Category Archives: sermons

Perhaps if birds

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Perhaps if birds
Could bring the rain
We would seed our yards,
Learn their calls
Keep the cats inside.

/beckon to them with fields of sunflowers
/covet their myriad congregation along electrified wires
Build their houses
Guard their nests
Stay all our empty words

For a mated call to water

My children play
Duck, duck, goose
With rich adjectival muster-
medium-sized duck, superhero duck
Yell Goose! and always be prepared to run

Anthropomorphize these missing storms
See sparrows in each laden cloud

Sow the fields with barley
Surely they will love barley
And swoop down toward us
“with healing in his wings”

All our science is naught
Fruitless and pendant
Cotton in the mouth
We cry
medium-sized rain, superhero rain,

Or no rain at all
Because we have forgotten…

He said fire the next time

Bring the Rain

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I have a short story I recite with my son–

It rains
And then the worms come out
Then the birds eat the worms.

You will notice it is both a celebration and a cautionary tale.

The worms don’t fare so well.

But at this point the story is almost entirely mythic. It does not rain here. My son does not know rain.

I have written about my misguided annoyance about this drought, this lack of rain. I used to think God was not listening to me. Now I know we are not listening to Him.

This is our drought.

Both California and Texas are experiencing historic droughts. Here in Texas we squander our water on fracking. In California they are paying people to remove their lawns and deep water drilling is big business.

And in our churches we ignore our glorious interventionist God.

We must pray for rain.

But first we must pray for the reign of God. Our lack of water is merely a sign of the drought of holiness that defines this generation of believers in Christ.

The message is simple and incisive and begins with a question not an injunction, an invitation to love, not a list of rules.

Ask yourself–

Are you in love with God? Do you long for Him the way a man in the desert longs for rain?

And if the answer is yes then the result will be apparent to all who know you.

You will bring that rain. You will bring that water.

The water of life. The city of God. A Man, a Word: Jesus.

There are no deserts of either holiness or love when He is close.

So keep Him close.

Bring the rain.

Clouds without rain

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Two days this week we had beautiful storms. There were dark clouds full of rain. Thunder. Lightning.

Only the rain never came.

I told my kids that I had to hope that it rained somewhere in the state of Texas. But the lack of rain makes my heart ache. We need it.

I think of Elijah, praying for God to hold back the rain because of the sin of his people. Mine are no better than his, am I praying the wrong prayer?

This week I heard a story of ordinary sin and degradation. Well…several. This one particular story was disheartening because a number of people who claim to ascribe to a clear moral code registered little or no willingness to apply that code.

When our moral code lapses we are clouds without rain.. The phrase comes from James. He is exhorting a young church to be active in applying the good news and power of salvation to a broken world.

If we don’t because we are uncomfortable we are as useless and sterile as clouds without rain.

Hydrate, Darling. Hydrate.

Tennis, anyone?

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Yesterday I was privy to one of the greatest non-combat snap-out-it speeches ever.

I wish I had it written down verbatim, but the gist, expletives deleted, was still pretty good–

Snap the effe out of it. You have not been shot! I have seen men shot in war. And you have not been shot. This is not a war. These people are trying to help you.

So shut the effe up and man the effe up.

I need this speech myself sometimes. We all do, I suppose.

Take tennis…

I found myself gazing at a tennis ball one night (on a tennis court), thinking–I should play more tennis.

I should. I would have to practice a lot just to get back to decent, but I should.

It takes a lot, a lot of hours to be good at something. Then when you are good at it, people think it comes naturally to you.

Perhaps to you.

But not to me. I am a clumsy middle aged woman. I gotta practice.

A lot.

What you practice a lot matters.

The Alabaster Jar: what we used to be

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The story goes like this:

A woman who owes a great debt to Jesus takes her expensive dowry perfume and breaks it, then pours it over his head.

The scent wafts throughout the house. Beautiful, costly, extravagant.

She weeps and wipes his feet with her tears.

Humbling, intimate, kinda embarrassing.

Onlookers don’t get it.

Jesus does. He is the ultimate gift of love, she responds with the next dearest thing she possesses.

Because he has returned life to her.

Because he has redeemed her soul.

We have an impulse to scramble either to embrace or evade the expectations of our “love holiday.”

Perhaps we don’t need to do either.

Perhaps we already possess the most priceless gift of love–a perfume born of sacrifice and redemption.

More satisfying than chocolate, far more enduring than cut blooms.

The cost and burden of love is a Man who pours out the only life he has for us.

I have a theory about all of this–overpriced roses, fancy chocolates, even costly French perfumes are all nice, but the real symbols of love are often more like the tears at his feet–baby wipes, paper towels, mops, and detergent.

Often it is the daily, ordinary sacrifices we make, the humble and invisible things we do without any glory whatsoever, which in the end define love…

in the shadow of his Cross.

Stay close to Jesus

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It is the Sunday before Christmas and I am not in a church.

I am in a messy house watching over sleeping children.

But I know I have to stick close to Jesus.

I know because I am broken
The world is broken
And he is the only one who can fix it
Did fix it.

A while back I was talking to my daughter about Jesus’ pronouncement at the point of his own death–

It is finished.

She shook her head in surprise.

By the time she was five she had seen her world crumble. She has walked through incredible suffering, loss, and loneliness.

Nothing seems finished.

But it is.

When Jesus dies for us he pays a complete price for us. We have been given back our wasted lives.

If we wanted them.

Many of us don’t. We willingly hand our lives over to selfishness, pride, immorality, anger, fear….other gods.

Gods who in fact will happily consume our wasted eternities.

But not Jesus.

Jesus stripped himself down to a naked convict and took every ounce of the pain and wrath of this broken world.

He was and is and will be the Finisher, the hope and Judge of this broken world.

Don’t be fooled by substitutes. Seek Jesus. Don’t rest until you find him.

He is worth the search. He is our only hope.

Is. 53
Is. 11

Approaching the Infinite

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My young son poses the greatest math questions–

Is x 15 hundred thousand million billion? Is y 85 hundred 251 thousand 6725 million?

Yes. I know that means I need to work on number sequence with him, but there is a lovely poetry to his big, big numbers that I am not anxious to lose.

He approaches the infinite with gusto.

We, the American tax payers, often seem to have even less of a grasp of the bigness of big numbers. We need to break them down into meaningful units.

A trillion, for instance. Do you know how much a trillion is? A trillion dollars? A trillion stars? If we are ever to regain our fiscal footing we all must face an unimaginable debt. A debt in the trillions. Lots and lots of them.

And how about a billion? A billion people? A billion years? It is easy to pretend to grasp numbers that are beyond our normal comprehension.

And even a few hundred million. Heck, let’s just say 65. Sixty five million is great lottery payout, but a nightmarish loan.

Be careful of the debt you are not rich enough to pay by yourself. Be careful not just about money–here today, gone tomorrow, but the other kinds of debt a human can incur.

Grace or judgment on each note.

Good Shepherds–a dying breed

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There seems to be a new trend in excuses for rape–pastors who claim their illicit and immoral acts were somehow motivated by a desire to “cure” their victims.

This, of course, like so many of the insidious blurred lines of our debauched culture, is from the pit of hell.

These men, or anyone who uses the mantle of spiritual authority to harm children, should expect judgment.

But how about the antidote to wolves in sheep’s clothing? Where are the good shepherds?

I have read tragic stories lately about violence in Kenya and Chicago, about livestock suffering at the hands of people, about grief coming unexpectedly from a simple water accident.

Each story of violence and loss reminds us of the importance of good shepherds.

We live in a perilous world and we ourselves are the most dangerous element of that world–polluting, raping, murdering, and neglecting.

Yes. Neglecting.

Sometimes the worst thing we do is not direct harm.

Sometimes it is a terrible enough injustice for us to walk away from our flocks, our children when we know there are predators lurking in the fields.

Daniel and the Ghost

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Church at our house is a makeshift, dramatic affair aimed towards the active under 6 set. Today my young son asked to do the story of Daniel and the Ghost.

At first this seemed extra-biblical until
I remembered that there is a decidedly ghostly hand in the story of the hand writing on the wall.

We told it and then re-enacted it with maximum drama, but it was also a quiet reminder–

God, and God alone will weigh our lives. Don’t be found wanting by the one person in the universe whose scales are always just.

Rise

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Mark 9:9-10 (NIV)
As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. [10] They kept the matter to themselves, discussing what “rising from the dead” meant.

The worst feeling in the world happens a million times a day for at least a year after you lose someone you love. You wake up thinking (for just a second…bad dream?). No. Death.

Death is a terrible darkness. It robs us of comfort and love and a person who cannot be substituted for anything else.

Gone is gone and there is a whiplash agony when a beloved is gone.

The conditions of human existence for the last 6000 years have ground each of us down in the maw of grief. None have escaped it’s power or devastation.

And yet, here is Jesus speaking of rising from the dead.

Not that I hadn’t happened a couple times…there were a couple old testament resurrections…but…

What did Jesus mean?

They did not understand the impossible yet. Do you?

I don’t, but Jesus’ resurrection spills light and hope and courage all over his followers. They believed in the impossible because Jesus was the impossible.

He’s got this.