easter | most hopeful

Mar 27 2016

on, poems, Prayers, the calendar, what they are teaching me

Easter Monday

Easter Sunday feels both impossible and a little too easy.

To claim impossible things hours upon hours across the globe as the meridian moves in single-hour increments.

Bombs. Easter egg hunts. Incense.

We celebrate ridiculous hope one time zone after another;
That’s what we do on Easter Sunday.

And then comes the Monday after Easter.
Easter Monday.
We return to our jobs
where we are in trouble for questioning the reasoning,
and caught between our ideas of Easter Sunday and bottom-line Friday.
And we make our choices.

And then comes the Monday after Easter.
Easter Monday.
We return to our churches
where we are in trouble for questioning the lessons and the allegiances,
and caught between character and piety and donor-approval.
And we make our choices.

And then comes the Monday after Easter.
Easter Monday.
We return to our neighborhoods
where we are pushed to hate and discriminate for the sake of something…
and caught between partisan and party and allegiance.
And we make our choices.

Easter Sunday is as holy
and easy
and gutless as
Christmas Sunday.

Unless we decide that somehow
ultimately
Easter changes everything.
And the Monday after Easter
is going to make us different
in all the ways
we hoped to secretly stay buried in
the tidiness
of our own racist and pious histories.

But Easter Monday means we crash into our
jobs
and our
churches
and our
neighborhoods
uncomfortably different than we left them.

And once we notice where we are,
we ask ourselves,
What about Easter Tuesday…

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Tagged choice, choices, church, decisions, easter, easter monday, easter sunday, easter week, egg hunts, God, hope, jesus, jobs, work

Apr 21 2014

Leave a comment

on, the calendar

EASTER | we mistake him for the gardener

It’s comforting, really.
When retelling and rehearing the stories
of those before us
misunderstanding death
misunderstanding loss
misunderstanding power and popularity
misunderstanding endings
misunderstanding, seeing a gardener instead of
the dead man we put all our hopes in
the dead man we put all our hurts in
the dead man we put all our
proverbial eggs in the basket of
and then watched it all end.

But the story is still the same today as it was then.
When we think the story is over
When we think we’ve held our breath as long as we can
When we think we waited till the last minute for something
to crash in and save the day….

It’s then that we give up.
It’s then that we give in.
It’s then that we unclench our jaws
and our guts
and our lungs
and our hopes
and surrender to what is coming true
whether we anticipated it or not.

and it’s only then,
like it’s only on Easter morning,
that the impossible becomes true.

All the rules change.
All bets are off.
Life is death.
Humility is power.
Poverty is wealth.
Kingdom comes. Unexpected. Unrehearsed.

And we mistake him for the gardener.
Because we know better than to think people come back to life.
Or do we.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Tagged easter, gardener, good friday, hope, jesus, raised to life, ressurection

Apr 06 2013

Leave a comment

grief and trauma, on, poems, the calendar

things regarded as dead

I woke up Easter morning to find an email from a friend that only read:

“Today may you start seeing God’s resurrection of things regarded as dead.”

One week later, I’m not sure in what ways I’m starting to see the resurrection of things regarded as dead.

I let a lady check out in front of me today at the store, and she replied that chivalry might not be dead.

Another lady at another store had to ask me a million different questions and try to sell me on a million different offers during the checkout process. I thought nothing of it all until she leaned over the register and said, “thanks, at least, for being nice about all this, young man.”

I went to the funeral today of a good friend’s father who got sudden news of serious cancer, and within weeks, goodbyes were said and tearful thanks given for the notion that the end of life might not actually be an end at all. As much as it still hurts like hell, of course.

And so I wonder, one week after Easter, what it means to begin seeing God’s resurrection of things regarded as dead.

Chivalry.
Kindness.
The lost life of a father.

What about hope that good can overcome evil?
That generosity can overcome greedy anxiety?
That humility beats out power and success and ambition?
That justice can break its way into dark injustices?
That forgiveness is stronger than any force of revenge and retaliation.
That families can come together, no matter how they’ve wrestled apart.
That marriages can make it.
That children can make it to adulthood.
That adults can remember the joy of childhood.
That abundance can make its way to those living in great scarcity.
Abundance and scarcity of money, identity, understanding and freedom.

We don’t build our church buildings next to our graveyards anymore, and we’ve likely forgotten altogether the resurrection we’ve been counting on as a ragtag group of women and men and liars and lovers all these years.

We’ve also likely forgotten that things we’ve already written off and sealed up and buried deep as dead impossibilities are waiting, one week after Easter as much as easter morning itself, for the resurrection.

Hope, generosity, justice, families, marriages, children, adults, abundance, scarcity and equality, identity, understanding and freedom.

Chivalry isn’t dead.

Neither is the hope, and therefore the prayer, that God’s kingdom come, and his will be done, on the earth this week after Easter Sunday, as it is in heaven.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged death, easter, forgiveness, healing, Health, hope, hopeless, justice, life, resurrection, Resurrection of Jesus, things regarded as dead

Mar 29 2013

3 Comments

Uncategorized

if you know these things…

If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. + John 13. 17

I remember last year sitting in a Maundy Thursday foot washing service. We were at a Methodist church in my neighborhood sharing the duties for a night of Room in the Inn, an emergency shelter program that houses our community’s homeless in churches across the city every night of the year.

I watched a friend of mine who grew up with my grandfather wash the feet of the adopted child of good friends of man. An old man hunches over to wash the feet of a young man who has become a part of a family I care a great deal about. I remember sitting in that room of the sanctuary off of Forest watching my grandfather’s high school classmate wash the feet of my friends’ adopted son. I was sitting in the pews next to our homeless guests who had decided to join us.

Something felt very surreal and very holy.

Tonight, one year later, I found myself sitting in a Maundy Thursday service at the church I have called home for the last several months. I had my feet washed by a very good friend, and found myself remembering one year ago and the ragtag company and heavenly connections that found themselves mixed together in that sanctuary dimly lit observing that evening where that last supper was had in that upper room.

And I know, more than anything, that there is something very serious about this ancient practice that really makes no sense. Water poured over my feet tonight and poured over the feet of the son of friends one year ago by a classmate of my grandfather whom I miss deeply.

And there is some connection with the water and the flesh and the candlelight of what it means to lean into some way of life that makes no sense, and yet not leaning into makes even less sense when we still ourselves to try to evaluate it. And I watch online as friends ands acquaintances wait for pastors and priests and authors to tell them how to draw lines and what to think and where to make a stand on issues of politics and moral legislation.

And I wonder what it would mean to hear men and women push, more than anything, to follow Christ into the practice of washing the feet of those who will betray us, those who will deny us, those who will hurt us and embarrass us. There is a sense of fake honor in standing up against those who disagree with us, but there is a sense of real humility in washing the feet of those we desperately want to join us int he journey in the dark. this journey in the dark that we hope, Lord help us, is a journey toward the light.

To know is one thing. To wash the feet of another is wholly other. To humble ourselves and serve others in our own awkwardness and powerlessness is wholly other. We can know a great deal, or think we know a great deal, about what it means to follow Christ, but to actually do it is wholly other.

Beware those who announce they are doing the hard thing by drawing lines in the sand. And pay careful attention to those who say little and wash feet much.

To know is not to be blessed.

If you know these things, and do them, you are blessed.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Tagged answers, Christ, dignity, easter, Foot washing, Holy Week, Homelessness, honor, hoping, humility, jesus, Last Supper, Maundy Thursday, Pastor, Religion and Spirituality, service, waiting

Apr 08 2012

Leave a comment

on, the calendar

resurrection and the third way

It’s not even that we are being foolish to assume that one of two options is all we have to hope for, or if we’re lucky, all we have to choose from. We can feel the tension building as the story climbs to the cross, and if we didn’t know better, which of course we do know better, we would be hoping that they would change their minds and let him down. Or at least he would finally decide to call some winged agents in to take him down so he could find his place of importance on the throne.

We think it is only that, now, or death.

And death is final.

So we can’t blame the ladies for waking up the next day and taking the spices and oils they had worked on the night before as their tears feel into the mix. There were two ways, death or something spectacular there on the cross, and death is the way that won. So they head there prepared to prepare his body.

And that’s when we all learned for the first time, of many times by now, that there are more than two ways of being and moving forward in this world.

That empty gravesite sits for us now as a reminder of our calling to follow Christ into the kingdom of the third way, the kingdom of impossibility, the kingdom of breathing new life into dying things, the kingdom of defeating death, the kingdom of upside-down conclusions to right-side-up stories.

With the poor.
With the lonely.
With the addicted.
With the greedy.
With the grieving.
With the marginalized.
With the marginalizers.
With the hopeless.

With those of us who have resigned to the fact that all is lost, so we prepare to bury our hopes and dreams for a new life and a new kind of world.

Welcome, today, in light of the resurrection, to the kingdom of upside-down conclusions to the stories we find ourselves in.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.
On Easter