Author: kenwoodley3

“The Pharisees went and plotted to entrap Jesus in what he said.”
—Matthew 22:15

DAYLIGHT, ANYWAY

Even after
the sun set
for the very last time
we sat at the edge of the flattened, rubbled world,
dangling our legs over the side,
dipping our toes,
then up to our ankles and knees
until—not thinking—we were waist-deep,
and then over our heads,
wondering how we ever got there
and how long the baptism would last,
amazed that we could breathe while submerged in so much,
blowing bubbles of light
that became stars above a world that refused to be completely broken
by what people had done
to each other after the sun
rose that morning.

We stood on October’s front porch and the door opens without our knocking. Autumn is upon us. Ready or not. The leaves of color begin to fall. They are blown against the bluest skies by breezes that mingle their coolness with the sun’s warmth. Humidity flies southward with the Monarch butterflies and beside the birds that have sung for us since spring nudged last winter out of the way.
There is so much to distract us in pleasant ways, to keep our minds off the coming darkness and cold that brings the inevitable scarves, ice-scrapers and our own frozen breath that hangs like a mist before sticking, frost-like, to windshields.
If you like sports, there’s football, baseball’s postseason, and soccer. There are fall festivals and school fundraisers, open windows and reading under a tree without swatting away gnats.
For those who love the great outdoors, fields, mountains and streams are now accessible in increasing beauty and inviting temperatures.
But always, lurking around the next football quarter and soccer half, is the bottom of Indian Summer’s ninth inning.
We can turn on all of the lights we want but the sun’s going to keep setting earlier and rising later. Soon enough, the landscape is going to take on funereal tones.
Melancholy finds me each year soon after the World Series ends, the sadness deepening when Daylight Savings Time follows the butterflies and birds, returning only when they do next spring.
But the seasons are blessings. All of them. They are different movements to the same symphony, necessary companions that allow the world of plowed fields and fulsome woods to rest and rejuvenate.
Without winter, there could be no spring.
Without darkness, who would recognize the light?
Walking through the woods and fields surrounding Appomattox Court House National Historical Park recently, I found a reminder that God is present in all of our seasons. Nature’s. And those within us, as well.
On a late September morning, I rounded a bend in a trail and could not believe my eyes.
Brilliant yellow crocuses in rich profusion!!
How, I wondered, could this possibly be? In all of my life I had never, ever seen crocuses shoot up from the ground and spread wide their sunbeam color in the fall.
The rest of the world, in a voice that was beginning to rise above a whisper, was speaking autumn, but these flowers, dozens of them clustered around the base of a tree, were declaring spring.
The sight felt miraculous and the spiritual message soon blossomed:
God’s love and grace are season-less. The rich bloom of God’s love is endlessly limitless and eternally everlasting. There is no Opening Day, no final Super Bowl. Not for God’s fathomless affection.
Most reassuring of all is that, like those crocuses, God’s love is not a miracle.
The flowers, I learned, are Autumn Crocuses. I’d never heard of them before, never seen them. But all of us can plant them in our own gardens to enjoy every fall.
Just as we can open our hearts to the love God yearns to cultivate inside us, the kind of love that can turn our seasons of the human soul inside out, blooming most brilliantly when it seems most impossible that we could even feel one petal.
Flowers come and go. Leaves fall. The final whistle blows on every season. But God’s love keeps playing beyond the final out of what seems to be our last inning. There is always a bloom for us somewhere around the next bend in our heart’s road.

Before being sworn into office, the president-elect places his or her hand on the bible and swears this oath in public to the people of the United States of America:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

I fail to see how President Trump kept his commitment to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States when he attacked NFL players for exercising their First Amendment right of free speech by kneeling during the National Anthem. I believe Trump violated that sacred oath when he stated, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘get that son of a bitch off the field now. Out. Out. He’s fired!’”

Any president who encourages the firing of any U.S. citizen for exercising their First Amendment right has clearly committed an impeachable offense by violating their oath of office.

Out, Mr. Trump, you’re fired.

Seriously.

“He said to them, ‘You also go out into the vineyard.”
—Matthew 20

If Jesus tells us to go out into the vineyard, we can just go. It’s okay. It’s not against any law that matters.
We don’t need anyone else’s permission. We don’t require any bureaucracy’s approval. There is no ring that we must kiss.
We just go out into the vineyard.
Throughout the New Testament, Jesus empowers his disciples to get up, go out and do things.
Feed his sheep. Share the good news. Work for reconciliation and healing. And do this in remembrance of him.
Jesus never said, “but first you are required to…” Jesus never made his disciples get a license. Jesus never said, “Do this in remembrance of me but first spend three years in seminary writing papers and passing tests.”
Jesus never told anyone that they must find a Notary Public to validate the movement of the Holy Spirit through his disciples.
The fact is, Jesus never earned a degree, either, though many Sadducees and Pharisees thought Jesus was breaking some Holy law by what he said and did without their stamp of approval.
So, we, too, can just go out into the vineyard. We can just do the things that Jesus told us to do.
Bear in mind, however, that others may disagree. Some may not believe that we have any right to be in the vineyard with them at all because they’ve passed tests, been given diplomas and have been out in the vineyard for 30 years.
There are Sadducees and Pharisees in our day, too. They are good people. They have done good things for the kingdom of God. But, like those who opposed Jesus, ours also believe that they know best what is right for us all and who needs permission from whom and for what reasons.
Such good people are susceptible, nonetheless, to believing that the vineyard belongs to them, that all of the grapes are theirs and that only they can say who serves the wine.
But, that is their misunderstanding, not ours.
We are simply doing what Jesus told us to do.
“You also go out into the vineyard,” Jesus tells us.
No ifs or buts. No dues to pay. No pre-conditions to be met. No hoops to jump through. Nobody else needs to bless us with their permission.
Because the vineyard belongs to Jesus and he told us to go out into that place of waiting vines and expectant fruit.
Because the grapes are his.
Because the wine is his vintage alone.
Because we are told to do this in remembrance of him.
And because we have the explicit permission of Jesus, how can any human-made power on Earth truly believe it has the moral authority to stop us from doing what Jesus has clearly told us to do?
Those who attempt to control and limit who does what in remembrance of Jesus undoubtedly have the best of intentions. But nobody has the words of Jesus to support a belief that any person or organization owns the majority shares of stock in what is holy and sacred. Nor do the words of Jesus give anyone veto power over Christ’s bread and wine.
The communion we share together in the corner of the vineyard where Jesus told us to go is inherently a sacrament.
Jesus makes it so.
Because, as he told us, we do it in remembrance of him.
If permission is required, it has already been given.

Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”
—Matthew 18:22

Peter had wanted to know how many times he must forgive someone who sinned against him. Probably thinking himself extravagantly generous, Peter suggested seven times. Forgiving someone a single time can be a struggle. Sometimes even once can feel like it is one time too many.
But seven times is not enough, Jesus made clear to Peter, and so to us.
Seventy-seven times, Jesus answered.
Seventy-seven times? Turning the other cheek that often could give us whiplash, couldn’t it? But that is what we must do.
It’s instructive to return to a point Jesus made in last Sunday’s Gospel lesson. If a brother sins against you, Jesus said, and refuses all attempts at reconciliation, then treat that individual as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
If Jesus is to be our guide, our Good Shepherd and our Savior, let us ask ourselves how Jesus treated tax collectors. Did he condemn and shun them, make an example out of them as evil and worthy of our disdain?
No, Jesus did not.
Jesus forgave them. Jesus loved them. Jesus opened his heart and God’s grace to them. Jesus, in fact, brought one of them into his inner circle of disciples.
How ironic that the Gospel of Matthew tells this story because Matthew, himself, was a tax collector when he first encountered Jesus.
So, how perfect that Matthew tells us this story because he knew from personal experience how Jesus treated tax collectors.
If we are to treat those who sin against us as pagans and tax collectors, that means we are meant to forgive them. It means forgiveness is for everyone.
Even for us.
Forgiveness is one more example of the narrow gate that opens up to the wide place of God’s love and grace. But how very hard it can be to fit feelings of forgiveness through the small opening in our heart when someone harms us. How difficult to squeeze forgiveness through the shrinking passageway in our wounded feelings.
But how far our hearts can travel when we do because forgiveness is a road with two lanes: forgiveness is for the person being forgiven but it is also for the person offering the forgiveness.
When we offer forgiveness—whether it is accepted or not—we free ourselves of the soul-harming burden of carrying that piece of pain forward day by day, like a heavy and ponderous chain dragging down moments of possible joy.
Seventy-seven times is a lot of repetitions, a whole lot of exercise. If forgiveness were a muscle, seventy-seven repetitions would strengthen it until we could forgive even the heaviest hurt.
By the seventy-seventh time, as we wrestled with the angel of absolution, forgiveness would have become a reflex action in our heart.
Whether seven times or seventy-seven times, forgiveness becomes less difficult when we understand what Jesus understood:
God loves us all and that necessarily includes those who have sinned against us.
We know that to be true because God keeps loving us even when we sin against someone, even when we sin against the love of God, itself.
As he hung dying on the cross, Jesus forgave those who hammered the nails. He set the standard for forgiveness. He walked his talk. But, I wonder if Jesus struggled to speak those words of mercy. If so, how many times did Jesus swallow his pardon into silence before declaring his exoneration for all eternity?
Forgiveness is not always easy but it is always worth the effort because it opens up the wide space where redemption may gather us in its embrace.
And where healing, too, may find us.
Redemption and healing for the forgiven and the forgiver.

“For wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

—Matthew 18:20

J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Fellowship of the Ring” makes it very clear: companionship on the journey is important, and can be crucial. I am re-reading Tolkien’s epic masterpiece—I’ve lost track of how often I’ve delved between its covers—and Kim and I are re-watching The Lord of the Rings trilogy on DVD.
The timing was perfect as I contemplated today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew.
In the book, the wizard Gandalf has advised the hobbit, Frodo Baggins, that he must leave his beloved Shire and take the One Ring with him to prevent it from falling into the clutches of the evil Sauron. With that ring, Sauron could destroy all goodness and rule Middle Earth, enslaving all in a great, evil darkness.
The Shire is something of a paradise. No apples have been eaten off the tree of knowledge there. And Hobbits retain much of the innocence of childhood throughout their lives.
The odyssey Frodo ultimately undertakes—journeying into Sauron’s stronghold of Mordor to try and destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mt. Doom—places him in constant and grave peril.
But, Gandalf makes certain that Frodo does not travel into the wilds alone. A trusted friend, Sam Gamgee, will remain at his side through the thickest thicks and the thinnest of thins.
I believe that Jesus had the same thing in mind when he told his disciples that “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” God doesn’t want us to be wrapped in shrouds of loneliness and Jesus knows that.
It is interesting to observe that by removing the letter L in lonely it becomes “one-ly” and loneliness becomes “one-liness.” But that is what being lonely and loneliness literally are—having nobody but ourselves, being one, alone.
Too much “one-liness” and being too often “one-ly” can have the same effect as the One Ring would have in Sauron’s hands—it can ensnare us in a kind of emotional and spiritual darkness. We fall too easily prey to anxiety, fear and doubt. Obstacles along the way can seem insurmountable and there is nobody with whom we can share our moments of joy.
Jesus is encouraging us to open our hearts to fellowship and companionship as we journey through life. I most definitely believe that the Holy Spirit of Jesus and the love and grace of God come to us in moments of solitude. Prayer, for example, is most often a solitary act and Jesus, remember, would often go off to a lonely—or “one-ly”—place to pray and re-gather his strength.
But Jesus would always return to the fellowship of his disciples.
His example is worth following. Thankfully, none of us has to travel through Mordor to Mt. Doom and save the world by destroying the One Ring. But we each encounter challenges, opportunities, obstacles and joys across our lifetime. How much better it is, in all respects, to have companions by our side on the journey. And to feel our companionship ending the loneliness of others along the way.

“Then Jesus told the disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

So, what are we waiting for? Let’s take up our cross.
You and me.
We each have one.
Everybody does.
They are not of equal size or weight. Our cross is unique to us, shaped by the life only we have lived. And only we, truly, know what the burden feels like.
But what does Jesus mean by “take up”?
We can “take up” golf. We can “take up” jogging. And we can “take up” sewing.
Can we also “take up” our cross?
Yes, we can and doing so is far more important than “taking up” a new hobby.
Jesus doesn’t tell us to take up our cross and follow him because he enjoys a parade. Jesus is urging us to take up our cross and make something meaningful of it because he knows that our own pain helps us to understand, and so minister to, the pain of others.
When we take up our cross and use it to lighten the world of some of its darkness, then we are following Jesus in the truest way possible.
Tellingly, from a certain perspective, a cross, in its physical appearance, can resemble a key.
And that is precisely what our cross can become when we take it up.
A key waiting to unlock a particular door because our cross, like our life, is unique to us. There is no other life, and no other cross—and so no other “key”—exactly like ours.
Therefore, our cross is the one and only key that can unlock a door behind which someone in particular waits in prayer, asking God to free them from the darkness of their pain.
We can set them free if we allow God to make that miracle happen.
The choice, as always, is ours. We have the freedom to resign ourselves to the darkness of our own pain, the freedom to remain stuck to our cross, static and going nowhere. But, if we answer ‘Yes, Lord,’ then the miracle may become doubled:
God knows how and where all of us have been broken by life. God also understands how the broken places in you can fit into the broken places in me to bring us both closer to wholeness.
By having faith in Jesus’ call to take up our cross and follow him, we may find that behind the doors that we unlock with our cross “key” are those waiting to use their own crosses as the keys that also set us free along the way.
No, we may not—probably will not—be completely cured. Miracles can and do happen but most of us will have to wait for heaven to forever free us from the effect of every hammer and all of life’s nails.
But God knows how to fit us to each other in ways that soften the jagged edges of the broken places in each of us and bring moments of healing along the way. The most frequent miracle is God-given loving companionship at key moments in our journey. Some will last a lifetime. And beyond.
Jesus, bearing his cross and asking us to shoulder ours, beseeches us to follow him toward those softer places.
When we do, the world becomes a little softer, too.
And its light a little brighter.

“Do not be conformed to this world.”
Seven words.
Eight syllables to live by.
Paul’s advice, delivered in his letter to the Romans, is as important today as it was 2,000 years ago. Perhaps, even more so, as one looks around at the state of the world in which we live.
Seriously, checking out the daily news headlines and soundbites, who would want to be conformed to any of that?
But, as soon as we’re born, the world tries mighty hard to achieve that goal. Almost like some military bootcamp aimed at squeezing out our unique personality traits so that we’ll obey orders without thinking.
“Conformation” classes begin almost immediately and the conformity blues play its tune right on along the rest of our lives, trying to coax us into thinking like everyone else, believing like everyone else, dreaming like everyone else, shopping like everyone else, voting like everyone else, eating like everyone else, dressing like everyone else, shaving, smelling, driving, you-name-it like everyone else.
Oh, and there’s surely one more: Hating like everyone else.
Mass individuality.
Uniform distinctness.
Fighting to wade ashore against the riptide of conformity to find our own grains of sand with which to build dream castles is a difficult, ongoing struggle.
The temptation to fit snuggly into a comfortable and desirable profile or demographic is powerful. We want to belong to something bigger than ourselves so that we don’t feel so terribly small.
That’s one reason history is littered with dictators who found it so easy to manipulate populations, to conform them.
Assimilate them.
Force them into capitulation by tricking them into believing the choice was theirs.
That’s why Jesus is so wonderfully dangerous.
Not for us, but for the powers that wish to conform us to this world.
Jesus was—and is—the ultimate non-conformist and his path of non-conformity is open wide for us. So wide that it’s not even a path. So wide that wherever each of us goes individually the path of non-conformity exists.
Cross the road like the non-conformist Good Samaritan.
Turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.
Move a mountain.
Plant a mustard seed.
Be a mustard seed.
Turn someone’s water into wine.
Touch a leper.
Enter through the narrow gate because the other side brings you to a place that is not the least bit narrow at all and wide open to every possibility.
Believe in love.
Not cookie-cutter love.
Not conformist love.
Not one-size-fits-all love.
But love.
The actual thing, itself.
The living, breathing holy presence that is God among us.
Unconformable.
Waiting for us—longing for us—to become something bigger than ourselves:
Love.

 

What a difficult story to swallow: Jesus has just gone to the district of Tyre and Sidon where he encounters a Canaanite woman who begs for mercy and the healing of her daughter.
Unusually, for him, Jesus says nothing, according to the Gospel of Matthew. His silence is so disconcerting that the disciples grow irritated with the woman’s continued pleas and ask Jesus to send her away.
What is more disturbing, however, is that Jesus seems to agree with them. When he finally does answer, he says this:
“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
In other words, the woman’s anguished begging for Jesus to heal her daughter is—seemingly—dismissed outright because of who she is and where she lives.
There are several explanations for this uncharacteristic behavior by Jesus: He’s simply exhausted. He’s had a bad day. He’s testing the understanding of his disciples or the faith of the woman.
The first explanation might be true but Jesus had to fully expect being approached by those seeking his blessing and healing. Especially because he was in an area he did not routinely visit.
If his silence and then grudging, seemingly cold-hearted reply are merely a test, it seems to me that the disciples fail but the Canaanite woman passes with flying colors.
“Lord, help me,” she persists, prompting another apparently callous response from Jesus:
“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
The woman’s test of faith—or the disciples’—got harder and harder, but she was up to the challenge, even if the disciples weren’t.
Actually, I suspect Jesus knew the woman wasn’t going to take ‘No’ for an answer. Nor, I believe, did Jesus want her to walk away without her child being healed.
If Jesus was waiting for one of the disciples to challenge his refusal because it ran contrary to his core teaching about loving your neighbor as yourself, Jesus was going to be disappointed. But the woman’s response would not fill him with the least little bit of chagrin.
“Yes, Lord, but even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ tables,” she boldly replies.
Jesus then proclaims her great faith and, just like that, the woman’s daughter is healed.
One can only imagine the startled reaction of the disciples.
Contrary to their expectations, Jesus was telling them that this woman and her child are also God’s children.
The disciples clearly didn’t think so. They had come into the region of Tyre and Sidon with stereotypes and prejudices firmly in place. They had looked at the woman and thought, “She’s not one of us.” She looked different. They had listened to her speak and thought, “She’s not one of us.” She spoke differently. Clearly, the disciples looked at her and listened to her and thought, “She’s one of them.”
Jesus directly challenged that point of view by the end of the Gospel lesson. But, in a real sense, Jesus is trying to get our attention, too.
We are all so blessed that God doesn’t look into the world and divide people into “us” and “them.”
How fortunate that Jesus offers to be a shepherd to every sheep.
Grace would not be grace if it came with premiums, restrictions based on race, membership guidelines on ethnicity and special zip codes for its delivery—you know, only to those who live on the right side of the tracks and in the best neighborhoods.
Ultimately, if that woman and her child are dogs, then we are, too.
But the truth is what Jesus taught: We are all children of God and there is a seat for all of us around the Lord’s table.

 

 

 

 

Oh, how often have I seen the wind.
Just like Peter in today’s Gospel lesson.
Jesus had been working hard, teaching the people that they are the light of the world, that they are blessed and sons and daughters of God, no matter how worthless or powerless they feel to do anything about their own lives or the world around them.
When he finished for the day, Jesus pointed the crowd back toward their homes and neighborhoods—their daily lives—and told the disciples to travel by boat across the Sea of Galilee.
Jesus sent them on their way, explaining that he was going up one of the mountains embroidering the sea and pray. “I’ll meet you on the other side,” he told the disciples.
The boat, however, began being battered by the waves. A storm came out of nowhere—which does still happen rather frequently because of the surrounding weather conditions in Galilee.
The boat was far from land, the Gospel of Matthew tells us, “and the wind was against them.”
Oh, how often has the wind felt like it was against me.
But always, somehow, Jesus comes walking across the water toward me, over the water and through the wind.
The wind of my fears.
The wind of the world whispering dread and doom.
The wind whispering and then howling that love will never overcome hate, that every sword will never be turned into a plowshare, that there will also be one sword left to defeat the last person standing, plowshare in hand, believing in the Gospel of Jesus that God is love.
But always Jesus walks through all of the winds that are whispering and howling, and over the battering waves that make me afraid that all is lost and that my boat will sink.
Jesus keeps coming through the surrounding storms that make me certain that I will never, ever get to the other side of whatever fear and doubt I happen to be trying to cross in my boat at the time.
I am so like Peter, the most human of the disciples. Impulsive. Out there. Let me be the one!!! But so susceptible to my human foibles.
“Lord, if it’s you, command me to come to you on the water,” Peter shouts after Jesus pointedly tells the disciples to “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid (and there’s that fearful word—afraid).
Peter is desperate to conquer his fear by walking over the storming waves he’s afraid will drown them. And, Jesus says, sure, come right ahead.
Just as Jesus tells each of us to leave our fears behind and walk on, over and away from them.
But, Peter is Peter. Peter is human. Peter is you and I.
Peter gets half way to Jesus and then he “sees the wind” and begins to drown.
Peter gives so much power to what he fears that he actually sees the wind. Gives shape and form to something that is invisible.
Just like all of us do from time to time. We believe that what we fear is so strong, stronger than we are, stronger than Jesus.
And so we begin to drown in our fear.
But Jesus is still there, always there, reaching out his hand, lifting us up and away from our fears until, just when we think it could never happen, we reach the other side and hear a voice:
Don’t see the wind, Jesus tells us. Instead, let the wind see you, and who stands by your side, no matter what storms life blows your way.