When trying to accept imperfections, one of the phrases people like to say is: Progress, not perfection. At first it sounds good. I don’t need to lose twenty pounds, just one per week. My kids don’t need to earn straight A’s, just keep raising their grades. And yet, when you stop and think about it, this mindset is also a trap. It assumes that there is such a thing as perfection, that ideal me, ideal child, ideal you, ideal whatever exists, and we can feel good as long as we’re all making progress toward that ideal. 

But who gets to decide what the ideal looks like? 

I was at a conference the other week on justice and renewal led by Christena Cleveland. One of her many great lines, maybe my favorite from the week, was, “Perfection is a figment of the colonial imagination.” Our ideas of perfection are usually shaped by powerful people and groups, used to rank people and cultures, elevating some, diminishing others. Perfection has a few winners and many losers. If we settle for progress, we haven’t changed the goalposts; we’re just making peace with our slow speed in never getting there.

A quick look at the trees could have taught us the same thing. I’ve been spending a lot of time this fall, walking, and looking at the gorgeous fall trees. I hope you have to. 

You’ll notice there’s no such thing as the perfect tree, so there is no such thing as progress toward that perfection. Healthy trees just grow. Their growth, their expansion signals their flourishing, no matter what beautiful form that growth takes. 

At Reservoir, when we think about life, and when we think about the life of faith, we have flourishing in mind, not progress or perfection. Our aim is for people to connect with Jesus and with our church and to thrive more as a result. We don’t think we need to manage exactly where our faith journeys should lead. But we do encourage us all to take one, to stay on journey, to choose movement over stagnation, to see what love and peace and joy this life and the one who made it all have in store for us. 

For the next few weeks, on Sundays, we’ll rather explicitly invite you to think about your journey. Pastors Ivy and Lydia and I will talk about five ways of being in the world that seem to help us find more of God and more of the good life, five ways of being in the world that might encourage some movement in our lives. They’re not the only five, obviously, but they’re five we like, five that so happen to be Reservoir’s five core values for doing Jesus-centered community life in our time and place. They’re connection, action, everyone, freedom, and humility.

If you like this approach, and if you’d like more company and encouragement on your faith journey, we’ll strongly encourage you to become a member at Reservoir. Membership in our church is about belonging, not believing. It’s a way of saying to yourself and the community: I belong here. I’ll let these folks encourage my faith journey, and maybe I’ll even encourage some on theirs. 

Membership - and the community and the giving it involves - is  also a way of sustaining a Jesus-centered, fully inclusive community of faith, one that values and empowers connection, action, everyone, freedom, and humility. Like most things in life, this stuff is good, but it isn’t free. We will only stay on our journey with your membership and your giving. 

I look forward to connecting this month around our faith journeys, to listening and learning from one another as we go. To putting aside perfection or even progress for a while, and discovering what beautiful things we will see and become as we move forward together. 

Let me read the passage I’ve been drawn to today. In the fourth account of the life of Jesus, the one called the Good News according to John, the story builds toward a climax with this surprising scene. 

Research tells us that every last resident of 19th century Greater Boston is dead today. It’s true. Odds are that almost everyone in the room right now will be gone by the next century. I did a few google searches the other week for the oldest living Americans - they were born in 1904, 1905, 1906. But every time I’d double check if of these remarkable people was still alive, it’d turn out they too had passed on recently as well.

You don’t get to be the oldest living person for very long, it turns out. 

We are all going to die. And we face these signs of that our whole lives - lost pets, lost loved ones, aging bodies. 

Even in our teens and twenties, in the prime of our health, we notice there are years and times and opportunities we are never getting back. Last week, my teenage daughter’s cross country team had their final home meet of the year, senior day - this year my daughter’s last home meet of her high school career. And the seniors and us - their parents - get emotional. Partly because that day is never coming back. We age, and then we die. Gloomy, but true.

We don’t like to talk or think about aging and death very much, though, do we? In a time and place where we’re as good at extending our lifespans as we ever have been, we avoid and fear death as much as ever. 

Which is too bad, because how we age and how we die is a big part of the life well lived, or not. In fact, there’s an old tradition of the experience of a Good Death, a way of approaching death that is one of the crowns of a good life. 

And today, I want to talk about the good death - how we can prepare for it, and how that readiness can be part of today’s good life.

Today is our final talk in our early fall series, “On the Brink of Everything.” Next Sunday, we’ll start five weeks of an annual engagement with some of our church’s core teachings to encourage you on your faith journey, wherever that finds you today. And after that, we’ll be into Advent, our Christmas season.

But I wanted to make sure we got to end our “On the Brink of Everything” series with the biggest change and threat we’re all on the brink of, that being aging and death. 

As it turns out, I’ve got this old school preacherly way into this, an alliterative three point thing going on about loss, and legacy, and levity. And some stories for each of those.

We’ll start by looking at a famous brush with death in the Hebrew Scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament. It’s a scene of one of the better kings of Israel’s southern land of Judah, and it’s so interesting it’s captured almost verbatim in two different books of the Bible. 

Here’s part of the story from one of them, in the second of the books called Kings. 

II Kings 20:1-6 (CEB)

Around that same time, Hezekiah became deathly ill. The prophet Isaiah, Amoz’s son, came to him and said, “This is what the Lord says: Put your affairs in order because you are about to die. You won’t survive this.”

2 Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord, saying, 3 “Please, Lord, remember how I have walked before you in truth and sincerity. I have done what is right in your eyes.” Then Hezekiah cried and cried.

4 Isaiah hadn’t even left the middle courtyard of the palace when the Lord’s word came to him: 5 Turn around. Say to Hezekiah, my people’s leader: This is what the Lord, the God of your ancestor David, says: I have heard your prayer and have seen your tears. So now I’m going to heal you. Three days from now you will be able to go up to the Lord’s temple. 6 I will add fifteen years to your life. I will rescue you and this city from the power of the Assyian king. I will defend this city for my sake and for the sake of my servant David.

So this is a story about so many things. It’s a story about prayer.

This past week I had a phone call week with my eight-year old goddaughter. I got to speak to Mari because I’d been talking to her parents about the hard time she was having in school. There are these two other kids in her class who have been mean, and off and on last year and again this year, they’d been really aggressive with my her. My friends had called me to ask for some advice in dealing with the school, and then they’d given me a chance to talk with Mari too.

I thought she’d feel down and maybe I should remind Mari that she didn’t deserve this. So I asked my goddaughter: do you know how special you are? Do you know that God made you smart and fun and beautiful and important? And she said very matter-of-factly, “Yes, I do.” Duh? Of course, like these were the most obvious truths about herself.

And we talked a little more, but this was that moment that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Of course Mari knows she’s special and smart and beautiful and important. She has good parents who have told her that and shown her that a thousand times. No bit of bullying or classroom chaos was changing that today or tomorrow. 

Of course Mari knows who she is. You and me, the grownups, we’re the ones that lose track of who we are. 

Years ago, the psychologist Mary Pipher wrote Reviving Ophelia, a little book about adolescent girls, and how they take in pressure and criticism and all manner of jacked up stuff in society regarding girls and women, and they take those messages and that pain inward and shrink down as they lose track of who they are. 

Thank God none of this is my goddaughter’s story yet, but in a way, it’s a lot of ours, I think. 

I’ve been thinking about how we can lose track of ourselves, of our fundamental identities, and about the kind of inner work that grounds us and centers us, helps us be at peace and be at home no matter where we are or what we’re going through.

We’ve got two weeks left in our series On the Brink of Everything.  And in the book by Parker Palmer that inspired this series, there are chapters about reaching out and about reaching in. Writing from his perspective as an 80-year old, Palmer has noticed that as we go through life, we can get more and more isolated, thus his call to keep reaching out. But we can also get more and more lost, thus his call to reach in. To keep asking: Who am I? And What can I do with my pain? 

These questions have taken me to a particular place in the scriptures, to the big letter in the middle of the New Testament, the one called Romans.

I’ve been reading and reading about Romans a lot the past few years, and this fall, I’ve started studying this letter each week with a few of you. I’m leading a community group right out there in the lobby every Saturday morning from 9:30 to 11 - you’re all invited. There are many other community groups too, of course - they’re maybe the best things we have going at Reservoir, so I hope you can be part of one. I’m loving mine. In my group, each week we spend about half an hour connecting with one another and about an hour talking about a short section of this part of the Bible.

 It’s been really fun so far, because if you didn’t grow up with much Bible in your life, Romans is confusing. But if you did grow up around the Bible, Romans was likely misused and weaponized - a religious handbook of who’s in, and who’s out with God, and how to get on the right side of that line. But as we’re reading Romans, we’re finding that it’s something else entirely. 

The author named Paul was a Jewish rabbinical student who for a brief time zealously persecuted the early first century followers of Jesus before he became one himself. Then, for about 25 years, Paul became the leading ambassador for the story of Jesus - what he called the good news of Jesus - throughout the Roman empire,

Hi everyone- it’s lovely to be here with all of you. 

I’m Ivy as Steve mentioned. “Happy October!” 

I love summer so much - that it is very stretching for me to use those two words “Happy” and “October”, so close in a sentence together.  September however, did a fine job of setting up October - in a way that I can genuinely and excitedly say, “Happy October”. 

I’m also excited for our Fall season here at Reservoir, and I’m enjoying the sermon series we are in called, “On the Brink of Everything”. Inspired by a little book by author, and quaker, Parker Palmer.  It’s a series that we felt would work well as a way to explore what it is to live in these fracturing times. If you’ve been around the last few weeks you’ve heard Steve and Lydia talk along these themes, of being on the brink of “chaos”, the brink of “overwhelm” and on the brink of “nothing” - and I’ve been thankful for this small phrase in the ways that it allows us to touch the baseline trauma we may be experiencing in our days.   This little book though, also helps us to imagine embodying the “fiercely honest and gracious wholeness that is ours to claim at every stage of life,” (Krista Tippett).  Parker Palmer himself, is looking out at the horizon of getting older - and his book was also inspired by a conversation with a friend of his - who has a toddler and also observing a young one looking out at the horizon of life.  

Today, I’d love to take us in a direction - where we really consider that “fierce, and honest and gracious wholeness”, and how it is that we can really claim that with Jesus..  So I want to talk about being on the Brink of Encounter. Encountering, a living God at every turn in our lives. Because, I think we are always on the brink of falling deeper into ourselves and deeper into knowing God in a way that has real power - power that can be game-changing in our fractured world.  Encounters with God can reveal to us that we have built within us a “survival kit” that includes surprising tools like vulnerability, intimacy and imagination.

If God is a God who is abundant in eternal, transformative love and tenderness and power - then it’s pretty WILD to think that it is available for us to touch and utilize in our LIVED experiences.   And so I think God’s invitation is to keep mining and discovering it, to not assume that we’ve had our fill, or know all the ways to encounter God… but that we could always be engaged with more. And it’s this ever-evolving display of God’s-self that God wants us to be in constant contact with. 

So for those of you today, who are comfortable with the ways you encounter Jesus, AND for those of you who are done trying to encounter God … and all of us in between -   I want to challenge you to be open to surprise, to engage your imagination and be willing to stretch beyond what is already familiar to you - and to dip into the great mystery of God’s presence. 

I think the implications of that posture, are huge - and also breathtaking. 

We can learn from history - and get a constant pulse through the daily news — how easily we forget what it means to be human.  We can forget that underneath every inequity, every act of  racism, and oppression and violence and sickness and hurdles to access of healthcare and education - is a human being.  Real life people with stories and souls, and voices and families that we live alongside. Yet, even in our most genuine efforts to bring about change (which are valid and needed),  we are quick to bundle people up under policies, and laws and votes, ideologies - losing track of the face of the one we hoped to help.   

I heard and learned a lot about how to “help people” in my faith community growing up.  It focused a great deal on biblical literacy and the accompanying moral rules that would construct a good life, (some explicitly told and some powerfully inferred...

For eight weeks this fall, we’re riffing off the title of Parker Palmer’s beautiful little book On the Brink of Everything. It’s a book about discovery and wonder and about change and threats, and our little pastoral team felt something timely and important in this. 

Today I felt like I needed to say a few things about an area of life where many of us experience fear and threat and frustration, that area being politics. Now I know that some of you love it when I connect our sacred texts and faith with contemporary controversy. For some of you, that seems important. I also know that some of you hate it when I do this. You want Sundays to be a refuge from the controversy and turmoil of public life, and it’s upsetting to you if church feels at all political. I just want you to know I’m aware of this and the rest of this series will go to other places entirely.

That said, politics is getting louder, not quieter. We’re already into our interminably long election season. And just this past week, we had the announcement of the start of presidential impeachment hearings. I checked both the Herald and the Globe’s most frequently read and sent stories the day I was working on this talk, and Boston being Boston, the leading story on each paper was about the Red Sox or the Patriots, but all the others were about politics. 

Our scriptures and our faith do not come out of a democratic age, so the vocabulary is different, but themes of politics and public life are all over the place. Because faith is both a private and a public matter. And today, I’m not going to tell you who do vote for or what cause to support in politics. We’d never endorse someone here, and I’d never expect this community to agree on our politics. But I do want to encourage us toward spiritually healthier political engagement. Toward thinking and attitude about politics that helps us live well; that helps us be healthy, generous people; that helps us be engaged in public life, however it is we do that, both usefully and joyfully, as I think we’re meant to be. 

I’ve got three postures I want to encourage today - no surprises, they’re all in your program already under, “Invitations to Whole Life Flourishing.”

As I said, the Bible’s talk about public life and politics was written in really different conditions than ours. Most of the Bible was written by people of a minority group, living under large, colonial empires. They didn’t know anything about voting or democracy, presidents or parliaments. And when the Bible’s writers do look back on what they’d consider their own independent government, they looked back to a four hundred period of the ancient kingdom of Israel, that for most of those years, was divided into two small kingdoms - Israel to the North, and Judah to the South.

We’re going to read a short excerpt of a passage that comes from the culture and politics of the southern kingdom of Judah, when they were threatened by the empire of Assyria, who had already conquered their cousins to the north. Here’s a bit of what Isaiah has to say to them:

Isaiah 31:1-3 (CEB)

31 

Doom to those going down to Egypt for help!

    They rely on horses,

    trust in chariots because they are many,

    and on riders because they are very strong.

But they don’t look to the holy one of Israel;

    they don’t seek the Lord.

2 But God also knows how to bring disaster;

    he has not taken back his words.

God will rise up against the house of evildoers

    and against the help of those who do wrong.

3 Egypt is human and not divine;

    their horses are flesh and not spirit.

The Lord will extend his hand;

    the helper will stumble,

Reservoir Church has a partnerships team that donates ten percent of the giving to Reservoir to people and organizations doing beautiful things in the world, people and organizations we’re in relationship with as a community. Our partnerships team facilitates those relationships as well, by staying in touch with our partners, hosting them as they visit us, communicating with you about their work, and sometimes facilitating opportunities for you to visit their work as well.

One of our most significant partnerships is with the Indian public health and community development organization, Asha. Asha’s founder and director, Kiran Martin, and her husband, Asha’s associate director Freddy Martin, have become deep friends of Reservoir, and good friends of my family as well. My family have all been with them and their work in New Delhi, India, and a number of others from Reservoir have had the opportunity to learn and serve with them in Delhi’s slum communities as well. Just this past year, two leaders in our community, the psychiatrist Dr. John Peteet, and the social worker Amanda Proctor, have been able to consult with Asha on the expansion of their community mental health programming. And Reservoir members Jean Peteet and Peter Choo are both on the Board of Asha-USA, that raises funds and advocates for Asha’s work in the US. All to say, Reservoir really loves and appreciates and respects Asha. 

In a few minutes, I’m going to welcome Dr. Kiran to join us and share about what Asha is doing, and the beautiful ways she sees the Spirit of our good God working in Delhi. We’re calling this Asha Sunday, because you’re going to hear from Kiran, and after the service, there are going to be friends from Reservoir who’ve spent time with Asha out at a table in the dome art gallery. They’d be glad to talk more with you about Asha, how you learn about or give to their work, or even travel to India if you would like to learn and serve in person. We also have a video up on our facebook page about our partnership with Asha that you can take a look at.

But before I welcome Dr. Martin to share with us, I’m going to give kind of a mini-sermon on faith and power for our best work in the world. It’s a response of mine to the amazing work of Asha, and a way to try to connect it to the work that Jesus has for you to do in your jobs, in your families, and in your communities. 

First, let me pray for us.

One of the best mentors and leaders in my life was my boss I had in the years I was a teacher, the school’s principal, Bak Fun Wong. Bak Fun had been trained as a teacher in Hong Kong. After his immigration to the US, he rose up the ranks in the Boston Public Schools from instructional aid in an ESL classroom all the way to deputy superintendent, one of the more prominent Asian American leaders and educators in our city at the time.

And Bak Fun had big vision for the little school where I taught. When our school was just three or four years old, still adding a grade a year on our way to a 6-12 integrated middle and high school, Bak Fun started talking with me about all that we could do for the youth of Boston. 

His vision was really nothing less the disruption of how we do urban education in this country. In our country’s large cities, you may know, the wealthier families who remain in those cities tend to either opt out of public education entirely or opt in to selective schools, accessible through passing exams or other kinds of recruitment or screens. This is a huge class divide in the experience of America’s youth. And there’s a racial divide overlaid on that, and a divide between native-born and immigrant Americans, and sometimes a divide between so-called regularly developing and so-called learning disabled youth as well. 

So our urban public schools, especially as kids get older are poorer in both their funding and the privilege of...

Both of my graduations were anticlimactic. College graduation, I got the cap and gown, but the diploma was just a cover. I wasn’t getting the real diploma, yet. As the end of my 4th year in undergrad was coming to a close, when everyone else was interviewing, landing a job, planning to move, I was graduating late because I didn’t have enough credits. In high school, it was easy to keep up and I wasn’t the smartest but still got A’s and B’s without trying too hard. SAT scores were decent enough to get into UCLA. Transition to college was a bit more difficult for me, not just the academic part but socially, emotionally I wasn’t able to balance out everything too well. Each semester I was overloaded and ended up dropping a class here and there. Which is how I ended up at my graduation with about 20 units short and was only “walking”. Everyone was asking each other, “what are you doing after graduation?” Oh, an internship at Deloitte. Grad school at USC. An oversees program with Peacecorp or some other exciting cool gig. It seemed like everyone else was on the Brink of everything, except me. After I “walked” my graduation, I had to take 3 classes in Session A of summer school and 3 classes in Session C, to finish all my classes by the end of summer. 

My grad school graduation also had a damper. After you graduate from seminary, you received a masters in divinity, because apparently you’ve mastered the divine (lol), and then in my little circle of the world, in the denomination of Presbyterians, the order was that you are then “called” by a church and that’s how you get ordained. I, happened to be working at a church that’s of another denomination and didn’t qualify for ordination right then. Folks would ask each other, “where you getting ordained?”. While others were becoming solo pastors at a church or becoming chaplains at a hospital, I had to explain about working at a church that’s not Presbyterian and the whole thing. 

Churches follow the season of the new school year, so it’s a new ministry year for us, and as we kick this time off, we’re doing a sermon series called, On the Brink of Everything, taken from a book by Parker Palmer. The series isn’t particularly inspired from the book, as our head pastor Steve kicked off the series last week talking about being overwhelmed in the midst of being on the brink of every kinds of things, whereas Palmer’s book is mainly about aging and reaching end of life. Palmer got the title actually from a reflection written by a mom as she watched her toddler on the brink of discovery and seeing the world with wonder. And yes, as I see my 10 month old daughter, omg she on the brink of swallowing cardboard, falling head first on a sharp toy, or knocking down any liquid nearby. So, whether we’re 10 months old, or very old, or anything in between really, this is a season for many of us, we’re on the brink of change, launching, possibility. And we just loved the title, kinda poetic, on the brink, of everything! 

But for me, there’s this thing about it, that’s a bit anticlimactic. On the Brink of… not much… not yet…. Not me…. And it feels like everyone around me is on the brink of stuff. They are working on some new cool project. They are starting a company. Their company’s about to go public for ridiculous amounts of money. I’m like, dude, we were in same small group a few years ago! But me, yes, I have recently had many changes, I moved here almost 2 years ago, had a baby. That’s a lot of change. But then like, since then it’s been, diapers, emails, uh trying to eat better, gym, work, ya know. Same ol, same ol. Every weekend we’re like, so….. Uh library? Costo? Burlington mall? Yeah, I know my life might look fabulous on Instagram, but that’s just it. It looks like everyone’s on the brink of discovery and excitement, but there’s this mundane regularness of life that we don’t see. What do we do with this time, the not much of nothing not yet?

Recently I was with a number of colleagues who all had graduate student interns, and one of them a little older than me asked about how we can help our interns be more resilient and dependable. Because, he suggested, it seems this generation gets overwhelmed in ways that his didn’t.

As you can hear, his question was equal parts compassion and condescension. Personally, I think he only had his point half right. I do think people are more overwhelmed today than we used to be. A lot of us find life hard, exhausting. But I don’t think it’s just a particular generation. I think it’s all of us. 

I get overwhelmed a lot. Most people I know do. We live in overwhelming times. 

There are probably a lot of factors in this, but one of them has got to be the pace of change we’re experiencing.

I used to be a high school principal. And I used to go to an every-other-month meeting of high school principals. This meeting - paid for by our school districts - was hosted by a therapist, and it kind of was group therapy for high school principals. We would all drive to this obscure development somewhere off 128, we’d stroll into a meeting room on the first floor of a nondescript office building. And then we’d take our armor off, and talk about how hard the work was.

The therapist who hosted these gatherings would look at us and say: Damn straight, it is. This guy was an expert in change, school change in particular, and how hard change was. He’d remind us that expectations were higher for us than they ever had been. Principals these days are expected to heal the sick and raise the dead, he’d say, but they haven’t given you any more tools to do that, have they?

He’d remind us that schools these days - like so many other institutions - say they crave change. Schools are obsessed with continual, simultaneous, multiple improvements. Everything always getting better, all at once. And yet by nature, people hate change. It’s hard. We don’t know what we’re doing. We usually don’t succeed. But in the process of trying to change, we’re always losing something we also want to hold onto. 

This guy didn’t give us a lot of advice, but he did affirm our sense that we had these overwhelming jobs, in overwhelming times. 

Another educator named Parker Palmer wrote a book recently that’s sort of about this. The book’s called On the Brink of Everything. It’s a little collection of poems and essays.

Partly it’s about dying. Palmer is 80 years old, wrapping up a long and fruitful career, and thinking more about the end of his life in front of him. And aging and death certainly can overwhelm. There’s so much change; there can be so much fear of what’s ahead and loss of what’s behind. 

But the book is it’s not just about aging and death, but really about all kinds of change and about the possibilities that hide in the middle of it. 

The title has two things going on. There’s the phrase, “on the brink” which usually indicates something really bad is straight ahead. On the brink of war. On the brink of disaster.  And yet it’s also taken from a poem a mother wrote about her toddler, who always seemed on the brink of everything - some new development or discovery always just ahead, caught up as toddlers olds are, in a wide-eyed kaleidoscope of ever unfolding wonder. 

We feel like all of this is true for so many of us in America, in 2019. Surrounded by infinite possibility and unending wonder, but also overwhelmed by all that’s happening, and overwhelmed by change. 

The next few weeks, we’ll make this our theme. We’ll dig around this in a series we’re calling On the Brink of Everything. And today I’ll start us off with some good options for the many times when we’re overwhelmed.

Let’s join the first followers of Jesus on the weekend after his death,

When I was an English teacher, I spent a lot of time and effort showing my students everything they were doing wrong. I had learned to teach and grade writing from some old school English teachers. And the basic method was to get kids writing a lot, mark up everything they did wrong, and get them to fix it, hoping they would do a little better next time. This was discouraging for me. I spent a lot of time marking up papers—there was usually lots that was wrong. And the method didn’t work. Paper after paper, students seemed to have the same problems. I was thinking: this can’t be great for my students either. Because they’d turn in their work to me, and get it back covered in a sea of red, letting them know they had failed again. How demoralizing.

I tried different things to make it less of a drag. I used green or purple pen—I’d heard that was less harsh than red. I tried to get students correcting each other’s papers—less work for me at least. I’d schedule one on one writing conferences, where I could tell students everything that was wrong instead of writing it down, while the rest of the class supposedly worked independently but more often than not devolved into chaos. But none of this was bringing a breakthrough in how my students or I experienced the writing process together.

Until I got an idea. It was from the mouth of Jesus, literally.

Every year about this time, my school had a 2-day retreat for the faculty to get to know each other and do some planning together. It was at a rural spot out on Rt. 2 Northwest of here, and when I could, I would bike out to the retreat instead of driving. This year, I stopped at Walden Pond on the way, to take a swim and spend a little time in prayer for the year ahead. It was a habit of mine every year I worked in the public schools to take a day or a half day in late August and pray for the school year and my work as an educator.

This year, I was at Walden Pond, and I was reading parts of the gospel of John to guide my prayers, and these words from Jesus jumped out at me and changed the way I taught writing.

These were the words:

John 3:17 (CEB)

17 God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

And I thought, what am I doing as a teacher? Am I there to judge them or save them? I could wiggle out of the question—neither of those were really my place. This is a passage about God’s work through Jesus, not you or me. But that’s not where my mind went that day alongside the pond. I was struck hard by the question: in my teaching, and in my teaching and assessment of writing in particular, was I an agent of judgment or an agent of salvation?

Was my work first to hold up a standard of excellence for my students, point out the many ways they continually fell short, in hopes that they’d be motivated and skilled enough to make the mark eventually? That sounds like judgment.

Or was my work to come alongside my students and say and do the things that would have the most likelihood of improving their lives—motivating them to engage in education, developing growing skills and confidence and inclination to try more and harder? That’s not the difference between knowing God and not, but it’s a type of salvation. My students who did well and grew skills and confidence were more likely to finish high school, less likely to end up incarcerated or impoverished, more likely to have greater opportunities in their adult years. The stakes were real—and was my job to be an effective part of moving life forward for them, or to hold up and enforce the standards?

Now if this was a talk for a room full of English teachers, or even just educators in general, I’d go into more detail here about educational philosophy, assessment practice, writing pedagogy, why the standards themselves are by no means the problem...

Late in 2017, I found myself lonelier, sadder, more stressed and less hopeful than I wanted to be. There were a lot of reasons for this - some of it was midlife - entering my mid-40s and needing to catch up with some much needed inner work. Some of it was the times we live in - stuff in the news at the time that was newly resurfacing some old pains. And some of it was just circumstance - a chance comment in an email from an old friend, for instance, lodged inside me and opened up some hard things. All to say, though, there I was - kind of lonely, sad, and stressed out, among other things.

Eventually this sent me in search of a therapist who I saw for a good bit of last year. But it also pushed me into a year-long version of an ancient set of spiritual practices that I’d meaning to try for some time. Those spiritual practices are called the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.

Ignatius was a Renaissance-Era failed knight. In the early 1500s, in his own version of an early mid-life crisis, Ignatius suffered a gunshot wound in war, and during his long, lonely recovery, he became captivated by the life and teaching of Jesus, and the stories of others who had followed Jesus. Eventually, this led Ignatius to found a company within the Catholic Church that they called the Society of Jesus, now known as the Jesuits.

And for priests who wanted to join the Jesuits, Ignatius designed a month-long curriculum called the Spiritual Exercises, a series of prayers and practices that were designed to help you become a friend and follower of Jesus. For people that didn’t want to become Jesuit priests and didn’t have a month to devote full-time to this experience, Ignatius designed a nearly year-long version of these spiritual exercises that became known as the 19th annotation.

And with the guidance of a book and a friend of mine, that’s what I did last year, the long, slow, part-time version of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius.

I’m not going to try to oversell you anything. This experience didn’t wipe away my life as it stands and give me a different, shinier, perfect me. That’s not available, thank God. After all, I like my life. But my experiences with the Exercises did help ground me in a more engaged, wholehearted life. A more resilient, more joyful, less lonely way through this season of life.

And today, I’d like to teach you how to do one part of the exercises, a part that helps Jesus be less of an idea or merely a historical person, but a practice that brings the teaching and acts of Jesus to life in the present, as Jesus is alive with us today. It’s a practice that has helped me make better friends with Jesus. And a growing friendship with Jesus is maybe the best part of my life of faith.

This practice at the heart of the Ignatian exercises is imaginative reading and prayer around the life and teachings of Jesus we encounter in the Bible’s four gospels.

And today, I’d like to teach you how to do that. Let’s try it on this week’s passage.

Luke 13:10-17 (CEB)

10 Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. 11 A woman was there who had been disabled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and couldn’t stand up straight. 12 When he saw her, Jesus called her to him and said, “Woman, you are set free from your sickness.” 13 He placed his hands on her and she straightened up at once and praised God.

14 The synagogue leader, incensed that Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, responded, “There are six days during which work is permitted. Come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath day.”

15 The Lord replied, “Hypocrites! Don’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from its stall and lead it out to get a drink? 16 Then isn’t it necessary that this woman, a daughter of Abraham, bound by Satan for eighteen long years,