watching everybody treat Mel and Will with a gentleness that made it very clear that nobody cared that they had to wait. Indeed, it had endeared them to us all.  After you’ve eaten lunch at “Mom’s,” it’s a little easier to be gracious. Eating lunch with people, who are different than you, helps you understand not only them, but yourself a little better.

But on this day there was something more, and I think you would have needed to have been there to experience it.  And by there, I mean, you would have had to have lived in South Haven for a good part of your life and have eaten the chicken at a little after noon on Sundays. Even then, you may not have seen it.  It was the extraordinary way in which Mel and Will received the small graces and affections offered them.  I watched Mel and Will, that day and for the six years I was in South Haven with them, receive what others offered them. 

Mel and Will received what others offered with a kindness and a gentleness that did not expect or anticipate, but allowed others to give the best of themselves.  It seemed as if, because you knew that there was more of a challenge or a pain or a wound or a need in the lives of those brother bachelor farmers than anyone would ever be able to know, that you wanted to be not only understanding or nice but, well, gracious.  The grace of receiving Mel and Will offered, in return, something that was truly extraordinary. It has touched and formed my life. 

Now here is what happened.  I’m getting up with my check for my chicken, which by the way was very good, and as I turn Will comes over and with the same hand he helped Mel turn off that beeping watch,  he grabs my check and says in a voice that is clear of any clutter,  “Let us buy you lunch.”  It wasn’t a question. 

I know it was just lunch at “Mom’s,” but I’m telling you that when Will took that check, I felt, in that instant, a part of the gang, accepted.  For a moment, I knew what it meant to be a part of that community.  I’m thinking it’s what the scriptures mean when they call us together as the body of Christ. Now here is the thing, I had no idea until they held the door for me that any of those folks understood how much I wanted to belong. But, you know, they do pay attention, especially folks like Mel and Will.

Who knows if Mel or Will or any of those around that table at lunch at “Mom’s” or any of us sitting around this table, are sheep or goats?  I don’t know.  I tend to believe the separation Matthew refers to is more of his and our own making than it is of God’s.  At the very least, I’ll say this, I agree with what seems to be Matthew’s intention which is – that you never know the real good you are doing or the lives you are affecting until you step back from the table or broaden your vision or rise above the prejudice that has been implanted and instilled within you.

When Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me,” he was talking about people like Mel and Will, who although they may not appear important, are truly extraordinary.  Today the scriptures teach us that it is in both our ability to be attentive to the needs of others and our willingness to receive from those Jesus might have called the “least of these” that we know something of the grace we are capable of bestowing, the depth of our humanness, the hope God must have for us, the beauty of heaven awaiting us.

Weekly Sermons from Dan – November 27, 2011

“Mary: You Can Do This..”
Luke 1: 26-38

A lot of people think that Mary, being an unmarried and what we would call an adolescent girl, would have been doing what most adolescent, unmarried or for that matter married, girls would be doing – which is fetching water at the well.  Nazareth was so small that one of the only reasons for living there was that it did have a source of water.  Nazareth is not mentioned in any census of the times. It is near a very large and prosperous city, but as others will later say, “Nothing good can come out of Nazareth.”  Nazareth was like living in Eden Prairie 100 years ago, nobody ever heard of it, even though it was only a few hours walk into Minneapolis.  Nazareth was a place to live if you could not afford or just didn’t want to live in the big city.

To understand the meaning of the name of Nazareth, you have to go way back in this great novel of God’s coming to be with us.  One understanding is that Nazareth took its name from a word that literally means “stump” or “root”, but figuratively it means “Hope.”  It was a long understood hope that one day God would send a savior from a “stump” or “root” of the family of the great King David.  People in Nazareth took that idea, my guess is, much like our ancestors here may have seen something of a Garden of Eden like valley near the great river that brought so many to Eden Prairie. You get the impression from scripture however, that there was a cruel irony in naming a place like the one Mary was from, “Hope.”

So there is Mary doing something she must have done most every day, whether she wanted to or not.  I doubt the water she might have hauled out of the well was a pretty blue.  But something happens there; something that is both beautiful and life changing.  In this town called Nazareth, which nobody has ever heard of, an Angel, a messenger from God speaks to this girl.

Who knows what the angel said?  Maybe it was: “Greetings, Favored One.”  Or “Hail Mary, full of Grace.” I like the interpretation I heard from this one young boy in a Christmas pageant.  He had the part of the Angel Gabriel.  With the help of his parents and grandparents, he had practiced his lines over and over.  As the pageant started, the excitement was electric around the room. The dramatic event was the announcement of the angel, "Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy." The spotlight hit this young boy, and as he stood center stage in the middle of all this excitement, his brain froze. Every grandparent, aunt, uncle and neighbor came to the edge of their seats, wanting to say it for him. You could see them in unison, mouthing, "Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy."

Still, his brain was frozen; he couldn't say it. He tried it, but it just wouldn't come. So, finally, in a heroic moment, he filled his lungs with breath and blurted out the words, "Have I got news for you!"

That is the word of God in scripture that is meant for our hearts.  God has news for us; it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do or where you live – God has news for you!  It doesn’t matter how young or old, rich or not so rich, type A or another type, single or married, divorced or engaged, or thinking about one or the other.  It doesn’t matter if you are gay or straight, right brained or left brained - God has news for you!  It doesn’t matter if you are from someplace that isn’t where you want to be from, or if you are from a place whose dirt you have somehow, after all these years, managed to keep underneath your fingernails – God has news for you!”   If the creator of the universe can come to speak to a girl who is not yet married – in a place that is literally the other side of the tracks, in a time when hope was lost – then God can find a way to speak to you!

God finds a way still to speak to our deeper more divine nature.  And when that message comes, the messengers don’t scare us as much as the message they bring.

In my small hometown church there was an “ancient” widow woman named Mrs. Meadows.  Mrs. Meadows looked the part; she was short and slim with small round wire-rimmed glasses and wore her grey hair tightly in a bun.  She wore those sensible old lady shoes.  I remember her dresses looking as if they came out of somebody’s thrift shop of depression era leftovers. I only saw her at church. 

But here is the story.  Every once on a while on Sunday nights – yes we had church on Sunday nights – Mrs. Meadows would shuffle her way to the front of the small church, holding on to the aisle seats every shuffle of the way. She would stand there hunched over with nothing to hold on to except one of those old lady hankies that was meticulously ironed. She stood there shaking, her voice quivering as she recited poetry. 

Her voice was staggered and weak; I use to think that the combination of age and nerves would at some time render her speechless.  The feeling I remember, when I remember her, is similar to the one I had when it was my kids in the Christmas pageant.  I sure hope she remembers the next line.  I pray that she will get through this without losing her voice or falling over.  I hope she gets off stage without falling. I was always pulling for her though. “You can do it Mrs. Meadows.”  I think the miracle was that she made it back to her seat.

Her poems were from the back of Readers Digest or some Baptist magazine.  There is not a one of them that I remember, and I am sure that if I did remember them, I would not want to repeat them.  And yet, somehow, yesterday morning as I was searching the Internet for some inspiration for today, Mrs. Meadows came back to me.  She came back in a story told by Phyllis Tickle –an author, a voice I trust very much. She was telling the story of a poem that her son – in – law had given to her. He had discovered it in his mother’s purse.  It had the look of a piece of paper that someone had carried around and memorized its contents.  As I read the poem, I heard Mrs. Meadows again. I’m not saying it was an angel giving me inspiration.  But it was different. The poem is called “Lovely Lady.”

Lovely Lady dressed in blue, Teach me how to pray!

God was just your little Boy. Tell me what to say!

Did you lift Him up sometimes, Gently on your knee?

Did you sing to Him the way Mother does to me?

Did you hold his hand at night?

Did you ever try telling Him stories of the world?

Oh! And did he ever cry?

Do you really think He cares

If I tell Him things -- Little things that happen?

And do the Angels' wings make a noise?

And can He hear me if I speak low?

Does He understand me now?

Tell me--for you know.

Lovely Lady dressed in blue, Teach me how to pray!

God was just your little Boy, And you must know the way.

Now I don’t know if this quaint little poem holds any significance that reveals the meaning of what we Christians call the incarnation. The incarnation is the idea that in Jesus – the Creator of all that is - became one of us, through one of us.  I do not know if there is a single line in this poem that I could adequately defend – even in a debate with my own mind.  And yet there is something here, something in the mystery of how and why I remembered Mrs. Meadows, and it has a hold of me today.

Perhaps that something is what so many of us are searching for in and around the trappings of our culture.  Perhaps that something is what so many of us are looking for as we try to make sense of our hearts being so connected to a story which enables us to live our lives out of it.  Perhaps that something is that, in this story, in Mary, in our lives, in people like Mrs. Meadows and others like her, God takes on an emotional, sensual, passionate life.   In this story God comes to be with us and needs a nurturing mother. God comes to our lives and is rooting for us.  God comes to our lives and is willing to be vulnerable enough for us to receive the grace we need.

God comes to be with us, and it is like the parents and grandparents of a kid at a play. God is like a congregation of 30 or so people pulling for Mrs. Meadows to make it up to the front get through her lines and get back to her seat.  God is like Mrs. Meadows offering whatever it takes to reach out to us in grace. God is like a voice that comes from deep within a young woman, desperate in her unwanted task of doing the dishes or cleaning out the kitty litter or getting the water saying, “You can do this. Mary, you can bear a child out of wedlock, out of this place and I will use him.”  “Dan you can take you Southern Illinois accent and the baggage of your life and I will use them.”  Susan you can face your addiction.  Larry you can reach out over the years and years of conflict to your brother.”

When we connect to this Advent story, it is not just a pep talk or the power of positive thinking.  It is the great mystery of faith, taking life within us as we become willing - like Mary- to receive.  It is the mystery that we cannot always or fully explain. It is that something from the other side of the tracks of our lives that becomes the hope for a lot of lives that are around us.  It is the mystery that our hardened and realistic lives are moved to the edge of change by a long forgotten memory of an old women in sensible shoes or a child unable to remember his line or a young woman named Mary who just went out to get the water for the day. 

There is never a real answerer to a mystery because as Phyllis Tickle says, “An answer would only wither the elegance, the poetry, the awful beauty of faith and leave us merely human again, stripped bare of all that exceeds us…”

In the end, it is not the truth that we prepare to receive this Advent season but the great mystery of faith. We are preparing to receive that which exceeds us.  And any one of us, from whatever place or from whatever condition of our heart, may hear and bring to life that mystery.

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