Facebook Posts
I'm wired to spend all my free days with a small stack of books and a full playlist of music. On any given morning, I read a portion of the Bible, then depending on my day, I happily juggle and organize the rest of my daily readings. Reading feeds the analytical side of my mind that loves exploring thoughts, but sometimes I come across things that feel too big to just think through. Those are the times that call for music.
Years ago, I built a song playlist during one of the hardest seasons of my life. It was a devastating season of pain, and for reasons I still keep to myself, I had to carry the pain in silence. Knowing that I didn’t have an outlet of conversation, I prayed for some other way to work through the sorrow. I knew I couldn’t just turn to my regular habit of deep reading; I felt like that particular moment’s agony was just too visceral to process in my usual scholastic way. Although, honestly, the building of the playlist was a fairly analytical process, too.
I went looking for a version of each of the 150 biblical psalms. I had to listen to each one and compare the words to the biblical text. You'd be surprised how much liberty musicians will take with a song to make a good rhyme! I discovered that many of the psalms had few modern renditions that met my criteria., but eventually I did finish the song list and began my new daily rhythm. I would wake up each morning, say a prayer, and press play. I've since learned I was keeping an ancient practice in a modern way.
Monks from the early centuries prayed and sang the psalms throughout the day and night. I had an opportunity to stay with the Benedictine monks at St. John's in Minnesota a few years ago, and I discovered that they still keep that practice with thankful hearts. Their days are marked by gathering to chant the psalms. They return again and again to words that have been prayed by so many generations before them.
Singing the psalms doesn’t depend on any one person's ability to find the right words. The beautiful words already exist, and we are invited to carry those words in community. This past week, our community gathered around Psalm 32, a song that touches on the burden of silence. The psalmist remembers keeping quiet about his wrongdoing and feeling its weight in his bones. When he finally acknowledges it to God, he discovers forgiveness. Admittedly, my silence was different since I was holding something entrusted to me and worrying about what might happen. Yet I recognize something familiar in the psalmist's experience: the weight of silence and our deeply human need to bring it into God's presence.
I understand something of the psalmist's longing for a place where nothing has to remain hidden. Then comes the beautiful declaration that God is a hiding place, surrounding us with songs of deliverance. There are songs saturating the world around us. I would not be surprised to find that many of us are carrying a silence right now, but the songs are still playing. Whatever you may be carrying, I hope you'll find a little time to sit with the psalms this week. Let their words become your prayers when your own words are hard to find, and may you discover that God is always surrounding you with songs of deliverance.
“Poor Methuselah will never have a date,” I told my biology class. I received the appropriate eye rolls for my corny joke. That was back in 2011, and at the time, I wasn't lying. As far as anyone knew, Methuselah was the only Judean date palm on the planet, and he had sprouted quite an interesting story all on his own.
In 1963, archaeologists excavating Herod's palace at Masada, the desert fortress above the Dead Sea, found a jar of date seeds. The seeds went into storage at a university, where they waited in a drawer for another forty years. Then, in 2005, a botanist named Elaine Solowey planted a few of them in a research garden, and one sprouted. The Judean date palm, a tree presumed extinct, sent up a single green shoot. They were able to radiocarbon date the shell after it sprouted, and the testing showed that Methuselah was from around the time of Jesus.
By 2011, Methuselah had flowered, and they discovered that he was indeed a male. Yes, apparently date palms come in both male and female varieties. Who knew? Methuselah, then, could offer pollen, but the fruit would have to come from another Judean date palm that was female. You can see the problem. I don't know why that made me so sad, but it really was depressing to think that Methuselah would literally never have a date!
Then, I lost track of the story until 2018, when I wrote Dr. Solowey to ask how the date palm was doing. Methuselah was thriving, she said, and the team was trying to sprout more ancient seeds in hopes of finding a female. They succeeded with seeds found at Masada and at Qumran, the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Six of them sprouted, and each received a biblical name: Adam, Jonah, Uriel, Boaz, Judith, and Hannah. And guess what? Hannah turned out to be female, and her seed was nearly 200 years older than Methuselah's. Think about that. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, John tells us the crowd went out to meet him carrying branches of palm trees, and it is not out of the realm of possibility that a branch may have come from Methuselah or Hannah’s direct lineage.
A species that had disappeared hundreds of years ago was always waiting to sprout. Eventually, these two Judean date palms that had lain dormant through the fall of Rome, the travels of the Vikings, Shakespeare writing plays, and Voyager being hurled out into space were finally ready to meet. In 2020, Hannah bore fruit, and the people who tasted those first dates described them as having a unique, honeyed sweetness; Hannah now produces hundreds each season.
Sunset Ridge knows a little something about seeds that only look forgotten. Last week, I had the honor of sharing part of our own story through the sermon. A few years ago, our vision team asked a brave question: Would our neighbors even know if we closed the doors? The honest answer was perhaps not, but they certainly weren't interested in going dormant for two thousand years. They decided to nurture a new story, one that took root and kept growing through coffee, kids, and community until the whole church was sprouting new stories everywhere. That's typical of God's work. Just when you think all you've got is a handful of old seeds in a forgotten clay jar, God sends a sprout.
I am a halibut. I have known this for quite some time, and I’ve made my peace with it.
I grew up in Alaska, and some of my favorite memories are of my family out in Cook Inlet, slowly reeling halibut up out of that dark, cold water. For Texans, I suppose it might feel like trying to pull a Longhorn off the bottom of the ocean floor. Halibut are strange creatures. They start out like any other fish, but then it happens. One day, an eye begins to migrate across the skull to join the other one. Then, the fish tips onto its side and settles onto the sea floor, where it will spend most of its life looking up, and its entire world becomes whatever passes overhead.
Halibut simply aren’t as fun as otters, who float on their backs, play together, and laze around in the sunshine with their bellies up. I wonder if Sarah from Genesis was more of a halibut or an otter, but there’s not a lot of info to help answer the question. She is talked about far more than she speaks, and it might be tempting to hear all that quiet as a problem. Maybe we feel the urge to rescue Sarah from her biblical solitude; maybe we wish she were more visible and vocal, more like an otter, but Sarah’s silence isn’t necessarily bad. The quiet can be enjoyable, and besides, the world doesn’t seem to suffer from a shortage of noise. What’s hard is that I don’t know whether Sarah wanted to be something other than what she was.
I do know this: Genesis 21:1-7 is a delightful space where she is free to share her voice and her laugh. God met her where she was and fulfilled a promise, then she was left to fill in the details. Sarah says, “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.” With those words, we enter into her joy. And when she laughs, I find it refreshing to hear her acknowledge that God gave her so much happiness.
You might be tempted to think her laughter proves she’s more of an otter, but not so fast! Halibut are not entirely passive. When something sparks a halibut’s interest, it comes up fast. It’ll leave the sea floor if given a good enough reason, kind of like Sarah rising into the verses we read this past week. I don’t know if that makes her a halibut like me, but I know that staying low and watching things go by above isn’t all that terrible. It’s quiet. I am free to think and wonder about curious things. And when I decide I’d like to hear a friendly voice, I love that I have a community filled with folks who are happy to greet me when I make my way up to the surface.
What I take from Sarah’s story is that God hears us even when we think there is silence, and God knows our voices no matter the volume. God meets us right where we are and never demands the quiet ones become otters. We are loved as we are, and if you are a halibut like me, I think maybe we can look forward to God dropping in on the sea floor to make us laugh, too.
PS: I was going to end with a joke in honor of the “Dad Joke Competition,” but all of mine fell flat; I guess I floundered.
I’ll chase a rabbit down any trail, and God knows that the Bible gives me plenty of rabbits and plenty of trails. This week was no exception. I discovered that there’s a century-old debate over whether the fields at the time of Jesus were plowed before or after seeds were scattered. Today, most commentators will acknowledge that either method was possible, and many wonder if it even makes a difference in what Jesus sought to communicate in the Parable of the Sower. Frankly, after I finished chasing that rabbit, I wondered as well.
I walked away from that odd fact and picked up an article by Theodore Wardlaw, a pastor and former president of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He recalls touring the city’s justice system with a group of civic leaders, and their final visit landed at a juvenile detention center. As they passed down a bleak hall lined with steel doors, a pair of young eyes rose up to meet his own. He stopped, leaned close, and whispered, “God loves you.” According to Wardlaw, those eyes did not seem to register anything, and Wardlaw has wondered ever since whether the words fell on soft soil or landed among thorns. “I will never know,” he writes.
And the rabbit suddenly jumped into my lap.
The sower in the parable flings seed everywhere, to the point that it almost looks reckless. The fact is, however, that if plowing occurs after the scattering, then the spot where the seed lands doesn’t necessarily have the last word. The sower can afford to be lavish, to scatter and move on, because the work of the field is ongoing. Wardlaw's words, “God loves you,” may have fallen on hard ground, but hard ground is not the same thing as hopeless ground. Some children grow up surrounded by love, healthy relationships, and people who help them learn to trust. Others inherit lives marked by neglect, violence, instability, or loneliness. They did not choose the care they received, any more than a patch of earth chooses the hands that tend it. If the ground has never been cared for, the seed is not the problem, but perhaps neither is the ground.
I've often heard the Parable of the Sower taught as an invitation to examine the condition of our own hearts. There is wisdom in that, but I wonder if the parable also teaches us to notice the fields around us. God scatters grace with astonishing generosity, and perhaps Jesus would have us pay attention to where that grace lands. Some soil has already been softened by love and encouragement, while other soil has never known those gifts.
As people who have experienced God's abundant grace, we share the good news of God's love as if it were an endless supply of seeds. It is! The remaining work is to notice where those seeds land. My rabbit trail this week reminded me that there may be more than one way to help a seed become a harvest. Sometimes we arrive before the seed, and we can help prepare the ground. Sometimes we arrive after the seed has landed, and we are then invited to tend the field where God has already begun to work. The kingdom grows through the faithfulness of many hands. So, we tend the fields where God places us…no matter how many rabbit trails run through them.
If you happen to be out on the sea floor, you might discover a snapping (pistol) shrimp and a goby fish spending their lives together. When I taught biology, symbiosis always intrigued my high school students, and the relationship between these two animals was a favorite topic.
The shrimp is a tireless builder. It spends its days digging and repairing a burrow in the shifting sand. Because the sand is always in motion, the shrimp’s work is never really finished. The shrimp has one significant problem, though. Its eyesight is poor, and it may not realize when danger is approaching. The goby has a different problem. The fish has excellent vision but no home to protect it from predators. So these two creatures live together. The shrimp provides shelter, and the goby lends its sight. But there’s a bonus detail that my students always loved. As the shrimp continues its almost endless digging, it keeps one antenna lightly pressed against the goby’s tail. The touch provides an early warning system. If the goby flicks its tail and breaks contact, the shrimp darts into its burrow, and the goby follows. Together they remain tucked safely inside until the danger has passed.
If two ocean creatures, with no obvious awareness of God, can instinctively share sight and shelter, then how much more might people build relationships soaked in the love that God has called us to share? That question borrows from a teaching method called qal va-homer, which essentially means “light and heavy.” Common in Jesus’ day, it calls for reasoning from a “light” idea to a “heavy” one; if something is true in a small way, how much more will it be true in a greater one? If God clothes the lilies of the field, how much more will he clothe you? If earthly parents know how to give good gifts, how much more does God know how to give such gifts? … If mutual care can be found in a shrimp and a fish, how much more should it be found among people who bear God’s image?
At the close of Matthew 10, Jesus reverses the usual qal va-homer pattern, but the logic is evident. Jesus begins with the heavy statement first: “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” Then he narrows the focus and speaks of welcoming prophets and righteous people. Finally, he concludes with a small and tender statement. Jesus says that even offering a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who comes in the name of a disciple is seen by God and rewarded.
The disciples of Jesus are sent carrying good news, but that good news must be welcomed if it is to take root in the heart of others. The disciples need to be received, and that’s why I thought of the shrimp and the fish. When the goby takes up residence in the shrimp’s burrow, both creatures become more than either could have been alone. So, how much more extraordinary is the simple act of one person welcoming another? We rarely know what God is beginning when we offer a seat at the table, a listening ear, or even a glass of cold water. An ordinary act of hospitality may become the place where Christ is welcomed. But remember the shrimp and the goby. Neither one only gives, and neither only receives. We were made in much the same way. We offer what we have, and we accept what we lack. So perhaps this week’s invitation is to do both: extend the cup of cold water, and be humble enough to receive it when it is offered to you.
Nehemiah 1:1-11
Nehemiah’s story begins far from Jerusalem and more than a century after the Jewish people were first displaced by exile (around 450 BC). In the Persian capital a thousand miles to the east, Nehemiah serves in the royal court. When news arrives that the walls of the city that once surrounded his people’s life together are in ruins, he understands that the news is both structural and revealing. In the ancient world, walls existed because peace and trust were elusive. The dilapidation of Jerusalem’s walls exposed how vulnerable and fractured the people of God remained.
Nehemiah’s first response is embodied grief. He weeps, fasts, and prays for days. Scripture often shows that God’s work of renewal begins with our awareness of need. We cry out, and God hears. Nehemiah knows his heart must be restored before his hands can begin the work, so his prayer is deeply communal. He confesses the sins of Israel as his own and remembers God’s faithfulness.
As we begin Lent this Wednesday, we prepare the church in a similar way. We confront what is worn down in us and turn again toward God’s mercy. We slow down for forty days of both individual and communal reflection. Nehemiah’s broken walls revealed how fragile the people had become, but reading with our historical hindsight, we know that rebuilding them will not permanently restore stability. The deeper need was—and is—shalom, the wholeness of life with God. Only God makes a community secure from the inside out, and as Nehemiah reminds us, our participation in that work should begin with the courage to grieve and the humility to pray.