“‘Come to the edge.’
‘We can’t. We’re afraid.’
‘Come to the edge.’
‘We can’t. We will fall.’
‘Come to the edge.’
And they came.
And he pushed them. And they flew.”
– Guillaume Apollinaire
We’ve got an edge when reading the gospels. We know how it turns out in the end. We know that there is pain and there is death, but in the narrative it all works out with this seemingly-easy thing called a resurrection that effortlessly rolls off our tongues on Sunday morning as we sip our coffee and have a church donut.
Resurrection is hard though. So hard that only God gets to do it. And we who have faith hope for a day when God will do this for us and for the rest of creation.
“For the only prayer of mine that rises above the roof is the prayer of what I am.” – J. Edgar Park
When I was in seminary, one of my fellow students led a class on dramatizing the book of Acts. It was not a seminal work, but it was a whole lot of fun. As we are going through our Easter lectionary in the book of Acts, I am continually reminded of the ways in which we re-invented this book for the stage. Some stories we kept pretty straight forward, such as Phillip and the Ethiopian eunuch. And some we took a lot of liberties with, like turning Saul/Paul into a blind blues vocalist, with sexy back up singers, or turning Paul and Barnabas’ missionary travels into a Hope and Crosby “On the Road” movie.
“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.” – Voltaire (“The pefect is the enemy of the good.”)
I love perfection. I love symmetry. I like perfect planning and perfect solutions to problems. I like little perfect lines of vegetables in my garden and I love the yard after the grass has been cut because there are perfect swaths measuring out our grass like wallpaper. When a square peg fits in a square hole, I’m excited because I found the perfect fit! I love math because of the perfection that it offers. Two plus two equals four even in the most confusing of circumstances.
“Three men went into the jungle on different occasions and saw a chameleon. ‘A chameleon is red,’ said the first man. ‘No, a chameleon is green,’ said the second man. ‘Nonsense, a chameleon is brown,’ said the third man. Those who disagree about the nature of God are like these three men.” – A Hindu Teaching Story
Today in our adult Sunday School time, called Coffee & Conversation, we were reminded about the children in our church. It isn’t hard to be reminded about them since a full one-third of our church is under the age of eighteen. Some churches only dream about statistics like that – we are living it and all of the creative chaos that it brings.
