Average, Everyday, Normal Days
Average, Everyday, Normal Days
Zechariah 7:9-10
A couple of weeks ago, Tracy and I led a women’s retreat for the church up in Racine, Wisconsin. Thirty of our women made a real sacrifice and put their lives on hold for a day to gather there. In the very first moment, I announced our two goals. First, we wanted everyone to get to know each other better. In part, the retreat was about creating and renewing connections, connections that will be crucial in the transition days ahead for our church family.
Our second goal was to invite everyone to consider what was sacred in their average, everyday, normal lives. I am convinced that the primary context in which we experience God’s presence is not inside a sanctuary but is out in the real world where we live. We come to church to practice making room for what’s holy and seeing it and naming it—through singing and prayer, through acts of service and shared expressions of compassion, through hearing God’s Word and being challenged by a sermon. However, when Sunday morning is over, we are meant to take what we’ve practiced and put it into action. There are choices to be made. How will what we’ve practiced shape those choices?
When it comes to the everyday sacred, the job isn’t to create something sacred out of nothing. Rather, the job is to take a closer look at our lives and be brave enough to name what is already holy as holy: “I know this sounds weird,” you say to your friend, “But you are not like a brother to me you are my brother—the one that I chose a long time ago. You are one of my sacred people.” You realize that you have carried that pocket knife that your grandfather gave you as a child for years. It is a sacred object. You get in the car and right away, the exact song that you needed to hear is on the radio. Sure, maybe you have a hymn you really like at church that is kind of sacred, too. But this song on the radio is sacred because it triggers powerful memories of the times when you heard it before. That song has always been sacred but there is something powerful about actually claiming it as your song. When you claim it, maybe you choose to weave that song, intentionally, into your days—a part of the sacred ritual of how you live a day.
So, the first step is to be daring enough to actually believe that your life—your average, everyday, normal life—is filled with what is sacred. You have to be willing to see and claim out loud—to yourself and to the people who matter to you—the things that matter most. And then, in a step that is just as important, you have to focus on making room for what matters most in your life. Sure, we all have to deal with the mundane tasks that just need to get done—all the things that are necessary but not necessarily interesting or meaningful. However, as human beings, we have the chance to plant and nurture and grow meaning. We get to intentionally create a life that reflects what matters most to us. When we rise to that calling, I believe that we tune ourselves to the presence of the “something more” that I happen to call “God” who is the source of all things sacred in the first place.
Let me boil this down. The biggest decision that we will make in our lives is what to do with this life that we have been given. Are we going to trudge through your days, acting as if the life we’ve been given is a curse? Are we going to sleep walk, day in and day out, with the stereotypical cop’s refrain rolling in your head, “Move along now. There’s nothing to see here!” Are we going to walk in fear, awake but just expecting the next bad thing to come our way? Or, is it possible to live differently, to choose differently, to make one loving choice after another because we live in a world that includes grace and forgiveness and unconditional love?
It should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been listening to me for long here that faith is not an excuse to check out on this life but is an invitation, instead, to go “all in” every day. The God who loves us every day is going to love us well beyond this life. Let go of “What’s going to happen some day,” and embrace the real question, instead: “What am I going to do with this day?” It’s a gift to be here at all. Why in the world would we waste it?”
If we are living that kind of life, we will create space for what’s sacred by attending to two things: what is and what ought to be. Let’s start with what is. 15 years ago, I started walking in Open Lands, every day, twice a day—sunrise and, usually, sometime near sunset. Sometimes things happened that disrupted my routine—people who needed to be cared for most often. That was fine. However, the more I practiced this sacred walking, the more I missed it when it wasn’t possible. What I missed was the daily experience of being in relationship with a place, with the plants that changed every day, with the animals that I came to recognize as not just a deer but as that deer with the missing tip of its antler or that squirrel with the skinny tail or that one dog who always makes me chuckle. There was wonder and awe just waiting to be discovered.
Of course, you don’t have to walk in Open Lands to realize that there is wonder and awe all around us. Really notice a sunrise or a sunset. Watch the moon rise out of the lake. Pay attention to a child and how they change every day. Notice the people around you—the guy picking up the trash that someone threw out of their car window, the parent who is the quiet volunteer who makes a whole school better. Stop “doom scrolling” on your phone long enough and you might realize how amazing it is that there is something and not nothing and that there is a place for you in this something. You might even wonder how you got so lucky to be here.
Of course, our lives are lived in chapters. Things change. This is a truth that all of us in this church are acutely aware of these days. Change is uncomfortable and awkward and makes us wonder if what has been sacred to us for so long will still be available to us in the next chapter. What if the next pastor of this church doesn’t know the magic words to get the ushers to come forward and receive the offering? What if the next pastor doesn’t know that laughter and applause during worship are sometimes the most sacred part of worship? You get my drift…
The truth is that things do change and change is uncomfortable…until, with a little time and practice and conversation and experimentation—things get less comfortable after a while. Everyone involved realizes—eventually—that the job isn’t to do what we used to do but to bring what we know is sacred with us into a new situation and allow ourselves to discover how to bring what is sacred forward with us. We’ll stand there for a while. Then, we’ll realize that we are actually still in the same “zip code”—there is some continuity. Then, we will have the shared joy of realizing that there is deep joy in experiencing what’s always been sacred in a new way.
One of the ways that we ensure that there is continuity is that we have sacred texts. We put what is sacred into words that we can come back to—again and again—to get back on track when we’ve wandered, to inspire us when things have gone flat, to guide us when the choices we face are complicated. These sacred texts don’t have to be from the Bible. I have poems and novels and philosophical and theological texts that are powerful guides. However, some of them are Biblical. Their power rests not in some argument about them being inerrant and literal word of God. Instead, they are sacred words because they shed light on the life and lead us to rediscover God’s presence in our lives now.
Listen to the words of our text from Zechariah again: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.” Zechariah was a prophet in a specific time in the people’s life in which they were transitioning from being in exile into returning to their homeland. It was a time of trying to discern, “Who are we now? What are we supposed to be doing here?” The role of the prophet was to remind the people of who they had always been—a people with God at the center of their lives, who’s presence shaped how they treated the people around them, day-in and day-out. Be honest. Be kind. Show a little mercy. Don’t take advantage of people who are vulnerable—the widows, the orphans, the people who are strangers, who aren’t from around here. Don’t spend your days trying to get revenge on the other guy.
Thankfully, we’ve got all those things worked out now, right? We’re honest and kind and merciful. We make the needs of the neediest people our first priority, right? We always welcome strangers, right? We would never choose to devote ourselves to getting even, right? Okay…maybe our work is cut out for us.
The core calling of what we are meant to live was in place for centuries before Zechariah’s time and remains the core calling of faith today, sometimes guiding us to bring those values to life in our choices and sometimes haunting us and challenging us to look at those choices again. We have been given consciences that amplify the dissonance between what we say we believe and what we actually do. And when we choose to remain deaf to that dissonance, prophets still rise to point out our hypocrisy with laser accuracy.
Here’s the thing. As we move toward Lent this year, living in a world that seems to have forgotten who we are and who’s we are, we should welcome the chance to meet Jesus of Nazareth once again, as if for the first time. Understand, he has been living his faith through average, everyday, normal days for thirty years, working to God’s presence in everyday life, falling in love with people, and with a community and with the world around him, one day at a time. What he gradually recognizes, more each day, is the gap between what we are meant to live and what we are actually living. He begins to hear a calling, a calling away from the particular place he loves, out into a larger world that seems to have chosen to value power and control and seems to have altogether forgotten that, in the end, what we are called to do is love.
Are you beginning to hear that calling, too?