Author: shelliwilliams

A Listening Season

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(Advent 1A) The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. 2In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. 3Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 4He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. 5O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord! (Isaiah 2: 1-5)

We like this vision of peace and tranquility, the days when wars will end and Shalom will finally be.  This was probably written to a people that wanted that desperately.  King after king after king had come with promises that life would be better, that they would somehow reclaim whatever had been lost.  Each one came with promises of prosperity and security.  After all, who doesn’t want that?  Who wouldn’t want a life of ease and plenty?  Who wouldn’t want a life of being “it”, being the people, being the ones to whom everyone looked for the way to life?  But king after king had fallen short.

The truth is, this is not a shallow promise of reclaiming what was lost.  This is an invitation to something new.  This is the vision of the Great Gathering, the Great Awakening.  Imagine it…a metaphorical (or maybe a real) streaming of all peoples and all nations to the mountain of the Lord.  It is the Great Listening too, the pathway when we stop proclaiming our ways over others voices and begin to hear what each other is saying.  The passage says nothing about elevating one people over another.  The passage is not a calling for us to separate according to our perceived tribal loyalties.  The passage doesn’t speak of making us into what we once were, as comfortable and non-threatening as that might have been.  The passage instead envisions us all walking in the light of the Lord–together.

Advent is time to remember not who we were, not who we wish we would be again, but whose we are and who we are called to be.  You know, throughout the Biblical story, God has torn down walls we have built and sent us forth—sent us on ahead to prepare the way.  We do fine for a while.  We journey as pilgrims to a new place and then we get somewhere that feels comfortable and we build a home.  And then we build a wall and claim that the home is ours.  And God tears it down and sends us forth.  And we go and we journey and we stop and we build.  And God tears it down and sends us forth.  God could leave us where we think we should be, where we feel comfortable and safe.  But we’d miss it.  We’d miss that light of the Lord that is streaming up ahead.  Let this Advent be our Great Gathering.  Let this Advent be our Great Awakening.  Let this Advent be our Great Listening.

 If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. (St. Teresa of Calcutta)

FOR TODAY:  To what or to whom do you need to begin listening to prepare the Way toward the Light?

Advent Peace,

Shelli

While We Were Sleeping

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first-light-16-11-27Awake, awake, put on your strength, O Zion!  Put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city; for the uncircumcised and the unclean shall enter you no more.  Shake yourself from the dust, rise up, O captive Jerusalem; loose the bonds from your neck, O captive daughter Zion!.  (Isaiah 52: 1-2)

Wakefulness comes slowly.  It is hard to let go of the darkness.  It is painful to let the first light in.  It stings our eyes and disturbs our comfortable slumber.  It would be so much easier to pull back and dive down into the warmth and comfort of what we know.  But the light is peeking through the window as it ascends from the distant horizon.  It is time to awake.  It is time to get up, put on your beautiful garments, and begin to walk.

This season does that.  It peeks into our lives that we’ve so carefully constructed and it expects us to awake to the first light.  And that light begins to show us what happened while we were sleeping.  Oh, maybe not sleeping REALLY.  Most of us probably haven’t been in bed these last months.  But maybe we’ve forgotten, forgotten that we are called to stay awake, that we are called not to wallow in our own comfort and familiarity, but to move forward toward the horizon and let the light in.  But the light is often too much.  It shines into the corners where we haven’t really cleaned and points to the colors of the world that have faded from our view. The truth is, we dozed off and instead of moving toward the light, we let the ugliness back in.  We opted for preserving our way of life instead of being who God calls us to be.  We chose to wall ourselves off from each other rather than listening to where we should go next.  We allowed ourselves to be swayed by fear and lies and language that we used to not use.  And now waking up is hard.

But while we were sleeping, God did not stop creating newness.  Advent reminds us of that.  This is the season when we remember what God has done before, the season when we look toward the horizon that holds the unknown, and the season when we awaken to the dawn.  This is the season when we start walking through the timelessness that we cannot claim but that claims us.  This is the season when we shake off whatever is sticking to us that does not belong.  This is the season when we let go of whatever it is we clutch out of fear—fear of losing what we have, fear of each other, fear of ourselves if we dare to allow each other to be who we are called to be.  This is the season when we loose whatever it is that holds us back.  This is the season when we awake.

On this first day of Advent, WAKE UP…and begin walking toward the dawn.  Who knows what God will do next or where God will lead us or who we will be?  But we have to wake up first and realize what happened while we were sleeping and realize where we should have been heading.

The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw—and knew I saw—all things in God and God in all things. (Mechtild of Magdeburg)

FOR TODAY:  What did you miss while you were sleeping?

Welcome to Advent!

Advent Peace,

Shelli

Rooted

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Roots6As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, 7rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. (Colossians 2:6)

 

The last weeks have been heart wrenching—Orlando, Baton Rouge, Minnesota, France, Turkey, Dallas, Baton Rouge (again!). The world seems to be swirling out of control, fueled by fears and predictions that may or may not come to be. What do you do when your world crumbles around you? You hang on for dear life. That’s what the passage says. We have to stay rooted in faith. Now rooted doesn’t mean dig in your heels and refuse to change, refuse to move from where you are. (That would be root rot!) I don’t think that it means returning to the “good old days” (that weren’t really “good” for everyone!) or returning to some sort of imaginary former glory or greatness that you thought you had. Rooted means that you find what sustains you and cling to it. And then, without ever letting go, you grow, stretching yourself beyond where you thought you could go, reaching out to places that you thought you would never see, turning and twisting through the sands and the mud and around the rocks that may have been kicked into your pathway. That is what strengthens us; that is what give us a foundation on which to rely; that is what gives us new life.

 

If you read the whole lectionary passage from Colossians, it includes words of encouragement probably to new converts who were being tossed and turned by those that were trying to tell them what it meant to have faith, which rules to follow, what things (or people) to avoid. But the writer of this epistle will have none of that. It’s not about all that. It’s about love. It’s about coming together as one Body, the way that God made us to be. It’s about unity. It’s about peace. It’s about being rooted in the One who redeems our best and our worst, the One who will bring all this together if we will only reach beyond where we are.

 

So, as the world spins beyond our comfort level, beyond our control, let us resist the tendency to pull ourselves into ourselves. Let us resist shutting ourselves off from the rest of the world. Let us resist building walls to protect ourselves or doors to lock ourselves away. Let us instead be rooted in our God who sustains us. And then let us follow God to new life—all of us, together. Rooted, let us become instruments of change rather than paralysis, instruments of peace rather than fighting back, instruments of God rather than our fears and our anger. Stay rooted and God will show you the way.

When the Manna Ceases to Be

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MannaScripture Passage (Joshua 5: 9-12)

9The Lord said to Joshua, “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.” And so that place is called Gilgal to this day. 10While the Israelites were camped in Gilgal they kept the passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho. 11On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. 12The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.

 

It was a glorious morning when the manna first showed up, fields upon fields of what seemed to be never-ending sustenance in the midst of deep hunger and despair. They ate their fill and it went away only to show up yet again the next day. It was what they needed at the time. It was God’s mercy and God’s grace and God’s fill raining down upon them. They had come out of Egypt downtrodden and emotionally beaten. They were not who they had been or who they were supposed to be. They couldn’t provide for themselves and the anger and the frustration and the disgrace became a part of their lives. They seemed to be in some sort of never-ending spiral of despair upon despair. And then, one day, they awoke to manna, gleaming pools of white that beckoned them to eat their fill, to feel better. It was comfort food at is finest.

 

And then one day, they ate unleavened bread and parched grain. It was food that they had grown and harvested, food that they had been able to produce themselves. It was wonderful, wonderful to eat of the harvest that they had a hand in bringing to be. It felt good to feel like they were getting back on their feet again. And then they realized that the manna has ceased to be. It no longer came unbidden in the morning. It no longer just appeared out of the clouds. It no longer came and what was interesting was that they really hadn’t realized it.

 

The manna was never meant to be permanent. It was never intended to be the thing that would sustain them forever. You can call it a stop-gap of sorts. But it’s probably better depicted as God’s way of helping us stand. We all have times of despair, times when the manna is the only thing we have to sustain us. But if we spent the rest of our lives just eating manna every morning, what would life really hold? We couldn’t leave the place and travel to new worlds. We have to be there in the morning when the fields burst into white. We couldn’t just relax and maybe even sleep in. After all, the manna was only there for a couple of hours. But, more importantly, we couldn’t grow. We couldn’t become those who God intended us to be—the planters, the harvesters, the helpers, those that hope for something more, that understand that God promises something more. So God gently nudges us away from this sort of dependence. (God did that before when we first began…I mean, does anyone even remember where that little Garden is anymore?) Maybe God’s intention is not that we be dependent upon God but that we choose to depend upon God. Those are different.

 

So in this Lenten season, we remember the manna. We remember the way that God sustained us, holding us, helping us stand. We remember and then begin to walk. And what we learn is that God is not trying to limit our world or constrict our view. God is there when we need help standing. And then when we begin to walk, when we finally begin to hope, when we begin to become more of who God intends us to be, God walks with us as we plant and harvest and become a part of growing God’s Kingdom. And if we fall again, God will pick us up and show us fields of manna—if only for a time. We can depend on that.

 

Let yourself get shaken up. What are you willing to give up to ensure your own unfolding, and the unfolding of what is holy in your life? Where you stumble, here is your treasure. (Joseph Campbell)

 

Thank you for sharing your Lenten journey with me!

 

Grace and Peace,

 

Shelli

Mine to Walk

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path-795x380Scripture Passage (1 Corinthians 10: 12-13)

12So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. 13No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

 

Well, this is enough to rattle anyone’s self-confidence! We like to think that if we “get there”, you know, confess our sins, profess our belief, get baptized, do what we’re supposed to do, check all the boxes of good church people, that everything will turn out alright. The problem is that it’s not a one-time thing. (Yes, I’m Methodist. Sadly, we are not “once saved, always saved”.) I mean, really, what good would that do? We just spend a little bit of time on our best behavior and then we’re “in”. I don’t think God works like that. It’s not about what we’ve done; It’s about who we are. It’s about who we’re becoming. It’s about relationship. Our faith journey is long and sometimes hard and sometimes glorious. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we know we get it right. Sometimes we find ourselves diving into deep and wonderful pools of clear reviving water and other times we seem to wallow in the shallow mud pits of life. Sometimes we can feel so connected to God that there is no doubt in our minds or our hearts that the Divine is right there, almost touchable, almost approachable. But we cannot rest on the laurels of our past. That’s not the way relationships work.

 

Living a life of faith really does not allow us to become complacent. It doesn’t allow us to sit back and bask in our glorious history that we bring to the table. God’s not really concerned with the fact that my grandparents were good, church-going people (at least not as far as my faith journey is concerned). It was good for them and they taught me well. But, now, it’s mine. God wants to have a relationship with ME. That’s the reason that “inherited” faith can only go so far (which means that, thanks be to God, that whole “sins of the fathers [and the mothers]” thing also only goes so far. My faith journey is mine. It is my relationship with God. It is my walk toward and with the Divine. It is mine to walk, mine to navigate, mine to mess up and get all turned around and not know where to go. It is mine to choose to stop and stay mired in what I think is the “right” way or what hymns I like to sing or what style of worship in which I like to participate. It is mine to halt at any point and sit down and bask in what I’ve done or become laden down by what I’ve neglected to do. And with God’s grace, it is mine to begin again. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We help each other along the way. Hopefully, we can give each other what we do not have. And that, too, is God’s grace.

 

This journey of Lent is sort of a microcosm of our whole faith journey. We begin where we are (wherever we are) and we look at our self and we look at our lives and we see what we really are—beloved children of God. And then we look at the ways that we’re NOT what we really are, the ways that we have allowed ourselves to overstep or overreach or overindulge or somehow become a little too full of what we imagine we can be. We look at the ways that we do not walk with God. And then God offers a hand (or someone else’s hand) and we begin to walk. And the road twists and turns and the storms come and the sun’s heat bears down on us and the winds whip around and the sand gets in our eyes. And then we see the light of the path ahead once again and we follow it, at least until we get off track again. And in those times when we feel the path beneath us, those times when we are aware of God’s presence, those times when God’s grace seems to wrap around us and hold us, we realize that the hand we hold never lost its grip on our lives. And we relax a little. We become comfortable. We might become a little complacent again. We become a little too certain that we’ve got it figured out. And then the winds begin again and the curtain tears and the darkness descends upon us. But this time, we know to wait, to wait in holy silence until the stone of our lives is rolled away so that we can begin again. That is faith. That is the journey. We don’t travel it alone but no one can do it for us.

 

Deep within us all there is an amazing sanctuary of the soul, a holy place…to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us…calling us home unto Itself. Yielding to these persuasions…utterly and completely, to the Light within, is the beginning of true life. (Thomas R. Kelly)

 

Thank you for sharing your Lenten journey with me!

 

Grace and Peace,

 

Shelli

In the Thirst

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Dry Parched GroundScripture Passage (Isaiah 55: 1-3)

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.

 

Thirst, real thirst, probably eludes most of us who are reading this. We have water. We just turn on the tap and, usually, it runs freely. Many of us don’t think it’s good enough water so we spend money buying high-priced spring waters (which may be from a tap anyway!) But when one is really, really thirsty, thirsty to the point of feeling dry and parched, water is the most incredible thing in the world. So, here, we read of an invitation to all those who thirst. That really sort of sounds like thirsting is a good thing. So those of us with bottled water and instant food, those of us who satisfy our longing by buying more stuff or building bigger things or wrapping ourselves in the bounds of what we do, probably struggle with the whole idea of thirsting.

 

We live in a world that dangles satisfaction and completion in front of us. We live in a world that looks for results. We live in a world that looks for solutions to things that we do not understand, to things that are difficult. And yet, nowhere in the Scriptures does God protect us from the difficulties of life by telling us to run and hide, to avoid pain, to avoid suffering, to avoid darkness or wilderness or unknowing. After all, thirsting for something more means that we are alive. Physical thirst means that we are still living and breathing and our bodies are craving what they need. And spiritual thirst is the same. We are still alive. There is still something more. And in the deepest part of our being, we know that.

 

There are those that thirst for wealth, those that thirst for stature or position. There are those that thirst for pleasure or happiness. And there are those that thirst for things to be comfortable, to be the way they want it to be, perhaps to be the way it’s “always been”. But, for most people, attaining those things really doesn’t satisfy them at all. It leaves a veritable dryness in life. Perhaps the point is that life is not in the quenching but in the thirst. Alexander Stuart Baillie once wrote that “one needs to keep on thirsting because life grows and enlarges. It has no end; it goes on and on; it becomes more beautiful. When one has done [his or her] best there is, [one] finds, still more to learn and so much to do. [One] cannot be satisfied until one attains unto the stature of Jesus, unto a perfect [human], and ever thirsts for God.” I thirst. Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. And life began.

 

 

All your love, your stretching out, your hope, your thirst, God is creating in you so that God may fill you…God is on the inside of the longing. (Maria Boulding)

 

Thank you for sharing your Lenten journey with me!

 

I know I’ve tended to be a little irregular with the postings this season. I’m sorry about that. Life continues to get in the way. Maybe it’s part of that thirsting. I will try to keep the waters flowing.

 

Grace and Peace,

 

Shelli

Yearning to Fill a Restless Heart

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Reaching for GodScripture Passage (Psalm 85:8)

8Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts.

 

So, we’re on this journey, a journey toward who we are meant to be, a journey toward God with God, a journey where we are searching for God. The truth is, God is not lost. God is not up ahead waiting for us to catch up or up above waiting for us to clean up our act so we’ll get there! God is here and has been here all along, from the beginning (actually, even BEFORE the beginning). Actually, God IS the beginning (and the end and the middle and all the stuff around it.) So what exactly is this journey? What is our spiritual walk that we try so hard to maintain?

 

Maybe we need to go back to the basics. For what is it that you hunger? What brings you life? What gives you energy? All those questions are really close to the same. They all have to do with sustenance, with filling what is empty and satisfying what is wanting. St. Augustine said, “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” That’s our story—we are not evil; we are not bad; we are not unrighteous or ungodly or un-whatever; and we are certainly not “only human”. (I hate that…Jesus was human, fully human, so there’s no “only” about it. Maybe we’re inhumane sometimes, (maybe a lot!) but we’re not “only” human.) We’re not any of those things. We are beloved. God made us. We are part of God. But we just haven’t found our place yet. We are not bad; we are restless. We know there is something more. Our heart knows it. Our heart knows that there is an emptiness and a wanting that we almost cannot bear. It is that “God-shaped hole” again. Our hunger, our emptiness tells us that in our deepest being, we desire to be with God, to walk with God. And God, in God’s infinite love, is at the root of that hunger.

 

And so we journey. We walk and we walk and we walk and we search and we search and we search. This IS our spirituality. This IS our journey. This IS our Way. We all have it. Some of us struggle with it, muddying it with materialism and prejudice and fear that we will lose control or lose what we have. And some of us somehow, by God’s grace, actually travel further than we dared, into the unknown, into the wilderness. It is always a bit of a struggle, even for those that seem have their spirituality all together. If it wasn’t, then God would have just filled our heart and then hardened it up so it couldn’t go anywhere and never made the world at all. But God made us to journey, called us to journey, called us to search and wander and to, somehow, along the way, learn to trust that our real desire is to be with God, to fill our hearts with God and to, finally, have peace (not to be righteous, not to be holy, not to be perfectly and fully-versed in the ways of God, not to be the “best” at spirituality—just to have peace).

 

Our journey, our spiritual walk, is the way that God relates to us and the way we respond. It’s a dance. And the best dancers do not drag their partners across the floor or dance in front or over those in the line. The best dancers understand the rhythm that is not theirs but to which they belong. There are no easy directions to your spiritual journey. You will not find this in a self-help book. There is no quick fix, no shortcut, no road that is better paved or with less traffic. The Way is yours and God’s. And as you dance, your heart fills, and when it is full to what you thought was the brim, to the place where you cannot imagine it can fill anymore, you will find that you only yearn for God.

 

You called, you cried, you shattered my deafness. You sparkled, you blazed, you drove away my blindness. You shed your fragrance, and I drew in my breath, and I pant for you. I tasted and now I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and now I burn with longing for your peace. (St. Augustine of Hippo)

 

Thank you for sharing your Lenten journey with me!

 

Grace and Peace,

 

Shelli