Category: Weekly Meditations

May 21, 2018  “Is there anything else that wants to be said?” Why yes, there is, and what fun to to be able to share with you!  I haven’t worked out yet exactly how often to post, or exactly what.  But on this day when we in Southeast Texas have been afflicted once again with days of torrential rain and rising water, when our world is afflicted as ever with ‘storms within and storms without,’ it seems good to press forward with the aim of this website: to re-enchant the world.  Re-enchant not in the sense of magical thinking or dreamy other-worldly passivity, but in the robust sense of restoring to our anxious minds “a voice, a chime, a chant sublime of peace on earth, good will to men.”  And so I’m going to go ahead and give you my Refresh homily from last month.  With pictures!

-Phoebe

Refresh Worship Service

Trinity United Methodist Church / Beaumont, Texas

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

“Wild Thing”

Phoebe Hambright Dishman, Lay Speaker

 

Songs: #111 “How Can We Name a Love”/ #113 “Source and Sovereign “/#688 “God, Who Madest Earth and Heaven”

 

Psalm 147:1-5

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!
How beautiful it is when we sing our praises to the beautiful God,
for praise makes you lovely before him
and brings him great delight!
² The Lord builds up Jerusalem;
he gathers up the outcasts and brings them home.
³ He heals the wounds of every shattered heart.
⁴ He sets his stars in place, calling them all by their names.
⁵ How great is our God!
There’s absolutely nothing his power cannot accomplish,
and he has infinite understanding of everything.

 

We humans are all theologians. Did you know that?

We all say words—logos—about God—theos.

Theologians. You and me.

 

Made in God’s image, how can we help but wrestle with that image,

work to find words for the song we all sing?

 

As someone asked an atheist:

“Describe for me please this God in whom you do not believe?”

 

Even an atheist is a theologian! Of the God-wrestling persuasion…

 

Obviously, the person who wrote Psalm 147 was a theologian.

He gifted the ancient people Israel with words about God,

words to sing as they made their pilgrim way to their holy city.

 

And still we sing their ancient song.

As we make our pilgrim way.

As we evolve. As we learn, as we part the curtains

with our science, and our dreaming,

And God smiling to see just when we will find the wonders God has prepared. Just as a baby finds her hands, and her feet.

 

Barbara Brown Taylor is a contemporary theologian of some renown. She says this about God:

 

In Sunday school, I learned to think of God as a very old white-bearded man on a throne, who stood above creation and occasionally stirred it with a stick. When I am dreaming quantum dreams, what I see is an infinite web of relationship, flung across the vastness of space like a luminous net. It is made of energy, not thread. As I look, I can see light moving through it as a pulse moves through veins. What I see “out there” is no different from what I feel inside. There is a living hum that might be coming from my neurons but might just as well be coming from the furnace of the stars. When I look up at them there is a small commotion in my bones, as the ashes of dead stars that house my marrow rise up like metal filings toward the magnet of their living kin.

 

A living hum. A small commotion in my bones. Yessss!

Do you feel the joy? Hallelujah!

 

As for me, I have written a different response to Psalm 147.

With thanks to the Troggs, circa 1966,

and my own impressions so far of life on planet Earth,

it goes like this:

 

Wild thing, you make my heart sing

Wild thing, beyond which there is nothing and no greater

You are:

 

Surge of joy

Burst of creativity

Flash of inspiration

 

You are blessing

You are breaking

 

You are Divine Dance

You are love outpoured and ever refreshed

You are wine you are bread you are living water

You are community

You are engine for peace and fuel for justice

You are fire

You are dunamis, dynamite

You are purpose and passion and praise

 

You are Will

To be done on earth as in heaven

 

And we, made in your image

Oh my we are

Wild Things

You make my heart sing

For we are cherished

Precious

In all our imperfect particularity

 

Particularity, yes

The little things of every day

The little things

 

You are a wild darling of a baby rabbit, flushed from the liriope

By the intrusion of my water hose

A wee furry rabbit, wild and yet so young and trusting

That it allows me to touch

Its shining fur

You are the wild flower my sister saw on Beech Creek

You are the camera she captured it with, the love she shared with me

You are the wild science of shape, and color, and name

You are the religion, that is, the meaning

we brazenly assign to a humble flower:

Purple of Advent, trinity of petals, fleeting life,

nestled in the arms of eternal glory

                                                                             [photo by Kate Hambright, May 2018]

You are, when I need a new car

And I’m pretty sure I want the same sedate silver

I’ve driven for years

But what I drive home

Is ruby red

A prodigal Pentecost

An extravagance

A praise

You are

A wild thing

In a red car

You are my friend who was stricken

Who said to me, I don’t know how to be this sick

And then the dread of a deeper problem

And the relief when it was not so

You are the joy of my friend, who says, I’m better

I’m back!

 

You are my friend and friend to many who asked us to ‘say more’

You are his smile

You are his body now ashes—or is it stardust?—and you are his voice now gone. Or is it?

You are the wild red cardinal in my back yard

the day my friend died

And you are my shattered heart as I watch the cardinal

The eternity in its ‘cheer cheer cheer’

You are my reverie

And you are my shriek as I see a movement at my feet

And I look down to see an enormous king snake

Who shrieks right back at sight of me

Silently shrieks

and speeds away across my feet

into the azaleas

 

You are Jesus the teacher his voice now gone—or is it?—who said

Be ye shrewd as snakes

And harmless as doves

                      [medallion designed by John Wesley for his chapel in London]

You are the ones who love that man

The play of his mind, the stories he told

You are the ones who follow other ways of kindness and compassion

Of repairing the world

 

You are my new granddaughter

Growing every day

Her smiles her inexplicable storms

Her small body nestled in our arms

 

You are life new life

Ever emerging

In new and wondrous forms

 

And we circle up and say to a newborn:

We love you and support you on your journey

 

And when the darkness falls on one of ours

We circle that one and say

We love you and support you on your journey

 

And you, you are the circle of the words we speak to each other

At the beginning, through the journey, at the end

 

You are us, made for each other

 

You are sprightly treasure

And noble delight

 

You are pilgrim way

 

You are now

Forever you are

 

Creative purpose

And the possibility of things going wrong

 

You are the courage to love what will surely die

 

You are resurrection

The kiss we crave

The loss we dread

 

You are birthing and bearing what we must bear

 

You are fullness and emptiness

You are gutted animal keening

and you are logic and sober reflection

 

You are the remnant

The rallying of the reasonable

That which may—or may not—

emerge from disruption and chaos

 

You are stardust flung out

The strange attraction

The song in our bones

 

You are the river moving in us

Our reason to get up in the morning

Our comfort as we close our eyes

 

You are our mystification

And our joy

 

And you know what?

I think the love is mutual

 

Wild thing

 

You are I AM

far beyond our knowing

 

You are closer than our breath

 

You are the everlasting arms

 

You are the Eternal One

 

Hallelujah!

 

All praise to our beautiful God.

 

Postscript:

 

Every sermon should ask you to do something.

So here it is:

Go thou forth from here, my wild things, my darlings.

Find some words of your own for God.

And be ye constrained

By nothing less than Love.

To live any smaller than Love may be sufficient.

But it’s not complete. We need to be holy. We need to be whole.

 

Amen.

I should say here that for many years I’ve been honored to be part of a rotation of lay speakers who give the homily at our church’s Wednesday night worship service, which we call Refresh.  Over the years, this work has offered  a delightful discipline by which I’ve gotten to know my True Self and what she thinks!  And if my reflections, offered with love, have helped the blessed community, so much the better. Below, what I wrote and presented for the start of a new year.  I was told by a spiritual teacher that he appreciated the poetry of it.  Which is why I’ve included it under “poems.”

Phoebe

 

Refresh Worship Service

Trinity United Methodist Church / Beaumont, Texas

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

“Rise and Shine”

Phoebe Hambright Dishman, Lay Speaker

 

Isaiah 60:1-3 [Tanakh translation]

 

Arise, shine, for your light has dawned.

The presence of the Lord has shone upon you!

Behold! Darkness shall cover the earth,

And thick clouds the peoples;

But upon you the Lord will shine,

And His presence be seen over you.

And nations shall walk by your light,

Kings, by your shining radiance.

 

Arise. Shine. Our covenant with God,

stretching all the way back to Abraham,

is to bless all the nations all the world all of creation

with our shining radiance.

Brighten the corner where we are,

trusting the brightness to spread from there.

Simple, yes? Maybe not.

I don’t know about you, but my shining radiance comes and goes.

Often it’s blown away by an ill wind of unreasonable and irritated,

a darkness of brow as I strain through my all-important list,

narrowly intentioned, feeling thwarted and overwhelmed.

Oh evil star that’s got me down

Oh swarm of troubles buzzing round…

 

Oh well. Eventually I lurch back to my best approximation of radiance.

Oh, to hold that vision a little more consistently!

To see how deeply essential it is. How I must work and work for it.

It’s a new year, a new day, and always we begin again.

Arise. Shine. There is a radiance. There is shalom, wellbeing for all.

By our every thought and action, we can help shalom, or hinder it.

Let us choose to help. Help more than we hinder!

 

Arise. Shine.

We are now in the season of the Christian church year called

“after the Epiphany.”

I would wager this season is not as well known to us as some.

In 2018, the season of “after the Epiphany”

will take us from Epiphany Sunday, which we just observed,

all the way to Ash Wednesday, which this year falls on February 14.

 

Just over a month. We should commit to use it wisely.

 

From now to Ash Wednesday

let us resolve every morning

to consider anew

this question:

 

After the Christ child has come into the world,

after those Gentiles from afar, those receivers of epiphany,

those wise persons, those dreamers who study the stars—

have traveled weary dangerous miles to Judea

to find a complete stranger,

a Jewish baby born to peasant parents,

after they have upset the establishment with their questions

after they have offered their strange gifts to the baby

after they have gone home changed by what they saw in his eyes,

what then? For their day, and for ours?

 

Isaiah’s prophetic persistent answer, to people living many centuries before Jesus, to people living many centuries after Jesus:

Arise, shine, your light has come.

 

Okay. But still, in our day as in Isaiah’s, darkness covers the earth,

and the people sit under thick clouds.

Under thick clouds, in the dark, how do we shine? What is the ask? What is our task?

 

For help, let us devote ourselves anew to the example of a master.

 

In a little town called Nazareth, Jesus grows up,

from child to carpenter to rabbi.

Leaving home, he starts his public ministry of cloud removal,

of teaching and healing and giving sight to the blind,

which as we know stirs up darkness and gets him killed.

And yet he keeps insisting:

Watch me. Follow me. Cultivate my way of being in the world.

For one thing, don’t you be puttin’ that radiance under a bushel basket!

It may feel safer that way. It’s not.

 

The wise ones knew Jesus for who he was,

and by their strange gifts they pointed to his mission:

 

Gold for a king.

Incense for a priest.

Myrrh to anoint the dead.

 

The season of “after the Epiphany” gives us several weeks

to think about that.

To think about what it takes for Jesus

and us

should we choose to follow him

to grow up into his gracious mindset

to take on his gift of committed citizenship

in the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God:

Gold for royal sons and daughters.

Incense for priesthood.

Myrrh for stewards each

of one precious life

to pour out in gratitude and service.

Myrrh, yes. We’re going to die.

On the other hand, as the psalmist says:

I end—but I am still with You.

 

Strange gifts. Daunting even.

Yet ours to embrace if we will.

 

And I hope we will,

whatever the cost in growing pains and boundary crossings.

For in truth, the cost of inertia, the cost of indifference and despair,

is greater.

Do we grow weary,

do we grow old in serving our particular corner of creation?

Of course.

Here’s something that might help you. It has to do with color.

 

In the spirit of teaching the Good News through the eye as well as the word:

 

The color assigned to “after the Epiphany” is green, the color of life. The color of growing things.

The color, we might say,

of Jesus growing from a babe to the fullness of a young man.

And so for us.

 

Green. The color of life.

As I move into the role of grandmother and tribal elder,

here’s a verse that gives me comfort:

 

Psalm 92:14 They will still yield fruit in old age;

they shall be full of sap and very green.

 

Full of sap, and very green. Amen?

 

As we all know, for green to happen, there must be light.

 

And so, for us, in the bleak midwinter, let there be light.

 

And there is light.

 

And what we learn in the season after Epiphany is

that the light keeps coming into the world.

Always and each new day.

And we followers of Christ must put on the mindset of Christ

and make like the leaves on the trees.

Which is to say, soak up the light.

 

Why? For our own sustaining and warming and hope, yes.

Also that we may be a light.

A calm, collected, disciplined, focused, persistent light to the world.

A breathing, a transpiration, an energy, a feeding, a nurturing, a repairing…

‘A song, a chime, a chant sublime, of peace on earth, goodwill to men…’

Beginning with ourselves, then outward to our circles of care.

 

Arise, shine, for your light has dawned.

The presence of the Lord has shone upon you!

Behold! Darkness shall cover the earth,

And thick clouds the peoples;

But upon you the Lord will shine,

 

Notice the darkness is not banished.

It still covers the earth.

 

Name your darkness. Tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine:

 

The darkness of disappointment.

 

The darkness of things I did, or did not do.

 

The darkness of unexpected calamity.

 

The darkness of diminishment and frailty and disease.

 

The darkness of pain, division, anger, and fear.

 

The darkness of generation after generation of the powerful

exercising coercion,

all in the name of certainty and quick resolution,

which sometimes seem to us so much easier

than the hard work of community and reconciliation.

 

The darkness of ignorance:

They say that for all the information available today,

in truth we have forgotten how to think. We have embraced technology but forgotten who we are and what we owe the common good.

We have grown ‘smupid,’ that is, smart but stupid.

 

So. So it is for us.

So it was in post-exile Israel, when Isaiah lived.

Name your darkness now, they shared it then.

Don’t forget that post-exile Israel had returned from captivity

to a shadow of their former glory,

that they were beset on every side,

that they were poorly resourced to make Judea great again,

that they couldn’t even agree what great again means.

This felt really bad.

They were tempted to indifference, anger, despair…

 

And what did Isaiah say to his poor suffering people?

 

Arise, shine, for your light has dawned.

 

Arise, shine.

Renew your shalom-covenant with God.

Go with the light you have.

Go with the light you have.

Go with the light you have.

Or, as someone has put it, Hallelujah anyway.

 

To me, this implies a pretty big ask.

And a pretty big confidence in our capacity.

 

Here’s something I recently came across:

 

“We are directed to look out into the darkness of the ever-longer nights and say, ‘I am not deterred.

I will answer this darkness with light.

I will remove a portion of the darkness

and inspire my neighbor to be empowered to remove some more…

We are not allowed to give up.

We don’t have to dispel all the darkness.

We simply have to do our part.”

 

Why? Why should I have to do my part,

when others are so clearly unable and/or unwilling?

 

Because I am not my own.

I am part of ‘an inescapable network of mutuality.’

 

Because something there is in me that feels a duty to hope,

in covenant partnership with the One who wills,

“Let there be light.”

 

Light for helping.

Light for repairing.

Light for mastering each and every day my own tumultuous self.

Light for everyday miracles.

Light for criticizing the bad by the practice of the better.

Light to move past the tyranny of trivia

into the glory of partnering my deep gladness

with the world’s deep hunger,

all according to the will of the One who gifted creation

from the beginning

with light.

 

Arise, shine, for your light has dawned.

The presence of the Lord has shone upon you!

Behold! Darkness shall cover the earth,

And thick clouds the peoples;

But upon you the Lord will shine,

And His presence be seen over you.

And nations shall walk by your light,

Kings, by your shining radiance.

 

Amen.