A candle against the gale...

As we gathered in the dusk of a windy evening, we knew we were in trouble. My friend, a fellow minister in the Methodist tradition, looked at me as she tried to light one of the candles we had brought for our candlelight vigil. There was no way that thing was going to either light or stay lit in the strong south wind. Here in Oklahoma, holding an outdoor candlelight vigil is a roll of the dice against big odds.

We had gathered at an outdoor park to hold a vigil for health care reform in conjunction with many others across the country. We had our sound system, our candles, our lighters, our notes...we were ready. As it reached time to start and there were just a few seats filled in an amphitheater made to hold a couple of hundred we delayed for a few minutes. But that was the crowd...

So we looked at the flickering flame, barely able to last a second in the unrelenting wind, and we counted the number of people who could make it to the hastily assembled vigil and for a moment we might have both had some reservations. What are we doing? We did throw this together at the last minute and weren't able to advertise or get much participation because people were already scheduled. What were we expecting?

The cool darkness of the evening, the small number of participants and the complete lack of any candles - a pretty crucial part of a candlelight vigil - might have been enough to completely deflate us. Yet there we stood. We had a single newspaper reporter to cover our story and no hint of a TV camera. There was just a few of us in the driving wind with no candles at all to stand against the approaching darkness.

Yet there we stood. We stood together. We stood even though we knew it was a small gesture against the torrent of opposition. We stood knowing that we were holding a rally in support of reform that none of us expect a single one of our representatives in the House or Senate to support. Yet we stood at least knowing that we weren't alone. Maybe that was why we were there. Not to be a grand showing of half of the city, or to raise a thundering cry of outrage, or to be the lead story on the evening news. Maybe we were there, in the way that we were there, just to be our small group. Maybe we were there, just like those candles were going to be symbols, to represent all of the people who think that health care is a human right. Maybe we were there for all of those people who just couldn't make it for a million different reasons, or who didn't think it would matter, or who can't speak out because of what it might cost them.

What I think is that it did matter, though maybe not for the reasons we had intended. God often works this way, foregoing our intentions and the lure of numbers we so often are beholden to in order to teach us something else. Maybe God was trying to tell us that while we may never feel like a majority, we are not alone. But it isn't the numbers that make an impact...after all, even Jesus never had more than 12 disciples.

It can be a lonely thing to be a progressive faithful person in Oklahoma. I often feel very alone as a person who wants a world oriented more towards justice than judgment, love over righteousness and grace over greed. It was nice that cool evening to feel a different kind of warmth...not the heat of a candle burning next to me, but the warmth of hope from deep inside, stirred by the presence of my fellow travelers.

And thank God for that.

Hoping for Peace

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde

President Obama is announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and audible gasps are heard in the room. Then, just like clockwork, the disparaging comments start rolling in. I have to say that I’m not sure how I feel about him winning. There is a part of me that thinks it is a great statement, and another that says awards like this should be given for accomplishment, not intent.

It is amazing to me how often this happens, but there is a great synchronicity between the gospel lectionary passage for this week and this topic. Jesus encounters a rich young man who claims to be blameless before the law and seeks the final step to inheritance of “eternal life”. Jesus calls him with love to let go of one more thing – his money. We can make this just about money, and that might be a good message in our greed driven society, but the real kicker is this – you can’t halfway hope. You have to give in completely or it will never work. You have to be willing to go as far as changing what you believe in…even when what you believe in seems a long way off.

I agree with a friend of mine who said that it wasn’t so much that President Obama won the award as it was the ideals that he represents. President Obama may not have accomplished much in the scheme of things yet, but he has brought a cool drink to a very thirsty people. The reason that he was voted in and that people all around the world are responding to him, despite his lack of measurable outcomes, is that people are hungry for hope.

We’re hungry for hope instead of power, for cooperation instead of competition, for “we’re all in this together” instead of “every man for himself” and the vast yet largely quiet majority wants to see peace…real meaningful peace as something beyond just the absence of war. None of these ideals are currently measurable. In fact, if one watches nothing but Glenn Beck and listens only to Rush Limbaugh you would think quite the opposite. You would think that the world is going to hell and that President Obama is the ringleader marching us straight into the fiery pit.

This is the funny thing about hope. Look at the gospel stories. People weren’t exactly beating down the doors to get into Jesus’ group. They liked the healing and welcomed his stance against the occupying forces of Rome, but when the rubber met the road everyone but the women (in most accounts) fled his side like a fire alarm had gone off. The hope that lots of us see in President Obama is met quite often with skepticism, doubt and even derision. A lot of that is just partisan politics, but there is something else at work…something deeper and more sinister. It is a questioning of what hope really is.

I believe that a sense of hope is crucial to survival and that, ironically, the more comfortable you become materially the easier it is to convince yourself that you have no space for hope. Hope is a more necessary and hungered for commodity the lower on the ladder you get. But I want to cut my angry brothers and sisters a break, because I understand that hope can be a scary thing…especially when it asks you to give up the things you have already done…to change the way that you live…to believe something entirely new and even invisible. It asks people with power to give some of it up for at least a couple of reasons. First, it isn’t real anyway. The possessions age and crumble or break, the money goes away and power or fame is a wicked slave master. Second, this is the way that hope works...at least the way that I have learned from an itinerant carpenter from Nazareth who tells us that the first shall be last and the last first and that in the Reign of God, power doesn't look like we're used to. In order for power to be real, just like love, we have to give it away.

So, Jesus meets this young man with a serious answer for a serious question. He loves him because he deserves nothing less. He just doesn’t sugar-coat anything or deny him the truth. There is a struggle for our souls going on – one side tells us that might makes right and that we cannot let go of “the way things are” or abandon the “America we grew up in”. Another side says that we have to change things…seriously and completely change things in order to see a world that we want to see. We have hope set before us. We‘re all in the same boat, but some of us are looking beyond at what might be shoreline in the distance. Others are afraid to abandon ship…even as it cracks and splinters and takes on water.

Maybe this award is the best thing…maybe it has just raised expectations so high on President Obama that it will be a detriment. At least it seems like an endorsement of the ideals he represents - the ideals of dialogue, humility and justice...the ideals that focus on the far shoreline of hope...though I don't count him (or any human being) as having a perfect score on those accounts. Perhaps it could encourage him to seek a different path in Afghanistan, or to pursue peace between Israel and Palestine with more vigor, I don’t know. In fact, I really have no idea how anything is going to work out. I just know that from my vantage point in the boat, the stars are very bright.