Yesterday was an amazingly grace-filled and rewarding day of youth ministry at Hinton Avenue. Each time a month has five Sundays (usually 4 times a year), we've designated that fifth one as Youth Sunday. The liturgical calendar has worked out so that the first Sunday in Advent, the first Sunday in Lent, and now Pentecost Sunday have been Youth Sundays. Pentecost is perhaps the season of the church with which I feel the closest communion, so there was no doubt that this would be a great experience for us. The service was better than I could ever have imagined, though. All the youth were well prepared, calm, and articulate, and the folks in the congregation seemed genuinely impressed once again. This was the sixth youth service we've had, and with each one everyone becomes a bit more confident and outspoken, and I am deeply excited to see where our youth worship leadership will take us in the future. I prefer to have other folks preach for these services, especially people from the youth group, but it typically ends up working out so that I speak. It's not really my best work, but I'll post my sermon at the end of this musing.

The most theologically provocative and profound assertion that was made all day, however, happened last night during our weekly youth group meeting. Andrew and April came to help with dinner, we had some fettucini alfredo and tossed salad, played a rousing game of charades/pictionary with the group, and then we all divided into three groups to look at the story of Pentecost from different biblical perspectives. Other groups came up with skits to share the messages of 2 Kings 2:1-18 (Elijah's being swept up to heaven by a great wind of God) and Mark 4:35-41 (Jesus calming the raging winds of a sea storm at his disciples' pleading), while my group made a poster to depict the seven days of Creation from Genesis 1-2. Lee Bibb, a seventh-grader from our youth group with unvelievable artistic talent, was our primary drawer, while the rest of us offered our reserved input. She did a great job for the first six days and then pondered for a while over how to draw a sleeping God. Then a lightbulb seemed to go off and she quickly created the aptest image of God I've seen in some time: a compass, with needles pointing in all directions, producing zzz's just above a created world which has been declared good. Lee's been going through the usual middle school pressure craziness lately, and we haven't seen her as often as we would like, but it's clear that God is continuing to speak to and through her in remarkable ways. Thanks be to God for her wise insights and deep faith! And for letting this eager, but entirely unqalified youth minister learn from her and from all the young people in our faith community.

You've read all the brilliance that there will be in this post, but here are my somewhat rushed, and necessarily incomplete (how could one sermon possibly capture the depth and nuance of this story?) thoughts on Pentecost:

The Rush of a Violent Wind
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with teh Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in teh native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, 'Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia. Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes. Cretans and Arabs--in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power.' All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, 'What does this mean?' But others sneered and said, 'They are filled with new wine.' But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them: 'Men of Jeda and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, tehse are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: "In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above adn signs on the earth below, blod, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and gloriouis day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved."' --Acts 2:1-21 (NRSV)

Today our sisters and brothers throughout Christendom, in all the cities and towns and villages where the good news has been heard and embraced, join us in celebrating the Day of Pentecost, the promised coming of the Holy Spirit. In most of those places, the story that Jessica just read for us will be taught by pastors and teachers, and in that very teaching, we trust that a new and exciting movement of the Spirit will begin. We trust that the gift of the Holy Spirit is not something that happened only once, to the community gathered at Jerusalem, but is instead a living and active journey in which we today are called to participate. The way that happens, however, doesn’t always look the same from place to place or from congregation to congregation. In some European churches, for instance, it is traditional to set doves loose in the sanctuary on Pentecost Sunday or to drop thousands of strips of red cloth over the heads of worshipers to symbolize the Holy Spirit’s descending upon God’s people, penetrating the whole of their lives, and empowering them to be ministers of love and justice in a blind world. Happily, that’s not our tradition, so we won’t have the mess of live animals and overwhelming confetti to deal with this morning. I sense that the youth group would get strapped with job of cleaning it all up anyway, and we don’t really want that, but I do want you to bear those images in mind as we begin to think about what this powerful and deep text might mean for us this morning.

There are also a couple other images that will be helpful to us in our exploration of the story of Pentecost, as experienced by the early church community in Acts and as experienced by the faith community at Hinton Avenue this very day. In many American Pentecostal and charismatic churches, the language that we see here of speaking in new and unknown tongues has been taken very seriously. When a person is slain by the Spirit (notice the violent language there---we’re coming back to that, so don’t leave it behind), when a person is slain by the Spirit, he or she has an almost mystical experience of worship and spirituality and leaves that service changed in some pretty important ways. This way of understanding and employing the Pentecost story is entirely different from unleashing symbolic doves and red streamers on your congregation, it emphasizes other parts of the Scripture, and we may have some legitimate questions to ask our Pentecostal friends about their experience of what they call “speaking in tongues,” but this is a symbol that is equally important and meaningful to their community.

One more symbol. For the last five or six years, I have worked as a counselor at Camp Rainbow Connection in Blackstone. Camp Rainbow is a ministry of the Virginia Conference Commission on Disabilities which provides two week-long summer camps for adults with mental and physical disabilities. All of our campers are folks who were diagnosed in childhood as mentally retarded, they’re men and women who deal daily with the challenges of autism, Down’s Syndrome, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and other conditions, and they’re some of the most fascinating, creative, and thoughtful people you’ll ever meet. Those of you who’ve had the blessing of being in ministry with these special people will surely agree that their hearts are uniquely able to reflect the love of Christ.

Our campers embody that in the most remarkable ways. And for an hour each morning, they come in small groups to Bible class, where they’re able to share some of the things they’ve learned in their own churches and Sunday School classes and to learn new stories and ideas from the Bible, and for the past couple years I’ve coordinated and led many of these classes. Last summer, our camp theme was “God’s Universal Mission.” We had real astronaut suits and freeze-dried snacks, and we talked about how God created and directed the entire cosmos, and how we, as small and seemingly insignificant as we are, are crucial parts of God’s mission. And on the very first day of Bible class, we talked about the story of Pentecost. Because it’s a story about the whole world. People have come to Jerusalem from all around the world to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. While they’re there, they encounter all the usual problems of miscommunication and cultural misunderstandings. One group’s accusing another of getting drunk at nine o’clock in the morning, some people are prophesying about the end of days, and nobody seems to be able to agree on exactly what’s going on and how God is moving in their midst. Come to think of it, they don’t sound so different from us today, do they? This could just as easily have been a meeting of a local church’s administrative board or the General Conference for the whole United Methodist Church.

Yet, even in the midst of all this chaos and confusion, God does something exceedingly good. And after God’s action comes a call for the people who have come to the holy city from all around the world to go back into the farthest corners of that world and bear witness to what they have seen and heard and felt of God’s grace. So I brought to Camp Rainbow all sorts of world maps and globes and representative items from different countries and invited the campers to imagine what it would be like to have people from all over the world come together, not to argue or fight or destroy, but to worship and listen and grow together. And in that imagining, we learned a new language of diversity and inclusion. By telling the story of Pentecost, we found ourselves, like the first confused disciples, caught up in the life and love of the Holy Spirit.

So needless to say, the symbols in this story are deeply rich. They tell of the Holy Spirit’s coming in the form of a dove to bless Jesus at his baptism and to bless all who would encounter him, they tell of individual lives being claimed and transformed by the God of all creation, they tell of God’s Spirit being poured out on the nations, for healing and forgiveness and reconciliation. Perhaps the most dominant symbol in this story, though, is the very first one we find in the Scripture. Let me read to you again the first couple verses of Acts, Chapter 2:

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”

Before new tongues are learned, before the good news of the Holy Spirit’s coming is proclaimed to all the world, there comes a sound like the rush of a violent wind that fills the entire house, instilling awe and wonder in everyone there. The wind is rushing and urgent and demands everyone’s attention. And when it comes, it sweeps away the barriers of race and language and misunderstanding the people have built between them, and offers a glimpse of a new world, the rule of God, where justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream, where blind eyes are opened and deaf ears unstopped, where the last will indeed be declared first.

And this great, all-encompassing wind of God, that gave birth to the Church at Pentecost, continues to touch and stir us today. When telling his disciples about the Holy Spirit, Jesus describes her at different times as the Guide, the Advocate, and the Comforter. And the Holy Spirit, as God incarnate, has continued to be all these things in the life of the Church, bringing peace to troubled lives and direction to searching souls.

But perhaps the most relevant image of the Holy Spirit for us this morning is not nearly so easy or comfortable. Many times we need a Guide and an Advocate and a Comforter, and God is good and provides for us, but other times we need the rush of a mighty wind to overturn the old order and call us to action in service of God.

Any of us who have ever encountered a truly fierce thunderstorm, a tornado or hurricane, can attest that they are not always easy or pleasant phenomena to deal with. They tend to uproot the things we had hoped would stay neatly and conveniently grounded, and they sometimes change our whole lives in ways we could not predict or control. And we don’t like it one bit. We don’t like it when the windows begin to rattle and the power begins to flicker and the trees begin to fall. We find ourselves completely powerless, and it’s genuinely frightening.

So what a peculiar image for the third person of the Trinity! It seems almost unimaginable that God should choose to come to us in such a scary and unpredictable form. Or maybe that’s not really surprising at all. You see, this is the God who offered blessings to Jacob after wrestling with him through the night, who called the unlikely and unwilling figures of Moses, Isaiah, Rahab, and Deborah to positions of influence and leadership for the people of Israel, and who chose an unmarried maiden to bear his son. God has always been about the business of supplanting those things we have built that we think are solid and certain, our palaces and shrines, our attitudes and prejudices. Jesus cleared the Temple when it had become corrupt and after leaving his followers at the Ascension sent to them a violent, rushing wind which would mysteriously look over them and protect them while at the same time leading them into wild and dangerous places in the name of their faith.

These are the ways in which the wind of the Spirit is violent. It’s violent because it pierces our lives and leaves them changed and different. But this is an entirely constructive, even altruistic, violence. With the eternal wisdom of God, the Holy Spirit is able to tell us the truth about who we are and to strip away those princes and principalities, those sins and failings, those unnecessary burdens, that are keeping us out of the kingdom.

It is when we think that in our own wisdom we can make use of violence to bring harmony to interpersonal relationships, to international relationships, that we run into trouble. In fact, one might argue that we put ourselves in the place of God when we begin to behave as though it is our spirit, not God’s Spirit, that is a violent, rushing wind.

So ultimately, the song of Pentecost that we sing this morning is a song of peace. Not a song of easy peace, simply given to us without expectation or effort, but rather a peace born of a violent shearing away of our own inclination to violence, a sort of constructive destruction, a mighty rushing wind that carries us into the world, speaking new tongues of faith and witness. Thanks be to God.

And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's home town." --Luke 4:24

While I was in high school, I became a Certified Lay Speaking Minister of the United Methodist Church. Basically, this meant that I had completed a number of hours' training in public speaking, church polity, worship, and liturgy, and was thus "licensed" to serve as a guest preacher in local churches. I continued lay speaking in churches around the Virginia Conference (often two or three Sundays per month) until I took the job as Director of Youth & Children's Ministry at Hinton Avenue UMC in January of 2003, and the experience of traveling the Conference, meeting the laypersons who make life in the Church happen in real, tangible, life-changing ways was an amazing experience. I am deeply grateful to have worshiped alongside sisters and brothers in Norfolk, Richmond, Winchester, Petersburg, Charlottesville, Lynchburg, Roanoke, Alexandria, and so many places in between.

One of my strongest memories, however, of this season in my faith journey is not quite so positive. When I would come from Charlottesville to speak for a congregation or small group on a Sunday morning, almost without exception, someone in the church would listen to my sermon and greet me afterward with a statement akin to, "It's good to know there's a Christian up there at that liberal university," or "Don't let them change you too much up there...keep that faith, even with liberal professors everywhere."

These uncompromising, conspiracy theory-like voices were wrong for so many reasons. Two come immediately and passionately to mind:

1. The notion that a "liberal" person cannot be a faithful and prophetic minister is laughably self-centered and patently untrue. Do names like Saint Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, John Wesley, Martin Luther King, and Jesus mean nothing to us?

2. If "liberal" means teaching young people to think for themselves, paying employees a wage which will allow them to actually put food on the table for their family AND have health care, or recognizing that everyone in the world does NOT think exactly like you and that, in fact, sometimes there is wisdom to be gleaned from perspectives, experiences, and interests other than your own, then sure, UVA might be understood as "liberal." Otherwise, I would in no way categorize this school as particularly left-leaning or, even more absurd, "dangerous" to my religious convictions.

Interestingly, I think people would have been very much appeassed and encouraged should I have been a student at Randolph-Macon or Virginia Wesleyan (both colleges supported with money from the UMC), without even considering the lower academic and (gasp!) moral standards at such schools. How tragic that so many people in our pews still do not recognize that the true witness of our Christian faith in higher education is not happening at the lower-tiered colleges and universities we have supported for so long, but in the Wesley Foundations and other United Methodist campus ministries at large, public universities like ours. It is here that a new generation of clergy and lay leadership is acquiring and claiming the language of the Church. And it is here that much of the most effective, prophetic, and new ideas in worship and ministry are being explored and proclaimed.

Certainly, strong ministry is happening in and through our private colleges and universities as well, don't get me wrong. But my experience of Wesley Foundation life (in addition to simple statistics on seminary enrollment, incoming clergy classes, etc.) leads me to believe that we have experienced a profound, and largely unrecognized, shift in young adult ministry over the past two decades that should take us far beyond encouraging our young people to "stay strong" in the face of a "liberal" university.

Perhaps prophets can still not be accepted in their hometowns, or home churches.

If I had one of those live journals where each post is accompanied by your current mood, mine would probably be off the charts with excitement, happiness, stress, anxiety, relief and countless other emotions. The highlight of it all is that April's coming home tonight, and after youth group I'll actually get to see her. It's only been like five days, but they've been pretty tough, so it will be really nice to be together and catch up without having to fight with bad cell phone reception or faulty internet connections. Between now and then, though, the list of things to do is impressive, including preparations for next Sunday's youth worship service, for the youth group mission trip to West Palm Beach, for the Camp Rainbow Bible Class, for Project Transformation, for next year's SCC, and for my move upstairs. I've just finished cleaning my room and (hopefully) getting it to a place where boxing up books and pictures and clothes to haul up the steps will be as easy as possible. Now it's off to the shower and then into the office to continue working there before worship at 11:00.

Before I leave, however, I should say that I've discovered once again my conviction that the whole of human wisdom (not only about courage and identity, as I had thought before, but also about love) is bound up in what we learn from The Lion King:

There's a calm surrender to the rush of day
When the heat of the rolling world can be turned away
An enchanted moment, and it sees me through
It's enough for this restless warrior just to be with you

(chorus)And can you feel the love tonight?
It is where we are
It's enough for this wide-eyed wanderer
That we got this far
And can you feel the love tonight?
How it's laid to rest
It's enough to make kings and vagabonds
Believe the very best

There's a time for everyone if they only learn
That the twisting kaleidoscope moves us all in turn
There's a rhyme and reason to the wild outdoors
When the heart of this star-crossed voyager beats in time with yours

Chorus

It's enough to make kings and vagabonds
Believe the very best
--Tim Rice & Elton John

Astute readers of these Musings may have noted (in the What I'm Watching link to the right) that I recently watched the film 'High Fidelity', starring John Cusack, Jack Black, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Tim Robbins, and countless others. This was interesting for a couple reasons: first, because Andrew has been relatively obsessed with it lately (reading the Nick Hornby novel upon which the film is based, purchasing the dvd, etc.) and secondly because it stars Todd Louiso, who later directed another film that April and I watched a few weeks ago, a dark independent work entitled 'Love Liza'.

Without spoiling too much of the plot of this witty and poignant movie, I'd like to offer some rather brief, possibly crude, reflections of my own which it has inspired. Rob Gordon, the film's protagonist, keeps Top 5 lists in his head for practically everything (songs, albums, teen movies, etc.), and the story centers around his top five breakups. This idea has prompted me to think about some top five lists of my own. Perhaps it will become a weekly tradition here on the Musings. You know the sort: I throw out my top five and you respond with your own and we just have ourselves a good old conversation. For my first list, I had thought about the Top 5 patriotic songs of all time, which would prominently feature John McCutcheon's 'Our Flag Was Still There', Lloyd Stone's 'This Is My Song', and Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land', but I think that's just too tame for establishing such a tradition.

So here are the top five things that make women completely hot, in no particular order:
1. Neckties
2. Skirts
3. Bare Feet (especially in the car)
4. Messy Bedrooms
5. Engagement Rings

I realize it's completely random, unexplainable, and could cost me a great ministry-related job some time in the future, but there you have it. More lists later, if they don't run me out on a rail . . .

Mrs. Smith, my brilliant and thoughtful AP English teacher, wrote me a couple months ago to ask me to come back to Colonial Heights and offer the opening prayer for the retirement celebration for Mrs. Sandra Coleman. For 33 years, many of them at CHHS, Mrs. Coleman has worked as an English and Reading teacher, specializing in education with gifted students (back in my younger days, people actually mistook me as a 'gifted' student ...as it turns out, we're all gifted, but myself perhaps least of all). I gladly accepted this invitation and have been looking forward to this dinner for some time now.

Now I've just returned from the event and am feeling peculiarly nostalgic. Of course, it was wonderful to see Mrs. Coleman and offer her blessings on behalf of all the lives she's touched, and I greatly enjoyed seeing all my high school English teachers (even years ago, they saw me for the bookish student of literature I never thought I'd become but in truth already was). I had expected, with a certain degree of apprehension, that I would also be seeing lots of the people I'd gone to school with, but only Mark and Nicole, an amazing couple with talents and charm I could only wish for, were there. I enjoyed great conversations with fellow Wahoos Kim and Tim and Pam, who graduated with other high school classes, but the Class of 2001 was fairly underrepresented. Interestingly, I left the party (the last person to go, as usual!) wishing that I had done a better job of keeping in touch with all the old crew from the Heights. I still send the occasional email or instant message to let people know I'm alive, and once in a while I'll get together with some of the folks who are at UVA now, but other than Andrew (he and I went completely overboard with the whole keeping in touch thing and have been roommates for the last year) I rarely take much time to reflect on and maintain those relationships. Mostly this is because I'm so involved with life in Charlottesville and the people there, and I would not change those newer relationships for anything in the world, but sometimes it can be good to be surrounded by people who know your story. When a person watched you grow up, had your dad as a Little League baseball coach, or slept over at your house during middle school, you can't hide from them and so the relationships are by necessity intimate and complete. With many of my friends I share this sort of relationship, but there are also many I've let slide over the past few years. It's by no means too late, though, so here's to old friends and the connections that stay with us always. And here's to feeling proud of being a graduate of Colonial Heights High School, which, as self-absorbed and imperfect as it can sometimes (okay, oftentimes) be, has served me exceedinly well through its social and educational foundations. Never thought you'd here me say that, did you?

But this post was about the retirement celebration, though, right? As best I can remember, this is the prayer I offered to begin the dinner tonight. Perhaps it's true for all the Mrs. Colemans in all of our lives.

Dear God, for the many gifts you have given Mrs. Coleman, gifts for teaching, leading, listening, opening doors, and building community, we offer thanks and celebration. For the ways she has so faithfully and generously shared these gifts with students, parents, and colleagues, making education not merely an institutional, academic endeavor but instead an exciting and dynamic journey, we give thanks. And for your continued presence with her and her family in retirement, we gather tonight and give thanks. As she begins this new chapter in her journey, may she continue to meet you in the teachers and students in her life, may she find love and peace in abundance, and may she know that she will always have a home in the hearts and minds and lives she has shaped during her teaching career. For this time of celebration, for this gathered community, for Mrs. Coleman and her passion for learning and teaching, and for this meal we share, thanks be to God. Amen.

Each year, the Wesley Foundation's Bacallaureatte service is one of the highlights of worship and fellowship life in our faith community. It's an opportunity for family, friends, and community members to come together to remember, celebrate, and look ahead. Tonight we gathered for that service, and I was invited to offer a reflection from the continuing community. As per usual, I found myself hopelessly inadequate to this task. What I had in my head, and even on the paper in front of me, was more articulate than what actually came out, but people were encouraging nonetheless, and it was a great honor to be able to share a word of grace with these amazing people. Here is my reflection, as best I can remember it:

Alex sometimes says the Wesley Foundation is a lot like heaven, because it's a place where time takes on a totally new meaning. From his perspective, I think that means that all of the students who are a part of this campus ministry, and their experiences, and their values, and their stories, exist at the same time. It's not at all uncommon to step into the game room upstairs at the Wesley Foundation, or into the sanctuary here at Wesley Memorial on a Sunday morning, or into Deborah or Alex's office, or into the living room of one of the houses in our Wesley Residential Community and find graduates from past years who have stayed in Charlottesville to work or returned to visit friends in this community. This, we hope, will continue to be true, as the Wesley Foundation will remain a place of comfort and a home for the folks who will begin a new chapter in their journeys this weekend.

For students, the new understanding of time in this place means that we plunge off, even in the middle of raging hurricanes or blizzards, to have 2nd dinner on the Corner or other adventures around the University, that we get together for a movie night or a game of Nerts on the night before a big exam (because we can always study later in the night, right?), and that we can somehow travel from Cortazar, the city in central Mexico that was our spring break mission trip destination a couple years ago, to the ruins of Teotihuacan to climb the pyramids there, then on to visit castles and open markets in Mexico City, and then back to Cortazar. Something like 48 hours of driving in one day! During our cookie bakes and basketball game campouts and UN Seminars in New York, time truly does take on a new meaning for us.

Alex says this means the Wesley Foundation's a lot like heaven, and my experience of this faith community, my experience of being in relationships of trust and growth and accountability with the people at Wesley, especially the graduates whose faith and passion and accomplishments we're here tonight to celebreate, makes me think he's right. But apparently Alex thinks this place is so much like heaven that the impossible can easily be done here. See, the charge he has given me this evening is to speak on behalf of the continuing community and, in five minutes, offer thanks for how we have seen God's grace through the members of this year's graduating class.

This week, as I thought about how might do that, I igured I'd need to learn a Springsteen song, with full guitar and harmonica accompaniment, and play it for Andrew. I thought I would create a snazzy new variation to a ballroom dance in honor of Elizabeth and an ode to the world's fastest roller coasters for Kristen. I knew I'd need at least a couple quotes from Bruce Lee and J.D. Salinger for Brian, from U2 or Jars or Caedman's for Lisa Hovey, and from some obscure Irish Celtic jig that I can't quite understand but know must be brilliant for Drew. Inspired by Heather, I read up on the corpus of great science fiction, and to connect with Molly, I spent hours reading up the my Supreme Court justices and important historical legal cases. To get into Bethany's head, I tried my very best to figure out just what the life of a nursing student at UVA might be like. And then for visual aids, I was considering a world map which showed all of Caroline's travel adventures and future road trips, as well as all of the random towns and national parks and exotic islands Scott's called home over the past few years, and a display of sculptures and other amazing works of art from Lisa Fong, including all those great crafts she made last summer with the children of Project Transformation.

Yep, that was my plan. And in fact, while many of my peers were away at the beach this week relaxing after a tough semester and looking ahead to their summers, I was here in Charlottesville diligently working on all this. But in the end these graduates just provided us with too many memories, their gits to this community and to their friends and families were just too great, for me to catalogue them for you tonight.

So instead, I'd just like to offer a word to my sisters and brothers who will be graduating tomorrow. You have brought yourselves to this community, with all your gifts and all your talents and all your hopes, and you have helped make it a place where students and community members can come and encounter the Risen Christ, reflected in your love for people and in your service to the world. Sometimes I can't quite imagine what next year will be like with so many people going out from here into the world whose presence in our community has been so important and so uplifting for me and for all of us here. But I'm also encouraged because a whole new group of students have learned from your example what it means to live together in community, to be asking the hard questions, unafraid to grow and change. At a university that can sometimes feel far too competetive, where it can be so easy for people to get lost or to forget who they are, you have made me and so many people feel welcomed and at home in this place. So as you prepare to walk down the Lawn and into an exciting world of challenges and possibilities, know that we will be praying for you to find that same sort of welcome and support wherever you go and in whatever you find yourself called to do and be. And know that we'll be expecting you to come home, to this home, from time to time so that we can catch up and reminisce and play Sardines in the church (not, of course, that we weould ever dream of doing that now or that anyone should come check on us tonight!). Come back with your pictures and your stories and your wisdom, and know that the Wesley Foundation is a special, grace-filled place because of the gifts you've given us.

For all that you have brought to this community and for all that God is doing and will continue to do in and through your faith journey, we give our thanks and praise. Shalom to you!

---Fortunately, the music and liturgy of the service was much more helpful and appropriate than anything I could be capable of. Most fittingly, we sang Dougie McClean's beautiful hymn 'This Love Will Carry'

It's a thin line that leads us
And keeps a man from shame
And dark clouds quickly gather
Along the way he came
There's fear out on the mountain
And Death out on the plain
There's heartbreak and heart-ache
In the shadow of the flame

This love will carry
This love will carry me
I know this love will carry me (2x)

The strongest web will tangle,
the sweetest bloom will fall
And somewhere in the distance
we try and catch it all
Success lasts for a moment
and failure's always near
And you lookdown at your blistered hands
as turns another year

This love will carry
This love will carry me
I know this love will carry me (2x)

These days are golden,
they must not waste away
For our time is like that flower
and soon it will decay
And though by storms we're weakened, uncertainty is sure
And like the coming of the dawn,
it's ours forevermore

This love will carry
This love will carry me
I know this love will carry me (keep singing...)

For the graduating Wesley folks and for all that God is doing in and through this faith community, thanks be to God!

At least five Iraqi civilians and one more US soldier were killed in yet another suicide bombing yesterday. Of course, many people, including myself and most of the rest of the world, might understand these people to be still more victims of a senseless war insisted on by a thoughtless cowboy president with little foresight or compassion. Regardless of the senselessness of their deaths, however, these persons deserve to be remembered and honored, and yet their deaths are overshadowed this morning by the emergence of still more humiliating photos taken of Iraqi prisoners by American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

Such behavior is unethical, un-American, and even unhuman. Yet, what we have in our country this morning is a Defense Department which has been for months engaged in everything short of a coverup, friends and family members of these soldiers making the morning news rounds to defend the offenders by describing their stress levels and the rigors of peer pressure, and a President who misses a wonderful opportunity at reconciliation by appearing on Arab TV to continue to defend American intervention in Iraq and bash the Hussein administration rather than offering any sort of sincere apology. Once again, Arizona Senator John McCain seems to be the only Republican source of reason in all this debate. This morning, he criticized the President's pompous speech, saying that all Americans are, of course, deeply sorry that this has occurred, and that the President should have made good on his promise to be "transparent" by emphasizing that sorrow.

Democratic leaders, perhaps most notably Deleware Senator Joe Biden and Presidential candidate John Kerry, have begun calling for heads to roll in the Defense Department, including the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The problem everyone is observing, it seems, is that incriminating photos have surfaced which depict abusive behavior being perpetrated by Americans in Iraq. I'd like to suggest, though, that the murder of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of American soldiers during this ill-planned military operation is a much graver violation of human rights. So, in an administration which is hell-bent on stamping out the 'Axis of Evil', detaining prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere without warrant or charge, keeping secret the Vice President's relationship with Haliburton and other large energy corporations, and isolating America from the international community, can we really expect Rumsfeld and others to be held accountable for this behavior, which is little more than a logical outgrowth of official US policy? If anything, the administration seems to want us to remember that our abuses are less severe than those of the Bath Party. That must be paticularly reassuring to an Arab world which already realizes it has been dragged into an illegal holy war with the United States.

Here's hoping the real work of American freedom and respect for life happens this November.

Okay, so I'm a dork. That I freely admit and embrace. But I also happen to be a dork who wants to become both happier and smarter this summer. So, because reading purely for pleasure is, well, a pleasure, I'm putting together a summer reading list and would like your help. I'm interested, epsecially, in learning about books from genres which I might not otherwise be familiar with (good science fiction, obscure but brilliant biographies, ethnic fiction, etc.). Some of that's already here, thanks to Jeff Kaster and others, but more input is always welcome. You may remember that I tried this last summer with little success (as a cursory glance at the 'What I'm Reading' link to the right will tell you), but this will be different, honest! Below are some works carried over from last year's list and many that I've added since then. Yes, I do realize there's no way I'll even begin to tackle this list over the summer, and yes, I have already read many of these but want to re-encounter them. So please feel free to comment on the works that are here, but especially to add to this list. I'll bold the ones I read, so check back often to see my progress! (Gosh, I really am a huge dork . . . )

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Richard Adams, Watership Down
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment
James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong
Isaac Asimov, Caves of Steel
Augustine, City of God
Augustine, Confessions
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
Wayne Besen, Anything But Straight
Ludmila Bird, America the Beautiful
Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century
Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery
Dante, The Divine Comedy
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Nettie M. De Wall, Memories of Red Bird
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamozov
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
William Faulkner, Absolom, Absolom
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred
Andrew Greeley, Summer at the Lake
Susan Pace Hamill, The Least of These: Fair Taxes and the Moral Duty of Christians
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Frank Herbert, Dune
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Tom Horner, Jonathan Loved David
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land
Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is
James Joyce, Ulysses
Jan Karon, At Home in Mitford
Stephen King, From a Buick 8
Stephen King, The Stand
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Madeline Lengle, A Wrinkle in Time
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy
C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology
Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
George Meredith, The Egoist
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Rick Moody, Demonology
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge
Anders Nygren, Eros and Agape
Vanessa Ochs, Words On Fire: One Woman's Jouney Into the Sacred
Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams
Michael Phillips, Rift in Time
Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
Philip Pullman, Clockwork
Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
D.W. Robertson, Chaucer's London
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Larry Sabato, (something or other)
Roberta Schaeffer, The Story of Red Bird Mission
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
Adam Smith, The Wealth of the Nations
Elizabeth Spellman, Inessential Woman
Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstacy
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Adriana Trigiani, Big Stone Gap
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Virgil, The Aeneid
Jim Wallis, Faith Works: How Faith-Based Organizations Are Changing Lives, Neighborhoods, and America
Walter Wangerin, Jr., Ragman and Other Cries of Faith
Cornell West, Race Matters
Tobias Wolff, In Pharaoh's Army
Tobias Wolff, Old School
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse