Dismissals

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…

When I was a boy my family lived on the British island of Antigua. I recall Dr. Lucius Wynter, an ophthalmologist who could set broken bones. He was of African descent and a Knight in the Order of the British Empire. With a fine baritone that moved between proper British and island patios, he greeted everyone, even this small boy, in the same way: “Good day, my Lord.” When the conversation was done, Dr. Wynter parted with the words “Go in peace” and all who were with him were dismissed. To dismiss means to send away. The deacon’s dismissal, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord” sends us away, into the world. It is fitting to be dismissed…