"My Lord and My God": An Easter Sermon from Our Student President

This sermon was given by our Student President, Ms. Emma L. Brown '14, on the Second Sunday in Easter 2014. The readings for the day are available here. 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Poor Thomas. If we take this story at face value, a grieving Thomas is so saddened and shocked by the events of Good Friday that he doesn’t break bread with the other disciples on Sunday evening. He’s scared and hurt and lonely, and he doesn’t want to be around the people who remind him of Jesus, his lost friend and leader, who he thinks is gone forever.

The gospel notes that the disciples are all still scared, and that they lock their door for fear of further violence. We can imagine how shocking the events of Good Friday must have been to the disciples, and how tensions in Jerusalem must still have been very high. Thomas watched as Jesus was convicted, beaten, taunted, and violently killed. So on the night of this scripture, he doesn’t feel like fellowship. He doesn’t eat supper with his friends. But as a result, he doesn’t get to see Jesus like all of the other disciples. He didn’t get to see the looks of joy and wonder on his friends’ faces when their savior appears. He doesn’t receive the peace that Jesus grants them. He doesn’t receive the holy spirit or the authority to forgive others for their sins. He doesn’t see for himself Jesus’ wounded hands and side, and he is not reassured.

So imagine how Thomas must have felt when he heard from his friends the next day. “Either my friends are playing a joke on me,” he must have thought, “or, I just missed the greatest miracle there could be. I missed the opportunity to be comforted in a time of great pain by the person who could have comforted me most. I missed the opportunity to see for myself that Jesus is alive.” But Thomas, because of his hurt and his anger and maybe because of his jealousy, refuses to believe his friends’ story. He says: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Fatalistic and pessimistic and wholly swayed by the events of the past week, Thomas doesn’t even want to let himself hope that Jesus is alive. That could only lead to more sorrow, right? He was protecting himself.

I think it’s easy to see things from Thomas’s point of view. Or it’s easy for me to be sympathetic. But maybe that’s because when I got to college, I felt let down by my church, and by God. I felt really alone, and like God wasn’t with me, and like if he had ever been with me, then he certainly wasn’t here with me in Cambridge. I was far away from home, really for the first time, and I didn’t make the effort to go to church, or even to find a church. I missed the disciples’ Sunday supper, let’s say, for my whole first semester of college. I don’t know what I was waiting for, or what I was looking for. I didn’t have specific demands like Thomas either. I didn’t feel the need to touch Jesus or see him in the flesh to know that he had died for me. Unlike Thomas, I wasn’t even consciously looking for a sign. In that way I guess I’m a little worse than Thomas. And yet people haven’t adopted the phrase “Doubting Emma” to mean someone without faith.

In the scripture, a week later, Thomas has healed enough to go to Sunday supper and be with the other disciples. Jesus comes to them again, he grants them his peace, and then he looks Thomas in the eye and addresses him directly. “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

During my second semester of college I shopped a class called Leverett 74: The Question of God. It was a seminar taught by Armand Nicholi in which texts by C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud were read and discussed in dialogue with each other – like a debate over the existence of God. Looking back, I know that there was a reason that I was interested in this course, even though there was a required essay and interview to even be considered to take it. And I was a freshman, and I was intimidated by everything, and I usually didn’t take chances like this. But I got into the course. And I was the youngest person there. And for a semester I read the texts that encompassed this grand debate, and I wrote about them, and I debated them myself. And, needless to say, at least for me, C.S. Lewis won. It was like he was directly answering every question I had in texts that he had written 50 years ago. And you know what? That course, which Professor Nicholi had been traching for about 50 years, that was the last time he taught it. He retired. And now it seems very clear to me, however murky it was at the time, that that course was Jesus looking me in the eye and addressing me directly. “Here, read this. Do not doubt but believe.”

Thomas answers Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” And Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

I think the uncomfortable thing about this story is that we all have doubts occasionally, or we have had doubts in our lives – about God, or about why we’re here – and it can be an awkward conversation, as open as we try to be here in discussing doubts and questions and hesitation, to say, “Hey. Wait. I’m not sure.” Because if we’re doubting Thomases, why are we here? Doesn’t doubting somehow exclude us from the body of Christ, from this community? Isn’t it something to be ashamed of, something that we should try to ignore until it goes away? No. Not at all. Not even a little bit. Thomas has gotten a bad reputation. We call faithless people “Doubting Thomas,” and we mean it as a bad thing – you pessimist, you skeptic, O ye of little faith. Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe.” But I think it’s the “come to believe” that’s the important part of that sentence. Jesus doesn’t insult Thomas for needing guidance and support. He seeks Thomas out to give it, in fact, and once Thomas sees Jesus, he cries, “My Lord and my God!” He comes to believe. Eventually. Passionately. And for the rest of his life he travels as a missionary (as far as India) to provide others with reassurance when they need it.

Thomas asked for reassurance of his faith. He was a human, a sinner, in a moment of extreme sadness. He had his doubts, and he asked for a sign from God to renew his faith. Have we not all prayed, or asked in some way, for God to lead us back to our faith? Have we not all asked for a sign, or guidance? Have we not all had our doubts? I don’t even think I asked. I just doubted. And I was lead to this place. And all I can say is thank you, and hope that I can help assuage some doubts, or at least talk about them, without shame or judgment, with the rest of my time.

Jesus's Willing Executioners: A Palm Sunday Sermon

This sermon was given on Palm Sunday at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard by Richard Parker. Richard is a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and a member of the Chaplaincy board. 

Today is Palm Sunday—and with over one billion fellow Christians worldwide, we are celebrating it, here at Christ Church, to mark the coming of Our Lord into Jerusalem.  Waving our palms, shouting our hosannas, we sing:  “All glory, laud, and honor--all glory, laud and honor.”

But let me ask you for just this one moment to pause, to put down your palms—and reflect with me on exactly what it is that we are celebrating.

What is it that begins today as Jesus enters Jerusalem—if not the solemn and horrifying march toward Friday, the inexorable start of his arrest, humiliation, execution and death, including his sorrowful march toward Golgotha, his painful hours on the cross, and then the overwhelming first reality of an empty tomb?

This Sunday it feels far too early to celebrate His resurrection—that will come a week from now, and is the purpose and meaning of Easter, not Palm Sunday.  So instead contemplate what’s before us and before Him--the weight, the darkness, and the misery that in fact begins this Sunday--in order to see it anew.

Jesus enters Jerusalem today, knowing what unfolds next.  We do too—but His disciples don’t, nor does anyone else in Israel.  Indeed many at that moment of this first Palm Sunday clearly anticipate not Jesus’s death but his coronation, the embrace of this poor carpenter’s son by the multitudes, the recognition that this whispered bastard (for surely it was whispered) is, unimaginably of all people, the Messiah, the Deliverer, that Israel has so long awaited. 

We as Christians must grasp something more: that at this seminal moment in the Gospels Jesus is still a Jew, and his act of entry into the Jewish capital is a sign of impending redemption for the Jews--not for us as Christians because on that first Palm Sunday there are as yet no Christians in the world.

So then if, like his followers that first Palm Sunday, we are celebrating—but know what his disciples didn’t and couldn’t have then—what, after all, are we celebrating?  That’s the question I ask you to consider now in all seriousness—because the answer I’m afraid to admit is this second question: paradoxically, are we not celebrating his execution? 

And if we are, to what extent are we—as much as the high priests and scribes, the Saducees, the Pharisees, and the Jewish mob are poised to do—on this Palm Sunday ourselves calling for his death? 

And if that is so, are we not acting, each one of us here as--- to adapt a phrase from our own times--Jesus’s Willing Executioners?

I ask this because I’m also aware of Palm Sunday’s place in the life of a man I count a contemporary Christian saint.  On Palm Sunday 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer celebrated his final communion in a Nazi concentration camp. Fellow prisoners had asked him to conduct the service, but he had initially refused because among them was an atheist, and Bonhoeffer wanted to do nothing that would exclude the man from their shared final moments. 

But the atheist himself had then asked Bonhoeffer to proceed, and thus he had—and so the tiny group had knelt together that Palm Sunday, in  a dank and windowless cell, knowing as surely as Christ had that first Palm Sunday what awaited them as well.

I would ask you today to hold in your minds two images.

First, consider Christ, the Son of God, entering Jerusalem, knowing that with his death on the cross, he would return to His Father.

Second, contemplate Bonhoeffer and his fellow prisoners--including the atheist, all sons of men, none a son of God--facing the same impending end of their lives on earth.  Realize, then let the realization sink into you: unlike Jesus,  they are united by fragile human faith, not certain divine knowing, of what is to come.

The men were hanged days later, guilty of the crime of attempting to assassinate Hitler, the man who’d instigated a war of men against men that had taken over 50,000,000 lives. 

Hitler himself would be dead three weeks later, and the war in Europe over a week after that.

Two millennia ago Christ came to teach, and in our own time Bonhoeffer had tried to learn—and learning why sometimes acts of cruelty and finality are part of God’s demanding love, he had offered up his life in order to take another man’s, not for himself but for mankind.  He had failed to kill that other man, so now had only his own life left to offer.

 None of us here is the son or daughter of God, and so we must use the meaning of Palm Sunday to renew our understanding of what it means, in all its complexity, freed of treacly dreams, to stand in the name of God for God’s love and justice amidst our fellows and against evil. 

If we do, I believe we will be able to understand what Bonhoeffer said, as the noose was placed round his neck, the end of his own Golgotha Road:

“This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.” 

Today, on Palm Sunday, we owe Our Savior all glory, laud, and honor for submitting to our willing execution.  Today, on Palm Sunday, we no less importantly owe one another not just the promise offered but the rededication of our lives to love and justice, remembering the courage of the Bonhoeffers before us who willingly gave their own lives on the promise—without the fact—of Jesus’s return.

A coda: we owe that atheist our thoughts—and, offered silently in utmost humility, our prayers.  Unnamed and today unknown, he the disbeliever, gave the followers of a god he didn’t know or believe in, something remarkable.  Out of his love (that’s the only possible word here) he allowed them (and perhaps himself) needed communion that Bonhoeffer led in that prison cell.  In some powerful way I can’t begin to articulate but can see, his willingness to love proved to be the manifested sign of God’s presence in plain answer to all the other men’s prayers.

And seeing that, seeing in him as much as in Bonhoeffer—perhaps as much as in Jesus the Man Who Knew He Was God’s Son---what it means to be transfigured by Faith when Love is its source, I am myself transformed.

Knowing God

This talk was given by Rachel Johnston during Morning Prayers at Memorial Church on Monday, April 14. Rachel is a senior at Harvard and a steadfast member of the Chaplaincy community.

A reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, chapter 3:
“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.”

God found me at Harvard. I say this with a great deal of hesitancy and humility, because reason tells me that that’s not really God’s M.O.: He is everywhere and in everything, after all, and therefore doesn't need to play much hide and seek. But it seems unfair to say “I found God at Harvard” because that implies a certain amount of willingness on my part, and let’s be honest—I tried really hard to avoid God. A staunch atheist during my last two years of high school, I approached the subject of God in college from a purely academic and ethnographic standpoint: I studied how other people conceived of God because it made for a fascinating scholarly pursuit. I wasn't really after the mysteries of the universe, here.

But the perspective of the distanced observer that I clung to quickly revealed a void in my life. I felt absent from my studies and from my social life, and it was out of the depths of that void God called to me. As a medievalist who studies early Christian mystics, I am normally quick to distinguish between physical and mental manifestations of God’s voice—but this was both. While I didn't hear God with my ears, I felt a physical ache—a breathless, constant physical pain akin to heartache—that pulled me to prayer, of all things.  

Last Wednesday night, the Episcopal priest Rev. Steven White shared with the Episcopal Chaplaincy his story of saying no to God’s call. He has said, “Never say no to a call from God. You can say yes, or you can say maybe, but you never say no.” I think I must have instinctively understood that I shouldn't say no, because even though the idea of prayer felt foreign and downright silly, I started to pray anyway. In an effort to mitigate my perceived awkwardness of talking to God, I wrote my first prayers. A few months into my freshman year, a few months after trying to ignore or cover up the ache that drew me to God, I sighed and I faced the ache. I wrote, “God, I want to know you. I want to understand you. Help me know you.”

Out of my pain and wrestling came a desire to know God that defied all reason. Brother Geoffrey from the Episcopal monastery down the street recognizes that this is not an unusual manifestation of God’s love; after all, before Paul was writing down his own desire to know God, he was Saul, being struck blind by God on his way to Damascus to persecute Jesus’ followers. Brother Geoffrey writes, “…our truest selves…become real to us as we struggle to make sense of our own lives. The revelation comes through the struggle. It seems that God likes to struggle with us, and it is often through the struggle that we become who we most truly are, that we come to recognize God and recognize that God’s name is love.”

During Holy Week, we are plunged into the remembrance and recognition of Jesus’ suffering. I wonder if we might take the time this week to dig into that, to sink into the struggle and pain in the Bible and in our own lives, instead of only looking ahead toward what we know will be the glorious renewal of Jesus’ resurrection, because we might see God’s love that much clearer, and experience it that much more strongly, if we first understand the depths of the pain and struggle out of which it has risen.

Let us pray: “Almighty God, whose Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son, Amen.”

Breath of Forgiveness

This sermon was given by Laura Shatzer on Sunday, April 6 at Church of the Covenant in Boston. Laura is a Life Together fellow living in our shared space at 2 Garden Street and working with Massachusetts Council of Churches.

By the end of July 1994, the country of Rwanda was a valley of dry bones. Driven by government propaganda, many Hutus slaughtered their neighbors, the Tutsis.

More than 1 million people lost their lives, and millions more lost their loved ones and homes.

Limbs were brutally severed and other people were buried alive. Their bodies were not discovered for months, and what remained were bones.

This April marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide. The official commemoration in Rwanda begins tomorrow.

In some ways, Rwanda today is prospering, at least according to government officials. There are more than four million Rwandans today that weren’t alive during the genocide, there is a growing business sector in the country, and healthcare is improving, especially with aid from organizations like the Boston-based Partners in Health.

However, there are still dry valleys: deserts of poverty, unemployment, poor education, and lack of land. And the bones remain.

One image from the Internet struck me in particular: a genocide survivor stands in a church next to rows and rows of skulls and femurs, praying.

At genocide memorials around the country, coffins and display cases are filled with bones. They are open graves, and they speak for themselves.

In Ezekiel’s prophecy, the people of Israel lament: our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely. And the Lord God tells Ezekiel to prophecy: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from them. I am going to give you new life, new spirit, and new breath.

Ezekiel writes from exile in Babylon, imagining secondhand the destruction of Jerusalem. Dry bones name the desolation he and his people are feeling. Ezekiel, a priest, understands this temporary desolation as punishment for the Israelites’ idolatry and ritual impurity.

In this prophecy, however, the bones are re-membered. The people of Israel are put back together.

God forgives them.

They will always carry the memory of displacement and destruction with them, but they will also carry the reminder of God’s restoration and healing in their very breath.

Ezekiel’s dry bones prophecy is a story of forgiveness, and of resurrection. As you know, Easter is not here yet.

And yet, what I love about this passage, and what makes it fitting for this last leg of our Lenten journey, is that the resurrection of the body of Israel is not immediate. It is gradual, a process.

First, the bones come together, forming a skeleton of rebirth. Then, Ezekiel observes, there were muscles, and then flesh, and then skin. But still: no breath.

Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they MAY LIVE.

It is only after this second prophesy that breath reanimates the dry bones. And it’s only after they’ve received this gift of breath that these bones are able to stand, ready to live again. 

The dry bones have heard the word of the Lord, and now they can speak for themselves. They are ready to tell the story of a forgiven people, a people who have been given new life.

Forgiveness is a process. The process of forgiveness is about re-membering, in both senses of the word.

It requires recalling past pain and grievances in order to let go of them. And it requires the coming together of individuals and groups to hear one another.

One of the most amazing things that has happened in Rwanda is that perpetrators and survivors are now, years later, coming together to seek forgiveness and to forgive. Genocide itself is unforgiveable. And yet, some Rwandans have been able to individually forgive perpetrators.

In today’s New York Times magazine, the feature is titled “Portraits of Reconciliation.”[1] Genocide survivors and perpetrators stand or sit side by side in each photograph.

I wish I could show you these photos now, and I implore you to look them up. They are incredible…haunting…hopeful.

In one photo, a woman rests her hand on the shoulder of the man who killed her father and her brothers. In another, a perpetrator and survivor stand side by side with arms folded across their chests. Their faces are worn by struggle, and yet there they are, together.

In a third photo, Dominique Ndahimana and Cansilde Munganyinka, stand up straight and clasp hands, as if they are walking into the future together. 

With each photo, the Rwandans tell their story of forgiveness.

Dominique, who looted Cansilde’s village, said: “The day I thought of asking pardon, I felt unburdened and relieved. I had lost my humanity because of the crime I committed, but now I am like any human being.”

Cansilde shared this: “After I was chased from my village and Dominique and others looted it, I became homeless and insane. Later, when he asked my pardon, I said: ‘I have nothing to feed my children. Are you going to help raise my children? Are you going to build a house for them?’

The next week, Dominique came with some survivors and former prisoners who perpetrated genocide. There were more than 50 of them, and they built my family a house. Ever since then, I have started to feel better. I was like a dry stick; now I feel peaceful in my heart, and I share this peace with my neighbors.”

Forgiveness is not the same as excusing or rationalizing behavior. It does not mean ignoring or denying real pain and harm.

Forgiveness is possible only when are able to see ourselves reflected in another human being, each bearing the image of God. Forgiveness is possible only when we see our own capacity to do what we cannot imagine ourselves doing. Forgiveness is possible only when we remember that we all fall short of the fullness of life that God intends for us.

This is the message of the Gospel we heard this morning: we are all sinners, and we are all forgiven. Jesus proclaims to the crowd who accuses a woman of adultery: Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.

And no stones are thrown.  

We are given only the bare bones of this nameless accused woman’s story. We don’t hear from her; she never shares her perspective or confesses her guilt or innocence. We can only imagine what Jesus might have written in the dust with his finger while the Pharisees and scribes tested his legal knowledge. 

But perhaps all of this is not important. Perhaps the story does not need to be fleshed out. What is important is that Jesus forgives the woman.

In the midst of a crowd of dry bones and stony hearts, Jesus breathes forgiveness and gives the woman a chance to start anew. He does not accuse or condemn the woman. He simply tells her not to sin again, from that point forward.

Flesh is often used as a symbol of human weakness. It is a catch-all metaphor used to describe human sins –as in sins of the flesh. And yet, I think that it’s our very vulnerability – the warmth and softness our flesh represents – that catalyzes forgiveness. God replaces of hearts of stone with hearts of flesh.

Forgiveness asks us to become vulnerable. It asks us to get in touch with the skeletons deep in the closets of our souls: Those things we have never forgiven ourselves for from the past, those people whom we have not forgiven, and those parts of ourselves we would rather forget.

First we have to greet those skeletons, and then we have to be willing to expose them for what they are: dry bones.

In this moment on our Lenten journey, what are the skeletons in the valleys of your soul?

Where are the dry bones in your life and in your relationships?

Have you fallen into the pattern of casting stones, either in your mind or through your actions?

Who do you need to forgive? 

Whom do you need to ask for forgiveness?

Sometimes, it is harder to forgive those closest to us than strangers. We can shrug off the driver who merged right in front of us or tail-gated us too closely, maybe after uttering a few choice words, but we might carry a grudge against an old friend for years.

It might take a few minutes for us to forgive the barista for making us the wrong beverage, but it takes a lifetime to come to terms with the baggage our parents passed on to their children.

For me personally, the most challenging thing of all is to forgive myself.

In this season of Lent, it is all too easy for Christians to become less forgiving of self. If you’ve taken on a practice of self-discipline this Lent, and, like me, you’ve struggling to keep it up or have decidedly failed – you might be feeling guilty or frustrated with yourself. You might even devise a new practice to punish yourself, or compensate for messing up the first one.

Take it from me: this doesn’t really work. And this striving mentality is so far from the point of Lent. It is so far from the breath of forgiveness that the Holy Spirit is constantly moving through us.

The next time you find yourself self-blaming and shaming, try this: take a deep breath. And know that breath is a gift from God. That in that breath, God gives you a new heart, and a new spirit, and a chance to begin again.

This is how it is, when dry bones are restored to new life.

Tomorrow, Rwanda will begin commemorating 20 years of healing. Next week, during Holy Week, the city of Boston will commemorate the one-year anniversary of the marathon bombings.

Since then, new runners have been born, inspired by the courage of first-responders and law-enforcement. Survivors who lost legs have learned to stand again on prosthetic limbs. Runners are preparing to race again.

For some, it is still too soon and too difficult to forgive the Tsarnaev brothers.

And yet, we have good news: that God’s mercy is wide enough, and deep enough and vast enough fill up all of the times we struggle to forgive others, or ourselves.

Thanks be to God for the gentle breath that enters us and reminds us again and again, you shall live.  Amen.

---

            [1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/06/magazine/06-pieter-hugo-rwanda-portraits.html?_r=0

The Pearl of Great Price

A Morning Prayers Reflection

Appleton Chapel -- Saturday, April 12, 2014

The Rev. Dr. John Oakes

[Jesus said] “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.” (Mt. 13:44-46 - NRSV) 

Back in the mid-1970s, I had to work quite hard to win a scholarship to Oxford, but not that hard. And if you’d asked me how I’d built my resume, I‘d probably have needed a definition of that phrase. I don’t remember producing a CV at all until I hit the London job market in my 20s! 

But the academic world, like so many others, can be a lot more competitive nowadays. Few who go anywhere like Harvard get there without making sacrifices. And if we have serious career ambitions, the pattern tends to continue throughout our lives. 

That’s one of the reasons why I find this morning’s reading from Matthew 13 so relevant and so challenging, because it raises the questions of ambition and sacrifice in a very thought-provoking way. 

Jesus has been teaching about the "kingdom of heaven," or the “Kingdom of God.” The general biblical premise is that God has always been sovereign. But in the New Testament Jesus presents his own mission and ministry as signifying the advent of God's rule or reign in a powerful new way.. 

He claims to be introducing a new age or era, when people can find reconciliation with God in and through him. And one of the main points that Jesus stresses in today's reading really flows from that. For this Kingdom, he says, is "like treasure hidden in a field.” It’s like a “pearl of great price.”

We don't need to be treasure-hunters, or in the jewelry business, to understand what Jesus is driving at here. He is talking about something of great value - so valuable that it justifies the kind of behavior exemplified by the treasure-seeker and the jeweler, who sell everything they have to get what they want. 

The big question, I guess, is what all this has to do with us. And that can bring us back to issues of ambition and sacrifice, because we all know that there’s much more to life than our academic, career or even family achievements. Why else would we be here on a sunny Saturday morning? 

So what are we truly seeking spiritually? What are our goals and how much are we prepared to give up for them? These are important questions. And in response, our reading from Matthew 13 suggests that Jesus himself has the answer. For he offers nothing less than the ultimate treasure, the pearl of great price to all who will welcome the coming of God’s reign in him. 

As a Christian minister, you’d probably expect me to say something like this today. And I will gladly do so, because I have personally found the ambition of following Jesus to be much more worthwhile than any other, and that has been true, whatever the sacrifice.

A Prayer for Spring

"Help Me to Believe in Beginnings" by Ted Loder from his book Guerrillas of Grace; Prayers for the Battle

God of history and of my heart,
so much has happened to me during these whirlwind days:
I’ve known death and birth;
I’ve been brave and scared;
I’ve hurt, I’ve helped;
I’ve been honest, I’ve lied;
I’ve destroyed, I’ve created;
I’ve been with people, I’ve been lonely;
I’ve been loyal, I’ve betrayed;
I’ve decided, I’ve waffled;
I’ve laughed and I’ve cried.
You know my frail heart and my frayed history -
and now another day begins.

O God, help me to believe in beginnings
and in my beginning again,
no matter how often I’ve failed before.

Help me to make beginnings:
to begin going out of my weary mind
into fresh dreams,
daring to make my own bold tracks
in the land of now;
to begin forgiving
that I may experience mercy;
to begin questioning the unquestionable
that I may know truth
to begin disciplining
that I may create beauty;
to begin sacrificing
that I may make peace;
to begin loving
that I may realize joy.

Help me to be a beginning to others,
to be a singer to the songless,
a storyteller to the aimless,
a befriender of the friendless;
to become a beginning of hope for the despairing,
of assurance for the doubting,
of reconciliation for the divided;
to become a beginning of freedom for the oppressed,
of comfort for the sorrowing,
of friendship for the forgotten;
to become a beginning of beauty for the forlorn,
of sweetness for the soured,
of gentleness for the angry,
of wholeness for the broken,
of peace for the frightened and violent of the earth.

Help me to believe in beginnings,
to make a beginning,
to be a beginning,
so that I may not just grow old,
but grow new
each day of this wild, amazing life
you call me to live
with the passion of Jesus Christ.