MONDAY MATTERS
Reflections to start the week
Monday, July 28, 2014

The church was big. It could seat over 1500 people. I went there last week for a service of burial, offered in thanksgiving for the life and witness of a friend, someone I admired for many reasons. Apparently, I wasn’t the only friend and admirer. The place was full for this sweet, sad liturgy that affirms the power of resurrection and calls us all to “alleluia” even in the midst of things beyond our understanding.

The homily at the service told the story of a full life, well lived, marked by what the well-heeled crowd would undoubtedly consider notable accomplishment. We honored a man who had a PhD in physics, a Harvard MBA, a remarkable and extended career in management consultant, working at top levels of a major firm. He served the community in many ways, on all kinds of boards. In retirement, he ably led a faith based organization that sought to draw people into deeper relationship with God and touched thousands of lives in North and South America. He had a deep commitment to his wife, who has had a powerful ministry in her own right, her ministry marked by goodness and grace. He had a deep commitment to the rest of his family and his many, many friends. He had a warm and winning personality. He was a skilled and avid golfer, even developed his own golf course. By many measures, he was a success. Out of all these impressive, even enviable accomplishments, here’s the thing that struck me in the homily offered by a wise clergyman. Indeed, this was the point of the sermon. This friend was described by the homilist as someone who for almost his entire adult life was hungry to know God. From what I could tell, the guy knew God pretty well. But the homilist suggested that there was always this desire to go further, to go deeper, to know more. I found myself thinking that would make an amazing epitaph: A person hungry to know God. It caused me to ask: What does it mean to live a life hungry to know God? What would it mean for me to follow that hunger?

Our liturgy is there to help. The service of Morning Prayer begins with confession. I consider it daily course correction. Whenever I read this service, I pause on this phrase: We have not loved you (God) with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbor as ourselves. There is not a day that prayer is not true in my life, even when prayed just moments after waking. On most days, before my feet hit the floor, a word or action or thought has demonstrated that I have room to grow in love of God and/or neighbor.

We see it in the eucharist. As a priest, I was asked this question at my ordination, a question to which I return in moments when I wonder about my peculiar profession. In the ordination service, the bishop asks the would-be priest: Will you nourish God’s people with the riches of God’s grace? When we gather for communion, the bread and the wine, Christ’s presence with us, address that hunger.

Jesus taught his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. That word “righteous” is not so much an indication of right action, following the rules, coloring in the lines, staying in your lane, thinking inside the box. It indicates relationship. To be righteous is to be rightly related to God and neighbor. This Monday morning, consider what it means to you to be hungry to know God? Where do you see that need, that hunger and thirst in your own life? How might you go about meeting that hunger? Give thanks for those you know, like my departed friend, who have helped answer those questions, even in a small way.

– Jay Sidebotham

Contact:

Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org

MONDAY MATTERS
Reflections to start the week
Monday, July 21, 2014

Suffer the little children.

Several years ago, my wife and I had the privilege of visiting Holy Cross Monastery in Grahamstown, South Africa, founded in response to a request in the late 1990’s that the monks come to that divided nation to model community. Several monks answered that call. They went, in the spirit of Abraham and Sarah in the Bible, not knowing where they were going or what they were meant to do once they got there. They went, and did what they knew to do, which was to say their prayers, confident that the Holy Spirit would show them the way.

It was not long after they had arrived that their mission became clear. Three young boys, who lived near the monastery had been left unattended one day, because the mothers had to work and could not afford child care. The boys were playing on railroad tracks nearby the monastery. An oncoming train hit them. Two of them died. The monks not only offered comfort, not only arranged for funeral and burial. They also discerned their call, which had to do with the local children who began to make their way down the long dirt road to the monastery. The monks began a scholarship fund to help these young people go to school. They founded a school on site for the children who lived in the area and in the local impoverished townships. The monks set a goal of providing an education as good as the best private schools in South Africa, making it accessible to people who never dreamed they could afford it. They found their vocation. It was about the children.

My ministry has offered the privilege of traveling to places where God’s love shines through with beauty and grace, even in most desperate and deprived settings. Grahamstown is one for sure. Another is Honduras, where I have traveled a number of times. I haven’t taken groups there in two or three years because we’ve been told it’s too dangerous. On one of my last visits, I visited an AIDS clinic in San Pedro Sula, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. I stepped outside the clinic to take a phone call, just on the sidewalk. The staff urgently pulled me back through the open front door. It was not safe to stand on the sidewalk, even in the middle of the day, just a few feet from the door.  Since that time, the clinic has been robbed several times. Employees have been beaten up. Two have been murdered.

This Monday morning, I’m mindful of those children who have made their way to the southern border of our nation, from places like Honduras and other neighboring countries. I remember the children I met in Honduras, who look so much like that 8 year old boy I saw in a news photo this week, standing in front of U.S. border agent, showing the policeman his birth certificate, the only thing he brought with him besides the clothes he was wearing. 8 years old.

This Monday morning, I’m mindful of four boys playing soccer on the beach in Gaza who lost their lives when a missile ended their game.

This Monday morning, I’m mindful of infants sitting on parents’ laps on a plane shot down over eastern Ukraine. Those infants had nothing to do with the conflict that raged beneath the jet they boarded.

Each of these situations suggests political challenges that defy solution, broken human relationships that defy mending. No one politician or policy will solve them. Apparently, no one knows what to do about them. I have neither inclination or aptitude to weigh in with answers. All I know is this Monday morning, my heart is heavy with the brokenness of the world, and with the realization that children seem to bear the brunt. So maybe this Monday we mimic those monks, and we stop right now and pray for all God’s children, and for what God would have us do. If you’re not sure what to pray, you’re not alone. You could start with the prayer for the human family from our Prayer Book. And perhaps, in some way, prayers can be offered not only with our lips but with our lives 

– Jay Sidebotham

Contact:

Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org
www.forwardmovement.org

MONDAY MATTERS
Reflections to start the week
Monday, July 14, 2014

No wonder.

Recent experiences lead this morning to a favorite spiritual growth opportunity: air travel. I’m choosing to regard recent random and unexplained flight cancellations as the work of the Holy Spirit, offering time (actually lots of it) for reflection, affording opportunity to embrace the Serenity Prayer, and calling me to consider the particular liturgy that begins each flight, as the attendant at the head of the aisle showing everyone how to fasten a seat belt as if I could not have figured that out on my own. Youtube has recently featured videos of flight attendants who have taken that liturgy to new heights, witty and whimsical variations on important messages we all need to hear (for the billionth time).  I recommend these videos. They will lift your spirits.

They stand in contrast to my experience on a recent flight, as the attendant at the head of the aisle showed safety cards, seat belt fastening technique, oxygen masks and seat cushions that become life preservers. I ached for this woman who was clearly really unhappy to be doing what she was doing, going through the motions, droning on about how to be saved in emergency. The repetition had gotten to her. I think in the moment, if I was a billionaire, I would have given her enough money to stop doing this job she hated because she was inflicting her unhappiness on a planeload of people who were already feeling like claustrophobic cattle. As we sometimes say in our family, this woman needed the joy of the Lord. Big time. No wonder. She had no sense of wonder. I compared her demeanor to the elderly women in another Youtube video, showing them on a flight for the very first time. Their sense of wonder about the experience was uplifting, as it should be, when you think about that mysterious miracle, all that metal, all that luggage, all those people lifting off the ground, up through clouds to the place where sun shines unobstructed and life is seen from new perspective.

Where am I going with this, you rightly ask? I do have a point.

When I watched the flight attendant droning on in rote misery, inflicting that on others, I thought about how familiar I have become with sacred text in scripture, Prayer Book, hymnal, and in creation that surrounds us, preaching a loving creator. I thought about how I use words like awesome and amazing to describe a cup of coffee. I thought about how perhaps in my own spiritual journey I prattle on mindlessly, self-absorbed, captive of habit and ritual, and really expect little to happen. I thought about how I take grace for granted, all of which stands in contrast to folks in the Bible who meet the Holy One and are overcome with a mix of holy fear and praise. When I was ordained to the priesthood, my sister gave me an illustrated quote, Annie Dillard’s widely circulated critique of the ways we worship. It came to mind when I thought about the flight attendant.

I also thought about a letter that the mystic Evelyn Underhill wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1930’s as she observed clergy of her day and concluded that they had lost a sense of wonder. She wrote: “We look to the church to give us an experience of God, mystery, holiness, and prayer, which though it may not solve the antinomies of the natural world, shall lift us to contact with the supernatural world and minister eternal life. We look to the clergy to help and direct our spiritual growth. We are seldom satisfied because with a few noble exceptions they are so lacking in spiritual realism, so ignorant of the laws and experience of the life of prayer.” Ouch. She goes on to say: “God is the interesting thing about religion, and people are hungry for God. But only a priest whose life is soaked in prayer, sacrifice and love, by his own spirit of adoring worship, can help us to apprehend God.”

Her comments about clergy apply to all of us who move with intentionality on the spiritual journey. What would it mean for your life and mine to be soaked in prayer, sacrifice, and love, in a spirit of adoring worship? Look for the holy today. Savor the preposterous idea that in some way we can have divine encounter. Keep an eye out for amazing grace. Get ready to meet an awesome God. Go for wonder.

– Jay Sidebotham

Contact:

Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org
www.forwardmovement.org