Last week I had the opportunity to fly away. I'd wanted to go to the Annual Festival of Homiletics in years past, but never got there. This year it was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a place where I'd only changed planes once. I don't know what made me do it, but I emailed an old friend-- Bonnie, whom I hadn't seen in three years and who I knew had moved but wasn't sure where she'd landed. But I knew also that she was graduating from seminary, and so I took a chance and asked her if she'd be interested in meeting me at the Festival.
Would she be interested?
It just so happens she just recently MOVED to Minneapolis! Of course! And I could stay at her house!
Serendiptious, my husband said. You're meant to go, he observed.
I needed a vacation. This wouldn't be a vacation, technically it was a Continuing Education trip, but it was time away, and I had suspicions that it could be fun. The last time I'd taken a vacation was a desperate run to a nearby camp for a few days away, which ended in me finding out that Karen had cancer. That seems like years ago.
There's something about flying away that is good for the soul. I'd been mired and weighed down with grief these many months. It seemed that everything related to death or made me think of death, and life was beginning to look like a crap shoot-- just waiting to see who fell next. My perspective had gotten a little clouded, to say the least.
The Festival was Monday through Friday last week, and during that time I would be saturated with excellent preaching, music and lectures from people whose books I read in seminary, and who are on the cutting edge of a new thing that I believe God is doing in the Church. I guess everybody wouldn't appreciate listening to 3-4 sermons a day and sitting in church for hours on end. But being someone who delivers that good Word every week, trying desperately and achingly to find the nugget that will connect to our 21st century lives and pains, I was long overdue for my space in the pew rather than the pulpit. I didn't realize until I got there, how desperately thirsty and famished I was for a Word for my own soul. How I needed to be fed and watered myself! My soul was getting dangerously thin.
I worshipped in two large churches all week. A Presbyterian and a Lutheran church. Both old buildings built in great majesty, the architecture itself lured your soul toward the heavens. I heard music with origins from all over the globe, singing praise to God and celebrating God's amazing grace. I heard preachers from several different traditions, male and female, black and white, old and young, that stirred my soul, set before me a banquet feast of word and Spirit. No boring sermons in sight. People who made me believe again in the power of the Word to feed, to nourish and even to set people on fire to bring a little love into the love-starved world. People who made me feel that this crazy profession I'm in may be crazy, but it's Jesus-crazy, and therefore more sane than most things that are going on in the world. I got hope. And that's no small thing. I felt like I was cleaned, inside and out, scrubbed and bathed, toweled gently dry only to be graciously drenched with God's thirst-quenching Spirit.
We were Methodists, Presbyterians, United Church of Christers, Baptists, and Lutherans, all worshipping together. There were people from California to New Jersey, Africa and England. All drawn together because some crazy burning bush enlightened our path somewhere and we found ourselves in pulpits preaching the Word that seems foolish in the ears of the rest of the world. We listened to a Presbyterian Choir that would rival the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, to an African American Woman who made us feel like we could just reach up and touch heaven if we tried, an African American man whose voice squeezed tears out of us at the sheer beauty of his music, a songwriter/singer with a guitar who survived the death of her husband to cancer and her own bout of breast cancer, who put words together that made the darkness seem so light.
There is power in the Word.
Up in the sky, looking down on the grid-like landscape of Nebraska, everything seemed so clean. Beautiful. Sometimes you need to get some distance to see clearly. Sometimes you need to fly up into the sky and look down at the ant-sized cars and trucks of your home to get perspective. Sometimes it's as simple as remembering that we all need to eat and drink, to be fed, to be bathed, to come away for awhile and breathe. I didn't get away from my grief. Everywhere I went I still thought of Karen. In the stories of loss and grief and healing and air that people spoke, I heard my own story. When the human angels sang and played their music, I sometimes felt that I could reach out and touch Karen's fingertips while she enjoyed the heaven-like music that filled the space with God and Spirit. I cried at the memory of standing on the edge of this world six months ago and catching a glimpse of heaven as Karen held my hand.
There is power in the Word. And for now, I'll keep on preaching, scattering seeds, trusting that they will fall on fertile ground and somewhere in darkness and light, someone else will be fed and watered and made new again.
There IS power in the Word.
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