He Is Risen, and He Is Fabulous!

Isaiah 25:6-9;
Easter Sunday, 2011
I have a sister who’s several years older than I am. As it turns out, we were born on opposite sides of the great divide between the tail end of the Baby Boomers and the dawn of Generation X, although that line is quite fuzzy and most of us born in that cohort have cultural touchstones that lie on both sides of the line. Personally, I love the Beatles and REM.
This is not unusual, and the only reason I bring it up at all is that the divide lived out in our lives at the church we grew up in. She was part of the last large high school youth group that congregation ever had. I was part of the much smaller faithful remnant after the great church exodus of the late 60s and early 70s saw that congregation, just like this one and thousands of other Mainline Protestant congregations across the United States, lose about half of its members in what must have seemed like the blink of an eye.
Why bring this up on Easter Sunday? On a day when churches fill up for one morning like they used to every time they opened their doors?
It is not nostalgia. Trust me on that. I do not ever long for the “good old days,” because I know that they were, in fact, not so good. After all, back in those old days of the 1960s and early 70s, the evangelical wing of the church was starting up all kinds of so-called “Christian” schools that, upon closer examination, seemed to educate only the children of Christians who happened to be white. Back in those old days the Presbyterian Church had held about 180 General Assemblies and never elected a woman moderator. In point of fact, in 1970 the church had only been ordaining women ministers for 14 years. We were still three years shy of the first Assembly at which the Rev. David Sindt, founder of the predecessor organization to More Light Presbyterians, stood on the floor of the General Assembly and held up a sign that read, simply, “Is anyone else out there gay?”
So, no, those were not “good old days,” and it’s not nostalgia that has me looking back this morning.
Actually, I’m looking back this morning in recollection of a Youth Sunday that my sister’s high school group led way back when. They asked the congregation a whole bunch of provocative questions, including “what would Christianity be without the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus?”
There are tons of sociological reasons for the decline of the Mainline Protestant church in America during and since the late 1960s, but I am convinced that the singular theological reason for the decline is that the church could not give good and honest answers to the questions of its youth.
So here we are almost a half century further on: the faithful remnant, gathered on Easter Sunday. Can we yet imagine good and honest answers to the questions of our youth about resurrection, about salvation, about redemption, about any of those dismal and catechismal questions of orthodoxy?
Perhaps we need to begin by understanding the questions. Deep questions about faith so often come down to this: how can I find meaning for my life when there is so much brokenness all around me? Or, how can there be such suffering in the world if God is good? The Good Friday variation is simply, how could a good and loving God have allowed the cross to happen to Jesus? The personal version is runs like this: How could God allow the people of Japan to suffer so much? Or the people of Libya? Or the people of North Carolina? Or my neighbor? Or my parents? Or my child?
In other words, our most profound questions of faith bring us to the edge of the abyss of life.
The invitation of Easter is simply this: step into that abyss, give yourself over to life, lived fully, authentically in this one sweet, small moment that you have been given. Step into the abyss, and trust that God will be with you all the way down, all the way through, and all the way to your own rising up.
Of course, as Anne LaMott suggested recently in an NPR interview, that’s pretty un-American.
“The American way,” LaMott said, “is to trick out the abyss so it's a little bit nicer. Maybe go to Ikea and get a more festive throw rug.”
Make it fabulous! It is certainly a brighter, shinier path to fulfillment than picking up one’s cross and following Jesus.
We’d like to follow a bright, shiny path to salvation: a trip to a big box shop where we can purchase happiness right off the shelf. After all, that is our fundamental right as Americans – to pursue happiness, primarily in the form of what can be packaged and sold.
Of course, it doesn’t work that way, and not so far deep down we all know that. Knowing it doesn’t mean that we don’t keep trying it. Lord knows a bright, shiny iPad would probably make me completely happy!
When it doesn’t work out that way, when we stumble into the abyss instead of the Best Buy, it’s a huge letdown.
For many folks of my generation – and those who have followed us – a deep cynicism and snarkiness is our principle generational inheritance, as we live into the realization that we will be the first generation of Americans who are not materially more well off than our parents, and that the institutions we were taught to trust as children are in such utter disrepair that it seems irresponsible to depend upon them at all.
When that is your primary orientation toward the world, it is difficult to give voice to resurrection hope.
I think often these days of the words of the late Archbishop Oscar Romero, who said, “I try not to depend on hope, because unfulfilled hope leads to despair, and we have no need of despairing people.”
The deep cynicism of our age is grounded in the despair of unfulfilled hopes.
If, as scripture tells us, faith is hope in things unseen, then the one thing we refuse is hope because our hope in the things we can see has been so often disappointed. If our hopes in the things – the people and the institutions – that we can see has been dashed then we are not about to place hope in things we cannot see and touch and make demands upon.
Of course, Romero did not say merely that he tried not to depend on hope. He completed the thought saying, “I try, instead, to depend on faith.”
What’s the difference?
Hope is an abstraction; faith is a relationship – one marked by trust.
I hope that nothing bad will happen to my children when I kiss them good-bye. I trust them to make good decisions no matter what happens.
I’m pretty sure that the disciples hoped Jesus would somehow escape the clutches of the empire. They trusted that he would be with them always, no matter what the abyss, that nothing – not even death – could separate them from the love of God that they experienced in his presence because they had experienced so much that was, well, frankly fabulous beyond words.
It’s a bit like the difference between the traditional dictionary definition of “fabulous” and its contemporary usage. We hope that things will turn out fabulously – that is, they way they do in happy fables. We trust in the One who is “wonderful, loving, awesome, inspiring, passionate, hope-filled, transformative,” as the Urban Dictionary defines fabulous, at least in the part of its definition that sounds almost like it could have come from Isaiah.
As a resurrection people we are called to nothing more, but nothing less, than faithful living, trusting in that same love the disciples experienced in Jesus’ wonderful, loving, awesome, inspiring, passionate, hope-filled, transformative presence.
After all, if resurrection simply means “rise up” – and it does mean just that – it is something we do every single day, day after day, in faith that in our living and in our dying we belong to the God made know to us through the fabulous life of Jesus. That faithful rising up is the ground of all authentic hope.
Thus, in following the way of Jesus – the way of resurrection, of rising up day after day – we walk upon the ground of authentic hope.
The way of Jesus is the way of salvation – it’s a more difficult way than the route down I-95 to the Ikea, for it does go by way of the cross. It does not seek to avoid the abyss or to trick it out nicely. It goes straight on through. For Jesus went that way: the way of poverty, the way of the outcast and marginalized, the way of the sick and the imprisoned, the way of suffering, and ultimately the way of death.
As Fr. Richard Rohr wrote years ago,
It is indeed difficult to lead people to believe in the "bad news" of the crucifixion. It is hard to trust death; ironically, it is even more difficult to trust the good news of resurrection. We are afraid to call upon the new power of risen life and expect it to be there. Or to put it another way, many Christians would sooner put up with death than confront it.
The resurrection of Jesus is an active assault upon the death and hopelessness of the world. Jesus stands in the midst of the fear of the upper room and turns it into Pentecost. To be Jesus Resurrected is to be a new power standing over and against the sick world. To be Jesus Resurrected is to be glorified body, new order, new world, new person; it is to be church.
You and me and all of us together are to be Jesus Resurrected, living faithfully in the world as it is, witnessing everyday to the world as it should and could be.
Jesus went the way of the suffering servant with joy, because he trusted completely in the faithfulness of God, in the abundance of God’s good creation, in the love of God that is from everlasting to everlasting. Jesus trusted completely that in him and through him God was at work doing a new thing in the world that would, ultimately, confront and defeat the powers of despair.
Jesus went with joy – I am convinced that there was great good humor and laughter, with abundant food and drink at most stops along the way, all kinds of fabulousness – and, at every step along the way Jesus trusted the love of God that would be with him for his rising up every single day.
It will be a great day for the whole body of Christ when we embrace all kinds of fabulous, and when we find the fabulous most deeply in living the same life that Jesus did: a life of joyous service, of healing and hope, of liberation and love, of faith in the loving Father and Mother of us all.
So on this Easter Sunday, 2011, I am thinking way back: way back to the church that David Sindt confronted 40 years ago; way back to the church of my youth, and to the questions of its young people.
But I’m also thinking about the future: about the church that soon, and very soon, will finally respond to the challenge that David Sindt and so many others have faithfully embodied; about the church that our young people will inherit and the questions they are asking of us.
Do you believe in the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus?
I don’t think that’s the right question, and it doesn’t bother me at all however you choose to answer it for yourself. If answering, “yes,” helps you to rise up each day and faithfully follow the way of Jesus, then great. If you answer that question more figuratively, focusing on the continuing reality of Christ’s presence in the world, that’s great, too.
As for me, even if I don’t think it’s quite the right question, if pressed, I’ll say simply this: he is risen; and he is fabulous!

Are We There Yet?

Palm Sunday, April 17, 2011
I want to tell you a story this morning, but first let me put an image in your mind, courtesy of something that Henri Nouwen wrote some 30 years ago:
There is a little man in Peru, a man without any power, who lives in a barrio with poor people and who wrote a book. In this book he simply reclaimed the basic Christian truth that God became human to bring good news to the poor, new light to the blind, and liberty to the captives. Ten years later this book and the movement it started are considered dangerous by [the United States of America] the greatest power on earth. When I look at this little man, Gustavo [Gutierrez], and think about the tall Ronald Reagan, I see David standing before Goliath, again with no more weapon than a little stone, a stone called A Theology of Liberation.
“Are we there yet?” the little one cried from the backseat looking out across the dusty hills toward the city whose skyline was just visible against the setting sun. We’d been on the road since dawn, eating breakfast and then lunch at roadside stops along the way. The children were road-weary and beginning to get whiney.
“Are we there yet?”
Traffic was heavy, way worse than usual, but, then again, it was festival season in the city and people were coming from all over to celebrate, to gather with family and friends. Passover always brings folks together. It’s just a joyous time!
But just at the moment there was no joy in our little band. The kids were ready to be done, and so were the grownups.
We’d come to a complete standstill on the road. There was some kind of commotion up ahead. We could see a lot of dust swirling around, and the noise of a distant crowd drifted on the breeze.
“What’s going on?” one of kids asked.
“Can you see anything, Dad?” asked another.
I stepped down and walked past the edge of the roadway to see if I could get a good look at whatever was causing the traffic jam. Probably a wreck, or maybe an animal in the road.
“Is it the king’s parade?” my wife asked.
“Hm. … I don’t think so,” I said, remembering that, yes, in fact, the king’s soldiers did parade into the city during the festival and it was a sight to behold – soldiers marching, drums beating, weapons gleaming. But we were coming into the city from the east, and the military parade always came into the city from the west. I think their barracks are out that way.
“Aww, bummer,” said my teenaged son. “I’d like to see the king. That’d be cool!”
“Well,” I said, “maybe we will, but I’m pretty sure that whatever is holding up the works, it’s not the king.”
Just then a little boy, no more than 10, barefooted and dusty, came running along the side of the road from the direction of whatever was up there blocking the way.
“It’s the king! It’s the king! It’s the king!” he yelled.
“Come and see! Come and see! Come and see!”
“Let’s go see, Dad,” came a pleading chorus. “Can we? Can we, please?”
Looking at the crowd ahead, and the line of traffic stretched out behind me, I thought, “well, we’re not moving this vehicle anytime soon, and the kids are sick and tired of being cooped up … why not?”
“Sure, why not?” I said to a wave of happy shouts.
“Now let’s stay together, kids. It looks like a mob up there.”
They joined me at the road’s edge and we half-walked, half-trotted along around the stopped traffic ahead of us. The closer we got the bigger the crowd grew and the noisier it got.
We could hear shouting now:
“Hosanna! Hosanna! Hosanna!”
“Save us! Save us!”
“Pretty weird thing to be shouting at the king,” I thought. After all, the king was not particularly popular. He wasn’t really a king at all. He was just a lackey of the emperor, and I was pretty darn sure that the emperor was not in the center of this crowd. Everybody sounded way too happy for that.
We kept squeezing our way forward. It helps to have kids dragging you along because sometimes people will make way for a child. Today they did, and pretty soon we found ourselves surging toward whoever it was that was the center of all this attention.
Suddenly the people right in front of us parted, and there he was – the man at the middle of all the fuss. The one who had stopped traffic for miles around.
“He doesn’t look much like a king to me,” my daughter said, and she was right. He was a pretty average looking guy, as far as that goes. He surely didn’t have on a crown, or jewels, or any of that. He didn’t have guards around him either, and he was not riding on an imperial horse done up in parade armor.
The guy was on a donkey! And if I had to guess, I’d say it was a Jenny, too, because the little colt at its side wasn’t big enough to be weaned yet. What a sight!
Guy rides in on a nursing, female donkey! And the crowd calls him king? What kind of king is that? Who was this guy? What is going on!
“Momma,” said our daughter, “isn’t that guy Jesus? Remember. The rabbi we heard talk back home.”
“I think you’re right. Didn’t he say something like, ‘blessed are the meek’?”
“Well, he sure got that right! There’s not much more meek than what he looks like on that donkey!”
And just then, the donkey slowed, and Jesus turned his head our way … and he laughed out loud.
I didn’t hear the joke, but it must have been a good one.
The strange parade moved on toward the city, but I stood still watching, holding my wife’s hand, and keeping our kids together.
“Can’t we follow him?” asked one of my sons. “Listen to the songs; I want to go with him.”
Oh those songs. I can still here that music:
I’m on my way to freedom land … I’m on my way to freedom land … I’m on my way to freedom land … I’m on my way, praise God, I’m on my way.
If you can’t go, don’t hinder me … if you can’t go, don’t hinder me … if you can’t go, don’t hinder me … I’m on my way, praise God, I’m on my way.
And my son asking, again, “can’t we follow him?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, thinking to myself, “I’m not sure how long he’s going to be laughing and singing.”
To my family I simply said, “the traffic is thinning out now. We should go get our stuff and head on into town. We’ve got things to do and people to see.”
That was all so many years ago. You know what happened that week. The army had marched in to the other side of town. The king got wind of the little parade with the donkey, and I don’t think he liked the joke at all. The rich folks weren’t happy with Jesus either; not after that stunt he pulled in the temple square. And the religious leaders didn’t like it one bit; not when folks started calling Jesus, “messiah.”
I think back sometimes to the question my son asked me that dusty afternoon: can’t we follow him?

Render Unto God

Matthew 22:15-22; Psalm 146
April 10, 2011
For some reason that I cannot explain – and do not want to try – when I read Psalm 146 the theme song from Ghostbusters runs through my head:
If there’s something strange
In the neighborhood.
Who ya gonna call?
Ghostbusters!
When I read the passage from Matthew that we just heard, I think of the sign that hangs above the cash register in a second-hand store I was in a while back: In God We Trust; All Others Pay Cash.
And, of course, this week I have to play the Beatles’ Taxman song at least once or twice. After all, April 15 is right around the corner.
What can I say? Sometimes my brain works like a search engine whose algorithms are a bit wonky.
In any case, this disparate set of Biblical texts set off a strange set of connections for me over the past several days, reminding me that our exegesis – our interpretation – of scripture is always bound to time and place. It’s tax week. It’s the week before Holy Week. It’s the weekend when we’ve been brought face to face with the regional crisis, and for some of us, the family crisis of a government shutdown.
There’s a scripture study practice known as “dislocated exegesis” which holds simply that where you read changes how you read. There’s a truth there that’s both physical and more broadly social.
That is to say, imagine sitting on the front steps of the U.S. Capitol and reading Psalm 146: do not but your trust in princes, in mortals whose thoughts perish when they draw their last breath.
Imagine standing in the A-SPAN soup line and reading, “blessed are the poor,” or, perhaps, Jesus’ instruction to not “worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.” How much different would those words sound if read in line at Macy’s?
Imagine reading the story of Jesus sitting down to dinner with the tax collector with someone who works at the IRS, or the passage from Matthew about rendering unto Caesar with someone who refuses to pay taxes because she does not want her money going to support America’s military machine.
Where we read, when we read, with whom we read makes a difference in how we read and what we understand.
Jesus understood this, and his give and take with the Pharisees underscores this awareness. The Pharisees and Herodians named in this passage mean collaborators with the Rome occupation of Israel. They have put their trust in the Empire and they are clearly deeply suspicious of this rabble rousing rabbi.
The question that Jesus asks them is, at its essence, simply this: in whom do you paces your ultimate trust. This is, fundamentally, the question of Lent, the question of our journey near to the heart of God:
in whom do you place your ultimate trust?
Think of all the people and institutions to whom we render our trust, to whom we give our trust. Better, think for a moment about the people and institutions who ask for your trust?
How do you give them trust? What actions indicate your trust?
Now, think for a moment about the ways that God asks for your trust?
On the slip of paper you have, I invite you to draw an image, an icon, a symbol – whatever your artistic bent – that points toward a way that you give your trust to God – an aspect of your life that reflects what you render unto God.

Our trust is what, ultimately, belongs to God. As you’ve just imagined and “rendered” in pencil, we render our trust in many ways.
Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God,
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord!

Have You Not Heard? Have You Not Seen?

Matthew 5:33-48; Ephesians 5:8-14
April 3, 2011
There’s a beautiful image returned from the Hubble telescope about a decade ago. On the Hubble web site it’s described this way:
“’Starry Night,’ Vincent van Gogh's famous painting, is renowned for its bold whorls of light sweeping across a raging night sky. Although this image of the heavens came only from the artist's restless imagination, a new picture from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope bears remarkable similarities to the van Gogh work, complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of miles of interstellar space.”
Last Wednesday was the 158th anniversary of van Gogh’s birth. If anyone in human history understood the play of light and imagination, it was van Gogh, who said once, “I have a terrible need of, — dare I say the word? Religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”
I understand the impulse. Sometimes, when I feel a terrible need of being bound back to the tradition and community of Christ (that’s my personal definition of religion as it pertains to Christianity) I go looking for the inspiration of compelling, mysterious beauty. If the night sky is unavailable, sometimes I come in here and look at the windows.
Take a moment to look around.
We may not have every possible color shining through, but Roy G. Biv is well represented.
As you take in these beautiful colors, the various shades of light shining through this glass, what color do you feel like this morning?
I spent quite a bit of time in here last week. Perhaps because it was so gray out, and so colorful in here. When I’m stuck for inspiration I walk the sanctuary and look at the windows, and I lift you up in prayer.
We’ve shared a great deal during this first month of the journey of Lent: letting go of what needs to be let go of, giving voice to our lamentations, building on that broken ground a stone foundation of hope.
This week I want to extend that.
In the book of Hebrews faith is defined as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen (Heb. 11:1).
I reckon that is the perfect Lenten point of view from a North American perspective. After all, Lent falls, for us, in spring when the greens of summer are as yet unseen but the evidence of their coming is all around us. Even during such a gray week as last one, things unseen are working their way to full bloom.
Besides all that biological evidence all around us, baseball season began again! Heck, even though last Thursday was a cold, drizzly day, it was also opening day, and from that vantage point it was even possible to imagine the Nats as playoff contenders – if you have a very good imagination.
Imagination, Einstein famously said, is more important than knowledge. I certainly cannot speak to how that plays out in physics or in the science behind Hubble or in the mechanics of a baseball game or even in the production of great art, for in all of that there is a balance between knowledge and imagination, between technique and inspiration.
But I can tell you that imagination is far more important and powerful than knowledge when it comes to Christian faith. It’s not that knowledge is worthless to the life of faith – far from it. We do need to learn the history of our own tradition, and, indeed, of our own small congregation. We do need to know about the history of the texts that are central to our tradition. It does matter that we understand that the authors of the Genesis creation accounts were not engaged in writing a scientific account of the beginnings of the universe but were, rather, writing an account of the beginnings of a particular people and of that people’s multi-faceted relationship with their Creator.
The Genesis account really was something new, sprung from the imaginations of writers trying to give words to the beginnings of their people’s faith story. That people’s story of faith and doubt and struggle and exile and unbelief and restoration is marked throughout by imaginative renewal. God’s covenant with God’s people is renewed over and over and over again.
“Out of the depths I cry to you,” the psalmist says, and over and over and over again God responds.
From the depths of enslavement, God renews the covenant through promised liberation in the imaginative actions of Moses.
From the depths of exile, God renews the covenant through promised restoration in the imaginative witness of Isaiah.
From the depths of oppression under the crushing weight of Rome, God renews the covenant through promised reconciliation in the imaginative life of Jesus.
Liberation. Restoration. Reconciliation. These are the constant promises of God renewed in every generation through the creative acts of God and the imaginative responses of God’s faithful servants.
That renewal comes through a distinctive interpretive practice of the faithful, and through their willingness to pay the price that comes with making things new.
Jesus’ words in the section of Matthew that we read a few moments ago demonstrate the practice, and our entire journey of Lent toward Jerusalem and the cross reminds us of the cost.
Jesus gives distinctive voice to the interpretive practice in his refrain, “you have heard it said … but I tell you.”
Every time he uses that refrain he begins by quoting the sacred scriptures of his own people, and then proceeds to reinterpret them for his own time. For example, an eye for an eye was an early Judaic rule of justice that aimed to reduce tribal violence. An eye for an eye was a rule that tempered the violence by balancing injury for injury in an age when mass slaughter was often the response to relatively minor insult.
But Jesus pointed beyond that tempered violence to a reign of nonviolence, taking the sacred text and reimagining it.
Jesus had a new mind for his time, and, in the Sermon on the Mount, his essential teaching might be paraphrased that way: you’ve got to get a new mind for a new time.
The title of this brief meditation, “Have you not heard? Have you not seen?” is taken from God’s words in Isaiah, when God says, “Behold, I am about to do a new thing! Can you not see it?” You’ve got to get new eyes for this new time, as well.
I began with the amazing images from Hubble. Before anybody here was born, Herman Oberth got the idea that a telescope in space might “see” things that no telescope on earth could see. One can imagine him saying, “you have heard it said that the telescope on Mt. Wilson is the greatest ever, but I say to you if we could just put that sucker in space ….”
I don’t know if Dr. Oberth thought he might see images that would remind the world of van Gogh or not, but I don’t have any trouble at all imagining van Gogh saying something like, “you have heard it said that if you want a figure to appear holy just give him a halo, but I say to you ‘I want to paint women and men with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize and which we seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrations of our colouring.’”
The artist and the scientist – each had a mind for a new time, and not necessarily a time which their contemporaries could imagine.
Jesus had that same mind – an imagination that saw a future otherwise and began living into it in his own time regardless of the ridicule, regardless of the persecution, regardless of the risk.
He had to set aside that which needed to be set aside. He lamented that which needed to be lamented. He constructed a foundation of hope. And on it he imagined a future in which the poor, the mourners, the peacemakers, the pursuers of righteousness and justice would all be blessed.
Imagine that. If you can.
Imagination is a multi-color word to me, and when I think of great imagination I think of van Gogh, of Marc Chagall’s American Windows at the Art Institute in Chicago, of the artists in my own family. Individuals gifted to see things in ways that I don’t imagine until I look at their work, and get to step forward into their world. When I step back from that world of artists and colors, I try to hold onto that same imagination in broader social and theological terms, and imagine a future otherwise for the church and the society in which we live.
That’s why you have a piece of colored paper this morning – a small spark for your own faithful imagination.
What do you imagine today for the church and the social world of tomorrow? We know, all too well, that the world we live in is marked by so much that we need to let go of – the fears that we cling to, the false idols of security that we construct. It’s marked also by so much that we lament – the suffering that scars us, the violence that destroys.
But we know that the God of hope goes before us – a pillar of fire shining in the night, a light that the darkness shall not overcome. In that light we can see the bright colors of a new dawn breaking forth: a future otherwise.
What will it contain? What do you bring to it? What, this day, is your hope for the days to come?
I invite you, in the next few moments of quiet, to take the colored paper you received a while back, and on one end of it jot down one hope for the days to come. On the other end, jot down what you can do to bring that hope to fruition. Then tear the paper in two, and as you leave, to go forth into God’s beautiful, multi-colored creation, drop the end with the “hope” into the basket at the door, and we’ll put our colorful hopes on the stones of hope from last week, to be with us through the remainder of this Lenten journey.
Keep the other end – the one that says what you can do to bring hope to life. Carry it with you as a sign of your own promises, and as a reminder to live into those promises day by day.