Ah, Lent. A long walk in the wilderness with nothing to distract from thinking thoughts about life and self and world and stuff. Is it over yet? Almost. A couple more weeks to go.

As many of you know, and the rest of you can discover by reading through our history, CCfB has undergone many transformations and relocations in our seven years. This body of Christ is young and still growing, and sometimes that means growing pains and sometimes that means scary leaps into unknown ventures, but that’s part of what it means to be vital and alive as the body of Christ. At seven years, we haven’t even hit puberty yet…we’re still losing our baby teeth.

(Okay, stopping myself before it gets too goofy… no one wants to think about puberty…)

Back to Lenten seriousness. During this time of Lent CCfB has been consciously and deliberately contemplating what is next for this community. What are we growing into? What do we need to keep maturing into the body of Christ we have always wanted to be?

Growing is just another way of talking about transformation–and growing is not always slow and steady and imperceptible…somehow those cute babies of a year ago are walking and talking, somehow my “baby” looks like she belongs in kindergarten already. Growth happens in spurts, after a period of storing up energy in preparation. That’s where we’ve been for awhile–storing up in preparation, getting ready for the next growth spurt and transformation.

So as we reach the end of this process of preparation, introspection, assessment, contemplation…consider another aspect of Lenten wilderness: visions. We need visions. We need your visions. What are our visions for this body of Christ’s future? How exactly do we want to grow? What do we want to grow into?

And then get ready. I don’t know what’s next, but it’ll be good.

These words are from Allison Brown, one of the many Mission Lazarus workers who carried medications from Honduras to Haiti and stayed to offer medical care and to work toward organizing health care in the aftermath of the earthquake. After describing the trauma and the strength she witnessed during her days there, she ends with this reflection, written Friday, January 29:

God is seeking those who are not yet His.  How does God seek people who are not yet His? – exclusively through the people who are already His, I believe.  We live in end times.  All I can say is, “God Come Quickly.”  (Psalm 70)  Shouldn’t we plead with God for His Second Coming?

How do you live your own life intentionally and conscientiously when you were given ease in the face of so much difficulty, wealth in the midst of poverty, opportunity in the midst of none?

Because you know, Go.

“Here am I.  Send me.”  (Isaiah 6:8)

When Haitians pray, “God, Come Quickly”, they mean you and me.

So be it.

WNYC’s Brian Lehrer did a follow-up segment today with Robert Hess, Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Homeless Services, on this year’s HOPE Count. It’s a good quick way to learn more about this event and how and why it happens, and also some advice about simple things you can do individually to help intervene for homeless people (like call 311 on a cold night if you see someone sleeping outside that you’re worried about).

Having missed it this year myself, I’m not sure how many CCfBers were able to join Casey this year in volunteering for the HOPE Count. But this opportunity, which has become a staple of our church’s calendar, is one of the simplest and most effective ways of helping address a problem that is local, complex, systemic…when “pure religion” is taking care of the widow, the orphan and the stranger, who among us is more a stranger than the one who lives permanently outside the web of physical and social safety that so many of us take for granted?

Mission Lazarus (JTB’s sister and bro-in-law’s outfit in Honduras), along with Healing Hands International and Mobile Medical Disaster Relief, has identified a specific problem that they are uniquely situated to address: the lack of anesthetics for necessary surgeries for the survivors of the Haiti earthquake. Right now, several members of Mission Lazarus are in Haiti, delivering the first rounds of these medications, and we can help them supply more.

CCfB’s  special collection for this effort is today–but for those of you who couldn’t make it,  if you would like to contribute to this specific effort, go to missionlazarus.org and make your donation through PayPal–don’t forget to include the word “HAITI” in the details area to indicate what your donation is for. Whatever we collect from individuals, CCfB will triple using our general funds…so just like with NPR, those fundraising professionals, giving one dollar is like giving three.

And thank you.

P.S. If you’d like, a great way to keep up with what Mission Lazarus folks are doing in Haiti (and Honduras) is to  follow @MissionLazarus on twitter.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.

When Paul wrote that, he was in jail. I imagine that it’s pretty hard to dwell on the true and the noble and the lovely and all that from a jail cell. A few verses later he writes something even harder to believe: “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.” In my family, we still tease my youngest sister Emily for a self-serving line she came up with in order to impress our parents: at about five years old, while we older kids were complaining about something, she said, “I’m just happy for what I’ve got.” And at Clare’s school, they use a little rhyme to teach the kids Paul’s secret of contentment: “you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” But I think Paul’s talking about something that goes beyond toddler stoicism, and I think the secret is in the connection to the earlier verse—whatever the circumstances, whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy, dwell on these things. I guess Paul was successfully experimenting with epiphany.

For some maybe this comes easy.

A couple of years ago, Casey–or was it the Feminarian?–turned me on to a lovely blog called “Three Beautiful Things,” by a woman named Clare in London. The point of the blog is simple: Clare makes note of three beautiful things she’s noticed throughout the day. And that’s it.

Saturday’s list was, a haircut, some crazy online game about London and the acoustics of her kitchen. Friday’s list was rain, chocolates, and a pepper.

But that doesn’t capture it. Listen to this: “…a beautiful red pepper. It is shaped like the nose of a Venetian mask, and its glossy skin shades between red and green. I look at the places between the colours and try to understand where the red ends and the green begins.”

This woman had an epiphany looking at a pepper! I think she’s someone maybe we could learn from.

So today, we’re going to practice this spiritual discipline of “seeing the good,” and we’re going to borrow Clare’s strategy of 3BT.

I want to begin by asking you to think about, and write down, three beautiful things from this last decade.

Then 3BT from this past year.

And 3BT from this past week.

And 3BT for today.

We’ll share what we want to share, and keep what’s too precious for speaking aloud to ourselves. Don’t strain yourself; don’t hold yourself to the poetic standard of Clare’s 3BT lists; and don’t worry if (gasp!) you find yourself short of 3 for some reason. But try. And when you’re done, look at your lists, and see the good.

In case you haven’t seen this already, here are the numbers for giving $$ to support the relief effort in Haiti:

Haiti Text-To-Give Numbers, via Gigaom and Mobile Giving Insider
•Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross
•Text HAITI to 25383 to donate $5 to International Rescue Committee
•Text HAITI to 45678 to donate $5 to the Salvation Army in Canada
•Text YELE to 501501 to donate $5 to Yele
•Text HAITI to 20222 to donate $10 through the Clinton Foundation
•Text HAITI to 864833 to donate $5 to The United Way
•Text CERF to 90999 to donate $5 to The United Nations Foundation
•Text DISASTER to 90999 to donate $10 to Compassion International
•Text RELIEF to 30644 (this will connect you with Catholic Relief Services and instruct you to donate money with your credit card)

Yesterday, in case you missed it, was Epiphany-with-the-capital-E.  Sunday will be the first Sunday of the season of Epiphany. What is that, you might be asking. Other than the time between the end of Christmas, and the beginning of Lent. In other words, a sort of in-between time between two “sad” things (isn’t the end of Christmas season a little sad? I have to take down the tree today, ugh…and Lent is a little sad too, I mean, who wants to give up chocolate for 40 days???).

Yeah, I had to ask too. Luckily, I happen to have a live-in liturgical expert who comes home everyday for lunch and doesn’t mind fielding random questions like, “hi hon how’s your day so far and what on earth is Epiphany about, anyway?”

One way to think about it is as an extension of Christmas–that glorious moment when God breaks into our world in the surprising form of a little baby. Epiphany teaches us that the surprises don’t end there. God didn’t just burst into our reality in that one isolated moment, and that was that. Perhaps that might be enough–but God is a God of abundance. So the surprises keep coming. In a world that is disappointingly, predictably sad and wrong and awry, God’s surprising presence keeps showing up in odd, glorious, sometimes extremely quirky ways. (I mean, water into wine for Jesus’ first miracle? Tell me that’s not quirky.)

So I want to embark on a little Epiphany season experiment, and I invite you to join in too. For this season, I am going to experiment with seeing the good. I don’t mean turning myself into one of those relentless and oppressively cheerful Pollyannas. But personally, it’s always been easier for me to see the ways in which the world is not how it should be, than those surprising, hopeful ways in which the good shines through. And yet–it does, and not just once, but over and over. Epiphanies: those moments and places where presence of God in our dark reality shines through, always unpredictable and always surprising and yet, always there, waiting to be seen.

Seeing the Good: an experiment for Epiphany.

And last night God made LOTS of it. There’s something in my task-oriented, puritan work-ethic personality that makes me feel like I’m going to hell for this, but…

CCfBers & friends, no church today.

Worship God by celebrating the snow–build a snowman (Clare’s agenda for today) or stay in, stay warm, & stay safe and enjoy the snow through the vantage point of your window.

And if you like, spend some time with this pray-as-you-go podcast:

http://www.pray-as-you-go.org/mp3/PAYG_091218.mp3

See you next week. And, merry merry Christmas!

Week 1: Expecting (…still).

We end our study series on N. T. Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope, with his reflections on resurrection and Easter, just in time to start all over again on the liturgical calendar, with Advent. Maybe you feel like you need a little time to catch your breath, but I like the way the end of the story bumps into the beginning of the story as we begin the re-telling of it to ourselves once again.

Even more, I like the way Wright’s challenge to take up the ongoing work of God in the world, to continue the work of creating God’s kingdom in the here and now, leads straight into the anxious question of Advent. Where is the kingdom of God in the here-and-now? When will it finally get here? Sure, we’re supposed to be working hard to make it happen, and thanks for the reminder, Reverend Doctor Wright; but what sort of visible effect does all this hard work have? While we’re working at it, we’re waiting, and hoping, expecting to see something of this kingdom break into the human reality that is often still too sad, too broken, too painful. As one critic put it to Wright, “as there is clearly no trace of a new kingdom after 2000 years, perhaps it is kinder to Jesus to leave this out.” (244) Now there’s the crux of the problem, right. What signs of this inaugurated kingdom of God do we see in this world? Or do we only have evidence of brokenness?  This has to be faced head-on.

Wright’s answer is to suggest some visible traces of the kingdom of God; and I pray that you too can find those traces in your own lives and in the lives of others. Quite frankly, the people gathered here in this room today constitute the strongest visible sign of God’s presence in the world for me. But—I have to say—you people are exceptional. Most people I find to be depressing, or simply maddening, to be around. And so this trace of the kingdom that I see is exceptional—a light shining in the darkness, and while we can, and should, celebrate that light, we should also be asking, why is the rest of this place so damn dark? Could someone turn the lights on, please? Didn’t you do that once just by saying “let there be light”? C’mon…because we’re waiting, down here in the dark.

This is what it means to live in the kingdom of God which is both “already” and “not yet.” Already, because we, and so many many others, are the torchbearers, the lights in the darkness that remind us that darkness is not all that there is and not all that there should be. Not yet, because we long to stand in the full floodlights of a completely fulfilled and present kingdom of God, in which the darkness has receded. We wait for it. We hope for it. We expect it.

And so, for the next few weeks of this Advent season, we’re going to meditate on this theme of expectation. And because I’m a woman who loves to talk about bodies and pregnancy and babies and birth, and because there was no one to stop me, our theme will be “what to expect when you’re expecting.”

[you can find the whole text of this sermon here.]