Sometimes my words are found on the page. Sometimes they come out via a Janet Jackson lapel mic or in a short homily at our little neighborhood church. Today you get the second part of the latter, still chalk-full of coloring outside the lines theology – or if you want to listen to it in full, just click here. Enjoy!
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Because when I do that – when I make these boxes and create black and white worlds of dualism in my mind – I forget about the gray. I forget that when we walk in the way of Love, sometimes there are more questions than answers. I forget that God’s presence is evident in all those middle-of-the-road and ugly-to-my-eyes places, too, and not merely where I more easily spot divine thumbprints of peace and justice and wholeness.
And sometimes – dare I say oftentimes – God is found in the holy interruptions of life. In fact, sometimes those holy interruptions are the very stuff of God.
I love how one author, Liz Ditty, puts it in her upcoming release, God’s Many Voices:
“If coincidences are wrinkles in our world that spark wonder, interruptions are the more irritating version of reality going off script. Interruptions come as invasions of our plans, dreams, productivity and sometimes our identity. The magic of coincidences is something we can muse over while plucking petals from a daisy, but interruptions don’t engage our wonder for long before annoyance, anger, or blame join the party. But God’s good words and wisdom can come to us through interruptions if we are paying attention” (150).
Oh, how I yearn to pay attention to these interruptions, to the One who might be trying to get my attention in the first place.
Two and a half weeks ago, my friend Sarah texted me: I’m about to send you the craziest text you’ve ever gotten, she wrote. Go! I replied. Double dog dare you. A couple of minutes later, said craziest text I’d ever gotten arrived, inviting me to go on a peacemaking trip, particularly as it related to issues of immigration on the San Diego-Tijuana border, eight days later.
I said yes, because how could I not?
So, last weekend, she and I, along with a group of twenty or so other people, found ourselves paying attention to peacemaking conversations, mostly as listeners. We listened to the stories of border patrol agents, and then, a couple of hours later, we listened to stories of men and women who’d been deported for overstaying their welcome in the country they’d called home for decades, in the nation where they’d served in the armed forces, in the place where they’d raised their children. We sat and listened to one woman who, because of deportation, hadn’t seen her children in eight years …but who continued to hold on and cling to the hope of reunification and who started a non-profit specifically to help deported mothers with children in the states. We wept tears alongside our Latino brothers and sisters, beside those who held out hope for asylum in the United States and beside those for whom trauma overwhelmed and threatened to suffocate their very existence.
We wondered aloud where God was in the midst of the pain, in the sorrow of lament, in the tension of not knowing.
In those moments where pain sometimes feels more soluble than hope, I want to just do something. I want to just fix it. I want to just sprinkle some magic Holy Spirit pixie dust over entire situations and make the hard things go away.
But I’m reminded that even here God is present, as I embrace discomfort and tears, as I experience feelings of intentional displacement. Here, I live in a world of both-and, mulling over memories that are simultaneously haunting and inspiring, and over a three-day trip that leaves me with more questions than answers.
For here, God is present in the interruptions, even when I can’t seem to put the pieces together in my mind.
Might it have been the same for the crowd and the disciples and the scribes and Jesus’ family that day, even when their expectations of Jesus didn’t seem to fit together? Might it be the same for us, as followers in the way of love, when injustice seems reign, and the orphans and widows don’t seem to be cared for, and hate seems to be the rhetoric of our neighbors?
But even here, holy haplelujahs and divine interruptions break through – when we gather at the table, when we embrace one another with peace, when we collect each other’s tears.
Might we tune ourselves to paying attention.
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Do check out the first part of the sermon if you haven’t already, which can be found here. Otherwise, how are holy interruptions sometimes a good thing? How has God broken through to YOU in this way?
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