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Easter XI

Healing
Part II: Trees

One of this Sunday’s passages is Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21.

As one commentator summarized it: “The conclusion of Revelation has seemed to many interpreters to be a bit choppy, a barely-held-together conglomeration of leftover pieces, stumbling toward the close of the book.” I’ll say.

Earlier this week I heard a sermon which dealt with the morass of endings by focusing on one image from the text: the tree of life. Just that phrase took me like a hyperlink to one of the most healing images of my own life time . . . . the tree of life.

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Easter X

I’ve wanted to start a series on healing for several weeks now. But every time I get plans underway it seems something new crops up that needs healing . . . like discovering how many files are really unrecoverable from my defunct hard drive, or seeing our drowned garden, or finding myself living in a city experiencing its worst devastation since the Civil War.

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Easter IX

This week’s floods in Nashville, Tennessee have been overwhelming to many and devastating to others. So much has been lost . . . lives, homes, livelihoods. In comparison to the magnitude of losses that others have felt, my family has mostly been inconvenienced. Still I am struck by the sheer force of it all. Water has such incredible power for both good and tragedy. Reading this week’s lectionary texts, water is at every turn. You’ll hear echoes of those scriptures in this short poem . . .

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Easter VII

A Decade of practice: This year feels like a series of milestones in a way. Why do we think that 10 years makes a difference? Why not nine years? or 12 and 1/2? Nonetheless. It was during the last few months of 1999 when my full-time work in and for a congregation came to an end. And a new vocation, or really a revised longer-term vocation, began to take shape. I started graduate school in the fall of 2000 and began learning the practices of becoming a scholar. This is scholarship that I understand to be for the sake of the church.

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Easter VI

It has been 16 years since Costly Obedience was published by Judson Press. It was the first published collection of sermons by Southern Baptist women. Now comes a long overdue next incarnation of sermons by Baptist women across a much wider swath of Baptist life. It is important for lots of reasons. It includes sermons by more than 30 women on a wide variety of topics and texts. It lifts voices and delivers messages that need to be heard beyond the local congregations and events where they were first offered.

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Easter V

Almanac: Tonight a half moon is shining (or more technically, the first quarter). We’ve had no rain to speak of in the last week. Less than three weeks since we planted the farm . . . On Good Friday we put in beans, yellow squash, onions, corn, turnips, cucumbers, zucchini, butternut squash, watermelon, potatoes, garlic, and more squash.

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Easter IV

Today my family and I gathered with most of our in-laws and outlaws and had an Easter egg hunt. And enough food to feed a small church. About 500 eggs, give or take, were hidden. And most were found. Well, my father-in-law came up with 22 strays. The mower will no doubt turn up more. But kids ran around the lawn with abandon scooping them up.

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Easter III

One of the best gifts we can give to people is to ask them “How did God’s presence get you through that tough spot in your life?” This was the advice of sociologist and self-described “immigrant in practical theology” Nancy Ammerman. Nancy gave the opening key note address at the Association for Practical Theology last Friday evening.

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Easter I

Under the Stars: Since the weather turned warm in the last couple of weeks, I’ve found myself especially glad to be out under the stars in the evening. The trees in my yard are still cooperating with my desire for a view to the heights. Soon they will block a large piece of the sky above our little patch of earth.

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Holy Week I

Holy Week. As I removed my shoes tonight and pressed my feet to the cold tiles in the sanctuary I was taken back. . . . In my final year of seminary I preached to my peers and friends at Southern Seminary. It was the first (and I suppose the only) time I preached in my seminary community (outside of preaching class anyway). It was Maundy Thursday in 1993. It was something of a renegade service.

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Lent XI

Switchfoot. Standing here on the brink of Holy Week, I’m glad to be headed in to hear the music of Switchfoot in a live concert in Cincinnati, Ohio at The Underground. Since early November when Switchfoot released their newest album, Hello Hurricane, I’ve been playing it almost daily.

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Lent IX

Spring in Minnesota. I just came in from wrapping up the fifth round of interviews with seminarians who are completing their formal education and moving toward ministry. We held the interview at the Collegeville Institute adjacent to the campus of St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN.

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Lent VIII

Sunshine and Rain: I’ve been out walking in sunshine this late afternoon. And just breathing it all in. This week’s Hebrew Bible text from Isaiah reminded me of a short meditation I wrote five years ago after the “hundred year rain” fell in Death Valley and Joshua Tree, California. Today’s temperatures in the Twin Cities and the blue skies also reminded me of that amazing trip we took during Holy Week 2005.

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Lent VI

Standing in the den two nights ago my husband rubbed his hands through his hair, looked at me and said, “Have I come undone?” I said, “Well, I’m sure you have. Listen to this. . . .” I opened a book and read something I’d found earlier that very day. Stumbled across it really. “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other” (Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 2004, 19).

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Lent V

shining sun and skies azure
praying in time with my own beating heart
the smell of my daughter’s hair
remembering the rhythms of work
soup for dinner
pumping weights and running three miles
listening to the lament of crows
(opening notes. . . of a requiem . . . for grief)

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Lent IV

Lenten Lament on Grief
Yesterday was the first day since Lent began that I did anything I’d call productive for work. Why? Well grief keeps kicking my backside. And all my other sides, for that matter. I’m attending to it. I’m not rushing to get back to things. But it keeps spurting out in surprising and unsettling ways. So I’d like to write an honest lament about grief’s effects on me.

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