Not Invisible

If you were in church on Sunday and wondering about my absence, I was spending time with James at Camp Crestfield.  We were scheduled for the Father-Son Pioneer Camp, but that had to be cancelled due to low registration.  Not to worry, though; James and I did just fine on our own!

We took our bikes and spent Saturday morning biking at Moraine State Park, seven miles down the lake and seven miles back again.  That equals 14 miles.  I’m afraid these 41 year old legs and rump were dragging a bit behind my son’s 10 year old energy.  James – an almost daily bike rider – set the pace.  Even with the advantage of gears, I had to work to keep up with those young legs that keep on going at about the same speed, whether up hill, down hill, and on the flat stretches.

Back at camp on Saturday, we relaxed in our room in Scott Lodge – considerably cushier than the teepees we would have been sleeping in if Pioneer Camp had been a go!  Then we were back out to hike around and explore the farther reaches of the camp.  In the evening, we used my iPhone to view satellite images of the ground we had covered.  We were pretty impressed with ourselves.

For our morning devotion on Saturday, I had given us each the assignment of finding some item or scene  or two during the day that reminded us of God.  James found his in the coals burning in the campfire that night, reminding him of a story I once shared in a sermon about the importance of staying close to our church family to help us keep the embers of faith burning.

On Sunday morning, we were back at Moraine for 8 more miles of biking (ouch!) before driving home. James had another profound moment of reflection as we pedaled – apparently his mind was working as energetically as his legs.  “Dad, when I look at how huge the lake is and think about how small we are next to it, I think it’s cool that God knows we’re here.  If God didn’t know us, we’d be pretty much invisible.”

Maybe James should be preaching the sermons.

Viewed from the satellite on my phone, we would be invisible, or at least so fuzzy as to be indistinguishable from a rock, or a tree, or bench on the side of the trail.  Or, how about beyond the satellite?  Say, from one of the moons of Jupiter?  Jupiter is brightly visible in the clear summer skies, but even though it is 11 times bigger that Earth, it just looks like a star.  And you can’t see the moons with the naked eye, even though there are 63 of them.  So, from out there, we really are invisible!  And that’s a planet in our own solar system – never mind the galaxies far, far away.

But God sees us, knows us, and loves us.  The Psalmist marvels in Psalm 8, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?  Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.

Sometimes as a parent and a pastor, I wonder how much of the Christian faith is really finding its way into these souls in my circle of care.  Apparently, more than I know.  Certainly, more than I could effect of my own power.  If James can look out at the vast creation, feel his smallness, and yet feel known and loved by the Creator, there is something good is growing in his life, in his sense of self.  Somewhere along the way, the seed of faith has fallen on good soil and taken root.

As a parent and a pastor, I often feel like my legs and rump are fatigued as I try to keep up with my kids and my congregation on this path that winds in and around our lives.  What a comfort to know that God is not fatigued, but is riding on the wind at every turn, every steep climb, ever pleasant period of coasting.  The Creator is creating still, and we are the witnesses of this wonder.  The Creator loves the whole creation, down to the smallest creature.  Small we may be in the universe, but we are not invisible – we are seen and fully known.

Glory, On the Rocks

Ask the church staff, others who know me, or anyone who pays much attention in worship, and they’ll tell you, “Mike likes rocks!”  I love the way the Bible uses the imagery of rocks and stones.  The Israelites piling up rocks to signify a place where God acted to save; God as our rock and refuge; Christ saying of Peter’s confession ‘on this rock I will build my church’; Paul’s image of the church as a house constructed of living stones with Christ as the cornerstone.

Last week I was on silent retreat at Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester, Massachusetts.  The coast there is, of course, rocky!  For most of the weeks, a Nor’easter pounded the ancient, natural bulwark with wind, rain, and crashing waves – but the boulders stood firm and weathered the storm majestically.

On the last day, by which time the weather had cleared and the sun was shining gloriously, I walked out on the rocks to the ocean.  During the seven days of silence, Jesus and I had spent a lot of time together “talking,” and we were continuing a great conversation (Ignatius refers to this as “colloquy” with Christ).  As I paused and looked out across the craggy landscape, the Lord reminded me of when he said to the Pharisees “If these [my disciples] were silent, the stones would shout out!”, and “From these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham.”  I felt a sudden sense of community with the landscape, as if the rocks were gathered around me in a common experience of God’s glory.  We rejoiced together that the storm was over, and we stood in shared reflection of the sun’s warm brilliance.  As I listened to the waves breaking over the reef and splashing intermittently against smiling rock faces, I realize that this sound was not simply traveling from the water to my ears.  Every rock that lay between me and the ocean was reflecting this sound.  For a moment, nearly a minute, I was aware of the rocks singing together to the Love who created them.  The whole earth reverberated with praise.  Jesus winked at me, “Hear that?”

Simply by being what God created them to be, the rocks were giving glory to God.  The light and sound of the Creator’s love were beautifully reflected in every crack, cleft, and cranny.  Lord, may I live a life so true.

Preaching without Notes

Well, I’ve tried it twice now (this time around – I’ve tried before, at least two other times during my preaching career).  Preaching without notes!  (sigh)  What can I say?  I am promised by note-less preachers who teach classes and sell books that it will be the most liberating experience of my ministry, and that I will forge such a deeper connection with my congregation without that silly sermon manuscript getting between us.  Well, after two attempts, I can’t say I feel very liberated – mostly frustrated.  I have these things I want to say, gifts of sentences God has helped me to write, but I get all mealy-mouthed and stuttery when I try to say them from memory.  It just takes such a long time to memorize that many sentences!  And, frankly, I’d rather spend that time studying the scripture, talking to members of the congregation, reading good books, keeping up on the news, so that I actually have something worthwhile to say when I stand in the pulpit on Sunday mornings.

Some have commented on these two note-less sermons that I seemed more “down to earth” and like the sermon was more “from the heart.”  Maybe it’s true that more of my humanity comes through when I’m sweating and trembling before you trying to remember my sentences, but I’m not so sure that’s what preaching is supposed to be about.  It’s not about me – but I sure feel like it’s about me when I’m trying to “preach naked!”  One of the most telling things about the class I recently took on this kind of preaching was the comment made by the instructor on how to turn pages, if you must have them.  He advised making a large gesture with one hand while turning the page with the other – “then they won’t even notice you have notes.”  Hmmm.  Is this really what it’s all about?  Impressing the congregation?  Fooling the congregation?  I thought the point was to make a more genuine, heart-felt connection with them.

As for preaching from the heart, I can assure you that there is no other thing in my ministry into which I pour more of my heart than my words to you on Sunday morning.  Consider a passionate love letter written by a lover who lives a great distance from his beloved.  Would you say it isn’t from the heart, just because it is written down in complete sentences?  The sentences I write, the words I choose in preparing a sermon, are chosen with great care and with deep love for God and for you.

One final thing:  If you want to hear me ramble on without notes, I would suggest coming to one of the Sunday morning classes I teach.  This is usually material that I’ve taught a time or two before and I can go pretty easily without notes in the give-and-take conversation of a class.  On the other hand, when I preach a sermon I am taking the congregation with me on the front edge of my own spiritual journey, into the mist of the mystery of our faith, as we discern together where and how the Lord is leading us.  With my written sentences, which I do my very best not to “read” but to “speak,” you are getting the best of Mike Hoyt.  More than that, I hope, with a written sermon manuscript, Mike Hoyt is better able to get out of the way so the proclamation of the Word is more about a conversation between you and God.  That’s what my heart tells me a sermon is really all about!

Does Prayer Change Things? (Lent Newsletter)

One of the things that seems “right” to me about our Sunday worship, is the freedom and acceptance people feel to share their prayer concerns with the congregation.  Even in our more formal, traditional service, this is a moment of informality in which we are able to reach out and respond to one another in a more personal way.  This practice of sharing specific prayer concerns, or reasons for our joy and gratitude, shows our faith that prayer is for us more than an empty ritual.  We believe God is real, hears our prayers, and will respond.  We believe Jesus when he says, “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search and your will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Luke 11:9).

But what do our prayers really do?  Do we, by prayer, accomplish something that God wouldn’t have accomplished without us?  Without a doubt, yes!  The first thing prayer accomplishes is something inside of us.  By turning to God in prayer, as Jesus teaches us, we are doing two things: asking for God’s will to be done in all things (“thy kingdom come”), and asking to have our basic daily needs met (nourishment, forgiveness, perseverance in faith).  That is, we are acknowledging that we depend upon God for the most basic elements of human life: food, relationships, and hope!  We become stronger when we pray because we become more open to the Source of Life.

Beyond our own inner strengthening, can prayer change things beyond us?  Or is it simply magical thinking to believe that our prayers can change circumstances in the world?  To appreciate the power of prayer, we must first believe that God is real.  One spiritual teacher suggests that “the first thing we need to ask in this prayer business is whether we take God seriously.  For starters, I suggest considering that God is more real than the desk, the tree, the rain – more real than we are”¹ God is in our breathing, our heartbeats, the sound of our voices, the air between us, the bending of space that we know as gravity, the molecules that are in our body now but may be in our neighbor’s body years from now, or in a maple leaf, or the wing of a hawk.  God’s doesn’t act over-against the creation, but through it, through us.  Philosopher Xavier Zubiri says, “God’s movement is not a second movement added to my own.”  Rather to ask God’s help “is not to ask assistance from someone who is outside and whom one requests to draw near to help…[but] to ask that God intensify God’s own activity within us.”  To pray is to ask God’s life and love to “intensify” within us, and through us.²

The other thing that happens when we pray is that we become more open to working with the God.  Have you ever had moments where good things happened by “coincidence”?  I call those “holy coincidences!”  Like the day I wondered how I was going to see all the people I need to see, or do all the church business I need to do.  After a longer-than-expected cell phone call about a personnel matter (which resulted in the employment of our new custodian, Frank), I was later-than-expected in visiting Lois Cooper at Montefiore hospital.  On knocking at the door of her hospital room, I found that it wasn’t a good time to visit.  So, I decided to go down one floor and take a walk across the pedestrian bridge between the hospitals.  While meandering and enjoying the photographs of famous bridges on the wall, I heard someone behind me say “Hey, what are you doing here?”  It was one of the people I needed to see – Jane Hackett, on the way back from her blood test.  So I walked with her to her part of the hospital and caught up on situation.  After going back and visiting with Lois, I had to catch a quick and unplanned lunch in the hospital cafe in order to make it to my next appointment.  Who walks in but Corey Pacek, just the guy I needed to see to coordinate some important details for Adult Spirituality classes.  A simple coincidence?  Or an answer to prayer?

Of course, things don’t always work out this nicely.  Some prayer do seem to go unanswered.  Some of the suffering in our lives and in the world continues despite our prayers.  This is where faith comes in.  Do we believe God is real?  Do we believe God is who Jesus reveals God to be?  Then this faith leads us to trust that God is at work in ways that are hidden to us, but nonetheless live-giving.

I hope these reflections on our life of prayer will serve as invitation into the Season of Lent.  The purple colors of these 40 days remind us that we are welcome directly into the throne room of the Great and Loving Sovereign of the Universe, where we will find grace, forgiveness, and the power of new life.  Will we lose this invitation amidst the clutter of our busy lives?  Or will we do as we do with other less important matters: schedule some time in our calendars to be with God to contemplate how God is at work in our reality, and to pray that God’s life and love would intensify within us.

Yours in Christ and in prayer,

Rev. Mike

¹ Dean Brackley, SJ in The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times (New York: Crossroad, 2004) p. 226.

² Quoted in Brackley, Discernment, p. 231.

Ayudar – to help

In these first few weeks of the new year, we may be energized by a renewed sense of commitment to things that matter.  We make New Year Resolutions, refocusing our efforts to be the person we want to be, and who we believe God wants us to be.  We may feel a surge of hope that we can accomplish more than we have in the past year, live with more integrity, be more disciplined, have more courage.

This new energy is a good thing and can be harnessed to benefit ourselves and others.  But we may also set ourselves up for a frustrating crash into the wall of reality.  The problem with New Year Resolutions is that they tend to focus on what we can do, rather than on what God is doing.

I find a helpful corrective to this self-reliance in the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola (if you’ve been reading much of this blog, you’ll find no surprise in this!).  Ignatius describes his life’s work using the Spanish word ayudar, meaning “to help.”  God call us to help with the work of the kingdom, by working with Christ to serve others.  Helping others doesn’t require us to be superheroes, just available – available to work with Christ as he blesses people and situations.

This simple call to help others calls us back from the two extremes of work:  overachievement and apathy.  As overachievers, we think everything depends upon us and what we can accomplish; we also think we must create value in ourselves by what we do.  But Christ already sees and knows our value, and already wants us to serve with him.  Conversely, we are tempted to apathy when we think that nothing we do really, ultimately matters; we feel worthless, invisible.  But we are not invisible to God.  The fact that Christ sees who we are and wants us to work with him and his Father, means that we possess great, intrinsic worth.  We are always of value to Christ in any given situation, in every relationship.  We need only make ourselves available to help.

From this perspective, perhaps we don’t need any gargantuan New Year Resolutions.  Instead, let’s go for a simple New Day Resolution, or a New Moment Resolution, to find the little ways we can help Christ help others.  Ayudar.  To help.  Our calling in Christ.

Christmas Boots

Last Saturday was the Hoyt family’s annual Christmas Tree tradition.  Pile into the car.  Breakfast at Eat-n-Park.  Christmas CDs playing.  Drive through the countryside to Ski Tree Farm in Saxonburg.  Gloves on, saw in one hand, tape measure in the other, kids run up the hill with sleds in hand.  This year they learned that their sleds work almost as well on a steep slope of hard frozen grass.  We hunt for the perfect white pine – always white pines because they smell the best.

Up early that morning, as I was pulling on my boots in the basement, I felt something lumpy and pebbly down in the toes of the boots.  I took them back off, turned them over and out came the red sands and white rocks of New Mexico, left over from our mission trip back in June. I went with our church youth to Santa Fe to work with Habitat for Humanity.  While on the site we had met a few of the families who would be moving into the houses.  They were mostly single moms and their children struggling to get back on their feet.

In a mildly mystical moment, I felt the connection between my family’s excursion that morning to cut down a tree, and our missionary endeavors this past summer.  God blessed me with boots and the feet that go in them, to prepare the way for his coming.  God came as a poor child born to a mother in Bethlehem who had no decent housing in which to give birth.  And still God comes today when compassion compels us to work to provide decent housing to poor children and their mothers.

Christmas joy is more than sentimental memories of lights and greenery and bright packages, but the profound knowledge that we are participating in God’s ongoing work of redeeming the world.  Jesus is still coming today and every day.  Where are we seeking him?

Is God busy?

This morning in my reading I came across a line that seems funny to me because it is such an understatement:  “Redeeming the world involves much work.  God is a busy God.” (David Fleming, SJ)  Ya think?  I had to laugh.  I should say so!

Redeeming the world is the hardest of all work and something only God can do.  Funny how often I feel it’s my own job to make everything come out just right – relationships, work projects, budgets, my children, my sermons.  These things keep me really busy, sometimes frantically busy.  So it’s a little strange for me to think of God being busy.  That sounds like a trait of limited human beings who have more on their plates than they can handle.  But it’s quite true that God is busy, if the Bible is any indication.  God is not passive but active, creative, purposeful.  The difference between our busy-ness and God’s is that God can be busy without being frantic.  God is perfectly busy and perfectly at peace.  God is persistently busy, yet always available to us and attentive to our needs.

Fleming goes on to write “God is a busy God – active, ever-present, prodding, suggesting, inviting.  He calls us to share in the work he is doing.”

Seeing our daily efforts in the context of God’s ongoing work is a good way to keep our lives in perspective.  We can and should work hard, but at the end of the day we can rest knowing that God will keep things going.  It’s good to get tired, participating in God’s redeeming work.  Our efforts may seem small and sometimes ineffective, but they are part of a greater work.  We are free to work hard, do our part, and trust God to do what we cannot do.

Our Conversation with God

Prayer is a conversation with God.  As with any conversation, we speak and listen, give and receive, attend and are attended to.   The spiritual life is a series of conversations sustained by this one eternal conversation.

Our word “converse” is derived from the Anglo-French converser, and from Latin conversari, which orginially meant “to live with.”  In it’s archaic form it could also mean “to have acquaintance or familiarity” or “to become occupied or engaged.”  In modern usage, it means “to exchange thoughts and opinions in speech: talk; or to carry on an exchange similar to a conversation (as with a computer).” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/converse

Ignatius of Loyola based his Spiritual Exercises on this notion of conversation.  He believed we can “find God in all things.”  Every moment and experience provides the matter and context of our relationship with God.  Further, our conversation with God is helped by conversations with others who are also conversing with God; and our conversation with God leads us to engage others, to live with others, in a life-giving way.

Do you live with the expectation of meeting and conversing with God in your day?  Where have you conversed with God in the past 24 hours?  Perhaps it was a moment of grace or challenge or conviction that you didn’t recognize as God speaking until later.

Are there places or times in your day when you feel more ready and open to converse with God?  Are there situations when a brief conversation with God would give you strength or focus?

What about your interaction with others?  Has God spoken in these relationships, either to you or through you?

Attending to these many conversations, and in them the one eternal conversation, is the art of prayer and of living deeply in the Spirit.

Frantic or Fulfilled: on “being known” by God

In his book, New Seed of Contemplation, 20th century mystic Thomas Merton invites us to get behind the masks of our many false selves to discover the true self at the center of our being.  This is the self that God knows and loves.  To know ourselves as God knows us is the first step toward living an authentic life.

“God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself.  A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it.”  (New Seeds, p. 37)

For Merton, the spiritual life is about “being known” more than “knowing.”  God’s knowledge of us is what matters most.  We cannot comprehend God, but we can come to know and love ourselves as God knows and loves us.  In this way we discover who we are meant to be, and what we are meant to do.

This idea of the true self being known by God coincides with a book my wife just finished reading, The Tree Big Questions for a Frantic Family, by Patrick Lencioni.  The author asks (1) What makes your family unique? (2) What is your top priority – rallying cry – right now? (3) How do you talk about and use the answers to these questions?  http://www.tablegroup.com/books/frantic/

These are questions aimed at getting to the heart of who we are as families.  Just as with an individual, families and other groups (such as congregations) can operate as false selves, frantically diverted into every available activity.  Without a sense of who we are and what we are about, life can become fragmented so that we are going everywhere and nowhere at once.

Whether individuals, families, or congregations, the goal of the Christian spiritual life is to live into our true selves as we are known and loved by God in Jesus Christ.  To stay focused on our identity in Christ is no small matter, and it is unlikely to happen unless we make our spiritual lives a priority.  Nonchalance about prayer leaves us vulnerable to every passing fancy.  Ignorance about the Word of God leaves us without the wisdom to choose among the many voices that compete for our attention and allegiance.

Do you know who you are?  God does.  And you can discover what God knows about you.  This is the beginning of the fulfilled life.

 

Are you a phreatophyte or a xerophyte?

Or perhaps both?

This is a question about rootedness.  How are you rooted?  Phreatophytes and xerophytes are desert dwelling plants, though some xerophytes also survive in arctic conditions.  Phreatophytes are able to survive in a dry climate because their deep roots reach down into the subterranian waters in the zone of saturation.  Xerophytes are plants that survive because they have adapted to dry climates with shallow but broad root-systems, the ability to absorb water through the leaves, and large water storage capacity.

How are you rooted spiritually?  A few deep roots, or a broad variety of intake methods at the surface?  I’ve pondered which of these ways of growing spiritually may be better.  But why judge?  It works both ways for plants; maybe it’s so for people, too.

The picture at the top of this blog is one of rootedness.  At the surface, in the frozen mid-winter, these trees look like they’re barely surviving.  But in reality, their roots reach deep under the snow to where the warm water always flows.  What nourishes you in the dry or frozen times of your life?

As those who are reborn by water and the Spirit (see John 3), the question of our rootedness is of vital significance.  How are you rooted?