Thursday, April 7: Karen Haig

I have grown weary with my crying. - Psalm 69:1-23

The despair in these words is difficult for me to take in. Drowning in suffering and sorrow, sinking into the muck with nothing to cling to, utterly overwhelmed by wave after wave of heartache and no relief in sight. Yet there have been times in my life – not many, thank God – but there have been times in my life when these feelings were my own. Utter devastation. Shock and fear and hopelessness and loss… loss so excruciating that I had no idea how I would survive. I know what it is to be weary with crying, unable to speak for all the wailing I’d done. I know what it is to search and search and search for comfort, and all in vain. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Just as the psalmist suffered and as we have suffered, God in Jesus suffered too. And as strange as it may seem, this is the place we will find comfort and hope – right there on the cross. After all, if Jesus had not suffered like that, would we trust God to know what it’s like to endure excruciating pain, and to suffer with us? Would we feel the love of God envelop us in the midst of our grief? Would we count on God to know our own indescribable ache? Would we turn to God in our own suffering?

Hanging there on the cross, Jesus kept company with two mere mortals who hung on crosses too – just like He keeps company with us when we hang on our own. That is indeed Good News! Not that God wills us to suffer – suffering is not God’s will. But that when we do suffer – in those times of utter devastation that we fear we will never survive – the God who knows our suffering, experiences that suffering deeply. And taking it all in, God transforms our suffering – redeeming and resurrecting and turning it all into ever more love.

—The Rev Karen Haig

Sunday, March 27: The Third Sunday in Lent

"Salvation is from the Jews." - John 4:5-42


I imagine Jesus, sitting next to that ancient well in the hot, midday sun. Tired, hungry and thirsty, he was waiting there for his disciples to return with bread for their journey. Having no bucket, he was unable to draw water from that deep, cool well. Yet suddenly, right there in the middle of the day, a Samaritan woman came to draw water. Jesus must have been startled – no one draws water in the heat of the day. But there she was – the woman with the bucket. Jesus is forever telling us that God provides.

I imagine the Samaritan woman making her way to the well in the heat of the day. She always goes for water at this hour, as she knows she won’t encounter anyone. Her life has been a series of disasters, so she’s shunned by the people around her, and she is tired from the shame and the shunning. She must have been startled when she came upon this man sitting at the well, and even more startled when he spoke to her. He was a Jew; she, a Samaritan. Jews don’t engage with Samaritans. He was a man, she was a woman. Men and women don’t talk with each other without the presence of other men related to that woman. He wants a drink. That doesn’t make any sense to her. And when she says so, he gives the strangest reply. "If you knew the gift of God, if you knew who I was, you would ask me for the water that quenches every thirst."

If you knew…

How often have I questioned all the ways things don’t make sense and can’t get right and all the while Jesus was right in front of me, offering me the living water that quenches every thirst and fills my every need?

Gracious God, give me eyes to see you and ears to hear you in the many and varied circumstances of my life. Amen.

—The Rev Karen Haig

A Daily Devotional for Lent, courtesy of the parishioners of St. Thomas

Introduction

For Christians, Lent is a time set apart. Forty full and rich and long days to reflect and to pray, to look within, to seek out the things in our lives that create distance between God and ourselves. Lent is a time to discern how God may be calling us. What might we take on, or let go of, in order to more freely love God, our neighbors and ourselves?

We offer you the St Thomas Lenten Devotional and invite you to spend some time each day reflecting on Holy Scripture with our St Thomas community. These reflections have been written with great care and attention by the people of our community, and they offer us an opportunity to move more deeply into our relationships with God, with one another and with ourselves.

My heartfelt thanks to all who prayed and pondered and wrote so beautifully from the riches of their own lives to make this booklet happen. This little devotional is a great gift to us all, and it has been my privilege to have had a hand in bringing it to you. I invite you to use it to pray with, to come closer into community by coming to know a bit more of the people who have written these reflections. May this Lent be an especially rich and holy season for us all.

Faithfully, Karen†

The Narrow Door

sermon preached at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Medina, WA
by the Rev. Karen Haig, Priest Associate
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

“Lord, will only a few be saved?” - Luke 13:22-30

I recently flew to California, and because I booked my flight so late, I found myself in a middle seat, sitting between two rather large men. The man by the window had on a ball cap sporting the words “Man of Faith” on the front, and in very large letters, “Jesus” on the back. The man by the aisle was a bit imposing – very sure of himself and seemingly used to being in charge. Squeezing into my middle seat, the space between those two big men felt very, very narrow.

Settling in, I pulled out my prayer book, and no sooner had I done that than the Man of Faith exclaimed, “Amen sister, I’m praising God because we are all believers!” Being the good Episcopalian I am, I smiled at him and replied that yes, that was lovely, and quickly returned to my prayer book. The man on the aisle began to ask questions of the Man of Faith, who by now had spoken enough for me to recognize a significant slowness in his speech, and an inability to completely formulate his words. “God is awesome, man!” he drawled. “God saved my life and I’ve been a believer for 20 years.” He reached into the seat pocket in front of him and pulled out two cards, handing one to me, and one to the man on the aisle. “Look, this is my Mom, this is her ministry.” I read the card, which conveyed a brief version of the story of this man’s near-fatal car accident 20 years earlier, and of his recovery and the entire family’s conversion to Christianity.

“Oh my,” I thought. “I’m in for a long ride …”

As I tried to read my prayers, the two men talked back and forth, each of them leaning in a little toward one another in order to more closely converse. It was a funny feeling … as though I wasn’t even there. And my narrow little middle-seat space was becoming increasingly narrow. I invited either of them to change seats so that they might more comfortably converse, but the Man of Faith wanted the window seat, and the Man in Charge needed the leg room of the aisle.

Understanding clearly that this was not a circumstance conducive to reading my prayers, I closed my book and paid attention to these two men. “What do you do?” the man on the aisle asked me. “Uh-oh,” I thought. I hadn’t planned on a theological debate. I had planned to pray.

As I had been trying to read my prayers, the Man of Faith told the story of his accident, his recovery, his journey to conversion and his beautiful life as a Christian. This man had very certain and specific knowledge of God and of God’s plan for every person on earth. I would venture, in fact, that he would have had an answer to that question posed to Jesus in our Gospel reading today: “Lord, will only a few be saved?” “YES,” I imagine him saying with absolute certainty! “Only a few will be saved.” He’d already made known his very narrow definitions about who would be saved, what all of us must do to be saved, and how if you look at specific verses in the Bible and take them seriously (which to him meant taking them literally), you would know what you had to DO to be saved. Quoting scriptural passages popular among fundamentalist Christians, the Man of Faith described a god I do not know and certainly don’t believe in: an angry, vengeful god whose primary job it was to sort the good from the bad, casting aside all those who did not see the world through the same very narrow lens as did this Man of Faith.

I don’t think this is the way Jesus wanted us to understand the narrow door. This is a difficult passage, though, especially for those of us who understand God to be expansive and compassionate, a God of self-effusive and overflowing love. While we know Jesus often answered specific questions with expansive stories and parables, it is hard to understand his response in today’s Gospel. Why must the door be so narrow? Why will it be closed to many? Why would a gracious God make the doorway so narrow and the path to salvation so difficult? We know the answer to this question. Our good and gracious God did not make the path so difficult. WE make the path difficult.

We make the path difficult every time we exclude someone from God’s love. We make the path difficult when tend to ourselves at the expense of others or turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world. We make the path difficult when we lose track of our prayer life or forget that all we have is gift from God. We make the path difficult any time we allow anything in the world to separate us—or any one of God’s beloved—from the God who loves us all.

That’s why the doorway seems narrow. Because when we’re not paying very careful attention, we find that we’ve gone off the path – perhaps missed the doorway all together.

I think this is why Jesus tells us we must strive to take the less traveled and narrow way – because God knows that which is ugly in the world is indeed powerful. Jesus isn’t saying that what we DO brings us salvation or that our striving will bring us to the banquet feast. Rather, he is saying that being a Christian is big work, that it requires deep attention and intention and that we can’t rest once we’ve self-identified as a woman or a man of faith. We need to be mindful. We need to be prayerful. We need to be humble.

Sitting in that narrow middle seat on the airplane, I knew I needed to honestly engage the conversation that surrounded me. And because it was such an important conversation, I knew I needed to choose my words with great love, real attention, and deep prayer. One cannot proclaim the Good News of God’s all-encompassing and redeeming love in the world by telling someone he is narrow-minded and wrong!

This is a real story of the Christian life, isn’t it? A life where there are always choices. We can choose to take the easy way of disengaging, pretending not to notice the need for God’s love all around us and so not offering that love. Or we can choose to lovingly engage, and do the hard work of squeezing ourselves through that narrow door, choosing our words and actions with great love, real attention, and deep prayer.

What narrow pathways are you negotiating? Where are the very narrow doorways in your life? How are you striving? Take a few minutes of quiet. During that time, I invite you to reflect on these questions and to offer them to God, whose guidance and grace will surely sustain you and help you find your way through that narrow door.