They were so embarrassed to ask.   Their dog, Sheba, a member of the family for 13 years, had died.  Old age had taken her . . . They’d seen it coming, but it made it no less difficult when the time finally came.  They called, not realizing that if seeing a dog as part of the family was a disease, I had it, too.  I’ve spent very few years of my life without a dog as a living companion, and I’m grateful for each one—Corky, Star, Sparky, Sam, Lazlo, Zoey, Lyric, Bella…

It was a simple service, there in the backyard.  Sheba was placed under her favorite tree.  I listened to Jill and Tim share memories.  Now, funerals for dogs are not unlike funerals for people in the respect that while few of us are Winston Churchills of the Human World, few dogs are the Lassies or Rin-Tin-Tins of their world.  And part of the beauty and humility of the whole process of saying goodbye is honestly naming that.  

The beauty of a life isn’t so much in what’s been accomplished as in the fact that it happened.  God smiles through Every Living Thing.  God smiled on us through our Great-Aunt Minnie and her apricot-walnut pie that she made every Thanksgiving.  God taught us something in the way  Her spirit lived in Roscoe.  Life isn’t about accomplishment so much as it is about grace and seeing the grace that lives in each and every human being, whether they recognize it or not. 

And the same holds true for dogs.  They don’t have to have been heroes to be precious.  They don’t have to have saved lives, performed tricks, made a living, even been especially smart or loyal.  They may have been rascals.  But that’s the beauty of it.  Dogs are who they are.  And in them, we can see that there’s something wonderful at the Creative Center of it all.  They reflect the joy of Being, in and of itself.

When my nephew, Matthew, was quite young—4 or 5 years old—he said that he thought that we human beings might think of ourselves as being God’s pets in the world—that the same way we just love dogs and cats and parrots and gerbils for being who they are—that’s the very way that God loves each of us, as we are.

So we gathered in the backyard that day, celebrating the way Sheba could run like the speed of light when she chased a ball; the way she hopped into bed and warmed  it up with her bodyheat before Jill and Tim called it a day and turned out the lights.  We talked about Sheba’s Incredibly Beautiful Deep Dark Eyes and remembered that gentle way she had of licking the tears off Jill’s face on those bad days, reminding her that none of us is alone in the world with our pain.

Humble things.  But the Stuff of which life is made.  

I think of that wonderful prayer, “God, help me be the person that my dog thinks I am.”  And I shudder at the arrogance that makes us think, even for a minute, that grief should be reserved only for other human beings.  

Sheba . . . may she rest in peace.

You could say that alcoholism saved her life—or more accurately, it put her on a life-giving path through AA.  

I admire those souls who can grow in that “rocky soil” that Jesus described without getting choked by weeds in the form of parents who took way too big a share of the family’s emotional and financial resources and offered little in return. 

Alice seemed living proof of the spiritual wisdom that we have to lose our lives to find them.  In an environment where so little attention seemed to have been given her, she is a living reservoir of forgiveness and patience.    I’ve seen it happen over and over again . . . where parents are lacking, sometimes children have to turn to the wider universe for comfort.   It is powerful when that “still small voice” can speak through a family’s raging, a child’s tears and anxiety, and provide a spiritual sanctuary even in a violent home.

She spent years drowning the anxiety with drinking.  And in a miraculous moment, realized that she was simply carrying on her parent’s abuse—admittedly, more quietly, but equally life-threatening.    It is a challenge, when you leave a home like that, to know what you have a right to expect from the world.    Giving is easier than taking, demanding, setting course.   At what point does “giving” just morph into “giving in”?  Never easy to know and it’s a life journey to discern those steps.

AA became a family for her.   She knew something about trusting in that higher power, but it felt great to hear other people talking about it, too.  A vague trust in a world better than the one she saw in her own household had gotten her through childhood and adolescence.  AA helped her start building it.  Step by step.  Trust.  Friendship.  Honesty.  Compassion.  Honesty.  She came to church because of AA.  It was AA that pushed her through the door, looking for a spirituality that grew from the life of a community, a tradition that had lived through the centuries.

When she joined the church, she said that she didn’t really know anything about Christianity.  She just needed a church.  Fair enough–since most of us who “know” a lot about Christianity are trying to “unlearn” it and start again, anyway.   I asked her to read one of the lessons in our Good Friday service that year.  She’s not one to enjoy being in front of a group but she agreed, somewhat reluctantly. 

She arrived at the church that evening an hour early, wanting to read through the text to make sure she got it right.   Since she had so much time, I just handed her a Bible, showed her the particular part of the story she was to read, and left her alone in the sanctuary.

When I returned, tears were coming down her face.  “Is that really what happened to Jesus?” she asked.  “It’s just terrible what they did to him!” 

Seriously.  It had never occurred to me that she didn’t know that this was where the story was going. 

I guess I’d taken for granted the dramatic and memorable Good Friday experiences that drummed the story of Jesus’ last days into my psyche.  I remember our priest actually getting a whip  one year.   You could tell the acolyte felt awkward and embarrassed as he used it, on the priest’s instructions, to punctuate the reading  about the torture of Jesus.  (My mother, in good Episcopalian sensibility, was appalled at this dramatization.  “Tacky,” she said.)  Well, maybe it was . . . but it sure brought the message home.  

And here was Alice, realizing for the first time, the cruelty that entered Jesus’ life. 

It was moving to me to see her sympathy for him; again, a testimony to such a loving heart that had grown among the weeds of an abusive home, a heart that with just a little compassion and care offered so much to the rest of us.   She would probably think it presumptuous to compare Jesus’ story with her own, but Jesus would want it that way, I am certain. 

It’s a cruel world we live in, so many of us.  Last night, as I was praying, I found myself thinking about the children of Darfur and the unspeakable violence they have suffered, witnessed, and yet survived.   I imagined what some of them must be feeling.  What else is there to say but “Lord, forgive us, we know not what we do…”  Whether or not any of these children know Jesus by name, they know him.  They know the story of suffering that can only be lifted to God.  Sacred stories.   Stories of a child’s anguish and the pursuit of life.

 I’m not sure what it means when Christians say that Jesus died “for” us.  I know that it is true to my experience and to the testimony of so many others that Jesus dies “with” us.   

When I am in the presence of Alice, who has known the power of death so intimately, and yet is able to love, to grow, to empathize, to grow life from such rocky, weedy ground, I feel like I am seeing resurrection in front of me.  Sometimes a door opens for us and we can find our way to healing on this side of life.  Some of us go all the way to the cross and beyond it.  Only God can roll away the stone.  

It is just terrible what we did to Jesus.  What we do to each other.  

Andy

He’s been called our “Kosher Congregationalist”, raised in a Jewish family near Boston, educated at Kent State where memories run deep of the day  the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students–the May 4^th Massacre.   He came south, guitar and banjo in hand, and “discipled” on the music of Rev. Gary Davis who provided a repertoire that moves through the stories of Ezekiel, Daniel in the Lion’s Den,  Jesus Who Healed the Lepers and the Walls of the City envisioned by John. 

His debut into the liturgy of First Congregational came Easter Sunday, over a decade ago.   We’d hired his wife, Larkin, actually–one of the country’s best dulcimer players.  How beautiful, we imagined, to have the gentle, welcoming music of her dulcimer strings giving testimony to the power of a new beginning.  An Easter message, to be sure.

Instead, I stood at the entryway of the church and watched as Larkin stepped back, and Andy stepped forward.  In a voice that seemed to settle powerfully and provocatively on the edge of every pitch (how many protesters and activists through the years had been rallied by that confident, unfettered voice, I wondered) he belted out, “Gonna die one time and I ain’t gonna die no more!” 

What it lacked in subtlety, it made up for in honesty and confrontational courage.  My mind flashed to the various Easter services of my life with their various “calls to worship”—sweet handbells twinkling “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” at St. Matthew’s Episcopal, a sonorous tenor proclaiming, “I knowwwwwwwwwwww my Redeeeeeemer Livvvvvvvvveth!” with indisputable confidence at Christ Church, Waterbury; various high school trumpet players spitting into cold metal at Ebenezer Church in Augusta, Missouri, bravely calling forth the sunrise on those all-too-frequently-freezing-cold Easter mornings.  We’d had lovely, even elegant choral “Alleluias” some years; on others, an occasional venture into a joyful Mexican folk tune. 

But never had it been put this bluntly:  “Gonna die one time and I ain’t gonna die no more!”  No negotiation offered there.

Maybe Andy’s Jewish, Marxist, union background hadn’t acquainted him with that more “ruffly” side of Easter—the egg hunts, the new patent-leather shoes and matching purses that accompanied the just-purchased pastel Easter dresses.  And Rev. Gary Davis, from whom the song came . . . well, you know those Southern country preachers.   Never known for their tact.   We’re a southern church, to be sure, here in Memphis.  But not THAT kind of southern church, if you get my drift.

Leave it to the Kosher Congregationalist.   The way the Gospel of Mark reads, when the women went to the tomb after Jesus had died his “one time”, they were terrified when they went only to find the grave empty.   Better the death we know, I guess, than the change we aren’t ready for. 

Mark tells us that they were so frightened that they never said nothin’ to nobody about what they saw (or didn’t see) that morning.  Now, we know that’s not exactly true.  Somebody had to say something to somebody or we wouldn’t be ringing our handbells and pulling out the expensive tenors this many centuries later. 

Gonna die one time and I ain’t gonna die no more. 

When I listen to Andy sing, I find myself hearing that “cloud of witnesses” the Bible talks about.  I feel the courage and the idealism of those students back at Kent State.   He carries their memory in his voice as it rises.

When I hear Andy singing some of the old evangelical hymns we sometimes sing at church, it makes my heart glad.   However we die, it’s often a bloody mess and the evangelicals aren’t afraid to get right down into the thick of it all.  Of college kids massacred on a beautiful day in May.  Of a Memphis mother whose baby, Jakira, died in her arms from a wild bullet in a drive-by shooting.   Of foreclosed homes and all the dreams that wither when a family packs up.  “There is a fountain filled with blood…,” the old hymn reminds us.

 Indeed.   The messiness, the tragedy, the sheer difficulty of life doesn’t just belong to Christians and neither does the experience of Resurrection.  It belongs to all of us who have had the wind kicked out of us, who know what it means to do the right thing and see it go nowhere, who find, in one chapter of life or another, that we just can’t lie about who they are or the way the world is anymore.  Something in us says “enough”, and in desperation or exhaustion or whatever it is, we let go.

A lot of us have died one time or another, given ourselves over to what we couldn’t control for all the willpower, hope or sheer determination that we carried in us. 

A lot of us have died one time or another and realized as we were falling that we weren’t going to die anymore.  “This is it,” a voice testifies as we walk straight towards the cross, the conflict, the injustice.   We stop running scared and put ourselves in better hands.  Call it trusting in a higher power, call it succumbing to grace.  I call it salvation.

Resurrection, I have learned through the years, rarely impresses us with its classy cadence or its fluttery gentility.   When we see it, when it happens to us, we are often like the women in Mark’s story—we don’t say nothin’ to nobody ‘bout it.  Why?  I guess we’re conscious that we’ve still got scars to show from the experience.   Best to be humble about miracles when they come our way.  They don’t come cheap.

“Gonna die one time and I ain’t gonna die no more.”  You got it, Andy.

25 years ago, on January 15, 1984, to be exact, I was “rev’d”—that is, I became an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ. 

All of 26 years old at the time, I had been prepared for this work by 3 years of formal study at Yale Divinity School, time spent in Philosophy classes at Williams College, which were, for the most part, over my head, and God-only-knows how many sermons, classes, discussion groups and service projects within faith communities along the way. 

First Congregational United Church of Christ called me to “preach the Gospel” back in June, 1988.  Then a small-but-tenacious congregation, I was reminded by the then-Moderator of the congregation that they “didn’t really need a preacher”.  They were good at handling affairs on their own.

I realized that that was probably true.  We have written accounts in the Bible that we call “Gospels”, but for most of us, the Gospel that matters most is the Gospel that speaks from the course of the day, from the stories of our lives.  “Gospel” means “good news”, after all, and all of us, I think, are trying to develop the “eyes to see” and the “ears to hear”, to use the language of the Bible, the way that Good News is speaking within our days.  I am privileged to live my own story of the Gospel in such a vibrant, life-giving community of folks.

I live in midtown Memphis with my husband, Mark Allen, guitarist/carpenter/political scientist, 2 beautiful  and totally undisciplined Tibetan Terriers (Bella and Lyric), 8 canaries, and a great collection of books and CD’s.  

Mark and I were married just 3 years ago, and Mark was baptized recently into this company of named Gospel-seekers at First Congregational.   I would argue that he has been traveling among his own  less-explicitly identified group of Gospel-seekers–activists, musicians, scholars and street philosophers—for most of his life.  It’s been a joy to enter this circle of companions.

My hope is to share stories of the Gospel as it is lived in our Real-Life Church, First Congregational UCC of Memphis.  I may borrow a story or two from other “Real-Life Congregations” I’ve been privileged to know along the way, previous to my life here in Memphis.   Some of the particular details of stories have been altered a bit in the interests of protecting privacy; names have been changed.  I am surrounded by so many remarkable people, so many remarkable stories of faith and Gospel life for which I am profoundly grateful.