Mediant*
When was the last time you cried in front of someone? Did you find yourself embarrassed by your tears? Maybe even apologizing? I don’t cry—like really cry—very often these days, but a few months ago I found myself in my therapist’s office having one of those “ugly cries.” And I was mortified.
Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?
When we come up for communion and the priest says, “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven” or “The Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation,” we answer, “Amen.” At a baptism, when the priest asks, “Do you desire to be baptized?”an adult candidate for baptism answers, “I do.”
Amen. I do. They’re simple statements—words that stay on our lips for less than a second. But how often do we say them with true understanding
There’s this song my family used to listen to, called “So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt.” It’s by an Evangelical singer-songwriter from the early ‘80s, named Keith Green. It’s written in the voice of the Israelites as they trudge through the desert and complain at the beginning of our Old Testament reading today. They want to go back to Egypt—to eating leeks & onions by the Nile—because they’re sick of manna—the mysterious, heavenly bread that God provides to feed them, one day at a time. The song playfully catalogs all the things they made out of this miraculous but dreadfully monotonous gift: manna hotcakes, manna waffles, manna burgers, filet of manna, ba-manna bread!
It’s so good to be back with you all. I’ve spent the last week in New York City for the first session of a 2-year leadership development program run by Trinity Church on Wall Street. If you’re not familiar with it, Trinity is one of the wealthiest parishes in the Anglican Communion. It has a truly mind-boggling endowment and budget. And its office building in downtown Manhattan feels far more like a massive corporate headquarters than the small parish offices I’m used to. By all financial or numerical metrics, it’s a highly ‘successful’ church. So while I was definitely excited about this opportunity, I have to admit I was also apprehensive that I was stepping into a world that would be all about ‘success’—successful leadership, successful ministries, successful churches. But I ended up being reminded of something quite different.
“Who do you think you are?!”
It was one of the more humbling moments of my young adulthood. I had invited myself to a meeting of a local support group for trauma survivors. But as I took a seat in the circle of chairs, a woman a couple chairs over sternly said, “Who do you think you are, coming in here?!” This response was startling and off-putting, especially within the context a support group—after all, shouldn’t inclusivity be the priority?
What do you see when you look in the mirror?
You might see your reflection so often that you barely think about it. Most of us spend a fair amount of time each day gazing into mirrors—whether we’re picking an outfit or brushing our teeth or maybe noticing how a few more gray hairs or wrinkles have made their debut since the last time we looked. In daily life, we’re surrounded by reflections of ourselves: changing room mirrors, storefront windows, the pesky little pictures of yourself on Zoom calls that you have to click to turn off.
The trick is that these reflections don’t necessarily tell us the truth about what we look like.
One of the things I love most about Stillwater are the hills. I find much of the Midwest unnervingly flat, but being nestled in the St. Croix Valley feels like home—reminiscent of West Virginia, where I grew up among the hills and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. I’m not an outdoorsy person by any stretch of the imagination, nor have I ever been, really. I resented the weekend family hikes in the state and regional parks around our home. And I’m sure I was insufferable, with my bad attitude and melodramatic comparisons to forced marches in history. But even as a grumpy kid, I had to begrudgingly admit that mountaintop views are usually worth the sweat and mosquito bites.
