Finding an end

I spent most of this morning at Santa Maria Virgen cutting wire. We had just a few more rebar structures to make, and we needed wire ties to hold them together, and we had a large coil of wire and a pair of wire cutters -- so I set to it to make wire ties. This involved playing out wire between my left and right hands to a length of six to eight inches, snipping off that length, and doing it again. And again. And again. Just the kind of solo, repetitive work that encourages thought and contemplation. At one point I even thought it was like saying the rosary, only with lengths of wire instead of beads.

Well, mostly. The iterations weren't always that smooth. The wire coil had been moved around a few times in the past few days, and it wasn't as neat as it had been at first. Some of the loops had overlapped each other, so from time to time the wire bound on itself. Instead of pulling smoothly, it would kink and get stuck and have to be unwound. And then I would need to put down the wire snips, get both hands into the coil, and shift things around until I had some loops free to snip.

More than once, when this happened, I had a hard time finding the end of the wire I'd been working on. All the loops in the coil looked just the same; the loop that had the end wasn't always distinguishable from its neighbors. In order to start snipping ties again, though, I needed the end of the wire. So from time to time I had to stop what I was doing and go and find the end.

In a way, I feel like that about our mission trip: I'm having a hard time finding the end. In one sense, of course, the end is obvious: this is our last day; tomorrow we leave our hotel early in the morning for the drive to San Pedro Sula and the flight to Houston and the flight to Dulles; and by late tomorrow evening we'll be home. The trip is ended because we only planned to come here so many days, and we have used up those days and that is the end. Plain and simple.

But in another sense this is hardly the end. This mission trip built on relationships that were formed a year ago, when last year's team began work at this site. And the relationships built up here this last week won't just cease to exist because the ten of us are going back to Virginia (and, for one of us, Iowa). We've done a lot of work on this site: if you look at "first day" and "last day" pictures, you'll see the evident difference. But it is still just a beginning, still only the foundation of what we all hope will be a beautiful and serviceable house for the church -- the people -- that meets here. The work of building this church has hardly ended today. And even when the building is finished, the work of building the church won't be at an end, as people are equipped for ministry and trained for service and raised up for prayer and praise. What we've done here, as proud of it as we may feel, is a very tiny drop in a very big bucket, one little set of steps in a very long pilgrimage of faithful people in the Way of the Lord. This is not the end; how could this be the end?

So that leaves me trying to find the end. What sense of conclusion can I give to this trip, to this particular set of experiences, within the larger flow of experiences that is and will be the life of this church congregation? What will round out this week as a whole, while also knowing there is so very much more to come?

One thought that comes to mind is to turn to another meaning of the word "end." "End" means not only conclusion or cessation, but also purpose, intention, the reason for which a thing is done. I look for an end, a purpose, for this trip, and it is not hard to find: God's purpose for us in the church is that we love one another as Jesus loves us, and that in the light of that love we see each other and ourselves as children of God, sharers in God's eternal act of Creation. When we gather as church and act out our love in concrete, serviceable, practical ways, we are fulfilling the purpose, the end, God shares with us. The end of our trip is that we have deepened relationships, and given love concrete form (literally!) in foundations and rebar and block, and learned a few words of each other's languages (including the language of the heart), and made something together that could not have been made the same had we been left apart.

That is the end of our mission trip here. And, of course, it is the beginning of our next steps in mission, too.

Skills

Much of our work at Santa Maria Virgen today required some degree of skill -- or at least practice -- that not all of our mission trip team had. There was mixing of concrete, and laying of block, and setting up of concrete forms, and several other tasks that Ted and Oakley and Lee B seemed to know well enough, and that seemed more than familiar to the Honduran workers among us, but were outside the skill sets of most of us American visitors. Tying rebar and digging trenches is easy to share with less skilled workers -- like us -- because it's hard to do it wrong. But I, at least, knew that I didn't want to get anywhere near laying block or pouring cement -- I could just imagine coming back in a year or two and finding that the church had fallen down because there was a flaw in the foundation that a well-meaning but unskilled gringo worker had left by accident! Even some of the simplest tasks -- like digging foundation trenches -- went much faster when the Hondurans did them. So Martha Erickson and Lee N and I did our best with pickaxe and shovel, digging a trench, until a couple of Honduran workers came up and took over from us, and finished the trench much more quickly than we would have done. And that was after they had taken over and finished the trench that Todd Doorenbos and his mother Pat had been working on. All in all, it turned into a day of jumping in to help with things we were able to help with, and waiting while others worked, watching for our moments of helpfulness to arrive.

At some point in the day it occurred to me that, although there wasn't much going on at the worksite that I was skilled enough to really help with, there were some other skills I had, that might even be relevant in this working context. I've not had any practice in laying block; but I have lots of practice in saying prayers. I could sit there, I realized, on the sidelines, ready to jump in with a simple task when it presented itself -- and all the while I could be praying for the church, and for the workers, and for the people the church would one day serve, and for our mission team members, and for the folks back home, and for the beauty of the mountainside, and for -- well, for anyone or anything that God knew needed the benefit of prayer. Workers in the Lord have many skills; and if my skills aren't in construction, well then I could use the skills with which I have been gifted.

I started off with a simple prayer phrase I've been using lately, a verse from the Book of Lamentations, "The loving-kindness of the Lord never ceases." I repeated it over and over in my mind, like a mantra, visualizing the loving-kindness of God as an infinite support for Dana, Margaret, Ted, Oakley, Victor, Concepcion, whoever my vision fell upon at that moment. After a while I switched to the Lord's Prayer, and began repeating that in my mind. We've been saying the Lord's Prayer as part of our Noonday Office every day before lunch -- in Spanish. And though I don't know Spanish well at all, I do know the Lord's Prayer very well, and I began to think about the meaning of the Prayer as it gets expressed in different words. I started to think about the words of the Prayer in Greek in the two Gospels where it appears, and how those meanings influence the prayer as we say it in contemporary English. I began to think about the history of the English words in the Prayer, how they've changed meanings over the years, and what subtle theological nuances are woven into such simple-sounding words today. As I recited the Prayer in my mind, I began to change the words, reflecting on how these nuances can be expressed in different phrasings -- Give us today our bread for today; Forgive us our sins; Forgive us our debts; Make up for what is lacking in us, as we make up for what is lacking in each other; Lead us not into temptation; Do not put us to the test; Do not bring us into times of trial and tribulation; Bring us out of evil; Now and always and always and always. The Prayer that Jesus taught us turned and flowed and opened in my mind, applying itself anew to the people and situations presented to me; and yet it was always the same prayer at the core. Over and over again, and with a delight of new discovery each time around.

And then, as I prayed, I would see that someone needed some masonry blocks for a new course of foundation wall they were laying, and I'd get up and bring them some blocks. Or two Honduran workers were about to mix some more concrete and would need water; and I'd get a bucket and go down the hill to where the water barrels had been delivered -- there is no plumbing at Santa Maria Virgen -- and I'd bring up a couple bucketfulls. Or a form was ready to have concrete poured, needing only the open end to be blocked; so I'd get some wet paper and dam up the end. Simple, silly, unskilled things I could do, while the skills of the skilled workers went to more important things. Over and above and through and around it all, I could do the thing that I was skilled at: I could pray.

So, little by little, task by task, skill by skill, the worksite at Santa Maria Virgen is being transformed. Already in the few days we've been here, the site looks different: more formed, more developed, more revealing of the potential of the church that will be here. Hard work and shared work and skilled work and prayer work, all together building up the People of God, the church.

Square

One of our tasks at Santa Maria Virgen today was making square grids that will serve as footings for extra-weight-bearing bits of the foundation structure. It seemed very straightforward when the Honduran construction boss showed us how to do it: take four pieces of rebar, lay them in a square, tie the ends together, lay three more pieces within the square to make a ladder, flip the whole thing over and lay in three more pieces to make a 5x5 grid, tie all the intersections together with wire twists. Simple as you please.

Except that, when we began to do it, it didn't seem so simple at all. The pieces didn't want to stay where we put them. Lifting the bars up from the ground ever so slightly to pass the wire twist around the pieces had a tendency to displace the other pieces. Twisting the wire, which we'd done with such skill and finesse on the rebar cages before, seemed to follow a different geometry altogether on the grids. I never did figure out what I was doing wrong; I just know that more often than not I'd twist a nice figure-8 and the second piece of rebar wouldn't be connected to it at all. Mystifying. When the one I'd been working on with Lee Beam and Margaret Pearson and Lee Nancarrow was finally finished, I stood it up -- and it wasn't square. It wasn't all that far off square, no. But it was definitely a parallelogram, not a real right-angle square. How was that going to serve as a proper footing?

Not to worry, said Lee B. A few taps of a hammer in a few well-chosen places, a bit of push applied in a corner, and the whole grid shifted into a much more passable square. It may not have been a Pythagorean ideal form, but it would certainly do the job of helping to hold up the church.

Thinking of that, I noticed how many things we did today that required a little tapping, a bit of a push, some just-after-the-fact adjustment to line up properly for the job they were intended to do. We needed to pour concrete for another course of foundation; and to do that we needed to set up boards as concrete forms; and to hold the boards in place we created struts of masonry blocks piled on each other, angled against the boards, backed up with more blocks, pushed up together in whatever way would provide the most leverage for the board. It wasn't precision work. But the boards held, and the concrete stayed where it was put, and the foundation course looked pretty straight. There were rebar towers already set in concrete at the bases of several footings all the way around the structure; and while the bases of the towers were secure, the tops weren't always straight. As the new foundation course went in, the towers were propped into straighter line with sticks and struts and whatever could bring them into line before the next courses of blocks could grow around them. Wooden planks made up the majority of the concrete forms; but they had open ends, and the concrete had to be prevented from flowing out the ends; so Todd Doorenbos and Lee N and I stuffed wet heavy paper -- concrete bags, actually, that had been dunked in a pail of water -- into the places where the flowing concrete had to be dammed. It looked mighty strange. But when the concrete was poured into the forms the paper held, and it left just the open spaces needed to set in extra rebar cages and footing grids when the foundation reinforcements are built.

A lot of the things we did today required a little tapping, a little push, some propping up, some stuffing in, some little bit of adjustment before they came into line, before they were square enough to do the jobs they were meant to do.

In Christian theology we talk about "justification," and the best simple explanation of justification that I've ever heard related it to the practice of "justifying" a paragraph of text. A "justified" text has a straight margin on both the right and the left, both the beginning and end of each line. The lines line up in a satisfying square. In order to achieve the even margin on the right-hand side, the typesetter (or, now, the word processing program) has to add tiny bits of space between words, even between individual characters. In the days of movable type, the printer had to tap on the type, push a little here, pull a little there, in order to add the extra spaces to make the lines line up. But when all the work was done, the paragraph was justified, the characters were squared off in right relationship.

I think perhaps that's how God does the work of justification in us: a tap here, a push there, a bit of insight, an eye-opening experience, a forgiveness offered, a love deepened: bit by bit, God adjusts us in small ways to come into righter relationships, to line up our energies and actions and thoughts and feelings in something more like the way God really wants us to be. Like the grid for the footing, we are not squared up true all at once, but it takes some time and effort to bring our potentials into realization of God's best will for us.

But, unlike the footing grid, we have the capacity to work along with God, to co-operate in the adjustments that make us more true, to be part of the work of making our own souls. Not self-justification, but cooperating with God in the work of our mutual justification, our mutual adjustment and accommodation, for the righting of our many relationships.

A tap here, a push there, with humility and with good will -- that's how we become squared up true in God's love.

Church

Today is The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ. We celebrated the feast day twice, once at Espiritu Santo in Santa Rita -- the first church our mission team helped to build many years ago -- and once with the congregation of Santa Maria Virgen -- whose church we are helping to build on this trip.

The morning service at Espiritu Santo was deeply moving for many reasons. We had a baptism -- which is especially appropriate for the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus. Little Alex Mauricio, the son of a young woman who has been helping to serve lunches to our work team on all our mission trips, was welcomed into the church family today. Standing up for him as godparents were Margaret and Oakley Pearson. Their role in the service, and in Alex's life, is a wonderful outward and visible sign of the deep relationships that have been formed over the years of these mission trips. I was invited to participate in the service as well; I had asked if I could anoint Alex with the oil in baptism, so I had the privilege of saying to Alex "You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ's own forever" -- something I find personally meaningful in every baptism I preside at, but even more significant in this cross-cultural, bilingual, all-Episcopal baptism we shared today. Then, to my surprise, Father Mejia, the one priest who serves all those congregations around Copan, invited me to say the Great Thanksgiving at Eucharist, and to administer the bread to the people. I said the prayer in English, and spared them my very very poor pronunciation of Spanish; but the administration I chose to say in their language. They received by intinction, with me dipping the wafers in the wine and placing them on their tongues. a practice we don't do too often at Trinity; so the words I spoke to them as they received were "The Body and Blood of Christ," "El Cuerpo y la Sangre de Cristo." I am quite sure I didn't pronounce it correctly; but somehow the combination of the deep familiarity of Communion with the practice and words that were unfamiliar to me brought home the unfathomable mystery of the sacrament: that the God who is beyond all our understanding and comprehension nevertheless comes to be with us as we are, in terms we can understand, and lifts us out of ourselves to be more than we could ever imagine. Baptism and Communion are the cornerstones of that mysterious reality.

After the service we were invited up the hill -- and it was a very long and steep hill! -- for lunch at Adela and Mauricio's (Alex's parents) house, and they prepared for us a wonderful meal and genuinely heartfelt hospitality. While we were eating, Lee Beam shared with me a thought she later posted on Facebook (some of you may have seen it already), that we say we come to Copan to build churches, but really we build relationships. And our morning at Espiritu Santo bore witness to the truth of that. But it also got me to thinking that really, at the heart of it, the church is relationships: the church is the people, and the love of Christ that binds them together; the building is a manifestation of the community, a physical sign and vehicle of the community's presence, and so the building is pretty important; but really, the church is the relationships. We come to Copan to build churches -- and that starts with the relationships we form on the worksite and in the worship services and at mealtimes and in supporting education -- and even in being godparents -- and the buildings that rise from the trenches we dig and the rebar we tie are the outward and visible signs of those inward and spiritual relationships. Both are part of building the church.

This evening we attended a second church service, the people of Santa Maria Virgen (whose church is now just foundations and rebar and dreams) gathered in the garage of their lay leader, for a service of Evening Prayer and scripture and song. We sang songs that we Americans of course didn't know; but they had easy tunes, and refrains of simple words that were easy to pick up after a time or two -- and we could always clap along. After the service the Junior Warden (more or less) spoke about a fundraising dinner they were planning to pay for more building supplies; he mentioned that those who did not attend the supper would get an envelope for their contribution nonetheless. It reminded me that church stewardship is much the same no matter the language or culture. There again, it became clear that praying together and working together meant building the relationships that are the church, and of which the physical building is the material epiphany.

The original New Testament word for "church" is ekklesia, which literally means "those who are called out." Worshiping today at Espiritu Santo and Santa Maria Virgen made me think of how we are all called out: called out of our comfort zones, called out of our regular routines, called out of our complacencies, called out to reach across borders and boundaries, called out to proclaim by word and deed even when our words aren't the same, called out to be brothers and sisters with people about whom we know no more than that they too love and follow Jesus, called out to come together in water and oil and bread and wine in the most unexpected places.

Building the church, deepening relationships, being ekklesia, come to us today in the form of a dove -- like Luke says in his baptism narrative, like the mural painted on the front wall of Espiritu Santo -- and in a little boy with Honduran parents and Virginian godparents. May God grant us to build this kind of church in all our baptized lives.

San Rafael

Today we spent our morning visiting the school at San Rafael that is supported through our TIME, that is, Trinity's International Mission for Education. One Sunday a month at Trinity we take a special collection to support schools with which we have a relationship: one is St Marc's School in Cerca la Souce in Haiti, and the other is the school at San Rafael. Its official government name is the Francisco Morazan school -- but everyone here just calls it San Rafael.

The school complex is fairly small: four classrooms (or three classrooms and a faculty room -- I couldn't read the Spanish etched in the concrete outside the doorways well enough to be sure), a small courtyard with a swingset, a kitchen-cum-shed, a washbasin and bathrooms, and a small plot of land for a garden. In these classrooms they teach about 95 primary schoolchildren in the morning, and about 75 secondary students in the afternoon. There are three teachers, an administrator named Carolina, her husband Edgar who teaches one subject and provides transportation in his pickup truck, and one other man who teaches a couple of subjects. Carolina is paid by the government (and the government is several months behind in payments). Two of the teachers are paid by Trinity's contributions through TIME, the third receives a little help from the other two, and the two men are (as far as I can tell) unpaid. They work as hard as they do with as little pay as they get because they know that education is absolutely essential for improving the lives of people in the five communities served by this one school. San Rafael opened in 2005; before that there was no school at all for these five communities. It is remarkable to see face-to-face how much they have achieved in a short time with slender means.

When Edgar drove us up to the school this morning, Carolina was waiting to greet us, along with the three women teachers and a handful of students. Classes are not in session now -- their break is from November until February, not in the summer like our schools -- but a few students had come in on a Saturday to meet their Trinity visitors and help us get to know their school. They danced a couple of traditional dances for us there in the small courtyard, including a Honduran polka that involved much flouncing of large circle skirts. One dance simulated courtship, with the boys trying to impress the girls, the girls initially refusing to be interested, and boys and girls finally circling with their hands clasped. They also spoke with us, a little, through Oakley's translations, about the subjects they studied and how much the school meant to them. Carolina and Edgar told us about their hopes to build another classroom -- which their numbers of students clearly warrant -- and how the parents were willing to do the building so long as they could get materials. I thought about what it would be like if I'd been asked to help build a classroom for the school my kids attended -- and I came to admire those San Rafael parents on the spot.

We were invited to look through the classrooms on our own. There were lots of colorful posters, charts with words and numbers, a diagram of the solar system (I've never seen planet names in Spanish before!), paper cutouts with reminders of good classroom behavior (Do your homework, Eat only during recess, Respect your teachers) which we tried to puzzle out until Oakley translated them for us. In one room I found a list of words that I could mostly recognize: Los Valores, The Virtues. In handwritten letters on colored construction paper were the Spanish words for Perseverance, Freedom, Respect, Honesty, Solidarity -- and one on the bottom I couldn't guess from cognates: Agradecimiento. I asked Oakley to come into the classroom and read it for me,and he said "Thankfulness, Gratitude" -- and then the list was complete. I thought of the core values of our society, and of the Christian community we enjoy and work for at Trinity -- and especially of that last one, Thankfulness, which is key to them all but all too often one of the last that we think about -- and I couldn't help but feel a deep connection and affection for this place. It means so much more to me now to remind people of TIME Sunday and their opportunity to be generous, now that I have been to this school and have caught a glimpse of its values -- and its value. (And it makes me even more sure that I need to visit St Marc's in Cerca la Souce one day soon, too.) This school is changing the lives of children and five communities, and we have a share in their hope.

I'm not sure how the coffee farm and community and school of San Rafael first got their name; but in the Bible (Book of Tobit, in the Apocrypha) Raphael is the name of the angel sent to guide Tobias through his journey to find a wife and to save his family. Rafael provides key advice -- even medical assistance -- to Tobias; and because of that the Angel Raphael is traditionally identified as a patron of wisdom and healing. I believe the school of San Rafael is a source of wisdom and healing in the hills above Copan, and I was humbled and thrilled -- and thankful -- to visit it today.

Wire work

Most of our work at Santa Maria Virgen today had to do with wire. Because the church is going to be a two-story building, it needs very strong foundations, and the way the foundations will be strengthened is by laying rebar cages lengthwise in the trenches and burying them in cement.

For those who don't know (and I wouldn't have known without coming on these trips) rebar cages are structures made with different lengths and widths of wire. The rebar itself is a long steel rod -- which I suppose qualifies as a very thick wire -- with a raised texture to give it grip. A rebar cage is made with four (sometimes six) long rods of rebar held together by square rings. The rings are made from somewhat thinner wire bent into the ring shape. And the rings are held onto the rebar with even thinner wire ties. Most of our team spent most of our day making these rebar cages.

There are several stages to rebar cages. The mid-size wire has to be bent into rings. To do that, there is a jig consisting of several nails driven partway into a thick wooden board. Cut lengths of wire are run into the jig and bent around the nails with a special bending wrench. Lee Beam applied herself assiduously to the bending of rings for much of the day, spelled at times by one of the Honduran workers who belong to the congregation. Each cage required 43 rings, and we made nine cages today -- that's a lot of bending of rings!

Once 43 rings are ready, the cage is assembled by taking four bars of rebar, laying them horizontally on a series of work struts, and marking them at regular intervals to show where the rings should go. Rings are threaded onto the rebars and spaced at the marks. Then the rings need to be tied to the rebar with thinner wire ties. This is handwork: wire is looped over ring and rebar in a figure-8 pattern and twisted together at the corner. It requires strong thumbs; and it strengthens thumbs that keep at it for awhile. I'm going to be a formidable text-messager after a few days of this! The hand-twisted ties are then twisted tighter, and the wire-ends are cut off, with a tool called a "nipper," leaving a tight fit of ring to rebar. When all the corners of one side are done, the entire cage must be flipped over on its support struts, and the twist-and-nip process repeated on the other side, until all four corners of every ring are tightly tied to a rebar length. Bending, tying, twisting, nipping -- then and only then is the rebar cage complete.

At the height of our work day we had two tying stations going, building two cages simultaneously, and we were moving like a well-oiled machine.

Or, not so much. We weren't always so organized. We ran out of rings from time to time. Not enough thin wire had been cut into ties every so often. Tying the figure-8 loop wasn't a motion to which our fingers were accustomed at first; some ties had to be redone. Nippers went missing and were rediscovered. A group working on one cage had to stop and help the other group carry a finished cage from its struts. Wrists unused to so much twisting began to hurt. Skin was scratched from reaching across sharp wire-ends. As the day warmed, we were not without our frustrations and impatiences. But we kept building cages, building cages and more cages, until we used up all the rebar and had accomplished more than we had realized.

That was our day of wire work.

In movies and theater, "wire work" refers to simulated flying: using a harness and wires to lift someone and move them around as if they were airborne. It's the sort of thing you see in stage productions of Peter Pan and on the sets of kung fu movies. Several times in this day of wire work I thought of that other use of the term, and thought to myself how little this rebar-tying resembled flying. I couldn't even indulge flights of fancy, the way one can when doing repetitive manual work: there were enough variations in the task that the mind had to stay engaged. It was very down-to-earth stuff, scratches and sore thumbs and waiting for more wire and all.

And yet, when the rebar was gone and our wire work was done for the day, and we got to take a look at how the foundations of the church building are coming into place, and knew that our rebar cages are part of what is making that foundation strong -- there was a moment when I felt a little lighter, when my step didn't come down on the ground quite so hard, when it seemed like I'd moved my qi even a little beyond the drag of gravity, when it felt like maybe happy thoughts could lift us higher than we knew. Building something up means rising above the drag of dissolution -- and that was what our wire work accomplished today.

And, on the way home, we passed the truck delivering more rebar to the work site. I think I know what Monday will have in store...

Waiting

It seems like I've spent a good deal of the past two days waiting. Waiting in airports, waiting for takeoff, waiting for work to begin. And even when I haven't been waiting per se, a number of the things I have been doing have involved sitting still while other things happen around me -- which could be thought of as another kind of waiting.

Our mission group left Staunton at about 1:15 in the morning on Wednesday. Ten of us and our luggage -- and two drivers who generously gave their wee morning hours to the cause -- packed ourselves into a van and a pickup truck and drove three hours to Reagan National Airport. It was an uneventful drive, which is what you really hope for at that time of the morning; there was some conversation, but there was also some sleeping in the back of the van, as we made our way through the dark. When we reached the airport, we had to wait for check-in (which was not running full-speed at four in the morning) and security, in order to make our way to the gate and wait for boarding. Our party was spread out through the plane, so we couldn't talk much with each other -- and conversation on a plane is always an iffy proposition -- so much of the flight time felt like waiting to arrive. And when we arrived at the airport in San Pedro Sula, there was still a five hour drive to Copan Ruinas, over roads that were in fairly bad shape after a rainy winter; and several of us jouncing around in the back were waiting most eagerly to get to our hotel. We arrived safely, found our rooms, and then regrouped for dinner at a favorite restaurant in town, and made an early night of it. After all, we'd been up all night, and in the morning we'd have work to do!

But when we arrived at the worksite this morning, we found that supplies we needed hadn't been delivered yet, so there was more waiting. The church of Santa Maria Virgen sits in a beautiful spot on the flank of the mountain that reaches up above the city of Copan Ruinas. There was fog in the city plaza as we left the hotel; by the time we reached the worksite we'd climbed above the fog and found a bright sunny day already in progress. From the worksite we could look out over the valley of the Copan River and to the mountain ridge on the other side. Mission-trippers who'd been here last year looked over the work that had been accomplished since the last trip: foundations laid, trenches dug, rebar towers in place. We could also see clearly how much work there was to do. Without the supplies, though, there wasn't much we could really do just then. We took turns with shovels, adding some space for additional foundation footers that would be needed, because there weren't enough shovels to go around. And we waited.

It occurred to me that all during Advent we at Trinity had talked and preached and prayed about waiting -- it's the Advent thing to do -- but always with the irony that the pre-Christmas season is a tremendously busy time between social parties and family arrangements and church preparations, I'd not done a lot of prayerful waiting in Advent. So perhaps now, on a mountainside in Honduras in Epiphany, was my chance. Perhaps I could use this time not just to wait for a shovel, but to wait in a deeper way as well. The sky was brilliant blue, the mountains across the valley were verdant and lush, there was a branch of vivid red flowers (hibiscus, I think) trailing down the side of the worksite retaining wall, there were people here to build up the church -- not just the building but the communion of saints -- who knew what God might reveal in any moment, if I were just to wait for it?

And then, in a little while, supplies arrived. And there was a whole new variety of jobs to be done: rebar had to be cut, and thick wire had to be bent into square rings for the rebar, and thinner wire had to be cut into ties for the rings, so that they could all be put together into square forms that will be put in the foundations and walls to strengthen their structure. Our waiting issued forth into constructive (literally!) work.

Time waiting -- even when you don't know exactly what you're waiting for -- can become the origins of something creative and constructive when you offer it in the context of God's creating grace. And while it seemed to take a lot of waiting to get here, being here is already being at good work.

Marking our Mission

As I write this, I’ve just returned from summer vacation. As you read this, we are just getting into September and the prospect of our program year starting up on September 16. It seems like an opportune moment to think a little bit about why we’re here and what it’s all for.

We are here, as I never tire of saying, because we have been called to share in God’s mission. Our purpose as a church is to join with Jesus in doing the work God sent Jesus to do, and which we are now sent in Jesus’ name to continue. In principle, every single thing we do as a church — every worship service, every music event, every fellowship meal, every Sunday school class, every committee meeting, every stewardship drive, every bit of programming, every bit of maintenance, every single thing — is meant in one way or another to further the mission of God in our world.

How can we tell whether the many different things we do as a church truly fit in the framework of mission? A congregation like ours that is involved in so many activities and engages its people and community in so many ways is hard to sum up in just one or two representative goals or objectives. How can we take stock of the many things we do and connect them with the central purpose of God’s mission?

One way of characterizing God’s mission that has been gaining attention in the last few years is a short list called the “Five Marks of Mission.” The Five Marks have been coming into increasing use throughout the Anglican Communion, and are often seen as a way of recognizing mutual value in provinces that differ sharply on matters of theology and discipline — the focus on mission can be a way of uniting people in good work even when they disagree on ideas or interpretations. The Five Marks have a lot in common with the Baptismal Covenant in our American Prayer Book, though they have been embraced by Anglicans far beyond our borders, whose Prayer Books do not include the Covenant in Baptism as we have it. This past summer, our General Convention passed a budget that was explicitly designed around the Five Marks, showing that they can provide a framework for us to “put our money where our mouth is” in the practical matters of doing God’s work. Bishop Powell has recommended the Five Marks to our diocese as a way of framing our ministries and activities. I think the Five Marks can be instructive for our reflecting on our mission at Trinity.

The Five Marks of Mission are these:

• To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
• To teach, baptize and nurture new believers
• To respond to human need by loving service
• To seek to transform unjust structures of society
• To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth

Where these things are happening, the mission of God is being done.

In principle, every single thing we do at Trinity should reflect, to some degree, one or more of these marks of mission. Our Sunday morning services, for instance, proclaim Good News — not only in the reading of the Gospel and the preaching of the Word, but in the sacramental acting-out of Jesus’ death and resurrection in communion. Our Noon Lunch program responds to human need by loving service by providing food to hungry people; at the same time, it makes an effort to safeguard the integrity of creation by recycling. Those are some of the obvious ones. Perhaps more challenging, but no less important, is asking how, let us say, a Finance Committee meeting reflects the Five Marks, or filling a staff position, or cleaning the Parish House carpet, or providing space at the church for AA meetings, or developing a long-range property plan. All these things are part of the life of the church; and all these things can and do contribute to the mission of the church, characterized by these Five Marks.

What do you think? Where do you see the Five Marks of Mission reflected in what Trinity does and says? Let’s make a conversation out of this. At the bottom of the blog page there is a space for comments. I invite you — in fact, I urge you — to go to the comments and join the conversation. Where do you see the Five Marks embodied at Trinity? Is there some activity or ministry that you are involved in, where you think one or more of the Five Marks shine through very brightly? Do you think there is something we could do to make the Five Marks better reflected in our church life? Do you feel called in person to work for one or more of the Five Marks at Trinity or beyond? How would you characterize the mission of God at Trinity?

God is always and everywhere at work among us, furthering God’s mission of creating communion toward the New Creation. It is up to us to discern what God is doing among us, and then to join God in doing it. Conversation together, even conversation through the internet, is an important tool of discernment. Won’t you join me in discerning the marks of God’s mission at Trinity?

Peace,
Paul+

A Statement on Same-Gender Blessings

Yesterday the General Convention of the Episcopal Church approved a resolution allowing “provisional use” of a rite for the blessing of same-gender covenanted relationships. The measure was passed by the House of Bishops on Monday by a vote of 111-41, and by the House of Deputies on Tuesday by a vote-by-orders of  78 percent of the clergy and 76 percent of the laity. The rite will be available for use, with the local bishop’s permission, beginning on the First Sunday of Advent, December 2, 2012.

I believe the Convention did the right thing in authorizing this rite for use.

I know there will be a lot of people in the Church, and a lot of people here at Trinity Parish, who will not agree with me. It is part of the beauty and challenge of God’s gift of communion that we may disagree and yet remain in relationship with each other.

I believe the Convention did the right thing because I think the Holy Spirit may be doing a new thing among us, guiding us to see value and dignity and blessedness in relationships that our society used to think were unnatural and deviant and, well, wrong. Opening our eyes to see God at work where we had not expected it is something the Holy Spirit is traditionally believed to do, and I think the Spirit is doing it with us again. But we will never know if it’s the work of the Holy Spirit unless we try it, unless we live with it for a time and see if it bears the fruits of the Spirit that scripture promises will be borne. I believe that if we see love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control made manifest in relationships right in front of us, and do not acknowledge that as the blessing of God, then we may in fact be in danger of denying God, even working against God — and I do not think that is something our Church ought to do. This is what I have called “the test of Gamaliel,” after the episode in Acts 5:38-39 when the Jewish Council is deciding whether or not to punish Peter and John for preaching in the name of Jesus, and a rabbi named Gamaliel counsels them that if this thing “is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them — in that case you may even be found fighting against God!” I believe we must apply the “test of Gamaliel” to this blessing rite by living with it for a time and seeing how it works, seeing how God may be at work in it.

Of course, “living with” this rite includes thinking critically about it, studying it, asking clear theological questions about what it really says and what we really believe is happening when we pray in this way. As your rector, I can say that I will not make use of this blessing rite at Trinity without first giving opportunity for the whole congregation to learn more about it, to ask questions of it, and to understand more clearly what it does and does not mean. I will not make use of this blessing rite at Trinity without first seeking the Vestry’s advice and guidance. The Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, which prepared the text of the rite, has also prepared materials for studying the rite in congregations, and for preparing couples before praying the rite. I can assure you that no new thing will happen at Trinity in a vacuum, but only with due preparation. This, too, is part of living with the rite to discern the fruits of the Spirit it may bring among us.

The Church has blessed many kinds of relationships throughout its history. It has blessed relationships between men and women in marriage. It has blessed relationships between priests and congregations and between bishops and dioceses in ordination. It has blessed relationships between men and men, and women and women, in monastic communities. It has blessed relationships between parents and children in thanksgiving for the birth or adoption of a child. Fundamental to them all, the Church has for more than two thousand years blessed relationships between persons and Christ and God and each other in baptism. Each of these relationships has its own distinctive character, its own distinctive way of reflecting God’s triune love, its own distinctive mission for manifesting God’s love in the world, and its own distinctive rite for naming and blessing that mission. With the authorization of this new rite by General Convention, we open the door to discerning, naming, and blessing the triune love of God made manifest in a distinctive way in same-gender covenanted life-long relationships. And we must live with it for a time to discern its full truth.

In all humility, I acknowledge that we could be wrong. It may be that we come to know that this is not the work of the Holy Spirit among us. We may at some future time look back at this act of Convention and repent, and ask God’s forgiveness, and amend our lives. This, too, we can only discover by living into it.

But I, for one, do believe that this is the Spirit’s work, and that our Church has taken a courageous step to be open to where the Spirit is leading. May God guide us forward, in humility and generosity, in faithfulness and love, to discern all the ways in which God’s love is made truly manifest among us.

Peace be with you,
Paul+

Some Thoughts on Title IV

Over the weekend a couple of parishioners asked me about a letter to the editor they had seen in The Richmond Times-Dispatch. The letter was about changes to the canon law of the Episcopal Church which have taken effect as of the first of July. In the letter, the author makes claims that the new Title IV canons give “sweeping ‘Metropolitan’ powers” to the Presiding Bishop, that they “diminish the authority of bishops and clergy,” and that they create a situation where the Presiding Bishop can remove any bishop from any diocese if that bishop “doesn't go along with Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori's agenda.” These are disturbing statements, and the parishioners who asked me about them were understandably disturbed.

I can assure you that these statements are simply not true. While Title IV does mark a major shift in church practices regarding clergy discipline, they in no way concentrate power in the office of the Presiding Bishop, and certainly do not give the PB authority to enforce any particular “agenda.” Instead, the new Title IV sets out new procedures for assessing claims of clergy misconduct and their proper remedies.

The old Title IV was based on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and basically set up procedures for clergy discipline resembling courts martial. It was an adversarial process, in which charges were made,  a “prosecution” and a “defense” argued the merits of those charges, and sentences were pronounced. The new Title IV is designed to be less adversarial and more pastoral, where the process is intended to reveal the truth, to make sure all parties to a situation are able to tell their stories, and to determine a pastoral response. Instead of a list of offenses for which clergy can be charged, as in the old Title IV, the new Title IV provides a code of conduct to which clergy are expected to adhere. When a complaint is made against a bishop, priest, or deacon, panels are convened to determine whether the cleric has indeed committed the act, and whether the act constitutes a breach of the code of conduct. If the panel determines that the cleric has failed to uphold the code of conduct, the bishop may direct the cleric regarding more appropriate behavior, the bishop may restrict the cleric’s ministry or put him or her on administrative leave, or the bishop may depose the cleric, depending on the severity of the failure of conduct. The new canons direct that every complaint be taken seriously and be investigated; but it has many safeguards built in to weed out frivolous or baseless complaints. It is not true, as the Times-Dispatch letter writer claimed, that “bishops will be able to remove parish leaders on the flimsiest of charges.” Instead, the process of clergy discipline has been made much more similar to codes of ethics and professional conduct used in other professions in American society.

The new Title IV has caused some consternation in the Church, largely because clergy discipline is an issue laden with emotions and often unpleasant to think about in even the best of circumstances. In some ways it does make clergy more vulnerable, since it is arguable that living up to a code is always more difficult than avoiding particular offenses; and clergy against whom complaints are made must always tell their sides of the story, effectively meaning that clergy cannot “plead the fifth” in church complaints. But overall the new Title IV is intended to make the process of clergy discipline more transparent, more open, and more pastoral -- not to concentrate power in the top levels of hierarchy.

While it will take the Church some time to live into these new canons, and to learn the best ways to bring pastoral outcomes out of misconduct situations, I think the new Title IV is in fact a step forward, and is a better reflection of the covenant of trust our Church wishes to build up between people and their leaders.

The Last Supper and the Seder

A professor at Cambridge has published a new book in which he argues that Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples took place on the Wednesday before Easter, not the Thursday, as church tradition has long taught. He bases his arguments on astronomical calculations and an ancient variant calendar that seems to have originated in Egypt, concluding that Jesus held his seder one day earlier than the official Jerusalem calendar would have called for. Books of this sort of scholarly speculation appear fairly regularly. But in this case the secular press, with its typical taste for controversy, has seized on the book as a potential challenge to the observances of Holy Week, and is making hay of it as another example of how churches Get It Wrong.

This is, to my mind, an excellent example of the silliness of trying to take the Bible too literally. The four canonical gospel accounts of the Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Jesus' death and resurrection vary in many details. It has long been known that Matthew, Mark, and Luke present the Last Supper as a Passover seder and John does not. There's nothing new there. The Synoptics present it as a seder because they have a thematic and theological interest in showing how Jesus reinterprets the bread and cup of the seder meal to refer to the new covenant in his blood. John famously presents the meal as not a seder -- there is no institution of the Eucharist, no bread and cup at all, in John's Last Supper -- because he has a thematic and theological interest in narrating how Jesus dies on the cross at the very moment the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple. John's theological interest is not to show that Jesus reinterprets anew the Passover meal, but that Jesus is the new Passover meal (he earlier identified Jesus as the Bread of Life as well). It is directly connected to the verse in John 1:29 where John the Baptist identifies Jesus as the Lamb of God: Jesus as Lamb is a theme that runs through the entire gospel, and reaches its climax at his death on the cross. To John, the identification of Jesus as Lamb is far more important than the repurposing of the seder. The Synoptics, on the other hand, do not have John's theological focus on demonstrating that Jesus is the embodiment of the traditional symbols; to them, it is far more important to show how Jesus redirects the symbols to point to the reign of God rather than the Mosaic covenant. So for them it makes theological sense to stress that Communion is based on the seder, and they narrate accordingly. (It may also be significant that Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11:23-25, the oldest textual account of the institution of the Eucharist, makes no mention of it being a seder.) The point is that the identification of the Supper as seder or not is driven by theological, not historical, concerns. What all four (and Paul) agree on is the central point that Jesus died and was raised at Passover. That is enough.

So for a 21st century metallurgist to say that an Egyptian offshoot calendar can account for how Jesus could have had a seder on Wednesday rather than Thursday, so that all four gospels can be historically accurate, is, to my mind, simply missing the point. It is treating the gospels' carefully crafted theological symbolism with all the nuanced understanding of a baseball bat. I'd rather let the symbols be symbols, and the difference be a difference, and thank God for the richness of meaning in our communion with our Lord.

And don't even get me started on the conundrums hidden in the assumption that the date of Jesus' passion can be assigned confidently to 33 CE!

Monday in the Fifth Week of Lent

As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him." (John 9:1-3)

These verses are the beginning of an extended story about the healing of the man born blind, which gradually unfolds from the physical into a story about spiritual blindness and insight. At the very outset, however, there is this little exchange between Jesus and the disciples; it is almost a throwaway line in its context, but it poses an important question all by itself.

The disciples want to know what sin caused the man to be born blind. In their general way of thinking, illness and disability are the result of sin, they are the concrete forms taken by God's punishment for wrongdoing. But this man has been blind from birth. He could not have sinned in the womb, could he? So why then was he punished with blindness? Perhaps he is being punished for his parents' sins. Moses certainly talked about punishment for sin being visited on children and children's children. But then the prophet Ezekiel had changed that, specifically hearing God say that from then on "the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die" (Ezekiel 18:4). So, strictly speaking, it would go against the teachings of the prophets to assume this man was born blind because his parents had sinned. So the disciples are faced with a quandary: If this man's blindness is a punishment for sin, then what sin could possibly have warranted this punishment?

They can't figure this conundrum out. So they ask their teacher, "Rabbi, who sinned? Who's to blame for this man's blindness?"

Jesus' answer to them turns the whole query on its head. Instead of satisfying their curiosity about who to blame, Jesus tells them they are asking the wrong question in the first place. This man's blindness isn't the result of wrongdoing, but instead it is a preparation for glory. They want to know what thing in the past has caused this situation; Jesus tells them that what they should be looking for is what future God will bring from it. Instead of asking "What bad caused this?", Jesus makes the question "What good will God bring out of it?"

How often when we are confronted with disease and disaster are our first questions "What caused this?" and "Who is to blame?" It is as if we expect to find some emotional comfort from being able to assign responsibility, or we think we can control something and keep it from happening again if we can puzzle out the cause. And often that is true: knowing a certain drug causes birth defects, for instance, means we can know not to prescribe that drug, and further suffering can be prevented. But sometimes I think the urge to assign responsibility and figure out blame can become a red herring: we can spend so much energy trying to figure out why a bad thing happened that we become virtually blind to the good things that could and should be done to heal and cure the situation. Too often, I think, we can be like the disciples, asking "Who sinned?", when what God really wants for us is to be asking "What good will God bring forth from this?"

I think it can be a form of spiritual discipline to train our minds to ask the question "What good will God do here?" whenever we are faced with a situation of pain or grief or loss or disaster. Along with the necessary, practical questions about causes and effects, we can ask spiritual questions about purpose, about the end to be served, about the compassion and love and healing that can be revealed even in the worst of situations. And, asking that question, we can also ask "How can we be co-creators with God, to do God's work of revealing love and compassion even here?"

What insight into transforming loss into love will you be open to today?

Thursday in the Fourth Week of Lent

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:22-23)

Living in the first-century Hellenistic world, Paul had no inkling of the Darwinian theory of evolution, nor of our contemporary scientific view that the universe began in a hot big bang and has been evolving into more complex and interesting forms ever since. But Paul did have something much of the Hellenistic world lacked, something that makes his thought closer to our own: a sense of the future, a sense that the universe is going somewhere, a sense that the universe is bringing forth something new and not just an eternal return of the same cycle of ages and epochs. Some historians suggest that one of the reasons Christianity caught on in the ancient world (along with its practice of radical hospitality) was that it gave people a hope for the future in place of an expectation of unending repetition. Paul says the creation is "groaning in labor pains," and that image of birth, even though it involves struggle and pain, that image of birth implies hope for something new in the world.

And Paul clearly ties that something new to the work of the Spirit. The Spirit, the immanent and active empowering and unifying power of God, is, Paul asserts, involved in the world now in a new way, and  that new way has transformative potential for the whole universe. "We ourselves," Paul says, we followers of Jesus, "have the first fruits of the Spirit" — that is, we have in ourselves the beginnings of transformation in a new relational way of living that can change everything. Because of Jesus, because of the embodiment of divine Word and Wisdom in the human life of Jesus, because of Jesus’ faithful living-out of God’s purposes for him, because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, a new way has been opened up for the Spirit to enter into the very constitution of human life, a new way has been created for human spirit and Holy Spirit to synergize in enacting divine ideals of justice and peace and compassion and love in the very concrete and down-to-earth activities of human life. The Spirit empowers us to share with God the very same kind of relationship that Jesus has with God, so that, like Jesus, we can become agents and instruments of God’s love in the world.

This is not yet a fully accomplished transformation: we have just the “first fruits,” we are still “groaning” inwardly as we await the full new birth. But something new is already happening in us, and we can bring that newness to bear in the work of helping the universe itself in its labor of new birth. Relationships of justice and peace and compassion and love begun among us by the Spirit can and must be extended and enlarged, by the Spirit’s empowerment, to embrace all sorts and conditions of people and places and creatures and environments and ecosystems and even the most fundamental processes by which we exist in the world. We, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, are called to be midwives of the universe in labor to give birth to the New Creation.

That’s all very grand and cosmic — but it’s also very personal. We participate in the New Creation with every moment of our personal experience. When you speak to someone, that is a creative act. When you choose how to respond to someone’s emotions, with compassion or caring or anger or indifference or rejection or patience, that is a creative act. When you open your eyes and look at the scene in front of you, and your brain assembles thousands of nerve impulses into a visual image, and your preconscious mind connects the image to memories of other images and provides an identity and a context for what you’re seeing, and your emotional infrastructure provides feelings and responses and likes and dislikes and flights and fights and attractions and affections for what you’re seeing, and the whole thing comes to your consciousness as a world to be part of — that is a creative act. And the Spirit also enters into that creative act, lifting our perspectives beyond our own immediate horizons, and empowering us to respond with capacities for love beyond what we thought we were capable of. We midwife the New Creation in every moment, and out of those moments we, with the Spirit, build the transformation of personality, and community, and society, and ecology, and everything.

What new bit of the future, what first fruits of the New Creation will you birth today?

Tuesday in the Fourth Week of Lent

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Romans 7:15, 19)


In these two verses, Paul captures the very heart of the Christian idea of sin. In its most genuine meaning, sin is more that just breaking the rules, more than just transgressing God's commandments, more than doing things we know we're not "supposed" to do even though we  think they're fun. In its most genuine meaning, sin is the experience of not being able to do the good things we really do want to do. Sin is a kind of fracture within ourselves, an alienation from our own best selves, the inescapable sense that no matter how hard we try we just can't seem to act with the good motives and characteristics and outcomes we truly desire. Sin is not about some high-up, far-off, distant vengeful god watching to catch us when we trip over some arcane rule and punish us for every minor infraction. Sin is about our own bafflement that even our best intentions, even our wisest aspirations, even our most generous impulses, so often go awry, so often fail to live up to the love we mean them to be.


And that means, in turn, that repentance and forgiveness of sin is about more than just God letting us off the hook for the rules we've broken, more than just God deciding not to punish us even though we "deserve" it. The word "forgive" is built on the word "give": forgiveness of sin is an act of giving, a generosity to make up for the failings and inadequacies of our good intentions that miss their mark. God's forgiveness is a gift of wisdom to help us understand our own actions, a gift strength that is greater than our own to do the good we want. The repentance we practice in Lent is much more than beating ourselves up for the bad things we've done, but instead is a discipline of opening ourselves up and preparing to receive the gift of God's forgiveness, the strength and wisdom and love that makes life new.


How will you understand what you do -- and do what you truly want -- today?

Monday in the Fourth Week of Lent

One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. (John 6:8-11)


Two thoughts:


First thought: The boy had five loaves of bread, about the size of a modern pita, not the size of a loaf of Wonder Bread, and there were five thousand people there. Offering his five loaves to Jesus to share with the people was a silly thing to do. There was no way it would be enough, no way it would be anywhere near enough. A more sophisticated, more rational, more grown-up person would have known better than to have made the offer. But this naive child doesn't think the matter through; he gives what he has to give, even though it's nowhere near enough; and Jesus, also not limited by conventional rationality, takes it, and blesses it, and makes it enough.


Second thought: The boy had five barley loaves. Barley bread was poor people's bread. It was what you baked when you couldn't get wheat. It was ordinary -- it was less than ordinary. A more sophisticated, more rational, more grown-up person would have known better than to have offered barley bread to someone as important as Jesus, someone who had the public recognition and growing reputation that Jesus had. It's embarrassing. But this naive child doesn't know enough to be embarrassed by the poverty of his gift; he gives what he has to give, even though it's not good enough; and Jesus takes it, and blesses it, and makes it good enough.


Lent is a time for repentance, a time to be aware that we are not all we could be, a time to be mindful of the faults and failings and frailties that hinder and undercut our better aspirations. But we cultivate that mindfulness in Lent not to feel bad about ourselves or beat our breasts for our inadequacy: we cultivate that mindfulness in Lent so that we can open up our inadequacies to the possibility of blessing. Like five barley loaves, too little and too poor, we bring ourselves to Jesus; and Jesus takes us, and blesses us, and makes us more than we could be on our own, makes us enough to do the work of love.


What barley loaves will you offer Jesus for the sake of love today?