Church Life, Reflectionary, The Inner Landscape

Shake it off? No, sit with it.

Martha Spong

Long before Taylor Swift turned it into an ear worm (you’re welcome), my dad used to tell me “Shake it off.” It was a multi-purpose instruction, aimed at minor injuries both physical and social. While that’s good advice for a stubbed toe or even a bruised ego, some experiences jar us in ways that shaking will only amplify, because we are already shook. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a drive-by dagger in the handshake line, or a late night email intended to wound, or a theological snubbing, you’ll know what I mean. 

For me, step 1 is to sit with it. Today I’m doing that sitting in a Starbucks, pampering myself with a piece of coffee cake and a mocha topped off with the whipped cream I usually eschew. I’m thinking about something that happened yesterday, trying to figure out what to do with it, and what the ramifications of sharing the story publicly might be, for me and for the work I do. I’m asking myself, could it be helpful to share, or would I just be relieving my own tension?

Often, step 2 is to tell the story to a trusted friend or colleague, or perhaps a therapist, spiritual director, or coach. If you don’t have one of the above, I hope you will find one before the need is urgent. In my two pastor household, we have the trusted colleague available 24/7, and for that I am grateful, this day and every day. Still, for those times I need to tell the story 83 times before I feel finished, it’s good to have more places to put it. 

Step 3 for me is always to write about it. Sometimes that writing is an email I will never send, or a fragment saved in the Notes app on my iPhone that will find its way into a more polished form months or years in the future, when I have more perspective. And sometimes it’s like this, an exploration of how it feels to be injured, without saying anything about what actually happened. It’s an effort to make sense of things, to determine whether I was responsible for something I haven’t acknowledged, and whether I was actually wronged.

In this case, I’m pretty sure I was, but before I take it anywhere else, step 4 needs to happen in conversation with scripture, and in prayer. I’ll confess that since I stopped preaching regularly, I find this part harder, because for years this step took place for me in regular engagement with the lectionary. Having lost track of where we are in year B, I had to look it up. There I found the Syrophoenecian woman, like a trusted friend, ready to hear my story and feel it with me, right here in the Starbucks.

I don’t think this is a situation to shake off, but thanks to her, I’ve remembered where healing comes from ultimately. Now I’m ready to brush the coffee cake crumbs off my lap and go on with my day. Wherever you find your friends, may it be the same for you.

This post originally appeared in the RevGals Weekly e-Reader.

Liturgy, Narrative Lectionary, Reflectionary

All Age Liturgy for Narrative Lectionary Year 1, Week 1 (Noah and the flood)

Martha Spong
Noah's Ark by Edward Hicks
Noah’s Ark by Edward Hicks

Call to Worship

One: We come together to read the old stories.

Many: We are looking for God’s word to all people, long ago and today.

One: Some of the stories we remember from Sunday School.

Many: The Lord said to Noah, There’s gonna be a floody floody!

One: Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God. And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth.

Many: Get those children out of the muddy muddy!

One: Children of the Lord, let us worship God together.

 

Prayer of Confession

Holy One, you made the Earth and all that is in it. We give thanks for the sky and the seas, the mountains and the valleys, the trees and the flowers, the birds that fly and the fish that swim and all the animals that walk or crawl or creep on the land. You called on human beings to care for Creation, to serve you and praise you by loving all you have made.

We don’t always do it well.

We remember the story of Noah, and a time when people forgot to take care of the Earth and each other. We ask forgiveness for the ways we fail to love your world with our whole hearts. Help us to do better, one step at a time, just the way Noah built the ark one cubit at a time.

Assurance of Pardon

The Lord said to Noah, “But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.” God made a covenant with Noah, and God keeps a covenant with us. No one will ever be left behind again. Come into the ark of forgiveness, beloved Children of God!

Passing the Peace

In the Ark of this church, we are one family of faith. Sometimes it feels like close quarters! That’s all the more reason to greet one other with a sign of God’s peace. The peace of Christ be with you.

Children’s Time – Have someone lead “Rise and Shine”

First Reading Genesis 6:18-22 (including Litany of Animals)

Reader 1: Hear the words God spoke to Noah.

Reader 2: Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks.

Reader 3: For my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die.

Reader 4: But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.

Reader 5: And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.

Reader 6: Of the birds according to their kinds –

Chorus of Kids: Robins! Sparrows! Flamingos! Ducks! Geese! Chickens! Eagles!

Reader 6: …and of the animals according to their kinds –

Chorus of Kids: Dogs! Cats! Cows! Bunny rabbits! Groundhogs! Deer! Giraffes! Tigers! Lions!

Reader 6: of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind –

Chorus of Kids: Snakes and Mosquitoes and Bears and Honeybees! Elephants and Kangaroosies-roosies!

Reader 6: …two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive. Also take with you every kind of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them.

Reader 1: Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him. This is the word of the Lord.

Congregation: Thanks be to God.

Second Reading     Genesis 9:8-15 (consider doing some kind of display of a rainbow to accompany v. 12)

I created this liturgy in 2014 for Mechanicsburg Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Mechanicsburg, PA. To ask for permission to use it, please leave a comment here.

Church Life, Family, Whimsy

BuildIt

Martha Spong
A corner of my city.

My older children would be horrified to hear that the 13-year-old and I are both playing SimCity BuildIt on our iPads. Back in the day when Super NES became part of our household, I took on the seemingly innocent city planning game to show that I was a good sport, and to learn how to use the controller so I could also play MarioKart with my little guys. I loved creating neighborhoods, as long as I could avoid the disasters that were part of the game, fire and earthquake and Bowser rampaging through your city like Godzilla. All was fine until I stayed up most of one night; the next morning, my oldest, then 9, said, “Mom, I don’t think this game is good for you.”

In this generation of the game, which is much more sophisticated and complex, you have the choice of which areas of city life to develop, and unless you pay for extra SimCash and coins, those choices have to be made based on the budget you can raise yourself by creating and trading resources. I’ve been focused on ground transportation and education, versus entertainment and gambling.

Some of the in-game challenges involve choosing disasters and wars that will allow you to earn more. I’ve read that you can always rebuild. In fact, that’s the point. You achieve more by allowing the disasters and rebuilding after them, or fighting the wars and reconstructing your city. But I cannot bring myself to do it. The real world is hard enough.

We do something similar in the life of the church when we dream about what we might build, but we also consider the limits for what is possible. What can a particular congregation do well? What is needed in the community? Where can we put our limited resources to make the world we are building a little better, on behalf of Jesus Christ?

Playing the game my way, I don’t think I will ever save up enough to build the airport or the Parisian quarter my residents keep asking for in pop-up bubbles. But I am planning to stick with it at least until Level 40, when the game unlocks Worship. And I promise not to stay up all night to do it.

This post was written for the RevGalBlogPals Weekly e-Reader.

Church Life, Music, Reflectionary

Freedom’s Holy Light

Martha Spong

Until a couple of years ago, I would have described myself as a moderate about singing patriotic hymns in church. I wouldn’t design a whole service around patriotic themes; usually I allowed time for a patriotic sing-along before the start of the worship service proper. My philosophy was to keep what was usually a communion service on the first Sunday in July separate from nationalistic themes. I would tell myself, there is no other place where people sing together anymore. And some – even most – of those songs include themes that call us to be better.

We get into trouble when we consider them descriptive rather than aspirational.

This past Sunday I worshipped at kathrynzj’s church; her attitude about those songs is similar, but for reasons having to do with the installation of a new sound system and the resulting limited rehearsal time for her musician, two patriotic hymns were part of the service.

I can remember listening rhapsodically to a broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion” from Wolf Trap in which Garrison Keillor had the audience singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” a capella; I remember wishing I could have been there to feel the sound rise around me.

This past Sunday, though, I was crying by the time we got to verse 4.

Our fathers’ God to, Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light;
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King!

I’m past grieving now for the idealized America my parents let me believe in, because they hope it would be true, protecting me from the racism they wished were solved, promoting values of equality and fairness and kindness to others, particularly those less fortunate than we were.

I'm crying now because when God's holy light shines bright we see every sin, collective and individual, that plagues us.

I’m crying now because when freedom’s holy light shines bright we see every sin that plagues us. Worse, we see how many people in this country positively rejoice in those sins of violence and cruelty when they serve a White Supremacist agenda. Power now seems to belong to the cruelest, the unkindest, the most selfish among us, people who understand freedom as whatever profits the individual.

Today I am looking for and finding signs of hope, not the kind of candy-coated, bunting-inspired hope of past 4ths of July, but the gritty determination of activists, pastors, moms, and many other ordinary people determined to help others, to embody the values I cherish, values I derive from my faith, values I believe will bring freedom and liberation: inclusion, cooperation, and mercy.

I pray for the day when our land will be bright with freedom’s holy light, a freedom that will no longer be merely aspirational, a freedom that makes manifest God’s commonwealth of love.

Faith, Reflectionary, The Inner Landscape

Constant

Martha Spong

IMG_1533This morning in South Central Pennsylvania, the sun is shining. The Japanese maple tree outside my window is in full leaf. The steeple of the Presbyterian church rises behind it. Although the tree changes with the seasons, this has been my outside view for several years now as I sit at my desk, consistent and reliable. My star word for this year is Constant, and it reminds me how few things are. In a season of political and ethical turmoil, not much seems reliable.

But this view, and the things I see when I walk out my door or drive down my street remain – essentially – the same, despite potholes or snowfall. A hydrangea grows beside the church’s youth center, which sits next door to the Manse, with shades of blue like crayons, they are so intense. I see the church, these houses, the fence around the Associate Pastor’s backyard. (Yes, we live on what amounts to a compound.)

There’s something reassuring, constant, about the sameness of these things, this place. Similarly the landscape of Portland, Maine, offered a framework for my life for so many years, the curve of Baxter Boulevard around Back Cove, the uneven brick sidewalks where I walked my dogs, the esplanade of trees shading Sheffield Street. I did some of my hardest personal work talking on the phone while standing beneath those trees, considering what would come next while driving that route, trying to be ruthlessly honest with myself while wrangling a big dog.

Do you remember the concept of having a Constant that was part of the TV Show Lost? In that case the idea was that a person could be your constant; there was a romantic implication there about Desmond and Penny, although there was a time-travely bit, too. (#fantasy) In mathematics it means an unvarying value and in other disciplines the idea is the same, is constant. It’s something that doesn’t change.

I suppose that means a person or a place or a thing cannot be a constant, cannot be constant.

IMG_1536I’ve been pasting a little star with the word handwritten on it in my bullet journal every week, trying to keep the word in front of me instead of forgetting it as I have some years. I’ve studied lists of words in the thesaurus that suggest the nuances of the word: fixed, ceaseless, trustworthy.

What or who has unvarying value?

In this season of turmoil, I’m asking questions while walking a different dog under different trees. I’ve fallen out of the habit of my spiritual practice, which for many months was reading the Psalms and writing prayer in their margins. Instead I wake each morning to see what new terrible thing has happened in this inconstant world. The other day, my friend Mary Beth posted on the question, “How can you pray at a time like this?” She pointed me back to the Psalms, and I thought of a phrase from Psalm 146. It’s helping me today.  I’m not saying it’s enough to pray, but maybe if I can pray again, I can do the work that needs to be done, with God as my constant.

1 Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord, O my soul!
2 I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
    I will sing praises to my God all my life long.

3 Do not put your trust in princes,
    in mortals, in whom there is no help.
4 When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
    on that very day their plans perish.

5 Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
    whose hope is in the Lord their God,
6 who made heaven and earth,
    the sea, and all that is in them;
who keeps faith forever;
7     who executes justice for the oppressed;
    who gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free;
8     the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
    the Lord loves the righteous.
9 The Lord watches over the strangers;
    he upholds the orphan and the widow,
    but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

10 The Lord will reign forever,
    your God, O Zion, for all generations.
Praise the Lord!

Books

Book Review: God, Improv, and the Art of Living

Martha Spong

Let me start by saying that Improv terrifies me. Even as an audience member, I clench, more focused on what might go wrong than on what is actually unfolding. When compelled to improv in acting classes, both as a student and later as an adult, I felt like someone who just could not speak the language.

I do, however, approach every book I open with the belief it may have something important to say to me, whether an idea that sparks new understandings or a disagreement in perspective that challenges me. I’m open to possibility. My friend, author MaryAnn McKibben Dana, would have to tell you for sure, but after reading her excellent new book God, Improv, and the Art of Living (Eerdmans, 2018), I think I may just be taking a “Yes, And” approach to reading, if not to improv itself.

Many of the principles developed in the book resonated for this reader.

First, about God:

Rather than being remote and impersonal, God’s nature is to collaborate – to improvise – with God’s people. And when that improvisation occurs, it moves in the direction of inclusion and mercy and grace. (p. 49)

On the value of listening and how improv can deepen it:

Getting the gist is now our default practice, to the exclusion of deep understanding and shared wisdom…

True listening trusts there is enough time to consider, absorb, and be changed. Onstage, a good improviser trusts that a little bit of awkward silence isn’t nearly as bad as making a hasty move that doesn’t honor what their partner has offered. (p. 64)

On the role of the self-critical internal Voice that limits our risk-taking:

The Voice, also called the censor, is guided by two over-arching sentiments: “You’re not good enough” and “Who do you think you are?” These sentiments stop us mid-risk and keep us safe on the beaten path rather than in the improvisational mystery, which is scarier, but ultimately more interesting and satisfying. (p. 134)

And on getting to work:

Good ideas don’t have much shelf life. It’s much better to use them as quickly as possible, before they turn to ashes. (p. 142)

These and many other passages are underlined in my copy of the book, which is useful for looking at one’s life, but also a great tool for churches that might hesitate to take a risk in a changing world. To encourage exploring the principles of improv, the book includes a set of exercises for individuals and groups. Stories from scripture and contemporary life illustrate the principles. MaryAnn is a gifted aggregator, bringing together her experiences in class and on stage with the wisdom of teachers and scholars in a way that elevates her thesis. Being open to say “Yes, and” widens our sense of what is possible, makes our lives richer, and is faithful to the God who invites us to collaborate. Will we take the risk? I hope so.

I received an Advance Reader Copy of the book, in exchange for an honest review. I cannot guarantee that the page numbers indicated above are the same in the final version.

Books

Horses Speak of God, by Laurie Brock – a review

Martha Spong

“Sit deeply.”

After being thrown by her horse, Laurie Brock received that counsel from her riding instructor, a story she tells in Horses Speak of God: How Horses Can Teach Us to Listen and Be Transformed (Paraclete Press, 2018).

“Sit deeply and ride.”

I’m not a horse person. They are beautiful; that’s a fact. I rode horses on a family friend’s farm as a child and loved the experience, but I later had a scare at a riding lesson and never rode again. All this is to say I picked up Laurie’s book not even knowing how limited my knowledge of riding is. I appreciated the way she described the specifics of gaits and gear, as well as the temperaments of horses broadly and the horses she rides in particular.

Brock is an Episcopal priest and writes about her development as both a minister and a rider, here in a chapter on Fear, in which she describes the aftermath of being thrown by her horse, Nina. Just as she gets back on the horse, Brock encourages us to persist in faith.

When God meets us in our relationship and says, “Fear not,” God isn’t telling us to act as if we aren’t scared. Instead, God reminds us that fear will not be the only emotion or the conclusive one. When we are scared and fearful, we join a long line of faithful disciples who responded initially with fear, but stayed around. (p. 39)

In a chapter on vocation, Brock describes Nina’s role as a great teaching horse for riders who are new, and the instructor who recognized “she is an amazing lesson horse.”

Our vocations, our calls from God, work almost the same way. We experiment, perhaps discovering both what we are suited for and even what we are not called to do. We will need insight from others. Usually others can see our vocation before we can. Others can also see what might not be our vocation before we admit that we might not be suited for this particular ministry of God. (p. 45)

Brock’s book centers the reader in the necessity of balance and breath, routine and repetition, in our physical existence and our spiritual lives as well. Her relationships with Nina and the other horses she rides, grooms, and loves speak to our relationship with both the embodied and the transcendent. In the world of riding, some actions feel intuitive, while others require us to do what seems strange. We cannot grow without persistent practice, whether as riders or people of faith. It is not enough to approach our incarnate God with our intellect. Will we show up to meet God the way Brock settles on her horse, ready to move together, to be as one? 

I recommend this wonderful book to both horse-lovers and far off-admirers like me. Horses speak of God, and so does Laurie Brock.

I received an advance manuscript of Laurie’s book and wrote an endorsement, as well as this review.