Author: Pastor Jeff Smith

Liminal Space

In the 2008 release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (the last in the movie series that was released 27 years following the first in the series), there is a continuation of a subtle theme of spirituality. This movie takes us into the realm of space aliens and the idea that it was aliens who contributed to the various wonders of the ancient world.

It happens when we come face-to-face with the crystal skeletons of a council of these beings, who come to life when the crystal skull taken from one of their members is finally returned. Professor Oxley (played by John Hurt) has been out of touch with reality from the time we first meet him in the movie, and he immediately returns to his senses in this scene. At this point Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford) asks, “Are these from outer space.” Professor Oxley replies: “It seems, rather, that they are from the space between spaces.”

This idea of the “space between spaces” is also seminal to the theme found in Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time (of which I spoke in a recent sermon). It is in this space that Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Which take the children on the search for their father.

In Hebrew and Christian spirituality, it is what is known as “liminal space” or the “thin space.” It is best described in the story of Elijah, as Elijah has escaped the sword of Jezebel after he had killed the prophets of Baal. He has his own wilderness experience, where he first wishes to die only to be told by an angel to wait on a mountain that he might see God.

In 1 Kings 19:11b-12, Elijah then is on the mountain and he experiences God in a way that is unexpected:

Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.

This “sheer silence” isn’t silence like we normally think about silence. This is the silence of space … where there are no molecules to transmit sound waves. This is that vacuous sound where it seems as if everything is being pulled away from us. This is the “thin space” or the “space between spaces.”

Liminality is something that mainline religious traditions don’t always talk about. The truth is that I have experienced liminality when I have felt most broken. When I am at that place of deepest grief … when I have been poured out completely … it is here that I experience something like “sheer silence.” This isn’t the place to think or do … this is the place only “to be.”

We are invited into this liminal space in this season of Lent. This is where we come face to face with our brokenness and powerlessness. This is where we come face-to-face with our most authentic selves.

Listen deeply in this silent, liminal space. And in the depth of our listening we may simply hear the voice of God.

God, speak to us in the silence. As we journey in this season of brokenness, bring us to the liminal space where we might hear your voice of love, hope, and life. Amen.

Great Love and Great Suffering

This week, we will see Jesus begin to turn his attention toward a destination that ends in suffering and death. We, like Peter and the apostles, can’t bear the thought of someone we love intentionally walking to the place of suffering and death. When we love someone this much, we beg them to take any path but that one.

But the mystics teach us that great suffering is intricately interwoven into great love. I first encountered this idea in reading Henri Nouwen back in the first half of my ministry. He spoke the following in his teaching:

His work became foundational to my education, my ministry, and ultimately my own spiritual journey. Anyone who has lived long enough has learned the truth: if we risk giving our hearts to another, we can be assured that our hearts will be broken.

During the time when I was doing my doctoral work, I was blessed to have Dr. Tex Sample as one of my two key faculty members, and one of the things I loved about Tex was his capacity to tap into the profound wisdom of country western music and incorporate that into theological thought.

So as a true Texan raised on country music, I felt obligated to dig more deeply. One of the country singers who touched me deeply in that time was Garth Brooks, and the wisdom I am talking about here is the primary theme of The Dance. As he sings, he is reflecting upon how deeply he invested himself into a love that ultimately did not last. In the chorus, and the finale, he sings:

And now, I’m glad I didn’t know
The way it all would end
The way it all would go
Our lives are better left to chance
I could have missed the pain
But I’da had to miss
The dance

It’s my life
It’s better left to chance
I could have missed the pain
But I’da had to miss
The dance

-Garth Brooks, The Dance

When we love deeply, we will be called to the place of great suffering. I’ve read with interest the case of Alexei Navalny and his prosecution as an opponent of the Kremlin following his poisoning at the hands of Russian agents and his continued exposure of corruption in Russia. Navalny had spent much of his life as an atheist, but he has converted in recent years to Christianity. At his appeal and sentencing, he said, “To live fully is to risk it all.”

He understood that he could not be true to himself if he walked away from his love of his fellow Russians and the justice they deserve. His faith challenged him to speak truth to power … to challenge corruption. And that meant that he would experience suffering.

Jesus reminds us that suffering is now inevitable. Brokenness is something that comes to all of us. But the journey into the darkness … and subsequently out of the darkness … is best equipped by love … a love known as ἀγάπη (agape). It is the ultimate pouring out of self, and it is that image of pouring out that defines both great love and great suffering.

May your journey, my friends, be the pathway of love. When you experience great suffering, you will know you have walked the path that Christ walked.

Lord of Love: Come into our hearts and be with us as we take this journey through love and suffering. May it be a journey that connects us to you and one another as we walk this path. Amen.

Driven to the Wilderness

This is where I get down to the bare bones of my theme of letting go. Whether I live by the illusion of power and control or not, I finally am confronted with the reality that I am not in control. I am driven to the place I fear the most.

It is in the wilderness that I am confronted with my fear of scarcity. As we experienced this past week, it was hard to read about the people who didn’t have enough electricity … enough heat … enough water … enough food to get through. If the truth were told, my family had no reason to be afraid. We did not suffer like so many have suffered in this winter storm, but I have to admit that the fear of scarcity arose at least once during our forced isolation.

In the wilderness, I am confronted with the fear of not being enough. Clergy routinely have to come to terms with our own egos and ego needs. Speaking for myself, I fear not being available enough even as I heal from surgery. Will someone need me and be disappointed that I can’t be more available to them. Will people be upset that I am not preaching for a month … or will they think me irrelevant after hearing some really great sermons (I know I can say this because Steve Buchele is a good friend of mine and he knows how much I love hearing him preach).

Will I be enough as a husband … a father … a grandfather? We try to balance family in with the many demands outside the home, but are we really doing a good job?

The fears are real for so many of us as we confront the reality that we live in a world that expects productivity and evidence of our work. Our worth is tied to that productivity and work. There is no place for us to let go of our need to be useful, which means that things such as prayer, meditation, and silence are suspect because they don’t enhance the bottom line … they are thought to be distractions that take away from our work. Even in religious life, they don’t necessarily bring more people or money into the church.

In the wilderness, we are confronted with the fear that we will not have enough power … we will not be high enough on the food chain. I once had a friend who displayed a sign on his office door: “Every morning in the savanna, the leopard gets up and starts running to find its food. And every morning in the savanna, the gazelle wakes up and starts running to keep from being the food. So whether you are the predator or the prey, it is a good idea to wake up and start running.”

It was good humor, but it does belie the fear deep within us that standing still is not an option. We fear the loss of power or prestige or privilege, so we just keep moving.

But it is in that wilderness where Jesus reminds us what it means to face those fears head on and choose instead the ways of God. This is the thin place … the liminal space … where we meet God. Lent is the time for us to take a deep breath … to lower our anxiety as we confront our fears … and in that moment, just perhaps, we will let go and let God be God.

Lord, be with us as we encounter our fears and move through those fears to the place of letting go. In this moment, give us the calm assurance that you will be our God. Amen.

From Humiliation to Humility to Humanity

The psalmist writes in Psalm 25:

To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
O my God, in you I trust;
    do not let me be put to shame;
    do not let my enemies exult over me.
Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame;
    let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
Make me to know your ways, O Lord;
    teach me your paths.
Lead me in your truth, and teach me,
    for you are the God of my salvation;
    for you I wait all day long.

I have heard Father Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, NM, say on more than one occasion that he “prays every day for at least one humiliation.” I always found that odd. Humiliation is what we seek to avoid. We teach our children not to humiliate others, and we seek to avoid humiliation for them as we also seek to build their own self-esteem.

So what does he mean by humiliation?

For years, I have been fascinated by the colorful play on words that are part of the second creation story … a play on words that has found its way into the English-speaking world. When first hear of God stooping down into the dirt to form the first human … literally a “man” … God breathes life into this man.

The name is given: Adam … derived from the Hebrew אדם (‘adam) who was created from the earth by God. Here we discover a play on words. The Hebrew אֲדָמָה (‘adamah) meaning “earth”) is that from which we have Adam. Eve then is fashioned of the same DNA in a later (somewhat humorous) part of the story as the companion because, as we are told, it is not good for us to be alone … we are created for community.

The English picks up on the same word play as we talk about what it means to be humans who have an intimate relationship with humus (dirt … our Mother Earth), and the means of arriving there is humility … or perhaps even humiliation.

So again, we come back to Fr. Rohr and his prayer for one humiliation each day. Humiliation is that which drives us into the ground … it feels like rubbing our faces in the dirt. But this is where I think it takes a turn perhaps more for those in places of privilege and power. As I white, middle-income, cisgendered, heterosexual male … oh, American … and Texan (can’t forget those qualifiers) … I am in a place well above the dirt. There are many marginalized people who all too easily are humiliated on a daily basis. Those on the tallest pedestal risk the greatest fall.

This isn’t something to brag about. It is from this place that I find it easy to disconnect from God … and disconnect from own humanity. In The Universal Christ, Fr. Rohr quotes Carl Gustav Jung. In his later years, one of Jung’s students read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he asked Jung, “What has your pilgrimage really been?” Jung answered: “In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.”

What we are talking about here in no way gives us permission to humiliate, marginalize, or harm others. What we are talking about here is how we use our own brokenness … our humiliation … as a journey to our most authentic humanity.

The flow is from humiliation to humility to humanity. That is perhaps the best way to talk about our journey in this season of Lent. It is about letting ourselves experience even our humiliation in a new way … by embracing it … in hopes that it will teach what true humility is all about.

As we then discover the gift of humility … confronting the fact that “we are dust and to dust we shall return” (remember Ash Wednesday) … we are a short step away from our most authentic humanity.

And if I remember correctly, it is the authentic human that God first created and with whom God seeks to be in relationship. This is finally the journey that takes us from shame and humiliation to the place where we experience this God of our salvation who is seeking only the most authentic you!

God of our Salvation: May we follow you on the path that leads us to our own humanity and to the great possible connection to your heart of grace! Amen.

Covenant as the Practice of Presence

In the primeval story of the Israelites (found in Genesis 1-11), Noah has taken the animals and his family into the ark to avoid the massive flood that was overtaking a world of evil. As they finally found land, we then hear the story of God establishing a covenant never to destroy the earth with such a devastating flood and marked that covenant with a bow in the clouds … the symbol of our rainbow.

While we get caught up in the debate of how different this image of a judgmental God is from a God of grace, I want to look at the image of covenant as expressed here. This is God who rides out the storm with those who suffer. As we have experienced these winter storms during the middle of a pandemic, there is much scientific evidence to suggest that this is the judgment on humanity for the ways we have abused our planet and created the perfect storm for both global warming and the easy spread of viruses between species as we have continually taken over natural habitats for our non-human cohabitants of planet Earth.

This has felt like judgment, yet it is also that space where I encounter the covenant with God. It is a reminder that God will be with us no matter what we face, and it comes with a reminder of our responsibility in this covenant, as well.

This covenant God is the one who meets the Israelites at the mountain where the law is given. This covenant God is whom we meet in the person of Jesus, who reminds us of this new covenant (as we say in our communion liturgy) given to us in the very blood of Jesus. It is a promise of presence even as we stand in the place of death.

As we think about our brokenness in Lent, I am reminded of two key points here:

First, we have a God who loves us enough to be with us whether we suffer unforeseen natural disasters or the consequences of human sin. This is the God whom we have proclaimed during our Christmas celebrations as “Emmanuel” … God who is with us.

Second (and just as important), Lent is a season of repentance where we reflect on our side of the covenant relationship. For Israel, the covenant that comes in the law is that God will be our God and we will be the people of God. For the followers of The Way (the earliest Christians), the covenant comes with a reminder that Jesus calls us to repent … to turn towards God … to use this time to refocus our hearts.

As we experience the brokenness and hardships of unrelenting winter storms in the midst of a pandemic, we are invited to use this as a time of reflection. What is it that the brokenness reveals about us? How do we experience God’s presence? How are we then called to repent? How are we called to practice presence with one another?

God comes as a covenant God who will not leave us alone, no matter what we face. This is now our opportunity to turn our hearts toward God.

Lord, whose presence is made known through your covenant love: May we sense your abiding presence. May we hear you calling us into a deeper covenant relationship that comes from repentance and an ever-turning of our hearts to your purpose. May we hear you calling to practice a new presence … a solidarity … with everyone and everything in your creation. Amen.

It was a colleague of mine who taught me of a different way to think about brokenness. His was an experience of the particular sort of viciousness that can easily take root in the church. He knew the church was an emotional system, and he was fully aware that we, the people who comprise the church, do not always reflect the Christ whom we serve.

The people in that particular church were ruthless. In their quest to be both in power and to be right, he was just cannon fodder. Ultimately, his ministry was terminally damaged, and he decided that God would never call people to this kind of abuse.

As we talked, he began to share what he had learned about brokenness. He then shared the greatest insight: “Jeff, I hope you grow to understand the difference between being broken apart and broken open. I couldn’t stop what was happening in the church, but I finally awoke to the fact that I did have a choice as to how I faced it. It could either annihilate me or it could reveal something within me that was good and beautiful.”

I would come to experience my own brokenness. Brokenness became a theme for my ministry, and ultimately, it became, as I have written elsewhere, the foundational theme of my doctoral work. When we experience brokenness, we have a choice as to how we will encounter the brokenness. Will it be our undoing? Or will it reveal something good and beautiful within us?

As we take our first steps into Lent, we do so with an awareness of just how much brokenness surrounds us. We have lived a year with the COVID-19 pandemic. We have now spent days contending with rolling blackouts, sub-zero temperatures accompanying days of ice and snow, and mounting frustration at our state leaders who cannot adequately answer for our lack of preparedness.

We enter this Lent so fully aware of how racism and white privilege continue to define our politics at all levels of government … how racism and white privilege is lived out in systemic ways even in the life of the church.

We come to Lent experiencing a brokenness unlike we have experienced before.

What I have learned here, however, is that we are called to sit with our brokenness. Embrace the brokenness. Let it bring us to that liminal space where we intuit that there is something just beyond the brokenness, but we know that the way to wholeness does not permit us to deny or dilute the brokenness.

Today, it is ours to ponder. And with my friend, maybe the best question for us to ask is: “Will it be that which breaks us apart or will it be that which breaks us open?”

Lord, we come to you as one who knows us inside and out. You know the beauty that exists in each of us. May we embrace our brokenness in a way that reveals that beauty and goodness to us. Amen.

“What are you giving up for Lent?” That’s the question a good friend of mine always asks me. This year, I offered my usual glib response that “I am giving up ‘giving up things for Lent’ for Lent.” Because she is a faithful friend, she has not yet given up on me, and she won’t ever let me get away with glib responses.

So the question lingers. What is it that I am giving up?

Lent, this year, comes a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, and as if to add insult to injury, we find ourselves in what can only be called the “Snowpocalypse of 2021.” I write this in a rapidly cooling house with no electricity (this will be published when the power is back on), We must boil any water we do get from the faucet. I’m still recovering from back surgery, which then leads to its own level of hilarity when the power goes off on my powered recliner in a fully reclined position … with me in it … requiring a two person team to get me on my feet.

It is so easy to complain, but I am reminded that I only complain from a place of privilege. Lent this year is hard for me because it has forced me to realize how I am prone to operate out of a position of privilege and power.

In owning up to the privilege and inherent self-confidence that was part of my own upbringing, I am awakened to the reality that I have always been taught to start from the place of power and privilege. One of the poems of my childhood was Invictus by William Ernest Henley. The last verse of the poem tells it all:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Much of my life, I have lived with the notion that I am the master of my fate … the captain of my soul.

Then death makes an unexpected visit … a pandemic surges out of control … our divisive, rhetoric-filled world explodes in violence. It feels as if my head is spinning as the truth confronts me with its message: You are not in control.

As I shared these thoughts with my daughter, she made the comment that speaks to where my heart is. She said, “When I move into a minimalist space, that is where I meet God.”

Yes. Yes, it is!

The primary theme in my life … my opus … is founded upon the simplest phrase: “Let go, and let God.” The art of letting go for this Enneagram 7 … and very Type A … personality of mine requires considerable work. It asks of me that I stop struggling and live with the assurance offered us by Christ.

In Matthew 6 (an often used text for Ash Wednesday), Jesus challenges us to practice a level of humility that doesn’t come easily for us. He challenges us not to let our right hand know what our left hand is doing. He challenges us to give generously, to pray earnestly, to fast in private, and to let this be about how we connect with God and our world from the place of weakness and powerlessness.

My back surgery was 1 February, and as I found myself moving onto the operating table with the first shot in my IV taking hold, I uttered the simplest prayer: “Lord, I’m giving myself to you. I will be me, and I am confident that … in my release … in my letting go … you will be God.”

It is finally about acting out our death. Had we been able to be together for this Lent, we would be receiving the mark of the cross in ashes. As they are given, they are given with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

It begins with the place of weakness. A place where we finally can’t fully defeat the virus … we can’t control the weather … we have no guarantee of another day … a place where death itself is our final act of letting go.

The good news, friends, is that, when we move to that place where we realize we are no longer in control, it is there that we meet God.

I think Paul had it right: We are sown in weakness, and we are raised with Christ in power. (1 Corinthians 15:43)

So I am giving up control for Lent. I am actively creating space for people whose voices are often unheard. I am practicing silence instead of speaking. I am listening for God to speak hope in our world. I am practicing vulnerability and community.

As Lent begins, I invite you to join me on this journey that utilizes our weakness and powerlessness as our starting place. To my friend, I have decided what I am giving up. I am giving up myself.

It was in the opening minutes of the Zoom meeting of my worship planning team yesterday, January 6, when it started. We have a group text set up between my wife, two grown children, and daughter-in-law … and it lit up. Not with one or two texts, but with no less than fifteen texts. I saw pictures popping up in the text thread, and I knew it was something big. I finally had to say to my team that I needed to take a minute to see what was happening.

I was grief-stricken as I saw the images and read the texts. I looked back at the team to tell them what I was seeing. It was the lawless mob breaking into the US Capitol grounds demanding that their presidential candidate had won. In an instant, I felt the rush of anger, fear, and sadness that combined into one river flowing through both the conscious and subconscious parts of my being.

The prayer as we opened at the beginning of the meeting was for God to somehow be present in the midst of the anger, fear, and hate that was driving the crowd to breach the US Capitol Building.

Following the meeting, I was so overwhelmed by what I was seeing that I began to cry and pray. As I did, I remembered something we had used in the past couple years at Wellspring as we emphasized our inclusiveness … speaking out about racism. It was an affirmation that came as a gift to us from a group in Georgetown known as Courageous Conversations, which invites us to deeper conversations about racism and prejudice. The affirmation itself is based on words spoken or written by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I searched my computer and found it. I used it as my prayer, and then Jim Deuser, one of the leaders of Courageous Conversations, later sent out an email that had the same thing in it.

I share it here in hopes that it might touch us all with an even more expansive meaning today.

An Affirmation of Faith
Based on the Words of
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I refuse to believe that we are unable
to influence the events which surround us.

I refuse to believe that we are so bound to racism and war,
that peace, brotherhood, and sisterhood are not possible.

I believe that there is an urgent need for people
to overcome oppression and violence,
without resorting to violence and oppression.

I believe that we need to discover a way to live together in peace,
a way which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. 
The foundation of this way is love.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the
final word in reality.  I believe that right temporarily
defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

I believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day
for their bodies, education and culture for their minds,
and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.

I believe that what self-centered people have torn down,
other-centered people can build up.

By the goodness of God at work within people,
I believe that brokenness can be healed,
“And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and everyone
will sit under their own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.”

Friends, let’s be people of prayer and people who resolve to speak a word of peace and love as we nonviolently resist a world based on fear and hate. Let peace and love be our anthem.

Hope in the Age of Darkness: Gifts of the Incarnation

John 1:1-5

Merry Christmas!

Today is a day of hope and light! It is the day we celebrate the birth of Christ … the light of hope in a year marked by pandemic, racism, divisive rhetoric, hatred, and darkness. Our proclamation, in the face of all these things, is that today Christ is born. God’s presence has been made known to us in the life of this child born of poverty, sleeping in a trough meant for animals … yet embodying God who has chosen live among us.

We celebrate Jesus as the Word made flesh.

This year has taught us about waiting and longing. We are awaiting a day when it feels safer to engage with our friends and larger family. We are longing to be able to shake hands and hug one another. Sometimes it is a very lonely feeling.

But today! Today we recall that, no matter how alone we might feel … no matter what darkness we might be facing … Jesus Christ is born.

This is none other than Emmanuel … God. Who. Is. With. Us!

Lord God who is incarnate in Jesus and who abides in us: We celebrate your birth and the indescribable gift of your abiding presence. Amen.

Hope in the Age of Darkness: Gifts of the Incarnation

Isaiah 9:2-7

In this poem from Isaiah 9, we are given this prophetic hope of the One on whom all the authority of God rests. It is of the one who is named “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Then we are told that “his authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace.”

John Denver was an idol of mine through my high school and college years. In adulthood, I followed his career, I have played and sung his music through the years, and I even have a collection of his entire work. I grieved his untimely death, and I am still amazed at the gems I continue to discover amidst his work.

One of those gems I discovered just a few years ago was this poem, which I now offer here. It is an original from the late singer, songwriter, and poet … John Denver … and may it be a poem that moves us in this time of darkness and fear to the place of peace.

The Peace Poem
by John Denver

There’s a name for war and killing
there’s a name for giving in
then you know another answer.
For me the name is sin

But there’s still time to turn around
and make all hatred cease
and give another name to living
and we could call it peace

And peace would be the road we walk
each step along the way
and peace would be the way we work
and peace the way we play

And in all we see that’s different
and in all the things we know
peace would be the way we look
and peace the way we grow

There’s a name for separation
there’s a name for first and last
when it’s all for us or nothing.
For me the name is past

But there’s still time to turn around
and make all hatred cease
and give a name to all the future
and we could call it peace

And if peace is what we pray for
and peace is what we give
then peace will be the way we are
and peace the way we live

Yes, there still is time to turn around
and make all hatred cease
and give another name to living
and we can call it peace.

This is our Christmas Eve prayer, O Lord. Amen.