When Love Shows Up: Weekly Reflections about God’s Presence

WLSU, Silent Conversion - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

My relationship with silence is complicated. I know silence is important. I know it's healthy. I know silence is conducive to prayer and meditation, to peace and reflection. I also just really like noise of all kinds. I like the sound of things happening, I like hearing people talking. Even when they're not talking to me: I like to go places where people are talking to each other and just hear different voices and snippets of different conversations. I love all accents - even the ones you think are ugly.
Mostly I love music. It is playing most of the time I am awake, and even when at bedtime I often play music very quietly. My entire sophomore year of college my roommate and I fell asleep to the same album every night. It was Bob Dylan's World Gone Wrong.
I would not say I'm afraid of silence - at least I don't think I am. I even enjoy it sometimes. But I forget about it. I forget silence is an option.
I think I'm about to remember. As you are reading this I am on sabbatical. Don't worry: I'm not working. I wrote this before I left. But the very first thing I'm doing during this sabbatical is going on a 4-day silent retreat. Four whole days without talking to anyone or listening to anyone. No kids around. No spouse. No work. No music. I will be at a monastery and retreat center in Kentucky called The Abbey of Gethsemani. It is run by Cistercian monks who are apparently very serious about their silence. It's going to be very quiet.
Maybe I am actually a little afraid.
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WLSU, The Meal is I Love You - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

If you had asked me growing up if meals were a big deal in my house, I would have shrugged my shoulders. My parents didn't look me in the eye and say, "This matters!" And I ate in front of the TV as often as they would let me. But looking back, I see it differently. My father loved to cook. And for the first 13 years of my life, when my parents were still together and especially before my older brothers moved out, Dad would try to get us around the table when he was home. Throughout much of the 80's he was away on business, sometimes half of each month. But when he was home, he would cook as often as possible, and we would all sit together around the kitchen table and eat. He would insist I take my hat off, no matter what kind of rat's nest was hiding underneath.
I always thought he was doing that just for himself, that he loved to cook. And he did. But I'm Dad now, and I have a demanding job too. And now I know that part of loving to cook is the fact that I am feeding people I love, that I am potentially making something they will actually enjoy, and that I am nourishing them and caring for them in a real and practical way. I don't always feel it in the moment, and I don't say it every time. And my kids would love to eat in front of the TV as often as possible. But when I have the energy, I gather them around the table, and hats come off, and we hold hands, and someone prays. And sometimes they like it and sometimes they don't. But it's always I love you. I see that now.
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WLSU, Where is God - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

As part
of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this podcast which
was originally posted on May 12, 2023

Where is God when things are terrible? Where is God when I
pray for the healing of a loved one and they get sicker? Where is God when I
pray for
their healing and they die instead? Where is God when people are
being torn apart by AR-15 bullets?

Where is God?

I ask this question a lot, and I get asked it a lot. A
friend who is really going through it recently asked me, and followed up by
saying they were not asking rhetorically. It's not a new question.
Some biblical scholars believe that the Book of Job is the earliest story in
our Scriptures. Which means not only is "Where is God?" not a new question - it
might be the oldest question anyone who believed in God ever asked. And it's important
to remember that "Where is God?" is asked most frequently by people
who believe in God, because we often think it's a question rooted
either in faithlessness or cynicism. But in my experience it is one
of the most faithful questions anyone can ask.

Where is God?

I need to tell you that I will not answer this
question in anything like a satisfactory way. So please know that going
forward. Just the same, my first answer is that God is with us. This is
the stated belief of the Christian - even when we don't understand,
even when we question, even when we doubt, even when we are furious with God.
God is with us. When I was growing up, the spectacular Bette Midler sang, "God
is watching us from a distance." It was beautiful and it was believable,
but it was also not true - at least not according to the Christian narrative.
We say that God is here right now.

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WLSU, Save Me but Not Like That - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Jesus goes to work, and he heals people. He helps people. He saves people. Then he heads to Jerusalem, the political, cultural, religious, social center of his people, and he goes there during Passover, when every one of these oppressed Israelites has Egypt and the Exodus and liberation on the brain. And he symbolizes for so many of them the possibility of deliverance - of salvation - not just from some abstract afterlife Hell, but from the things that are harming them here and now. Hosanna! Help us!
This is a promising moment. It quickly disintegrates. After several days of teaching and fierce verbal confrontations with religious leaders and cultural influencers, Jesus is arrested, put on trial, and publicly executed. Among those who advocated so strongly for his death were the people who had cried Hosanna the loudest. The week between Palm Sunday and Easter is the grotesque illustration of what happens when we don't like how God wants to help us.
What Jesus does is he reminds each person that they need saving not just from some governing power or corrupt system - they also need saving from themselves, from their own ability to sabotage their lives, their own resistance to God's love and justice, their own complicity in the things that push them further from God. And he's not speaking to them from on high, from above the fray, from a place of privilege. Like all good prophets, he's speaking to them as one of them.
As you may recall, it does not go well.
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WLSU, Believing and Eating - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Conversion cannot be confined to the times and place I expect. I look forward to wherever it may be next. At the back end of the pandemic, we tiptoed back into real life. At Church of the Redeemer the very first gathering we had outside of masked worship was on the front porch of our church. We had a taco truck parked out front and we invited everyone. I will never my whole life forget that night. A hundred people showed up and ate tacos and just smiled at each other. "Look at us. We're sharing space. We're together. We're eating." It's all so simple isn't it? I don't ever want to take it for granted again, the being together.
I was angry a lot during the pandemic. I may have believed in God but I wasn't so sure I believed in people anymore. I had hoped that this health crisis would be an opportunity for people to unclench our fists and look out for one another - to cross political lines, to take seriously the danger and uncertainty before us, to love one another in practical ways. I did not see that happening, and I found myself succumbing to my own judgmental nature and cynicism.
The taco truck reminded me how much I love people.

WLSU, No Self Improvement - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

There's a moment in The Lord of the Rings where a character stops to consider how he feels, and then describes himself as "stretched thin - like butter scraped over too much bread." That's it. That's what I feel like. It's not quite burnout. I'm not looking out the window for something else to do. Rather, my body and spirit are tired, and have been and keep being, and I am looking for rest and renewal.
One thing I can tell you about being butter scraped over too much bread is that sometimes when everything is going well, you're not able to feel the joy and excitement of it. You can intellectually recognize that things are great, but not have the capacity to appreciate that reality.
Another thing that happens is a bandwidth problem. During the height (or depth) of the pandemic, there was a point when both my wife and I were working from home, and all three kids were home with us. The oldest two were attending school remotely on their computers, and the youngest was too young even for school and spent a lot of time on a screen. I'm not going to bother trying to explain or defend that. Anyway, when we were all online at the same time, we would sometimes have a bandwidth issue - our internet would be overloaded and everything would slow down. Since the pandemic, I have noticed myself having bandwidth issues. My internal processing is overwhelmed and everything slows down. If you've been around me, maybe you've noticed that and maybe you haven't. I notice it. Butter over too much bread.
I sometimes have difficulty admitting that I feel this way. First, it's never fun to acknowledge you're not operating at 100%. We're programmed to think of that as weakness, and to think of weakness as bad. But also, I worry that the people in my church community - the people with whom I share much of my life - will think I'm saying I'm not happy doing the work. And I'm definitely not saying that.Want to support our podcast?Give Here https://redeemercincy.tpsdb.com/Give/podcast

WLSU, Repentance at the Gym - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Today at the gym I overheard a conversation. I did not mean to. I was not eavesdropping. Well not at first anyway. In my defense the person working out next to me was talking at normal volume on their phone. She was not using, as it's called in elementary school, her inside voice. And because I had misplaced my headphones, I could only mind my own business for so long. Even without knowing the context of the conversation, I heard pain. Then I heard her say these words to the person on the other end of the line:
"Are you willing just to acknowledge your part in what went wrong, to be accountable and then move on?"
I was taken aback by the direct and simple nature of the question. We don't often hear people speak this plainly. I actually stopped listening at that point, both because I was trying to lift a very heavy thing, and also because this stranger's question sent me deep within myself. It was as if she had asked me the question just as directly and simply. Phil, are you willing just to acknowledge your part in what went wrong, to be accountable and then move on?
I delicately put the heavy thing on the ground, and then silently prayed for this person on her phone. I'm very religious, after all. I prayed with thanksgiving for her courage - because saying that to anyone takes courage. Then I prayed for, I guess you'd call it a happy ending, a resolution or reconciliation or whatever those two needed. I put the weights back on the rack, walked off and finished my workout. But that question stuck with me.
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WLSU, Cancelled - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

This canceling business is not uncontroversial. It's also not new, even if the lingo is.
I remember back in 2003 when the Country music trio then-named The Dixie Chicks responded to the US invasion of Iraq by telling a London audience, they were ashamed that our President was from their home state of Texas. The backlash was intense and immediate - with radio stations refusing to play their music and their music sales dropping dramatically. They even received death threats.
So did the Beatles, of course, back in 1966, when during an interview John Lennon remarked that his band was currently more popular than Jesus. Aside from the death threats, some Christian groups organized public bonfires of Beatles records and paraphernalia. The Beatles considered ending their US tour early for their own safety.
And then there was St. Paul, and even Jesus. Jesus, in describing conflict resolution at one point instructs his followers that if someone inside the community sins egregiously and is unwilling to apologize and atone, they should be treated like "a Gentile or a tax collector". Which is to say they should be treated as outsiders.
Maybe Jesus was an early proponent of cancel culture.
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WLSU, Prosperity and Adversity - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

My preference would be to see evidence of God's presence when things are going my way, and evidence of God's absence when things are not. And I know I am not alone in this: Many people find themselves questioning the existence (or at least the efficacy) of God specifically when they see the mess we are in as a planet. The reasoning seems to go, "What kind of a God would allow all of this?" And when things are going right? "Oh, God is blessing me."
It's worth remembering that all of Jesus' disciples died horrible deaths; that St. Paul was jailed repeatedly, stoned, and executed; that Job, who is most famous for his faithfulness, lost every one of his children, his home, and all his livestock in one day; that Moses died in the wilderness, never setting foot in the Promised Land. It's also worth remembering that none of these stories are told as tragedies: Every life is described as part of a larger redemptive reality at work in the world, played out in both the prosperity and the adversity of the faithful.
The truth is that pretty much every single book of the Bible was written for, by, and about people who were in tough situations - living in exile, surviving under oppressive rule, being persecuted, their lives threatened, their religion made illegal, their lifespans brief and rife with danger, famine, and pestilence.
Sometimes - especially when I'm in my head - I see things going wrong as evidence that there is no God; or that if there is a God, maybe they're impotent, or uncaring. Yet the words of hope that have most shaped my life come from people whose lives were objectively much worse, much more difficult than mine has ever been. Faith, it seems, may be more fertile in suffering than prosperity.
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WLSU, Love and Death - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

We Christians believe in eternal life. Yet we still manage so often to think and speak of those who have died in the past tense. But Jim is a poet. And though he wasn't reading a poem here, it takes a poet's heart to lay bare the beautiful forgotten truth in such simple terms. A man standing mere feet from the ashes of his friend's body and speaking of him in the present tense.
The words for what I came to understand that day did now show up immediately. But now I have them. When someone dies we do not stop loving them. Our love is not past tense. And it's not just grief or nostalgia or sentimental memories. It is love in the present tense. It is love that still manages to shape us. We continue to be transformed by love after their death. And I believe I know why. Our loved ones who died are still loving us. They are in eternal life. Right now. They are alive in Christ - not as a metaphor, but as a bare fact. They are in the present tense. Their love is in the present tense. And so is ours.
Our love remains. And when I say our love remains, I am not saying it remains as a stubborn insistence to hold onto what was. No, our love remains because it is alive and active and we continue to share it with the dead who live in the present tense.
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