Healthy living check-in

I got two notifications on facebook that my cousins had liked a blog post I wrote this past winter/spring in the midst of the grossness that was that this winter/spring were.  

I'm glad they did because they reminded me that I am really bad at this blogging thing.  But I know that it's a good way to hold myself accountable for keeping up with healthy living.  So here's an update.  

On September 12, my new primary care physician (nice guy, good doctor) and I had a chat about BMI.  

Sidebar: I hate the BMI because it doesn't take into account the fact that different people have different body types.  That's not trying to make excuses, it just is.  

I digress.  During the BMI conversation, the doc mentioned that despite my amazing BP and all the other good and healthy stats and blood work, my BMI is in the obese range.  I suddenly had the motivation I needed to get moving.  

And so, on September 15, 2014, I began the mommy edition of what I like to call "operation fabulous."  It sounds silly, but that name helps me stay motivated.  Here's how it works - by giving this "project" a name, I am committing myself to taking better care of myself.  I have been more committed to my appearance in the short term, my health in the long term.  So, I take an extra 5-10 minutes a day to make sure my complexion looks better.  I have been tracking relentlessly what I eat, for better or worse.  I have been walking.  I signed myself up for a 5k, which I will be walking.  I plan to sign myself up for another 5k, which I plan to run (anyone want to do the paczki run with me??? I'm told that there will be paczkis and beer at the finish line).  I put the scale away so I can focus on how I feel and not fall into the trap of defining myself with a number.  

I accomplished a lot in the last 2-ish weeks.  I walked 30 miles.  30.  I'm very proud of that.  I've also tracked my eating for over 30 days straight.  For me, that is an accomplishment in and of itself.  

My goal for October is to walk 60 miles and get to a 16 min/mile split time so that, come thanksgiving, I can have my eyes set on a 15 min/mile.   Let's do it!!

What the Israelites and Stephen Hawking (and you and I) have in common...

Pentecost 16A

September 28, 2014

Exodus 17:1-7

On Wednesday I came across an article in which the author delved into Stephen Hawking’s atheistic belief system.  I found out that Hawking became, with the advent of the Big Bang Theory, science had provided a more convincing explanation of the origin of the universe than religion can provide.  He explained that because science had provided a better understanding of the universe and its origins than theology, or the ways in which think and speak about God, God is no longer necessary.  Now, I respect Professor Hawking and his scientific work greatly…but I would submit that I believe that his atheism is based upon a minimalistic experience of the divine.  For Hawking bases his theology on one moment.  The moment of creation.  And for most theologians, this is quite problematic, but it isn’t a new form of theology…nor is it unique to one of the greatest scientific minds of this era.

Last week we witnessed the congregation of the Israelites in the midst of a bit of a faith crisis.  They were hungry, and their food crisis caused them to question the motives and the means of the one who had supposedly rescued the Israelites from the hand of their oppressors and made them a free people.  We learned that God heard their cries and provided for what they needed. 

This week, however, the crisis has gotten worse.  Now they are back to a situation in which water is low, thirst is high, and frustrations are higher. And so, we have moved from the Israelites grumbling against Moses to actually accusing him of having plotted against them so he could kill every last one of them.  But, more significantly than that, we have moved from the Israelites wondering, who was this God that didn’t think to pack water and sandwiches for a road trip into the desert? To the Israelites now wondering if God is even there at all. 

It seems as if our friends, the Israelites, have found themselves as a part of a similar theology to that of Professor Stephen Hawking.  It is not the same because the Israelites actually believe in God.  At the same time, however, it seems that the basis of the Israelites belief in God is in the moments in which God provides for them by means of unexplainable acts. 

The Israelites grumbled under the oppressive hand of the Egyptians so God set them free by means of 10 unexplainable acts – water turning into blood, invasions of frogs, gnats, and flies, followed by diseased livestock, boils, and storms of fire, then locusts, darkness, and, finally, the death of the first born.  After the plagues, the Israelites believed in God and followed Moses out to the Red Sea…where they grumbled again because there was water in their way.  But God performed an unexplainable act in the parting of the sea.  Then they believed.  Then they got thirsty. 

God heard them and, by another miracle, turned the bitter water at Marah sweet.  And the Israelites believed.  Then they got hungry, and God provided the manna and the quail.  And the Israelites believed.  And now they are thirsty again. 

Have the Israelites placed their faith in the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God who rescued them from Egypt and provided for their needs in the middle of the desert? Or have they placed their faith in the acts themselves?

Have you ever noticed that it is much easier to say, “Thank you, God!” on a day in which things have gone you way than on a, in the language of a children’s book “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, day?”  What about on those “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days?” isn’t it easier to wonder why in the world God isn’t listening to you or even, where in the world God is? To get so mad that we just cast God aside altogether because we don’t want anything to do with a deity who would either do this or allow that to happen? 

Do we believe in God because of God’s promises or because of the moments that God’s presence is so palpable there is no other logical explanation?  In other words, is our faith like the faith of the Israelites?

As I’ve been to visit many, I don’t want to say older, more experienced residents of this planet, throughout my life, and particularly in my ministry, I have noticed that a common complaint is that short term memory is becoming shorter.  And as the granddaughter of a woman suffering from severe dementia, I know the stress that this can cause in day to day life.  To some extent, though, I think we all have a memory problem.  I can tell you what Chris was wearing and what we both had for lunch on our first date at Leona’s restaurant in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago in 2007 but the only reason I can tell you what I had for dinner on Friday night is because I recorded it into the myfitnesspal app on my phone.  I can tell you about the day that I decided that God and I need a break when I was 19 and had been told one too many platitudes about the sudden death of one of my dearest childhood friends, I can tell you about being scolded by Roman Catholic friends for having taken communion at Sunday Mass at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, but I don’t remember what it was like to take communion for the first time other than the wafer stuck to the roof of my mouth.  And I have a feeling that I’m not alone.

My friends, we have an amnesia problem.  It is so easy to forget the ways in which God has provided for us when we stand in the midst of things that we cannot understand, things which are out of our control.  The Israelites were still living the reality of God providing them manna in the morning and quail in the evening and they STILL forgot that God was there with them, leading them to the land promised to their ancestors. 

But God is faithful, and even in the midst of the testing of the Israelites, God was faithful and God provided for the needs of the Israelites.  Because, unlike what one of greatest scientific minds believes about God, or the need for God because of one moment in the history of the universe, the God we worship this morning and serve every day of our lives is a God isn’t just about scattered moments here and there, but a who God is about every moment.  Our God is a God of relationships, who journeys with us on the hills and in the valleys, who laughs with us when we laugh and cries with us when we cry, who is there with us when we need when and even when we think we don’t, who walks with us every moment from our birth until our death…and then some. 

Our God is a God who invites us into the process of remembering, which in the world of graduate schools of theology and seminaries is called anamnesis.  Anamnesis is the opposite of amnesia, the opposite of forgetting.  Within the Christian community, this invitation happens whenever we come to the communion table and we hear the words “take and eat” “take and drink” “do this in remembrance of me.”  Remember what I have done for you.  That I saved you from the flood, that I rescued you from Egypt, that I sent you prophets to help you get back on the right path, that I died and conquered sin and death for you so that you could be with me for eternity.  And I require nothing in return because love cannot force anyone to do anything.  But there can be expectations…and I think that my seminary professor put it best when he wrote “While there is no sin so large that God cannot forgive it, God always loves us with the condition, or at least expectation, that God's grace and kindness will lead to transformation in our lives.”

May our lives be so transformed by remembering all that God has done for us that we may see God in every moment of our lives, in the good moments, and in the midst of the not so good ones. 

There will be enough...do you believe it?

Pentecost 15

Exodus 16:2-18

September 21, 2014

There was once an Anglican church in Denmark where a dispute arose within a congregation in regards to the color of the new carpet that was going to go into the sanctuary.  The congregation was split into two camps, the blue camp and the red camp.  Things got so bad that the pastor called the Bishop in to settle the dispute so that he wouldn’t be accused of taking sides.  The Sunday that the Bishop visited with the congregation, they all sat down after worship and each side argued their case for the color of the carpet that they wanted.  An hour later, after both sides had rested their case, the Bishop took some time to think.  Finally, he stood up and said to the entire congregation, “I fear that your mission as a congregation has become lost.  I charge you with the task of raising $100,000 with which you will feed the poor.  If you are not able to do this by the end of the year, I will close the doors to this congregation.”

The second time that the congregation of the Israelites began complaining against Moses and Aaron was three days after they crossed the Red Sea.  They had witnessed Moses raising his arms and God sending a breath of air to part the sea.  They had witnessed the drowning of the Egyptian army who had pursued them into the sea.  They had sang of the deliverance that God had provided for them.  Three days later, they were complaining.  How long our memories last, right? They were complaining because they were thirsty.  God, through Moses, fixed that problem by turning bitter water into sweet water.  

A month and a half later they are at it again.  This time it isn’t thirst, it is hunger…a hunger so extreme that they had forgotten the conditions they were living under in Egypt.  “If only we were back in Egypt where we ate our fill of bread,”(which was about as far from the truth as you could get), “but you have brought us out here to die of hunger.  It would have been better if we had died in Egypt.”

They sound like a bunch of whiny teenagers who haven’t eaten in all of, say, two hours. There is, however, some legitimacy to what they are saying in their complaints to Moses.  The complaint itself is not well placed.  Moses and Aaron are not the ones they should be complaining about.  Rather, it is the content of their complaint that you cannot blame them for.  They have just come out of Egypt, just been made into a new people, “the congregation” of the Israelites, and are learning how to trust and follow this God that brought them out of Egypt and into this new life in the desert.  Likewise, God is learning this new group of people that he created so that he is better able to nurture them so that they can thrive.  Not once in these complaints in the wilderness, not when they were at the other side of the Red Sea, even, does God begrudge them for their complaints.  Rather, God hears what they have to say and provides for what they need.  And right now they need some food.     

God generously and abundantly provides for their needs, providing manna in the morning and quail in the evening.  There will be enough for everyone to get their fill of the bread and of the poultry.  With the generosity comes a test, though, to see if the Israelites are listening to God or just following their stomachs.  Each day, the Israelites are to collect one omer per person, which is approximately 3.5 liters of manna each morning.  No more.  On the sixth day, they are collect two days worth of Manna so they have enough to eat on the Sabbath.  Those were God’s instructions.  And we learn, finally, in verse 18 that when the Israelites went out to gather and what they gathered was measured, what was gathered by those who took too much turned out to weigh in at exactly that omer.  And what was gathered by those to look too little turned out to weigh in at exactly that omer.  Everyone had just enough.  God’s generosity provided for all of the members of the congregation of Israel to have enough.   

What does this have to do with an Anglican congregation in Europe?  We’ll get there.  We need to talk about crises of faith first.  Because that is exactly what is going on here.  The food crisis that the Israelites faced in the desert turned into a crisis of faith.  Who was this God that had led them out of Egypt and into the wilderness but didn’t pack a cooler full of water bottles and lamb on pita sandwiches?  But they soon learned that God would provide for their needs and do so with great generosity. 

Which sounds well and good and all…but how does this “God is going to provide for all your needs with great generosity” thing sound when you’re sitting in the chemo chair?  Or when you go in for that first ultrasound only to hear the words from the doctor “I’m sorry, there is no heartbeat”?  how does it sound when you have spent months going back and forth to the unemployment office because you keep hearing the word “no” when you go to apply for a job?  Or when, in order to pay the bills to keep the roof over your head, all you’ve eaten this month is pasta and eggs? 

Here’s the thing, when we talk about God’s generosity and God’s abundance, we are not talking about it in the same way the Joel Osteen or Creflo Dollar or Kenneth Copeland do.  We are not talking prosperity gospel, where they preach that if you believe hard enough and do all the right things and give enough to the church God will bless you with health and wealth beyond your imagination because God wants you to be happy.  You’ve heard that, right? 

When we talk about God’s generosity and God’s abundance here in this place, that is not what we are talking about.  Because the reality is stuff happens, life happens.  The reality is that bad things happen to good people, try as we might to prevent it.  God didn’t even spare his own son from being crucified, but through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s ultimate act of generosity was shown to us in the promise that we will have life forever in his presence.  As Christians, we trust that God does hear us when we cry out to him and God’s generosity still shines through the bad things that we face in life, in the merciful smile and warm hand of the nurse, in the shared tears of folks who have been through the same hell you have and lived to tell the tale, in the friend who buys your dinner over and over again without asking anything in return, in the faces of the folks at the food bank. 

In the midst of the wildernesses that we find ourselves in throughout our lives, that is our manna, we are each other’s manna.

The test we face now, though, is will we pay it forward?  Will we have the eyes to see the manna waiting for us in the morning and the quail in the evening and trust in God that the omer we have gathered will be enough for the day?

The congregation of Anglicans was faced with a test.  To give $100,000 to feed the poor in their community.  Not only did they meet that challenge, but they exceeded it and their mission and ministry, and their joy is now in not only feeding the poor in their community but to combating poverty. Their benevolence is now the largest in the diocese for they realized that when they opened their eyes and their hearts to see just how generous God had been with them over the many years of their ministry, they gave them the freedom to respond by being generous with each other and their community.  And it all started over some complaining over a carpet. 

 

Jell-o and the Exodus

Pentecost 14

Exodus 14:19-31

September 14, 2014

This December, Ridley Scott’s version of the Exodus story will begin its run in theatres.  It features Christian Bale as Moses and will likely have the best of the best special effects around…special effects that would have made Cecil B. DeMille envious…maybe even covetous.  And really, you cannot blame Ridley Scott for trying to take a stab at directing a film based upon this narrative.  There are burning bushes and plagues, there is a sea that splits in two with dry ground left in the middle.  There is the story of two brothers, by adoption, who were once as close as they could be and now their relationship has been torn apart.  As much as the Genesis stories screamed “soap opera,” the Exodus story screams “epic film franchise.” 

We know it’s been done before.  In 1956, when Cecil B. DeMille won an Academy Award for his rendition of the Ten Commandments, he used Jell-O to create the walls of water after Moses raised up his right hand and the sea was spilt in two.  Clever, huh?  His version of this story has created the image carried by a generation when it comes to this portion of the narrative, Yul Brenner clad in shiny, blue armor with his gold chariots, and stunning horses standing behind a pillar of fire while Charlton Heston stands on a boulder holding his arms up while the breath of God parts the sea, allowing the Israelites to pass safely through to the other side.  Then, when everyone is safely to the other side, Moses lifts up his hands again and the walls of water come crashing down upon Pharaoh’s army while Pharaoh stands safely back watching in awe and disbelief at what has just happened.   

It is, indeed, an epic story…but have you ever thought of it as a creation story? 

Taking a page from our movie making friends, let’s set the scene.

After God has given the Israelites their recipe for roast lamb and instructions on how they are supposed to eat it, the final plague passes over Egypt…the plague that causes the death of the first born of all families, except for the ones in homes that have been marked with the blood of the lambs that that been set aside while preparing their Passover meal.  This final plague finally convinces Pharaoh to let the Israelites go…and go they do.  There’s a problem, however, and I think the conversation went a little something like this:

“Uh, Moses?”

“Yeah”

“Umm….there’s a…umm…well…a sea.” 

“Yeah”

“Last I checked, we can’t walk on water.”

The Red Sea stood in the way of the Israelites getting safely into freedom.  They had nowhere to go.  So, that’s a problem. 

The second problem is that Pharaoh kinda sorta changed his mind and decided to suit up and round up his army to get his slaves back, even if it meant killing them all.  So the Israelites see the Red sea on their right and Pharaoh and his army on their left and they panicked.  Off to Moses they go, convinced that Moses had led them out of Egypt so they could still die at the hands of Pharaoh.  “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you led us out here into the wilderness?”  We told you to leave us alone, we would rather serve the Egyptians than die out here.  Moses’ response, which was not in our reading this morning, but should have been, reveals the central focus of what the Exodus is all about. 

“Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. ¹⁴The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still,” (Ex 14:13-14).

Then at the instruction of the Lord, Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and the Lord sent an east wind to create a wall of water on their right and on their left as the Israelites passed through the sea on dry ground. 

Well, how is this a creation story? 

Think about Genesis chapter 1.  In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep while the “ruach,” the spirit or the breath, of God hovered over the waters.  And God said “let there be light,” and it was so.  Then, God separated the waters from the waters and, later, God gathered together the waters under the sky so that dry ground would appear.  So, again, in this epic narrative we find God makes light appear out of the darkness in the pillar of fire that protects the Israelites from the Egyptians AND it is a “ruach,” a mighty wind or breath that separates the waters from the waters revealing the dry ground on which the Israelites passed from slavery into freedom. 

In doing so, in utilizing nature in this way, God also created a new people.  No longer the slaves of the Egyptians, now the free people of God.  People who took a leap of faith by taking the steps necessary to walk between those walls of water, the destructive nature of the sea on their right and on their left. 

In this creation, God had a human partner, a co-creator, if you will.  As the human representative for God in approaching Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, Moses, with the help of his brother, Aaron, acted in a way that allowed God’s plan to be carried out so that justice could be served.  If we are honest, and this is a whole other sermon entirely, so we will just touch on it briefly, there was a second human partner in this whole Exodus business.  Pharaoh.  And here is why.  Forgetting about the whole heart hardening and all that, again, another sermon, Pharaoh’s role as a persecutor and oppressor of God’s people, acted in opposition to God’s plan for a new and just creation and, as a consequence, his own people lost their lives in the sea.

Well that’s great, and all, but what are the practical implications of all this? 

I’m glad you asked that!

The story of the crossing of the Red Sea and the Exodus isn’t just a story for our Jewish brothers and sisters.  Sadly, it has become all too overlooked except during Holy Week when “The Ten Commandments” is aired on ABC each year, because it is our story too.  God utilizing the power of nature with the help of a human co-creator to create a new people…where have we heard this before? 

In the story of the birth, the baptism, the life, and the death, of God’s own son, Jesus Christ.  100% human.  100% God.  Who points us to our creator God, who created us out of the dust, has washed us in the waters of baptism - where we enter the waters slaves to sin, and exit the waters free people of God joined to Christ as fellow heirs of God’s good gifts.  And as such, we are people able to take leaps of faith by responding to God’s call to be co-creators with God who stand on dry ground with the dangers of the world on our right and on our left.  And we have a choice.  To be the ones who stand for God’s justice and God’s peace, doing the sometimes painful and awkward but always freeing task of forgiving our neighbors at least 77 times, announcing freedom to those who are captive, and seeking justice for those who are oppressed.  Or we can be the ones who stand on the side of those things which benefit ourselves alone, regardless of who suffers as a result, not caring if justice is served as long as we are happy and comfortable.  Which will you choose?