Dismissals

I stopped for gas and went in to pay. At the register there was a rack of chips, each bag emblazoned: NEW FLAVOR! I asked the young lady at the register, “These any good?” “Don’t know. They’re $1.49 for that teeny bag. I can’t buy chips that cost like that.” “Well,” I said,” I’ll take a bag.” I paid for the chips and gas. She gave me my change. I slid the chips across the counter to her. “Here you go. Try ’em. If they’re any good, I’ll buy some next time I’m here.” I turned and went and as I pushed the door she called out, “Thank you!” I doubted I would ever get back that way but to…

Last Saturday, I went to an artist’s reception for a fine photographer and deacon in the diocese, Lydia Bailey. There were fifty of her photographs of residents of 2100 Lakeside, the men’s homeless shelter where Lydia works. One photograph is of a man named Kenny whom I know well from my Fridays at 2100. A smiling Kenny looks straight at the lens, a lined face, a hard life, a homelessness man. Always, his smile wins me over. There were few people at the reception and I knew all of them except for one, a well-dressed man in a suit and dark shirt, off in the corner, staring at a photograph. I walked over to him and put out my hand…

My father’s mother was Sarah Grace. She was 71 years old when I was born and lived a quarter of a century more. She traveled some, twice to the Holy Lands and to Europe and to most of this country. Her report of what she had done on her travels: “I marveled.” As I learned, to marvel was not passive. To marvel was active. I went with her, often on a Sunday afternoon, to marvel at the great and at the small, sometimes in the forest, sometimes in the city, but always to marvel at God’s work in the world. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord! Josh

Bishop Bowman, speaking last Saturday at Ministry Discernment Day, said there are three kinds of call. “Call” is a churchy word for the action of the Holy Spirit who beckons us to be God’s people in the world, whether as lay or ordained. I do not remember Bishop Bowman’s first two kinds of call, but I am familiar with his third: “Muddling.” We try, in prayer, study and conversation, to find how we are each called “to love and serve the Lord.” The process can be erratic and untidy. We muddle along. In time, the muddle is less until, at last, we find ourselves precisely where God would have us. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord! Josh

When I was a boy, a man came to our farm to put lightning rods on the barn. My dad tried to explain to me why we needed lightning rods, and what might happen when the thunderstorm came. I saw lightning hit that barn, a great bolt of white energy that dissipated through those heavy wires into the ground. Years later a friend told me what God expects of us: That we are to be lightning rods for God’s creative and healing energy in the world. I knew then how lightning rods work and how God works in the world. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord! Josh

After a Sunday service I went to visit a man who lives with five other men in an assisted living home. Some of them have family and friends and Sunday is visiting day. I brought my friend the Sunday paper, a magazine and a few personal items. He thanked me. We sat in his room and talked. There was a quiet knock at his door, a woman with a plate of cookies. “I heard your daughter and grandson are coming this afternoon. I made you some cookies.” She put the plate on the dresser. My friend thanked her and she left. I asked my friend about her. “I don’t really know. I never see her save for Sunday. She just…

My sister Lorinda and I were in the Caribbean, in a small village shop far from the usual tourist places. Bare bulbs, sacks of flour, butter from Denmark sold by the ounce from an unrefrigerated tub and weighed upon an iron scale from some previous century. Thumb tacked high on the wall were small, plastic signs with aphorisms and bits of scripture. Lorinda said to the proprietor, “I like that sign that says, ‘Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God.’” “Indeed,” said the proprietor, “The words of Micah.” He stood upon a rickety chair and removed the flyspecked sign from the wall. Lorinda and I looked at one another. Did he think we intended to buy it? The…

When do we first see the world as it is? Not a perfect and well-ordered world but a world untidy, slightly broken and not as we had thought? I was a boy. My mother, father and sister and I were traveling on a train. We had boarded the Pullman car the evening before and slept in a cozy room. The train clicked and swayed. The engine’s whistle entered my dreams. At dawn the train slowed. Bells clanged at crossings as we came to a great city. We entered the city not by some broad boulevard but by the servants’ entrance. I, from my perch on the top bunk, peered out the window and there another world, houses tight together, small…

I found myself once in the company of a nun who was showing a church youth group the ins and outs of a soup kitchen. The youth were to cook and serve a hot meal to the gathering throng of hungry men, women and children who waited just outside the front door. A young man said, “Won’t these people be hungry again tomorrow? Wouldn’t it be better if we spent our time fixing the system? Wouldn’t it be better for us to organize and lobby the government to do something to eliminate hunger?” Sister said simply, “You are not here to end hunger. You are here to feed the hungry and that is an entirely different matter. You will give…

“I don’t do much ministry. I should do more, I know it. I am just so busy with work and family and taking care of things.” A parishioner said this to me one recent Sunday. It was a needed reminder for me that our ministries come and go with the seasons of our lives. Not everyone can run out the door to spend the day, or even an hour, ministering to a hurting world. Our work, family, self-care and myriad other undertakings, in home and community, may be our ministry of this season. There have been times in my life when I heard no call to minister. There were seasons when I did nothing and let the world tend to…

I carry in the glove box of my car a point-and-shoot 35mm camera. It is old and rough and precisely the right camera for photos I take from the driver’s window at red lights or pulled over on a gravel road. I am drawn, with this old camera, to photograph the wreckage and disarray of cities, abandoned homes and farms. I do no more with the printed images than stick a stamp and my name on the back, add an address and mail them. These are postcards from out there, pictures from the margins. A great fire now burns across Yosemite, combusting the old, reducing all in its path to ash. Yet we know that new life will follow the…

I recall those grainy, black and white television images of Martin Luther King standing at the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963, fist raised, animated, speaking to that great assembly. So many had come from across the country to hear Dr. King’s words but the television in my home had only the picture. Were the words too dangerous? It was some years later that I heard the words spoken that day, words about broken promises to people of color, words about the “fierce urgency of now. Words that said not to “satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” The time is not yet here – but it is…