Children of God
by Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge June, 1, 2020
As we sit in our comfortable homes watching our television and computer screens, with beverages and snacks close at hand, it is difficult for us to fully comprehend what has happened in our country the last week. — I too watched the video from the Minneapolis street in horror as a police officer refused to remove his knee from the neck of a handcuffed man that he had pinned face down next to his patrol car. –Despite George Floyd himself saying that he could not breathe, despite the constant stream of continued pleas and exclamations from the group of camera wielding onlookers, –including many people loudly calling out to the police that the arrested man was no longer moving or breathing, the police officer’s singular focus on maintaining the pressure on George’s windpipe, and ultimately murdering him on camera, defies our imagination to explain: Why?? —Why are humans so broken and so good at hurting one another? Why do we riot, loot and burn and lynch and murder each other? –As we watch the spark of George Floyd’s death again light the tinder of 400 years of oppression, as we see the anger and pain rise into outbursts and riots across the country, we as followers of Christ turn to our God for comfort and for hope. Is there any good news for us from the church today? Is there any hope for the future in our grief for the complete brokenness of humanity? Yes, yes there is.
As believers living in this unprecedented time of pandemic and racial upheaval and economic injustice, we are called to be the people who use our voices in every language that we know to increase God’s kingdom of love and radical equality and justice for everyone. We are to demand that all of our neighbors be treated equally as God’s children; we are to live and act beyond the stereotypes that we too often accept as labels that we attach to each other. As the world cries out for help in ever increasing screams, let us each speak up boldly for those who are hurting and forgotten. Let all of us, as followers of Christ say:
People of color, we hear your voices crying out in protest and in pain. We pledge to continue to educate ourselves how racism affects your lives in every way and we pledge to do everything we can to undo hundreds of years of systematic racism that are woven into the very fabric of our country. We do this so that we can fully value everyone in our community. We seek to live our lives more like Jesus and to love all people as children of God.
1st Day of Lent
The First Day of Lent.
Brittany sat in her car outside of the church. The Ash Wednesday service was over and it was now Lent. She peeked into the mirror on her visor and saw the dark smudge of ashes on her brow. The shape of a cross and it stood out harshly against her winter white complexion. She bit her lip in thought. Before she started her short drive home, she wanted to think about the service a bit.
The service had been in three parts. The first part was an opportunity to reconcile herself with God. She mused about that. She loved her church, she loved the people there and the music, but it was true that she had not been making it to worship very much lately. She told herself that she had just gotten distracted with everything else in her life. –Sure, she was up and awake by 11 am on Sunday mornings. But then she realized that it wasn’t her busy life that kept her out of church on Sundays, it was her video game habit. It was too easy to just keep playing and let the time that she needed to get out the door slip on by for another week. She felt convicted as she sat there in her car with her phone in her hands. She whispered her apology to God and dedicated herself to attending church again. After all, some of the Jr. High School kids really looked up to her and needed her. Being someone to talk to about school stuff was really important. She remembered how tough Middle School could be.
Brittany’s mind then turned to the second part of the service. That had been about reconciliation with others. In her hands was a blue 3×5 card where she had written the name of her sister Madison. The worship attendees had been encouraged to take some time to write a note of reconciliation with someone. She had gotten as far as writing her sister’s name, and then she had stopped. What would she say? They currently weren’t even speaking to each other. They had gotten into a huge fight about her sister’s boyfriend. –She still didn’t think he was treating Madison very well. But not speaking to each other wasn’t going to make things better. She pulled up her sisters phone number and typed up a short text, “I am sorry for what I said, Madison. Can we get together to talk?” Holding her breath, she sent the text out with a prayer. Perhaps this first step would help.
The final part of the service had been about reconciliation with yourself. The pastor had encouraged everyone to write down what they were going to give up this year for Lent or what they were going to take on. While Brittany at first had thought about giving up carbs for Lent and doing the Keto diet again; she had quickly moved past that idea to something that she had done in the past that had been so valuable to her. She used to go running in the morning and she used to pray while her feet automatically kept the pace. She remembered how great she felt afterward, to have that quiet peace of her body and mind and spirit all in harmony. Her fears and all her concerns had all been left in God’s hands, and the rest of the day had felt open to a million possibilities. No matter what would come her way at work or with her family and friends, it seemed that she could handle it better if she had that morning run with God.
With her mind made up and already planning her tomorrow, Brittany put her car into gear and drove off into the darkness. Tomorrow was the first day in Lent, and she was definitely going to get some things back on track. She was really looking forward to it!
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In An Age of Twisted Values
In An Age of Twisted Values a Hymn by Martin E. Leckebusch, 1995
(Tune: Church United) 2/18/2020 Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge
In an age of twisted values, we have lost the truth we need.
In sophisticated language, we have justified our greed.
By our struggle for possessions, we have robbed the poor and weak.
Hear our cry and heal our nation; your forgiveness, Lord, we seek.
We have built discrimination on our prejudice and fear.
Hatred swiftly turns to cruelty, if we hold resentments dear.
For communities divided by the walls of class and race,
hear our cry and heal our nation; show us, Lord, your love and grace.
When our families are broken, when our homes are full of strife,
when our children are bewildered, when they lose their way in life,
when we fail to give the aged all the care we know they need,
hear our cry and heal our nation; help us show more love, we plead.
We who hear your word so often choose so rarely to obey.
Turn us from our willful blindness; give us truth to light our way.
In the power of your Spirit come to cleanse us, make us new;
hear our cry and heal our nation till our nation honors you.
It was in the early 1980’s when a young man named Martin E. Leckebush started attending a Methodist Church in Birmingham, England. The congregation was quite socially minded and in their building they were hosting a government training program designed to help people find employment. During the lunch hour, the church also sponsored a preacher to read from the book of Isaiah and to address some of the contemporary issues facing society. They also asked Martin to write a hymn for the occasion. In An Age of Twisted Values, was the result.
Even though this hymn was written in the 1980’s in England, it’s words still deeply challenge us here in the United States today. All of these pervasive issues are very common in our post modern society. Today, we have many families with broken relationships. We have elders who need costly care that we cannot afford. We have neighbors who have to choose between buying their prescriptions or groceries. Yet instead of opening our hearts and hands to those who need us, we instead willfully choose blindness. We close our eyes and our ears to the cries of those who are hurting that surround us.
Yet, despite all of our brokenness, there is hope. These issues of greed, discrimination, prejudice and fear are all walls that Christians need to tear down in order live out God’s commandments to love God and our neighbor while loving ourselves. The love of God, the power of the Holy Spirit and the work of Jesus Christ can heal all of us and turn us toward a new path. May we all work for justice and peace in each of our lives, everyday. So be it. Amen.
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When Christmas is Over
When Christmas is Over… 1/9/2020
It came as kind of a shock. It was December 26th, and when I turned on my car radio, the Christmas music was suddenly done. The festive tunes that had decked my halls with boughs of holly for the past months had now returned to regularly scheduled broadcasts. My Holy Nights dreaming of a White Christmas were now a thing of the past. Christmas 2019 now only existed in my memory.
For many of us, by mid January with our Christmas decorations all put away, our Christmas memories have already lost their sparkle and are starting to be forgotten. Some of our new toys are perhaps are even broken already. Our favorite Christmas cookies are now long gone and the leftover ones are perhaps broken or starting to get stale. And while we may still enjoy the taste of a peppermint latte, the novelty of that Christmas time beverage has worn off. We sadly remember that Christmastime, like many things in life, is something that is temporary and transient.
But our relationship with God is not one of those things! Our relationship with God is eternal! When we in prayer connect with God, when we are comforted by the Holy Spirit in times of trouble, when we in love reach out and help and care for our neighbors and feel that unfathomable and deep sense of joy in our fulfillment of our purpose –it is then that we know that we are connected to the stuff that really matters. That connection to God is like an eternal shape that snaps into our soul with a satisfying click that no plastic human made gadget can even come close to replicating.
So as this Christmas season 2019 comes to a close, I would encourage each of us to follow the light of Christ in a life of more deep and meaningful relationship with God in 2020. With clear vision may we all focus more completely on the eternal things that really matter. Amen.
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The Cracks in My Walls
The Cracks in My Walls 11/4/2019
Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge
I have been doing a lot of painting lately, the painting of walls. Over the last several weeks, I have been immersed in French Colony, a sophisticated grey-blue. I have stirred up two cans of Sand Castle, a creamy latte tan and I have painted trim in a custom white color that is actually very close in tonality to Polar Bear. The boldest color in the palette though was Aqua Fresca, a very striking turquoise that was inspired by someone either gazing over the Caribbean seas or captivated by the rich tones in the most exquisite piece of Native American jewelry.
But even as I spread these lovely colors on my paint trays, rollers, brushes, hair and shoes; I did also manage to apply most of it to the walls, which was of course, my primary goal. –But that did not mean that everything I painted turned out picture perfect. No matter how many times that I painted over it, the cracks in the walls could not be healed by my careful application of paint. There was definitely a gap there, and even though I hoped that my well loaded paint roller could hide the glaring emptiness, no matter how many times that I went back over the spot, it would still be a crack in the wall, a wicked long black line that anyone with eyes could see. –It reminded me of the broken relationships in my life, the people that I had separated from over the years. There are folks from my past that I have never been able to reconcile with. And those old wounds, like the cracks in the walls, are still very visible if you look in the right places.
There were other places too where my walls bore witness to my poor attempts at a slip shod repair job. In those places, while the paint did not fall away into a gap, it did however highlight in bright tones the bumps and the ridges of the scars that remained after I badly tried to fix relationships that were broken. My faults were not glaring, but they were not very pretty either, and even two coats of paint did not hide those mistakes of my past from clearly showing up in the middle of the wall.
The most wonderful section of the walls however, where those who were repaired or completely replaced by the Master Craftsman. In those places in the house of my soul, expert hands with eternal scars had taken away all of the troubling broken pieces and had smoothed away all the faults and ridges. Those huge new sections of drywall soaked up the primer and the paint like a child soaks up love. In those places, the colors on the walls were simply beautiful. They softly reflected the light in all of their semi-gloss glory. Those walls were not only made whole, they were made new. The beauty of the colors, both sophisticated and strikingly bold all shone in the way that they were designed to. It was a spectacular thing to see.
In the evenings, as I rinsed out my brushes and hammered shut the paint cans, I gave thanks to God for all of the gifts that I had been given and for the beauty and the joy that comes from a job well done. But most of all, I was grateful for Jesus, the Master Craftsman who patiently patches me up again and again and who offers to fix all the deepest cracks in my life that I have so stubbornly try to paint over and ignore. He comes and stands there, with his tools in his hands and with love in his eyes, asking me gently if I am now finally ready for him fix those ugly spots in my walls that he definitely already knows about. With my slow nod of permission, he goes to work as I sigh in resignation. This process of fixing all of the cracks in my walls is going to take a great deal of energy, time and patience. But I know that in the end it will all be eternally worth it.
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Try Something New
Try Something New
Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge 1/9/2019
Recently, my family and I went out to eat and we decided to try out a, “new to us” restaurant. We all love Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai food, but we each have our favorite dishes that we tend to order over and over again. My daughter is a big fan of green curry. My husband likes to challenge his palate with eye watering spice levels. My favorite is a certain Vietnamese comfort food dish called, Bun Tom Thit Nuong Cha Gio. But this evening we were all feeling kind of in a rut with our usual food places and so together we hopped into the car and decided that we wanted to go on a bit of a culinary adventure.
Since we all like sushi, the restaurant that we unanimously decided to try out was a Poke place. – A restaurant where they put all of your favorite sushi ingredients together in a bowl and dress them with a mysterious sauce. At the ordering counter, I looked over the menu with a bit of trepidation. — I wasn’t entirely sure that I was going to like what they were offering. It was risky to try something that I had never ordered before. But I was here for the very reason that I had decided that I was going to try something new. One entrée caught my eye. It had marinated ahi tuna, avocado, cucumber, sweet onion, mango, wasabi, pickled ginger, seaweed salad, spicy mayo and shoyu sauce. Many of these ingredients were familiar to me, I already knew that I liked tuna and avocado and mangos. But I wasn’t sure that I was going to like them all put together in this new way!
I gathered my courage together and I ordered it, but I made sure that I had plenty of water on hand for when it arrived. Since the dish involved seafood, this was not going to be a cheap experiment. After the bowls arrived, we said a quick prayer with our forks and chop sticks hanging in the air. We should not have worried. The Poke was absolutely delicious. Someone had the creativity and the boldness to take many good tasting ingredients and to mix them together in a brand new and wonderful way and we were completely blessed by it. All we needed to do was to take a risk and to try something new.
In this New Year, it is a good time for all of us to look at our faith lives and to take some of the best and most loved ingredients of our days and to try do something new with them. –Perhaps you like to sit in quiet prayer and meditation; or maybe you like to sing along to inspirational songs. It could be that this is the year that you want to volunteer to lead something new at your church or work to revitalize a ministry that is important to you. Whatever things that you find good and valuable for your life of faith and spiritual balance, what ever practices feed your eternal soul and your loving relationship with Christ, I would invite you to try to incorporate them into your weeks in a new and intentional way. This New Year, try something spiritually new. You may find out that you really do indeed like it.
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It is Racism. It is Sin. It is Wrong
The Day after Charlottesville. 8/13/2017. Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge
On the Sunday morning after the violent protests in Charlottesville VA, every pastor in the city the state and hopefully the whole country should have been asking themselves the same question. “What am I going to say today about the racial hatred that has just been put on horrifying display for the whole world to see?”
The easiest route is to think and say nothing. To pretend that we do not live in a hyper media world where instant video of hate drenched slogans backed up with torches, rifles and riot gear has not been streamed constantly across our plethora of viewing screens. Many pastors will ignore it completely and choose to stick with their worship plan and to cash their paychecks with a smile as they serve their congregations the exact same spiritual food that they have been accustomed to each week.
Other pastors with big hearts and small courage will watch the news in horror, and renounce the hatred personally only to their closest friends and family. They will agonize over if they should say anything and how to say things so that their congregations will be able to hear it. For these, a mumbled reference to the incident and prayers for the victims while everyone’s heads are safely bowed and eyes are firmly closed is as far as they will ever go to put themselves and their faith on the side of Justice without actually risking anything.
But my friends, neither of these is the way of Jesus. Christ gave up everything, even his life, to spread the message of radical inclusive love to the world. This was love for the prostitutes and eunechs, love for the broken and the poor, and especially love for the foreigners of different color and culture. This was not love and care offered in confidential counseling sessions, but radical love preached in the synagogue and in the town square and to anyone and everyone within earshot. It was the only thing that could save the world.
And so today, in my calling to follow the example of my savior Jesus Christ, I am going to stand up and say that the hatred and the vitriol and the violence demonstrated this weekend in Charlottesville Virginia is wrong. It is Racism. It is Sin. It is the antithesis to everything that Christ and Christianity stands for. And I refuse to be a traitor to my faith which I hold dear and be silent. I refuse to just mumble a few choice words and to pray that it will all just disappear. I choose to live into my faith in these troubled times and to speak loudly against any form of hatred.
Today and every day, I will choose to be a voice for love and inclusion. I choose to work for Christ’s Justice and for peace. Today and every day I will declare, It is Racism. It is sin. It is wrong. I will not be silent. Will you join me?
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Mobius
April 4, 2017 Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge
Inside, Outside. All around the Back Side, Front Side,
Inside Out.
Feelings of the Inside, expressed on the Outside.
Feelings on the Inside, fear and doubt.
Acting from the Inside. Reacting to the Outside.
Never pausing to think, what’s life about?
Changing all the inside.
To effect all on the outside.
Changing from the inside.
Inside Out.
Poem by Karen Fitz La Barge, 4/28/2000
The other day, I was going through some of the old files on my computer, and I came across this poem that I wrote while I was in Seminary. It is a reflection on an event that I attended, keynoted by the celebrated author on Spirituality, Parker Palmer. During the event, Parker described how many people are afraid to allow themselves to become the person that God designed them to be. Inside of their heads and hearts, they doubt that anyone will affirm them in their deepest longings, and so they themselves don’t affirm those longings in themselves either. They are afraid that they will never have what it takes to become who it is that they are called to be. And so instead of leading the life that they are longing to live, (The life that uses the gifts and follows the desires that God has given them), they lie to themselves about who they are, and they instead react to outside pressures and try to live by awkwardly fitting into someone else’s expectations for them. (Their life never seems to fit them quite right, but instead always feels like they are wearing someone else’s shoes. ) –But ultimately the fears and the doubts that they feel inside will become how they live their life in the world, always looking in fear for someone’s disapproval, always doubting their own ability to be God’s unique and wonderful creation that only they can be.
During the presentation, Parker used the image of a mobius strip. This very fascinating mathematic object can be created by cutting a strip of paper, flipping one end of the strip upside down and then taping both ends together. If you were an ant traveling along the length of a mobius strip, and you started walking along the strip where you taped it together, soon you would be upside down over your starting point, and if you kept walking, you would ultimately walk all the way around the outside to the inside again. The inside and the outside of a mobius strip are interconnected and are both part of the same journey. This very accurately describes how we humans work. Who we are on the inside will come out on the outside. If we are afraid on the inside, those fears will be part of how we relate to the world. But it also means that when we on the inside acknowledge and live into becoming into the new creation who God designed us to be, that new person will show up on the outside and become apparent to all. When we allow ourselves to be courageous enough to follow God’s call on our lives, when we allow ourselves to be who God wants us to be, it is like a new person is born.
Listen to this scripture from the Message translation from 2 Corinthians 5:16-20. Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.
This is the scriptural description of being born again. And that new person that God has created and called will, if we allow it to grow in love and in kindness, soon be easily recognizable to everyone on the outside, lending courage to other people to also follow their unique callings from God. This sort of change, from the inside out, is what we are each called to do through Christ.
Will you do it?
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Free Childcare
3/27/2017 Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge
Kayla and James stood together in the doorway of their 3 year old’s bedroom. It was, for once, blessedly quiet. Their eyes moved over the plethora of items scattered all over the floor. Stuffed animals, duplo blocks, plastic dinosaurs, trucks, board books, balls, socks, and happy meal toys were all sprawled without dignity where they were last dropped or thrown. Some were items that had been lost at least once that long Saturday. The instigator of all of this chaos was finally and completely asleep. One small hand still gripping a green crayon, the other grabbing the covers, his bangs hair curling on his temple in darkened sweat; his breathing low and gentle. Asleep, Mason looked far too innocent to be the cause of all of this trouble. But here it was, 11:38 pm and Kayla and James had finally won the three and a half hour battle to put their young son to bed. –They both were completely exhausted. Kayla looked up to find her husband James looking at her. He motioned with his head for them to leave. As silently as possible they shut the door and slipped quietly down the stairs to the other end of the house where they were able to have a conversation that would not wake Mason up again. This meant standing together in the laundry room. “We can’t keep living like this.” Reasoned James. “We need some help”, he continued. “I don’t know what to do.” Said Kayla, interrupting and repeating back the same phrase that she had been saying for the last six months. James, this time surprised her with a new line. “What we need is a community. Your parents are not around here, and mine certainly aren’t either. What we need is something like a group of grandmas and grandpas who have been through this before who can tell us what will work.” “Or some moms who are going through this same phase, but have figured out a better way.” Kayla added. They both were silent for a minute as they thought. The smell of detergent and fabric softener curled through the air. “What was the name of those retired teacher friends of your mom’s? The ones that she said were great with kids?” “Mike and Debbie” Kayla replied. Then she added more hesitantly, “Mom said that they go to the Presbyterian Church and that we could connect with them there.” “Church. huh.” Pondered James. Kayla looked up hopefully. “Are you really considering going to a Church? You said that if they couldn’t prove things scientifically, you wouldn’t believe it.” “Well, I am ready to believe that Mason could use a dose of morality! He bit me today, twice. I think it is going to bruise. How is he ever going to be able to go to school if he doesn’t learn how to get along with other kids?” James flashed his forearm with two sets of perfect bite marks in front of Kayla. She glanced up from her phone to see his arm, and made a sympathetic face, but ignored it. “It says here on their website that church is at 10:45 am tomorrow. Nursery care is provided.” “Really?” Said James. “Free childcare? ” “Yup. During church nursery care is free. And hey, look they even have a Mom’s group that meets on Monday mornings at 10:30.” “Let’s try it.” Said James. “If they are the Christian community that they are supposed to be, maybe we can get some support or at least some good parenting advice.” “I am sure that we can.” Said Kayla. “Hey, while we are in here, let’s start some laundry, so that we have something clean to wear to church tomorrow.” “Ok” said James, “But I am not wearing a tie and that isn’t negotiable!” “I am sure that ties in church are optional.”
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Feed us, O God
Prayers for the Hungry:
Let us pray for those who hunger in this land: whose only kitchen is a soup kitchen; whose only food is what others don’t want; whose diet depends on luck, not on planning. Lord, feed your people using our skills and conscience, and eradicate from our politics and private lives the apathy to hunger which comes from over-indulgence.
Let us pray for the hungry to be fed.
Feed us, O God.
Let us pray for the hungry in this land and other lands, where no one may see to respond to human need or have any capacity, or where fields are farmed for the benefit of others by workers whose own children are hungry. Help us discern between need and greed. Lord, feed your people, even if means our own lifestyles must change so that all may be nourished.
Let us pray for the hungry to be fed.
Feed us, O God.
Let us pray for the hungry for justice, who suffer gross inequalities, who suffer because of tyranny, who are persecuted or oppressed, who have no hope and whose lives contain great misery. May their labor not be in vain and may we be counted as bringing them a cup of cold water.
Let us pray for the hungry to be fed.
Feed us, O God.
Let us pray for the hungry in Spirit, who have so much noise in their lives they cannot hear the thundering of God’s Love whispering in their ears. Lord, open our ears to that your voice may be heard and understood.
Let us pray for the hungry and the fed. Feed us, O God.
(adapted from Trinity Cathedral Miami, Prayers of the People)