Striking imagery. And my immediate response was, “The title of my memoir—when I get around to writing it—will be ‘Dancing in the Eye of the Hurricane.’”
Maybe 24 hours later I sat down at the computer to look at the propers for today. And that’s when I realized that today is the one day in the church year devoted to a point of theology—perhaps our most important but most challenging point of theology—the Trinity.
Brothers and sisters, I don’t know if that memoir will ever be written. But today’s Trinity Sunday sermon is entitled “Dancing in the Eye of The Hurricane.”
Because that’s how I experience the Triune God and God’s call and claim on my life.
Now, you are not about to hear some clever theological explanation of how the Trinity is like a hurricane. Rather, like every other sermon I have preached, this one comes from my life, from what happened this week, from how I encountered God in the world yesterday, this month, 10 years ago.
God comes to us disguised as our life, writer Paula D’Arcy said. And that quote is now available as a poster, on a t-shirt, printed on.. whatever.
It resonates. God comes to us disguised as our life.
And life is a lot like a hurricane. Sometimes we dance along happily and competently in the relative calm of the eye. And then we miss a step or the roiling turmoil around us lurches in an unexpected direction, and we are bouncing off the walls. It takes time to get back into that eye where we can dance again, and only in retrospect can we see that God was in it… and we in God... the whole time.
Many times getting bludgeoned by the winds of the hurricane is exactly how we encounter God’s call and claim on us in a way we cannot ignore.
For me, God’s call and claim on my life began long before I encountered the Episcopal Church, long before I knew of such a thing as being a deacon.
I was first called to teaching. And that call came by way of the really messy business of a marriage ending badly. After careening about for a time wondering where in heaven’s name that had come from, I was left with the task of reinventing myself.
I went back to school to get a Bachelor’s degree, got to be a teaching assistant while still an undergraduate, taught my first class the summer after I graduated, went straight to graduate school, began teaching full time in the fall of 1990… and have been at it ever since.
And it is a calling. Teaching matters. It changes things. Here’s a story: A number of years ago, my brother was living on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean. He took tourists on sail boat snorkeling tours to the underwater national park near there.
One day a tourist on his boat noted his last name and said something like, Oh, I had a teacher at Penn State with that last name. To which my brother replied, Small world. My sister used to teach at Penn State.
The tourist—a woman whose name to this day I do not know—then told my brother that my teaching had changed her life. She related a discussion I had conducted in class some 10+ years earlier to my brother.. in sufficient detail that I recognized the exact lesson she was talking about.
It had been a media criticism class and we had critiqued an example from an ad campaign that used controversial depictions of race and race relations to sell clothes.
And that discussion, the woman on my brother’s boat told him, changed forever how I perceive and understand race in our society.
And that story made it into this sermon today in part because I’m still at it. Still teaching—and learning—about race, that is. I came to Pineville yesterday for a meeting of the Diocesan Anti-Racism Commission that Bishop Jake asked me to head.
Much has happened from there to here. I left Penn State to come to ULM where I still teach. And I thought I had stepped into a time warp in terms of race relations. In my first few months in Monroe, I repeatedly was told racially repulsive jokes featuring the n-word—once on the patio of an Episcopal church—by people who clearly expected me to laugh.
That—and the death of a second spouse that also sent me careening into the walls of the hurricane—led me to get involved in Northern & Central Louisiana Interfaith, a coalition of mostly churches that purposefully cross boundaries of religion, social class, gender and race. The most radical thing we do is form relationships with each other across those historic divides so that we can then work together for the common good.
And it was Interfaith work that called me to the diaconate. Interfaith needed more white, ordained leaders. In other words, I don’t do Interfaith work because I’m a deacon, I am a deacon because I do Interfaith work.
A couple of years after ordination, Bishop Bruce appointed me to be ULM Canterbury chaplain. Two of the young people from my Canterbury group became the first members of the Episcopal Servant Leadership Corps, headquartered in St. Joseph, the poorest community with an Episcopal church in this Diocese.
One of them is currently still in St. Joseph, and is helping me organize for the common good using the Interfaith model to bridge a racial divide rooted in slavery and as deep and wide as it has ever been.
My friends, this is what dancing in the eye of the hurricane looks like for me. I don’t know what dancing in the eye of the hurricane looks like for you, only that you too are called.
That does not mean you are called to ordained ministry, although you might be. It does not mean you are called to change jobs or careers or move to a new place or reinvent your entire life, although it might mean that.
It does mean that whatever you are doing with this one glorious and precious gift we call life, God is already at work loving and reconciling this world and you, me, all of us are called to be a part of it.
Please do not hear in any of this the tired notion that “God has a plan and if you just pray hard enough and are good enough, God will send signs to tell you whether to take this job or that one, move here or there, sell the farm or not, start that business or not, etc., etc.”
Consider the possibility that God does not care much about those specifics!
Discernment is the process of prayerful attention to the Holy Spirit’s presence and movement. It’s looking at everything we do, and aren’t doing, and asking, Where is God in this? How does or would this enable me to participate in God’s reconciling love in the world? To serve others? To care for those who must be cared for, and to help those who are able care for themselves and their families, and also participate in God’s reconciling love in the world?
My friends, we come from God, we are in God through the Risen Christ, and God is in us through the power of the Holy Spirit. That's my theology of the Trinity. And when we relinquish our own feeble attempts to control life, when we accept that we cannot, when we forgive life for being exactly what it is and seek only to offer ourselves and our lives to being God’s reconciling presence in the world, ...then we dance in the eye of the hurricane. AMEN
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