Dancing in the Eye of the Hurricane

Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2025, Grace Episcopal, Monroe, La

A few years ago, I was listening to American Roots on public radio and heard a song called “The Eye” by Brandi Carlile. The key lyric in that song is this: “You can dance in a hurricane if you’re standing in the eye.”

 

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.’”

 

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. 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 ever preached, this one comes from my life, from what happened this week, from how I encountered God in the world yesterday, last month, many years ago.

 

God comes to us disguised as our life, writer Paula D’Arcy said. And that quote is now available as a poster, and on a t-shirt, or printed on.. whatever.

 

It resonates. Hear it again: 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.

 

I’m a teacher. I didn’t always know that. I discovered it 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 and got invited to be a teaching assistant while still an undergraduate. I then taught my first college class the summer after I graduated, went straight to graduate school that fall, finally finished all my degrees in the spring of 1990, began teaching full time that fall. And I still teach…

 

Teaching can be made to matter. It can change things. Here’s a story: A few years ago, I had a student, a young woman who wanted to complete the Public Relations major. But she was not the best student and she struggled. I despaired of ever getting her through the program.

 

But finally she made it! She completed all the requirements with passing grades and graduated. A couple years later, I received a large envelope in the mail, from her. It contained a beautiful marketing brochure. It was well designed; the writing was flawless.

 

The attached note said, “Thank you to the woman who taught me I could do this.”

 

Comments like that will keep a teacher going for a very long time!

 

Much has happened from there to here. I’ve lost my balance, been blind-sided, and bounced off the walls by the hurricane of life more than once. Another marriage ended in the death of a spouse. A very real hurricane dumped a boy who needed a mom into my life. And I discovered I needed a son!

 

I think there’s some real truth in the adage, if it doesn’t kill you, it will make your stronger! Each time, a way forward that ends up looking like a call from God has emerged from the chaos.

 

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.

 

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 that.

 

Please do not hear in any of this the tired notion that “God has a plan for my life and if I just pray hard enough and am good enough, God will send signs to tell me whether to take this job or that one, move here or there, sell the farm or not, start that business or not, etc., etc.”

 

The Way Through, by BJK, 2020

 

Such thinking has never done much for me. I rely on the promise God made to Isaiah in Chapter 30, verse 21: Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

 

So consider the possibility that God does not care much about worldly details! Whether you teach or sew or practice law or medicine or babysit your grandkids or sell real estate or wait tables, make it matter. God’s plan for your life is that you will be God’s reconciling love in the world.

 

I invite us to look at everything we do, and aren’t doing, and ask, 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 need to be cared for, and to enable those who are able to care for themselves to do so, so that all can participate in God’s reconciling love in the world?

 

That’s the way. Walk in it!

 

We come from God, we are in God through the Risen Christ, and God is in us through the indwelling Holy Spirit. Nothing can take that away from us. Not the most devastating storm. Nothing can take that away from us.

 

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.  

 

Dance on, my friends.  

       

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

 

Focus on the Light

 Christ Episcopal Church, St. Joseph, La., Easter 7/Ascensiontide

The story of Jesus’ ascension is told near the end of Luke and at the beginning of Acts. Both accounts were thus likely written by the same person since scholars widely believe the two books have a single author.

 

Although there are several differences between the accounts, neither tells us when it happened. Nevertheless, the feast day for the ascension is always on a Thursday—the Thursday exactly 40 days after Easter, which is, of course, always on a Sunday.

 

It’s a bit odd since most churches don’t have a service Thursdays. But… of course, it must be 40 days after Easter to match the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness before he began his ministry. And why? Because that’s how the church does things, that’s why!

 

So… today is officially the 7^th Sunday after Easter, but I prefer to think of it as the only Sunday during Ascensiontide! And since you most likely did not go to church Thursday, well, today, is our celebration of Ascensiontide, that extraordinary moment between Jesus’ departure from Earth and the coming of the Holy Spirit—to be celebrated next Sunday—Pentecost Sunday.

 

And it is a moment, so to speak. It is just 10 days between Jesus ascending and the Holy Spirit raining fire on the heads of Jesus’s followers. And this is the only Sunday within that 10 days, thus our main opportunity for thinking a bit about what that time must have been like for the disciples and IS like for us today.

 

The disciples had been on quite a roller coaster ride. Jesus had been crucified. It seemed to have all been over. Their hopes for a new kingdom were dashed. They went fishing.

 

Then Jesus began to appear to them. At first they weren’t sure but he kept showing up. They moved from disbelief to belief. Could it be they had him back again? They hung on his every word. This time when he said he was going away but would send this mysterious presence that would be with them always, I suspect they were readier to believe, but…, did they have any idea what to expect? 

 

 

You know that I always love to look at artist renditions of the Bible stories. The vast majority of paintings of the Ascension show Jesus in voluminous robes and rising, arms outstretched. The focus is all on the glorification of Jesus. The disciples, if they appear at all, tend to be highly stylized hands and faces.

 

But there are a few that only show Jesus’ feet and maybe the hem of his robe dangling down from the top of the frame. In these, the focus tends to be on the disciples and their reactions, and their faces are not always calm! I saw one, in particular, that showed faces contorted by surprise, of course, but also fear and anxiety.

 

It is hard to be in an in-between time! What next? After all we’ve been through, what next?! Here we are alone again, and Jesus says something big is going to happen, but… what is this new thing going to be like?

 

It seems the disciples were kind of frozen in the moment—and wouldn’t we all be?! So the next thing that happens—and my fave thing about this story—is that two men dressed all in white appear. Angels, presumably. And they shock the poor, already stunned disciples out of their reverie.

 

Wake up guys, they say. What are you doing standing there with your mouths hanging open? You’ve got work to do—like “change the whole world” work to do. Better get cracking. Go back to Jerusalem and get ready.

 

So Ascensiontide is a little bitty—10 day, to be exact—in-between time when the disciples prayed and prepared for something to come, they were not sure exactly what or how, but they prepared in faith with prayer and praise, and lo and behold, something wondrous did happen, and they did go out and change the world.

 

But you have most likely noticed… you surely have noticed…the world.. still.. needs changing! Christianity brought some wonderful teachings to the world, and I’ll come back to that momentarily. But some of what Christianity brought was cruel and inhumane, and most assuredly not from God. Christianity brought the Inquisitions and the Crusades and the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny that supported our ancestors in decimating indigenous people and culture in this country.

 

Some Christians used passages in the bible to justify slavery. And then other Christians came along and used the Hebrew Scripture to preach that all humans are created equal and in the likeness and image of God. Christianity has always been a mixed bag and even though the disciples of Jesus changed the world… we have much to do today!

 

Our central teachings--love of God first and foremost then love your neighbor as self—are sorely needed in our still violent and evil world. We have a long way to go and our work cut out for us.

 

So we still need two men in white—or maybe any random priest or deacon—to show up every so often and say, “people of Christ Church, St. Joseph, why do you stand here gazing into heaven? You’ve got work to do! Get cracking.”

 

We too live in an in-between time, not a little bitty one like Ascensiontide but an enormous, ongoing one that stretches from the first Easter until that glorious day when God’s kingdom comes, fully and gloriously, and Divine Love and Perfect Unity rule everything.

 

What we do with our in-between time matters. What we focus on matters, as we play out our lives working toward the coming of that Kingdom. Here’s a gem I found on FB of all places, in the past couple of weeks. The author framed it as…

 

A reminder in these dark times…

 

We must call out the darkness, The unspeakable injustice and evil in this world. But we must never *focus* on it.

Make sure your focus is *always* on the Light. And remember that no matter how great the darkness gets, the Light will always be greater.

 

Yasmin Mogahed, Muslim woman

 

 

Our Gospel lesson today is Jesus the Christ’s prayer for his disciples, and us, as he departs this earth. It is a prayer for love and unity. But we will never achieve God’s kingdom of Love and Unity by striving for conformity and uniformity. It always sounds nice! If we could just get rid of our differences, we could all live in harmony, right? Except that what every human who ever thought that had in mind was the rest of the world conforming to THEIR beliefs, values and way of seeing! BE like me, then we can all get along, right!

 

Our only possible unity is in learning to live with and love in all our variation. That’s Divine Love and that’s the Light—the only Light that can guide us.

 

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.