Dear Friends of Second Church,

Last week, I was blessed to preside at a wedding in San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico.

What an adventure!

My last visit to Mexico was a four hour trip to Tijuana with my dad when I was eight, so I had a lot to see and learn. It was delightful.

I learned that Mexican children have the same loyalty to their mom’s mole recipe that Italian-American kids feel about their mom’s Bolognese.

I learned that weddings involve not only the ceremony, itself, and of course the reception, but also a parade through town led by enormous puppets and a mariachi band.

Most of all, I learned that the anonymous street scape of heavy doors and shuttered windows still offered momentary sightings of interior courtyards with bright tiles, gurgling fountains and hanging curtains of flame vine — places where anyone could happily hole up for the duration.

You don’t need to convince me that houses can have souls — or spirits, anyway.

I’ll save talking about the churches and what it’s like to pray in them for another post.

Eventually, though, it was time to go.  As it always does, getting home involved waiting for a while in any number of lines — check in, security, boarding “zone,” immigration, customs, etc.

But I found myself thinking about the streets of San Miguel as I waited.  About how the impatient guy in the Barca soccer jersey and the older couple in matching Travelsmith khaki vests were, in their own way, like those enormous doors and closed windows I had seen.

Any of us presents a face to the outside world that gives little clue to what might be found inside.  Maybe we are carefully tended, manicured to the hilt.  Or surprisingly unkempt, disordered in one part and wildly beautiful in another.  The fountains flow with abandon in some; in others, the pools are melancholy and stagnant.

This is what God sees.

These are the courtyards He would tend with such patience and love, if we were willing…or where God sees His own handiwork already in blossom, creating a peaceful place where the soul dwells.

It makes me wonder what I need to do to welcome in the gardener — what needs tending to — and what it might be like to open the doors so that others might see.

See you in church,

 

Dear Friends of Second Church,

After the great joy of Easter last Sunday, today interjects a somber note, as the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Many of you will remember those days.

As it happens, I don’t.

My father had returned from Vietnam only a few months earlier; my mother was back in school, hurrying to finish a teaching credential and get a job—they were busy starting out and hadn’t yet started a family. So I arrived a little later — about two weeks before the shootings at Kent State in 1970.

But I have lived in the shadows, both of Dr. King’s moral vision and of the violence of those days, for much of my life.  As we all have.

What I find myself pondering this morning is King’s tremendous hope for the Church, precisely in the face of turbulent and frightening times.

King spoke often about the call to be part of the “beloved community,” by which some understood him to be speaking directly about the Church—a community formed by and for the love of God and one another.

Actually, King’s hope went further than that.

He believed deeply in love of neighbor, and in the Church’s call to love and serve the world far beyond the walls of any particular community, or for the benefit of any one group—even a Christian one.

He believed that all people were loved by God and had a place in the beloved community, and that the charge of faithful people was to work together to ensure each person found that place.

He set a high bar back then.  Perhaps it’s even higher now.

But in the days after Easter, I’m reminded that we stand under not only King’s call, but Jesus’ call to love and serve the world beyond the walls of any particular community.

The disciples were in complete disarray after Jesus’ death, miracle or no miracle.  Yet they heard the call, and their mission grew clear.

We may feel scattered, ourselves, by a thousand different things, each important, too.  Yet the call—and the vision of beloved community—still echo.

Imperfect as we are, burdened and busy as we are, may we seek to follow it.

See you in church,