Newspaper Columns by The Rev. Canon Bill Lewellis
Be in love transformed
By Bill Lewellis
March 14, 2003, The Express-Times, Easton
My next to last step when preparing a sermon plays out on Saturday morning at a local diner where I review pages of notes made throughout the week and glance randomly at the faces of strangers. Might anything I've written be useful to anyone in this place?
Something good usually happens. I discard a few "wonderful" ideas and paragraphs to which I was wedded just a few days earlier. Was it Ernest Hemingway who called this "killing your darlings?"
Something else happened a few weeks ago. Seeing that my coffee cup was full, the waitress on refill duty said as she passed by, "You're good."
Lose the notes, I chuckled. She gave you the sermon. This is your waitress. Listen to her.
At all times, according to author Anne Lamott, 37 voices let us know how we are doing. Thirty-five have the job of telling us how awful we are. To hell with them, she says. Listen to the other two.
A few Sundays ago in many churches, we heard that Jesus took his inner circle to a high mountain, to a place where people encounter God. Peter, James and John witnessed a radical transformation of Jesus. "This is my Son, the Beloved," God said. "Keep on listening to him."
Fred Rogers, who died recently at 74 after raising generations of our TV-watching children, helped many understand that that you don't have to do anything sensational in order to be loved - unless you live in a dysfunctional family - and that "there's only one person in the whole world like you."
Life's trick is for us to integrate that without becoming narcissists -- to come down from that mountain and love one another.
Jesus did not stay on the mountain. "When you reach the mountaintop, you're only halfway," says a mountain climbers' proverb. Jesus came down to begin his journey to Jerusalem.
"Our last experience of God is frequently the greatest obstacle to the next experience of God," says spirituality writer Richard Rohr, because we make an absolute out of it. All great spirituality is about letting go." After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, a book title states.
"Once we recognize God's great secret, that we are all meant to be God's sons and daughters, we can't avoid the call to see one another differently," said Rowan Williams a few weeks ago during a sermon at the liturgy wherein he was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury.
"No one can be written off; no group, no nation, no minority can just be a scapegoat to resolve our fears and uncertainties. We cannot assume that any human face we see has no divine secret to disclose: those who are culturally or religiously strange to us; those who so often don't count in the world's terms. We have to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others, the ones whose company we don't greatly like, the ones we didn't choose, because Jesus is drawing us together into his place, into his company."
Listen to God calling you beloved. Forget the 35 voices - listen to the other two. Listen to your waitress. Listen to Jesus. Be in love transformed. Do the laundry.
[The Rev. Canon Bill Lewellis is communication minister for the Diocese of Bethlehem, the Episcopal Church in 14 counties of eastern and northeastern Pennsylvania.]
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