West Wing

I'm watching the West Wing as I wait for laundry to finish so that I can go to work (yes, I know that I should think ahead more). And I'm thinking about how they work and why they work and what it all means...and then about how I work and where I work and what it all means. I realize that this is simply a TV show and not reality. I realize that, no matter where one is, there are great triumphs and disasters. But I can't help thinking about how this White House team operates.

In the show, the senior staff have plenty of arguments; they fight over nearly everything and people don't always get their way. But, they all have a basic understanding that they are working for the same purpose and vision. They might have different ways of getting there, and they might have differing areas of passion within this, but they all share the same vision. So, they duke it out and work towards it as best they can.

Can I say that about my work? Yes and no. I believe that the people I work with are faithful people who truly desire for the church to be honest and faithful servants in the world. I enjoy the people I work with and often find myself having to work outside the building in order to curb the amount of conversations I end up having. But I have yet to find what the common vision is. I have yet to understand what it is that we are working towards and why. I know what I, personally, want to see and work towards, but I have no idea what the church is aiming for. And unfortunately, my suspicions as to what it could be, are less than what I had hoped. And with no clear vision as to what we're working for, it sometimes makes it difficult to enter into conversations with people because you don't know what the common ground is and then someone ends up losing out completely.

Fascinating how teams work.

Love the Lord your God

So the first part of the scripture reading for this Sunday starts out: "Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. 'Teacher,' he said, 'what must I do to inherit eternal life?' He said to him, 'What is written in the law? What do you read there?' He answered, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.' And he said to him, 'You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.'"

I've been thinking about this passage for a long time now - primarily because I have to preach on it tomorrow. This goes immediately into the story of the Good Samaritan, by the way, as the lawyer asks who his neighbor is. But I want to focus on the first part, and it's caused some problems for me. Interestingly, it's one of my favorite verses/concepts, and it's found in several places in the Bible. I love it, because it encompasses all of who we are - heart, soul, mind, strength - the possibilities of what it means to "love God" with those aspects of us are endless, and I'm completely fascinated. And the fact that "doing this" will give life? I think that's great. Because I interpret that not only as life after death, but life in the here and now. It's a great flip on our traditional 10 Commandments.

But this week, this text just exhausted me. I knew that I was being compelled to preach on it, but I couldn't figure out why, because it's just stressful to me right now. So I started complaining to God about how, with all of the other leaders and teachers and preachers and prophets of the faith, he had given words to speak and I had none and, well, I have to preach this thing in 16 hours. But I think I've figured it out. It's that I don't know how to love God when I don't understand how and if I've received love myself.

Obviously, I have received love in life. Family, friends, co-workers, supervisors, students - all have shown me love. But as a dense human being, the reality of that is easily forgotten. And I think that my congregation is in the same place. So the question now becomes: how do I preach about loving God while at the same time speaking tangible love to them?

Murky Dismal and Rainbow Brite

So my friend and I watched the first part of an episode of Rainbow Brite the other night. It was fantastic. A total flashback to the wonders of an 80’s childhood. It made me think about how I was Rainbow Brite for Halloween when I was four – my mom made me this incredible costume, complete with the boots and the belt. Now I didn’t have the hair that she did, and I wasn’t able to create rainbows or ride the “most magnificent horse in the universe”, but that didn’t matter, because for a day I was able to bring color to a darkened world and I had the outfit to prove it.

Twenty-three years later, I often find myself still believing that I’m Rainbow Brite. I like to think of myself as a realist, but really, I just like to imagine. I like to create solutions and solve riddles and believe in the impossible. I like to maintain that the world contains more possibilities than we can see and, most of all, I like to believe that I am capable of bringing new life and color to it, with or without that spectacular color belt.

But here’s the problem: Rainbow Brite knows what the cause of the darkness and dreariness is. She knows what problem she has to solve, and it’s in the form of Murky Dismal and his sidekick Lurky, and they can often be found driving around in their Grunge Buggy with some sort of “gloom” potion. What’s required of her is to bring color into the world despite these villains’ best efforts. But in the real world, the challenges aren’t so well-defined.

And so sometimes I find Murky’s cloud of gloom to be a bit disorienting. Because it’s not about fighting off an enemy or two. And it’s not about finding all of the different color sprinkles and all of a sudden color is reintroduced to the world. There aren’t clear lines between what’s good and bad, and there’s no final “goal” to aim for. So then the question is: how does someone who still believes in the ability of dreams use that imagination to actually dissipate the murkiness this world sustains?