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Monday of Easter Week

I wanted to say thank you this morning to all of you who followed my Lenten reflections. Without you, I’m sure my discipline would have flagged. Perhaps that’s true of most Lenten disciplines – they flag without community support for the act.

Wednesday of Holy Week: Isaiah 50: 4-9; Matthew 26: 14-25

"God has given me a well-trained tongue…and opens my ears that I may hear;"

"The one who has dipped his hand into the dish with me is the one who will hand me over."

Today’s gospel from Matthew retells the story we heard yesterday: Jesus is celebrating the Passover meal with his disciples and says, “…one of you will betray me.”

Betrayal comes in many forms from many directions.

When we look at the lectionary readings around the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, we have a story from Revelations about the Queen about to give birth and from Luke the story of Mary’s visit to her cousin Eliz

This has been a summer filled with the kinds of challenges that lead to new understanding - understanding that family is more important than my time to write; understanding that that old patterns of defense are harder to get rid of than we (I) expect; learning that the Oracle of Delphi is depicted as sitting over a cleft in the earth - an abyss, you could say - sometimes my toes feel precariously close to that abyss; and learning, once again, that if I simply allow the whirl of life to proceed as it will, it will proceed; learning that the true meaning of being a prophet was finding the rig

                This past Friday, Janet and I went to see the production, Galileo, by the Kansas City Metropolitan Theater Assemble. Galileo believed that the earth was not the center of the universe but simply another planet revolving around the sun. The production was a very good depiction of Galileo's struggle with the Church authorities, who refused to believe that the earth was not the center of our solar system, despite Galileo's observations of the stars and planets.

            As I sit here at my desk on the evening before Holy Week begins, I hear sirens two blocks away. Rain taps against the window. Snow is predicted for Palm Sunday. Life, and celebrations, are rarely what we think they 'should' be.

Mostly it seems life is full of those errors that we have to somehow live with. Like web sites. We were down for a few days, came back through the hard work of a webmaster. Maybe that's God's joke. For all the times we think "things" are under control and a little twiddling here and there will solve all problems, we learn, once again, there isn't much control going on right now. Lots of choices, but not a lot of control.

So web sites, I'm learning, are another of those "Let Go; Let God" things. Or let go, let webmaster. But even then, there's still a lot of letting go involved.

            Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice - the winter festival days all bunched into the same few days to remind us to celebrate these dark days with light and laughter and good cheer. Here in Kansas City, it's been dark and overcast for days with a cold wind from the north bringing sub-zero temperatures and, today, a southeastern wind bringing higher temperatures (all the way into the 20s!!) and the threat of freezing rain. But our house is warm, and friendly, and bright.

"Life got complicated," a friend recently said.

Indeed.

For most of us, life has been entirely too complicated in too many ways. For example, the last four weeks seem like a blur. Oh, there are the high points like four days in Baltimore and Barack Obama winning the election and a financial meltdown, but for the most part, my head has been fog-bound in a much too complicated world.

Darkness and light come in nearly equal measures these days, and the sun has shifted to a more southerly angle. The days become cooler with an absence of searing heat, not yet the bite of cold. A little time of balance.    

 But balance doesn't have to mean boring and it doesn't have to mean stasis; it can mean finding a rhythm that allows us to stay centered in our lives. Living and dancing are perfect metaphors for each other: both require balance and both require that we trust the rhythm of the music or the days - that's what keeps us from falling over.