"Lay It Down" by Jay Smith

These are the lyrics to the song Jay wrote and performed in worship Sunday night. Absolutely beautiful.

Lay It Down

John. I'm tired and I'm afraid 

I'm sure of the plans I've made,

but I can't sleep.

 

For I know, that tomorrow brings the night.

So let's wait for the sun to rise,

It's the last for me.

 

I'll lay it down.

 

I fear. I fear for the things you'll see,

What they will do to me.

Or will you be there?

 

I'm scared. For the pain it will split my bones.

and the burden is mine alone.

It's a lot to bear.

 

I'll lay it down. I'll lay it down.

I'll lay my head down.

Down on you.

 

I've been loved, but this time I will not be.

When friends become enemies.

I may be tough.

 

But I'll hang, and I look down upon the crowd.

I'll cry inside and cry out loud.

I may give up.

 

So I'll lay it down. I'll lay it down.

I'll lay my head down.

Down on you.

Down on you.

Down on you.

The Incompleteness of Life

by David Bissette

We are all on a journey of growth and healing, and most of us, as we travel along, struggle to engage in various activities that can help us to make progress along the way. 

Several years ago a woman spoke to me whose life had included a near-death experience. She described it as an overwhelming, life-altering experience of feeling forgiven, healed, and whole. There was a lot of content to her experience, including an experience of God, but the main result was that from that point forward in her life she lost all fear of death. She began to view death as the ultimate healing experience. In fact, since then she has spent much of her life offering comfort and hope to those facing death, actually being with over 500 adults--and children--as they have died. 

I believe the lesson she learned is a true one. Death is a time of transition from the incompleteness of this life to the overwhelming healing and wholeness of the next. We are all aware of the inevitabile arrival of that day, and we anticipate it with our own mixture of emotions. 

However, in the meantime we continue on our journey, and it's hard at times. While life offers much in the way of adventure and thrill, it also contains challenges that go on and on without change. And our hearts ache as a result.

Growth and healing in this life is always incomplete. In fact, even during the time of Christ, no matter how much healing was intended by God to happen, there was never going to be enough for everyone, even then. 

There must have been people who couldn't get to Him. Some of them probably had friends or family who were healed, while they unable to get close enough to the Master for it to happen for them. One lucky guy had friends who let him down through a roof. 

Heartache is a reality of life. Some of us are born into circumstances that virtually guarantee significant heartache in our lives. In fact, we all carry at least some heartache within our bodies, no matter how much we try to numb the sensation of it. 

What do I believe about all this?

First, that we can be whole in our souls--now. I also believe that we have no idea how much blessing can come our way even now. There are lots of good things and miraculous things that can happen now. We can always grow more, and we can always be healed more--even now. 

That can help a lot. We can even become grateful for some of our difficulties because of the gifts they have given us. 

However, most of us continue to have some source of significant pain that is difficult to endure. 

What does God do? Ultimately, I believe God joins us as a companion in our difficulty. 

The concentration camp guard asked the Jewish man working in a trench, "Where is your God now?" The man answered, "Down here with me, shoveling your mud."

If there is anything we can learn from the death of Jesus of Nazareth, it is that God is not above (or too good for) suffering. God joins us in our present day circumstances and feels much of what we feel. 

We also need to join others in their suffering and let them join us in ours. There is a joy that comes from joining in the suffering of others. It's like sitting with a friend through their detention back in high school. 

I don't believe that God looks down on horrific pain and thinks, "What shade of pain do I want to paint with today?" I think He looks down and is horrified..and promptly begins to work for good in what is happening. Yes, God allows all that happens, but much suffering is impersonal in it's causes, and I think God allows it in agony at times. After all, God is our parent.

Whatever God is doing, it MUST be stunning. NO parent would allow the events to occur that happen to us without being compelled to do so by extraordinary reasons. 

My belief about Jesus walking up to Lazarus's tomb was that sadness had been building in him for a while, and He was overcome as he broke down and cried. Yes, he was overcome with emotion, and it spilled forth from His eyes, His face, and His body. 

The Bible is clear that there is waiting involved in life...and heartache. We can relieve much of it, and we should. But much of it will continue, and it hurts. (And, you know, there is no reason to believe that God has cried only once.) 

Unlike Christians of previous generations, modern Christians tend to have no theology of heartache...but we need one. Don't assume that some ongoing suffering is because of something you have done. Much of it is simply inherent in life. And though heartache and the incompleteness of life are presently our companions, we do not need to harden our hearts against them. If we open our hearts to ALL of life, the companionship of God and of one another can keep them in their place until that blessed day when we are no longer forced to carry them with us. 

Be active in growth and healing...that is important. But also know that all healing is going to be partial in some way for right now. And, in the midst of all that is bad, and good, there is hope. After all, the best is yet to come...of that we can be sure.

Advent: Peace in our body’s unrest

From Joey Tomassoni: 

“After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst”.  A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth.”  John 19:28

There are a few foundational impulses that are embedded in the core of our existence, perhaps one of the most pointed and ever looming motivational needs is to be at peace.  Deep in our psyche we know all too well that our bodies are not completely stable or if they are, we at least know we don’t have control over that stability.  

And whether it takes form in what we might call aging, malfunctioning, hurting and hurting others, lacking control, being wounded, intolerant, not loving, hating, cutting, sinning or doing wrong; we carry around in our bodies a sense of incompleteness.  There is a continual grinding in our existence that longs to feel secure, to be in control, to be at peace. And in the context of this need there is a great paradox that lives within our bodies: a sense that we are both material and immaterial, of this world and of another, lacking and yet complete, physical and metaphysical, asleep and awake, dead and alive, dry and wet.

We sense this intrinsically as we mourn the loss of a loved one, when we feel the joy of holding a new one, as we weep and as we laugh there is something happening in or through us that signals something beyond.  Our temporal existence is a foretaste of a distant land, a land where suffering isn’t present, where confusion doesn’t occur, where the things, those limiting things we can never seem to escape in this world are vanquished.  

This is why so many tribes and peoples throughout the history have sought after that distant immaterial land where the good things they experience here go one with infinite magnitude and where the hurting things in our present forms, bodies stop at the threshold of the veil.  The veil, yes the veil, that transcendent space between here and there now and forever, this body and the one to come, the lighted tunnel, the darkness of abyss, the nothingness, the everythingness, that translucent and milky invisioscreen that is untouchable, intangible and never sensed until that moment, that twinkling of an eye, that rescue the day we will be gone, done, removed, free. The veil they say, that is the entry point, that is the place of destiny, that is the space that we will inhabit when our flesh begins rotting back to the earth and no one any longer remembers us.  

How we long to escape, how we yearn for a different place, torn between the reality that we are both body and spirit, how interesting it is that we all want to leave, to go home, to go to the place of ultimate comfort and happiness, our destination island, this why fantasy experiences exist whether it be football, second life or virtual sex.  How can we cope with our bodies but with different drugs, drugs that distract for a moment while we dream of peace.  In fact we are all journeying drug addicts seeking our out through various narcotics.  Narcotics that promise peace but return unrest.  To the moralist the drug is religion to the immoral the drug is autonomy, to the prophet the desired drug is to be hated, to the performer it is to be loved, to the dead the drug is to be alive and to one who is not at rest the drug is the desire for peace.  

Peace in and with our bodies is rare thing.  Perhaps this is because we are at the same time both aware and completely oblivious to our level of unrest.  My breathing changes when I am anxious, I take deep breaths of inhaled fear.  My two-year-old son’s palms perspirate when he comes into a room of strangers, he feels insecure, our bodies express the unrest in our souls.  Laying in my bed in the early morning I am struck with anxiety when I hear my children crying in the next room over.  I sink into my mattress to consider the daunting tasks of the day ahead.  Sometime getting out of bed is the first and most difficult task.  

When I am cut off in traffic, when I get a phone call from a certain person, when I drive through a certain neighborhood, when I enter into a certain store, when I remember a certain church or religious group, it all triggers unrest; when I see a certain person, when I hear their voice, when I smell their scent, it unleashes a quiet desperation screaming in my soul and yet my body only responds with the minimal response on the surface.  We are so unaware of ourselves, our bodies and the very real things happening under the surface, behind our own veils.  

For we are skilled at maintaining the surface of things in pristine ways.  We are able to carefully craft language both with words and our bodies that communicate we are at peace when really inside we are a raging storm.  How are things? We say, Good, how are you? Good, Good, Good, Good, Good, everything is just good. And both leave knowing we have lied to each others face.  We are trained from a very early age to behave in ways that will bear certain results.  My daughter hones her good behavior so she can get a piece of candy.  We leverage human desire (a foundational jewel of the created soul) to obtain good works.  We trade one evil for another.  You ought to tell the truth, why, because if you don’t you will be punished.  And so we learn not to tell the truth because we love the truth, but only because in sharing the truth we won’t ultimately receive what we fear.  Is it any wonder that through our bodily experience we lack a regular peace and at the very same time desperately desire to find it by any means possible? 

But it not true of the suffering servant, the Christ, the divine body incarnated.  With him something different was happening all together, in his moment of ultimate unrest, hanging from two planks of wood a tree height above, looking down on those who had done this thing to him. His heart beating in chaotic rhythms, perhaps stopping at any moment, draped, bleeding, mocked, and yet there he was, he just was. This is difficult and perhaps irreconcilable within the human capacity to grasp and understand. The immaterial God in the form of a material man, suspended in desperate dissemination and then speaking these two very ordinary words, that when put together, in a moment like this, echo in our collective conscious a primitive longing that we all get:, we all understand: “I Thirst”, he said “I thirst”, he said “I thirst”.  In his words we find for him and for ourselves cathartic moments, peace in our bodies through a time of unrest of suffering.

It is in our bodies, our human experience we are able to find identification with Jesus words “I Thirst”.  For both the tragedy and beauty of his moment of unrest is that Jesus thirst was not quenched by the sour wine, it only made it worse.  Neither was his thirst quenched by some deliverance from heaven, a divine rainstorm or a supernatural event that would take him off the cross like a superhero to slay the evil people who had committed such a wicked act.  He simply dies, alone he suffers, and accepts the weight on his body with no deliverance in his utter unrest.  The void was not filled, his thirst was not quenched, Jesus never received the kind of peace one might expect in the story, a relief or a filling of the void rather he received his death.  Accepting and relinquishing control he inhabited the unrest and there found a different way of peace.

But even this moment was not new to him for he had suffered both internally and externally never experiencing a life of ease.  In his birth and childhood he was an exile, into his adulthood he was accused of being a drunkard and a hypocrite by the religious.  He was homeless, restless, chased after, attempts made on his life, lied to, lied about, saw his close friends die, his best friends betray him. He was spit upon, mocked, cursed, hated, held a prisoner while a convicted murderer was released before his eyes, he wept, hurt, lived at moments in exhaustion, had no place to lay his head, no certain food to eat, few friends who would be loyal to the end and ultimately was murdered for a crime he was innocent of.  His life was never one of comfortabilty. 

Many years later a friend who journeyed with Jesus through his life, who experienced many his sufferings first hand writes a letter to encourage a small fledgling community of faith that was in a time of suffering themselves.  He pens these riveting words describing this thirsting moment of the Christ.   His friend writes:

“He himself bore our inadequacies in his body on the tree, so that we might die to our damaging ways and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed”.  2 Peter 2:24

There is something in his moment of suffering, in the actual physical wounds that he carried that we somehow, even so many years later are able to identify with.  Perhaps it is because our lives have been filled with wounds, filled with hurt, filled with unrest.  And maybe part of it is that we know what it means to be mocked, we understand what it means to be not live at ease.  Our bodies can identify with his body, our anxieties, our fears, our voids are very real and very much like his.  It is identifying with him that we, through our times of unrest are able to embody a different way of peace, not one that fills a void and takes away the pain but one that exists in spite of it. It is a peace that experiences and feels the heaviness of the unrest, the suffering and yet transcends.  

We are awakened to this different way of peace that embodies the suffering, letting go and being ok with the present circumstance, whatever it may be.  The question in our moments of unrest is not “where is God when I suffer?” but perhaps better would be to say: God is present, suffering with me as I suffer, the question is whether or not I will allow myself to experience Him in that moment as I did the moment before when things seemed ok.  For what kind of a God is only present when things are good but flees when we hurt?   There is no lesson to be learned here, no end goal in mind, no morality tutorial to be charged with, simply being and accepting.  As he was, just was, so we are, we just are.  His wounds were not bandaged that day, they were not miraculously healed on the cross, like his thirst the pain was not quenched yet mysteriously through the wounds on his body we find a different way of peace with God, one beyond the unrest we suffer. 

So what is the unrest in your heart?

What is that thing that causes your blood pressure to rise?

Who is that person that causes you anxiety?

What is the fear that lurks in your heart subconsciously and deteriorates your thinking through the day?

What are you desperately attempting to control that is uncontrollable?

What drug are you using to fill the void?  What narcotic to take away the pain?

What hurt are you carrying from long ago that has weighed down your journey?

What are you consuming that falsely promises to fulfill you?

And whose wounds do you identify with? Your own or those of Jesus.

Advent Week 2

From Joey Tomassoni's thoughts on Finding Strength in our Body's Limitations:

Perhaps one of the most amazing things about Jesus is that he never really wanted to go to the cross.  We read in Matthew’s account of him praying in the garden of Gethsemane before he went to the cross, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”

These are not words of a man who has it all together, but rather one who had reached his limit.  Not only was he overwhelmed by what was to come, but he was in need of others, friends to be with him, to watch over him, with him, for him. We find in this account a man who was limited, broken, overwhelmed, sorrowful; weak, even to the point of death. 

“Hear my prayer, Lord; let my cry for help come to you. Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress…For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers. My heart is blighted and withered like grass.”  Psalm 102:1-4

 Have you ever felt overwhelmed to the point that you would rather die than go on living?

"I am overwhelmed with troubles and my life draws near to death. I am counted as those who go down to the pit; I am like one without strength.”  Psalm 88:3-4

Have you been to the place where your sorrow was so great, that you felt you might just collapse and be given to the earth? 

“I am set apart with the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, who you remember no more, who are cut off from your care.”  Psalm 88:5

This was Jesus in his moment of limitation.  Or as described in Paul’s letter to a community gathering in the city of Philippi:

“Even though he was in very nature God, he did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!"

God limited himself by becoming human in form. Think about that for a moment.  The eternal, all knowing, all-powerful God of the universe made himself nothing, taking on the nature of a servant. 

Humility is about limiting ones tendency to power ahead.  It is about putting things on hold that you would desire to move on. It is about taking a posture of lowliness when others around you are attempting to stand tall. It is being weak when everyone else around you is professing to be strong.  Yet God himself decided to take this form, this flesh, this limited vessel.

Still we read;

“Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

His face pressed against the cool Jerusalem dirt, he was utterly broken and was asking for there to be a different way. He was weak to the point of death, knowing that his crucifixion was at hand.  He was broken and wanting another way out. In one of his lowliest states, his request was that he might not die. 

Jesus was made weak. He chose to limit himself.  Perhaps his weakness is about identification, his identification with us, that we might find identification with him. Perhaps part of why he made himself weak was so that we might find strength in our own limitation. 

We can only see so far,

we can only hear a limited amount of sounds,

we can only touch certain tangible textures,

we can only smell certain scents.

We can only jump so high,

we can only shout so loud,

we can only remember so much.

We can only dream so far,

we can only comfort to a certain level.

We can only grow so old,

we can only be so strong,

and we can only be so good. 

Part of our condition is fallen, having impure motives, doing things that bring about harm rather than good. We hurt others with our words, we hurt ourselves with how we treat our bodies, we hurt creation by how we are careless with our use of resources.

We are partly damaged, we have all been wounded and in the hurt that was inflicted upon us, we all too often turn and hurt others. Hurt people hurt other people, and though we don’t always intend it, we perpetuate this very real condition. 

And so we find Jesus, though not fallen--limited, relating to us, knowing our condition, being in our skin, the suffering servant in the garden of sorrow, the humble king washing his friends’ feet, continually identifying with our own weakness, our own suffering, our own limitation. 

It is in Jesus’ example and life; in his bodily experience, that we find an ever-flowing source of strength. He came to us, to relate to us, to identify with us, that in our weakness we might be made strong.    

"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the father, full of grace and truth…Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given."  John 1:14,16

Photos from The First Sunday of Advent

Birth, Photos: Rita Hadley

Dancers: Alyssa Hadley, Christiana Hadley, Nirell Hadley, Lydia Mullins, Laura Beth Gathman

Pleasure in Our Body's Goodness

From the first Sunday of our Advent series, Flesh: Anticipation of Incarnation by Joey Tomassoni:

Perhaps God himself desired to experience what we experience--the goodness (of creation) in it’s fullness.  God knew the pleasurable capacities we were created to have and God created the good things we are to enjoy. God created both the tart pomograntate and the tongue for its tasting.  He created the Northern Lights and the eyes that are in awe.  He created the Thunder and the ears to hear its roaring sound.

And as Jesus himself walked the earth he ate, he drank, he took pleasure in the goodness of the Creation. His incarnate body and its ability to sense and experience.  Consider the time when the incarnate God, Christ was anointed by a prostitute at Bethany.

It was He, after all, who in the beginning of all things created the scent of the perfume that would be broken and poured over His tired, earth covered feet, the same dirt he formed from nothing.  And he created the aroma spreading through the room that every person could sense, to some it wasn’t functional, the perfume could have been sold and given to help the poor and why this woman, after all she was bad, evil, a prostitute, a whore. 

Her body had been used for things unspeakable, a vessel of lust and receptor and transmitter of sin.  Yet to others, namely the incarnate one, the Christ, she was participating in a moment of fulfillment and perhaps, dare we say, pleasure, a scent of life in a coming death, in that moment her body was a living temple anointing, with perfume, the holy one, the humble king, the God of all who would suffer himself.  But in this moment it was the creator experiencing prophetic pleasure as part of the creation.   

For it was He who created the capacity to express sorrow and joy through tears, like those flowing from her eyes wetting his feet that day.  What does it feel like to have warm saline droplets of water poured out onto one’s feet after walking all day?  It is like being rinsed in a great summer rainstorm.  The water pouring down soaking every pore of the skin, wrinkling even toes.  All other senses are paused while his feet feel it all, her tears mixed with the perfume spreading through the dusted hairs on his calloused feet having walked to Bethany that day.

And hair, what function has hair but pure sensorial pleasure--seeing it shine and flow, allowing it to run through your fingers and brushing it close to your face to smell its fragrance--see, smell, touch.  Perhaps also to keep warm but consider the woman’s hair that day, soft and delicate strands through which a multitude of men had run their hands.  Her hair, wet with salted tears and the scents of the broken perfume vase, dancing across the feet of God every so cautiously and yet with desperation the hair spreading apart and then back together again, her head moving violently to cover his feet with her hair and to wash and wet, bonded by the substance of perfume mixed with tears and dirt. In that moment did he remember his creative act, when he delicately crafted the first woman’s hair, like silk. How he had longed to touch it and know his creation more closely and now her hair, beautiful hair touching his worn feet scorched by the Judean sun was at once bringing goodness and pleasure to a looming sorrow.

She knew sorrow and understood that her perfume, tears and hair were not enough.  How to get closer, how to share more intimately, how to convey with her body though broken as it was. Lips, yes her lips, she knew how to convey, made to love one, though grazing the mouths and bodies of many men. Her lips, soft, worn, now kissing heavy laden feet. His feet now receiving these lips of love in places where soon he would receive piercing of blood.  

God knows the goodness of the lips he created, the ability to receive and give unspoken expressions of love and at times betrayal. Now he was experiencing them in carnated form, the goodness of the creation, this small sensitive part of the body which contains so much power, so much expression, so much goodness.  Fragile portions of shortened fat covered in mucous membrane, shapes meeting together to give and receive others. 

Jesus must have felt her lips on His feet and known his creation was indeed good.  Hers were the purest of kisses she had ever given, her body expressing a new love but not like other men, for she had given herself to many men but never like this before.  Now she had given her body for the first time in full, for good undone, her entirety, created, now vulnerable before her Maker at his feet.  Though by the religious she was named a whore, her body was made pure through her identification with Him, the one who had made her body for good.  She was completed and forgiven and given new worth and he was in the same instance experiencing a moment pleasure before his cross. Pleasure before his pain, joy before his suffering. He was anointed by a holy temple that day and received from his creation grace.

And how many times did he experience this level of pleasure as he walked the earth?  Drinking good wine, tasting rich food, dipping himself in the Jordan River, hearing the sweet sounds of hymns being sung with his friends, laughing at the parties he attended, seeing the lame walk, the dead raised, telling stories of riddle and imbued with mystery, the hurting healed, the broken mended. What pleasure and goodness did he feel, what foretaste of goodness did he offer? What places did he play? These things were good, these things are good, we were made good, so very good.

In our exploration of the mystery of the incarnation we are met with this wonder, that God would craft us as good things not bad, and that he would enter into space and time in the goodness of the creation he himself created.  So through life, as we read the story God has written may we remember not to begin reading at the third chapter, may we take our seats before the preview begins, may we sit down to eat before the entrée is served, may we offer love knowing that we were crafted to experience pleasure, to live life full created good in the image of Him.