RKT2 - Teenagers...sheesh!

This past week I have had family visiting from out-of-town, among them a twelve-year-old girl, Kim. Most of the time she has such enthusiasm, it is infectious. So many things are new for her, it is a joy to witness them through her eyes and to hear about what she sees. Often, she sees things that I've missed for almost four years. Amazing.

Then there are those other times - the ones about which parents would shake their collective heads knowingly. Meltdowns over missing french fries. Pouting over unfamiliar foods that they insisted that they liked but somehow did not match their expectations. Anger about being corrected on a crowded bus that NO one cannot hop to a different seat every other stop. And the seemingly quintessential question, "Are we there yet?"

While I work with teenagers a LOT, it's a little different being the surrogate parent for one, 24/7, at least for a while.

I now have some deeper sympathy for Mary and Joseph in this passage from Luke chapter 2,

Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travellers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, ‘Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.’ He said to them, ‘Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house'"

Jesus, a precocious teenager, who wanders off in the middle of a family vacation. With the swaggering voice only an adolescent can muster, he turns attempts to pin the blame on his parents, how could they not known where he would be? Seriously, Mom, like you didn't know. DUH!

If we take seriouly that God was present fully and specially in Jesus Christ, on the one hand, it's hard to take this passage to heart. However, on the other hand, despite all we might be tempted to believe about teenagers, if God indeed was once a 12-year-old, then God too understands them and their mood swings and their pouts and doubts and tears. God knows and loves each and every teenager just as they are, even when they're driving us CRAZY.

God please help me remember!

RKT2 - The Banality of Betrayal

When we think of betrayal, we usually think of something quite dramatic and sinister. But, for me, betrayal is something a little bit more mundane. It was the summer when I was 15 years old that I betrayed my father. We had packed up the car in preparation for a mini-family vacation to King’s Island, my favorite annual amusement park experience. While my spirit and my nose were dreading a two-hour car ride with my brother and his stinky feet, my heart was already thrilling with visions of rides on the Beast, the Racer and the Vortex. My father had just gone outside to pull the van from the garage into the driveway when the phone rang. I answered, “Hello?”

“Is Larry Doty there?” the voice in the receiver said.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“This is Eli Lilly,” the voice answered. My father’s work. Being a high-voltage electrician, my father was infrequently called to manage some electrical crisis at one of their several plants in Indianapolis. Simultaneously my heart sank and my mind raced. This was our family vacation, how dare they call him to work when he was supposed to be on vacation.

My father walked in the door. Should I tell them he was here, I thought to myself, and risk losing our trip? I knew my father was just as excited about the trip as I was. “He really was on vacation, which was almost like being away,” the little voice in my head said. If I say he’s gone, then we can just leave for our trip and no one has to know.

“He’s not here,” I heard myself say. Perfect.

Then from the kitchen came my dad’s voice, “Who is it, Kevin?”

“It’s your work,” I replied.

He had heard my lie. And he knew. I felt ashamed and embarrassed and vile. My father knew and he simply glanced at me as he took the receiver from my hand, saying, “This is Larry.” In that moment I had betrayed his trust and the values of honesty and hard work that he had taught me. It wasn’t the first betrayal nor the last, but it was for me the most memorable.

We are all experienced betrayers - those mundane but somehow central moments when the facades we build around ourselves suddenly come crashing down and our affinity for the enemies of our lives, enemies like selfishness, greed, ambition and pride, become painfully visible to the rest of the world and to us.

My betrayals are all too frequent and too mundane and unfortunately often they are also too true.

As we continue in this season of Lent, I have been pondering the betrayal of all of the disciples, but especially Judas. I think while our hope is that we are more like Peter, denying Christ, but ultimately being forgiven, our deepest fear is that we are each a faithless Judas. We have willing been betrayed by our own anger and succumbed to violence, been betrayed by our loneliness and sought quick passions, been betrayed by our own helplessness and anxiety and fear and covered them up with intoxicating substances or pushed them down into the deepest recesses of our spirit hoping they never return.

But the good news of the gospel, for Judas and for us, is not that we will never be betrayers or denyers or deserters of our professed faith. The good news is that its not our faith that saves us who makes us right with God. It is not faith in Jesus Christ but the faith of Jesus Christ that matters.

RKT2 - Seeing the Stranger

When I was in school, I always had mixed emotions about teachers who thought they knew who you were because they happened to know your family. My dad and especially my grandmother had unintentional hidden networks throughout the school. Twenty-three years prior, my dad had graduated from the same high school I attended, while my grandmother had worked for the school system for many years as both a custodian and as a 'lunch-lady' back when 'mashed potates' on the menu meant that they had actually peeled and diced and cooked and mashed real potatoes. Every year it seemed at least one teacher would say, 'Are you Larry's son?" or "Are you Stella's grandson?"

"Yes," I would grudgingly reply, unsure what conclusions the questioner was making about my background, my intelligence or my personality. It felt like instead of seeing me, a bright new shining face in front of them, they actually saw me only through a hazy vision of my family.

The positive side is that I'm the oldest; my little brother had to bear being compared to Grandma, Dad and me.

I've done a lot of thinking lately about hospitality and how we practice it, as a community of faith and as persons of faith. To practice hospitality means that we actually see and interact with whoever comes to us. To practice hospitality means that instead of trying to figure out what boxes or categories we can fit someone into, we meet them where they are and respond to their needs as they are. To practice hospitality means the hungry get fed, the weary get to rest, the sick get healed and those who are bound get loosed. What is radical about this hospitality, God's hospitality, is that whether we are the guest or the host, we come to the table as equals, as fellow creatures and both are blessed.

But it's more than that. Hospitality, like all true Christian practices, is such because it molds us in the ways of God. For God comes to us as one who is completely other. God comes to us as a stranger, who cannot be put in a box or category of our choosing. God comes to us as a completely free person and asks us to respond. When we practice hospitality to the human strangers before us we learn to see, hear, touch and respond to the divine stranger.