I can’t predict when it will happen, but there are Sundays maybe once a year, perhaps twice, when I wake up and look at the scripture provided by the lectionary, and the notes on themes I’d planned out just don’t quite guide me to the words I feel I need to speak. Nevertheless, do hold onto the images we have from our two readings: one of welcoming everyone, particularly when it feels inconvenient or interrupts your expectation of what the life of faith is supposed to look like. The other: a profession of love from God for the people of God even when they stop listening. 

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Here’s the thing: We have reached a season of work in the life of St. Charles that, if we are not intentional, can feel removed from the deep, high, wide love of Christ and altogether daunting if not overwhelming. If you walk down any of the interior stairs from the sanctuary to the first floor, you’ll pass swaths of peeling plaster—what we now understand to be efflorescence—and you’ll make your way to the bare concrete floor of Building A. That’s what we sometimes call this oldest of our three buildings here. Constructed in 1925, first open to the congregation in 1926, the upper levels have barely changed from their initial design. The lower level, however, has morphed at least twice and is now morphing again as we spent the past two weeks in what felt like a hazmat zone as room after room of asbestos tile and glue were stripped from the concrete subfloor.

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We gathered in the courtyard at 9:00 on Friday night. A dozen children and teenagers and almost as many adults. The chiminea was putting out some really great heat, and we could see the s’mores supplies off to the side. But it wasn’t time for that just yet. The twenty of us quieted and recalled the words from the 1st century preacher, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

We named the witnesses who have gone before us who inspire us to live lives of faith and conscience, the ones who taught us the words of scripture and showed us how to live them out with their own actions, and we even named some animal companions who brought us love and comfort and laughter. We remembered there in that space, a space created by folks we did not know who imagined that courtyard into being almost a century ago. A community of faith convened by women in the late 1800s who gathered children together to tell them stories about the love of God. We sat in the sacred circle they created, though we do not even remember their names without flipping through the pages of our history.

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I am learning to enjoy air travel. It hasn’t always been that way, but I’ve taken quite a number of trips over the past several years for trainings and professional gatherings. I am fortunate that this wonderful congregation supports my continuing education and need for collegial community with budgetary support for conference travel. As I have gone off on my own more and more, I have grown increasingly accustomed to navigating the complexities of airports and planes because I’ve had more opportunities to travel and because I have a great therapist.

There was a flight from Richmond to Atlanta years ago, before children, when the turbulence was so bad that the plan dropped and re-settled. I didn’t know if I could get back on the connecting flight form Atlanta to Mobile and spend the layover debating renting a car and driving the next six hours. Then I had a panic attack on a flight to California with Nathan three years ago. I didn’t know at the time that’s what it was. I’ve just said I was a nervous flyer. I would get increasingly panicked in the days leading up to a trip. On the California flight, the woman next to me gave me some kind of concoction of lavender and other essential oils to smell or rub into my skin. I don’t even really remember. I just remember gripping Nathan’s arm and knowing every part of my body wanted off of that plane. 

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The Lott Family was away last weekend to welcome a wife, sister-in-law, aunt, and daughter-in-law to the family. Good New Orleanians that we are, we arrived late to the party but with a carload of French 75s to share—a full 36 hours later than the first friends and family arrived to Vesuvius, Virginia. We trekked into Nature Camp just in time to grab a plate of dinner and make our way to the Friday night sharing time—something like a summer camp variety show. About 130 friends and family filled a room covered in twinkle lights and white, flowing tulle with a cool, autumn breeze blowing through the screens. It was the first time in months and months that we needed scarves and sweaters. The energy in that place was clearly that of abundant joy, and that energy only grew stronger over the next day. Friends sang, told stories, shared poems, blessed Micah and Laura, laughed hard, and danced wildly. 

I was amazed by the deep affection in this tribe of friends, especially. The friends who gathered in the woods for days on end to delight in friendship and in love. The easiness of laughter and of their kind words for one another. The depth of their knowledge and trust of one another. Their capacity to pivot from the seriousness of vow-making to the absolute foolish, un-self-conscious joy of dancing until 3 a.m.—practically half a day after the pronouncement of husband and wife was made. I watched with happiness for Micah and Laura but also true fascination, like an anthropologist stumbling upon a foreign culture. I do not have this kind of circle of friends in my life. That’s not to say that I don’t have close, beautiful friendships. But I cannot imagine a circle of my very own whirling dervishes who dance to celebrate love with me. In fact, I do not know if I personally have the same capacity for absolute foolish, un-self-conscious joy.

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We’re winding our way through the Torah in record time—from creation to the birth of Moses in just six Sundays. Now we reach the point at which Moses has called to Pharaoh for the freedom of his people, marched them through the Red Sea, and taken them into a wandering time. In this wandering time and wandering place, many of them free people for the first time in their lives, they look to Moses and ask, “How are we supposed to live together out here? What are the guidelines? What are the rules? What are the boundaries? What’s the plan for this thing we are doing now?”

This movement began with hearing the cries of a people who were being oppressed. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who created humankind in the divine image, the God of compassion and love hears the cries of a people and sends for them. This movement rooted in compassion and freedom and holy love has led a people to a wandering place, and now they ask each other and Moses what they are supposed to do in that place. 

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We’re ignoring mandates from kings today, crossing borders as asylum seekers, listening for the holy word to release those who are enslaved. It’s decidedly and overtly political again, isn’t it, this sacred text of ours? I really do wish sometimes that it wasn’t that way. There are times I want to drop the requirements to DO SOMETHING with this faith and just let it make me feel better about my life. I crave the texts about rest and beauty and mindfully noticing signs of God in the created world. I understand the desire for spirituality to start and end right there: noticing, rest, beauty. But BEING and DOING are intimately linked in sacred story. Even if we’re practicing these things and only these things, it doesn’t take long before noticing signs of God in the created world causes us to feel something for the created world—something warm in our hearts that causes us to smile or sigh or say “wow” when we see that pink and orange sunset over the lake or a years-old-firecracker-plant hanging over a fence. This particular way of BEING makes a way in us and through us that necessarily and actively makes a way in and through the world.

Observing true Sabbath rest, fully and rightly, will absolutely and necessarily cause us to reexamine the other six days of the week and how they are ordered. If there is tremendous chaos in the other days, we will feel that imbalance. If our neighbor isn’t holding space for holy rest (or can’t hold that space because it means lost wages because the wages are so low to begin with), then we might start to at least question why rest isn’t available to all. If sabbath doesn’t set the pace for the other days of the week and other ways of being in the world, then we’ll feel that need to DO SOMETHING in order to get the balance and order right.

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