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"Be like the wise man who built his house on the rock"

In Papago Park, a preserve near the center of Phoenix, two small rock mountains rise up from the desert. One of them, Garden Butte, is 1.6 billion years old. The other, about half a mile away, is a youngster at only 17 million years old.

Because Phoenix receives fewer than ten inches of rain-fall every year, Garden Butte and its younger cousin aren’t covered with trees. One sees only rock, rock that has been around for eons. When I travel to the United Church of Christ conference office, or to see friends, I try to get to Papago Park to see those two rock mountains. Being in the presence of something millions of years old helps me keep my life and my ministry in perspective.

There’s Camelback to the north, the Estrellas on the west and the Superstitions to the east. South Mountain Park, where I spent a good part of my childhood exploring and scrambling over boulders, completes the circle. If it’s not smoggy, you can see beyond the Phoenix mountains to others in the distance, sometimes even as far as Four Peaks, which may be crested with snow if it’s been a wet winter.

As I gaze at these peaks, I sometimes imagine them emerging from the desert floor. I see dinosaurs roaming the land. I wonder which layers of rock color and variety represent which layer of earth’s history. The scope of time reminds me that "a thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone."

"Build your house on the rock and not on the sand." When Jesus ended his sermon with these words about faith, he was probably standing on a mount not unlike these Phoenix mountains. Matthew says the crowd was astonished, for Jesus "taught as one who had authority." That’s not surprising. Whether in Israel or Arizona, any desert dweller knows you build on rock and not sand. Just look at what survives in this land. It’s not tumbleweeds, that grow fast and big in easy places like sandy washes, but then dry out between the rains and blow away in the first big wind.

It’s the saguaro cacti, "giants of the desert," 70-feet high with root spans to match, that make it to two centuries. In the high desert of Santa Fe (altitude 7,000 feet), pinions and junipers survive too, They put down roots in the rockiest of places, wherever they have something to hang onto. A favorite painting by a Navajo friend shows a lone pinion tree growing out of the side of a cliff, its roots anchored in the rock. It’s not a huge tree, but it’s there, a good metaphor for life and ministry in the desert.

Desert people also know about desert thunderstorms, another part of Jesus’ sermon. For years, developers in the Southwest have sold newcomers land in the flood plains. It’s cheap to build on sand, and people can’t believe it ever rains here. But it does. Clouds move in and out in minutes, leaving the sightseer drenched. Those newcomer houses built on the sand are the first to go. What lasts in the desert are the "rocks of ages" and the life, both human and plant, that are anchored in them.

As a child I thought the mountains would always be here, always offering a place to climb and explore, always inviting me to imagine other worlds in long-ago times, connecting me to the eternal. The desert and its mountains gave me the foundation I needed to get through the storms and dry times of life. When I moved back West 18 years ago, I found new sermons and lessons in the landscape around me.

But in much of the West, neither children nor adults have a chance to know the desert’s incarnation of the Christian faith. Every hour an acre of desert is taken for development. Since 1990 the Phoenix area has doubled. Albuquerque and Las Vegas are not far behind. The exponential growth has drastically changed life not only for plants and animals but also for people. More and more shopping malls, big-box stores and housing developments block the vast vistas and mountain views. In Phoenix, air pollution often dims the valley’s mountains. Hundreds of miles away, the colors of the Grand Canyon -- layers of red and gold rock millions of years in the making -- are often obscured by smog from the cars of Phoenix, Vegas and even Los Angeles.

The rapacious development of the West troubles me. It’s not just nostalgia for days gone by, or the environmental concerns. When ageless mountains are blocked by Walmarts and smog, we don’t just lose breathtaking views. We also lose a direct experience of Jesus’ rock foundation. When green lawns and swimming pools replace centuries-old saguaros or pinions, plants and animals aren’t the only losers. We’re also destroying our incarnate connection to Jesus’ lesson on building a faith that lasts.

Ironically, the overdevelopment also illustrates Jesus warning about false foundations. Like a house on sand, the West has an equally risky base -- borrowed water. Depleting water tables and pumping water from faraway sources like the Colorado River has made development fast and easy. But a region built on borrowed water has no more chance of surviving than a house built on sand.

I am grateful for the foundation of faith laid for me by both the Bible and by this desert land. As a minister of a young church in the Southwest, I believe my call is to pass on that biblical bedrock and also to care for this corner of creation that makes it incarnate.

"When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted."

Passages like this assure me there’s a place for me and the people I serve. Unlike John’s story of Thomas, Matthew didn’t single out one disciple as the doubter. He says that some doubted." While Thomas was clear about his doubt ("unless I see the print of the nails Matthew didn’t say why they doubted -- or what they doubted. Perhaps they weren’t sure it was Jesus, or they doubted he had actually died. Maybe they had simply been through enough and weren’t about to be fooled or hurt again.

Thomas demanded proof. Jesus gave it. But Jesus didn’t address their doubt by telling and unpacking a parable or assuring them with another teaching. Not now. Now he simply commissioned them: "Go and make disciples, baptize, teach."

Apparently having doubts didn’t let them off the hook. Believe it or not, they still had a job to do. As they say in AA, "Fake it till you make it." I think Jesus said the same thing that day on the mountaintop.

I’m glad he did. Some people seem born to believe. For others, myself included, "faking it" has been part of the process. Always one to hedge my bets, I went to seminary on a "trial year" fellowship. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how passionately uncertain I was when I began 30 years ago. From the beginning, it was unclear who was on trial -- me or the school. I’d started college as a biology major but switched to religion and political science after taking a course from a professor who was also a rabbi.

It was the 1970s. None of my classmates were going to church, much less seminary. I had a slew of doubts. I wasn’t sure I had the right to be in a relationship with God. I doubted that I was patient enough, kind enough, loving enough, Christian enough to be a minister.

But as Woody Allen says, "Ninety percent of life is showing up." Like the disciples on the mountain, the trial year gave me the chance to show up -- in worship, in class, in the life of the community. To show up in the relationship with God, the Bible, and this thing called faith. By the end of the year, I still had doubts about my legitimacy as a minister and a Christian. But I had no doubt I wanted to continue the journey.

Two years later, an internship gave me a chance to show up -- in at a hospital room, a youth retreat, the house where someone had just died, the pulpit. Those encounters gave me a chance to put flesh on my faith. They taught me the blessing Jesus offered with his commission: "Lo, I am with you always" (even if my fingers were crossed).

By graduation I hadn’t answered all my questions, nor had I dispelled my impatience, feistiness and other non-Christian virtues. But without a doubt, I’d learned that faith was always a process and not some kind of neatly packaged product. Faith has stood me in good stead over the last 25 years, especially the last 18 as a minister in Santa Fe. The church I serve is celebrating its 25th anniversary. When I accepted the call in 1987, I wasn’t sure if either the church or I would make it to the next year, much less our 25th.

The congregation was founded in 1980 and had 90 members and a half-million-dollar mortgage. Our children’s space was so small that if more than 12 youngsters showed up, we spent our time slowing unchristian fights and skirmishes. The church was generous in terms of outreach giving, but we had no staff, not even a part-time secretary. To top it off, the congregation had just gone through two years of difficult leadership issues and came close to splitting.

Suffice it to say, I had my doubts. Sometimes I felt that the church wasn’t even sure it wanted to be a church. Santa Fe seemed to be a place where spirituality was in, but religion, especially organized religion, was out. Sometimes that led to new approaches. The sanctuary was the "Gathering Room," the Sunday school a "Learning Center." But the ethos could also be disempowering. One leader told me I shouldn’t ask people to "affirm their baptism" when they joined the church. Asking them to "follow in the paths of peace and justice" was OK, but not as a "disciple of Jesus Christ." United Way, yes. United Church, not so sure.

But we’ve kept trying to live into our commission as a church. At times, I’ve felt like Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, selling the idea that United could be a church just as the professor promoted the idea of a boy’s band. But with others who share that vision, it’s paid off. We’ve been committed to a strong children’s and youth program, and next month we’ll initiate 13 confirmands.

Worship has always been at the center of our life, even when we couldn’t afford a pianist. My first Easter we cobbled together a pickup choir to sing the "Hallelujah Chorus." We’ve sung it every Easter since.

When I get discouraged and full of doubt about our future, I remember this passage where true believers and doubting Thomases, Andrews, Johns and even Talithas all were assigned a job to do and a promise to go with it. No doubt that’s why it’s called the good news.

He had real grit, that Joshua. When his fellow spies felt like grasshoppers and the Canaanites looked like giants, Joshua and his friend Caleb urged the Hebrews to take them on even when their compatriots threatened to stone them for their advice. After Moses died and Joshua assumed command, he showed his mettle by trusting God to bring down the walls of Jericho with only the sound of the trumpet and the shouts of the people.

But I think Joshua’s greatest moment came in his farewell speech to the Israelites, when he told them the truth about their covenant with God. He and his family had chosen to follow the Lord, Joshua proclaimed. The people roared enthusiastically. They would do the same. But Joshua didn’t accept their initial response. Instead he reminded them not once but three times of the cost of that covenant and the consequences of breaking it. If they dealt falsely with their God, Joshua warned, God would do them harm and consume them. Probably the Hebrews were ready to stone him for being so demandingly honest.

As a parish minister, I assume Joshua’s role when I invite people to affirm their covenant with God and one another. But I seldom have his courage in the follow-through. If I did, when parents brought their child for baptism, I would ask more than the generic "Do you promise to grow with this child in the Christian faith and offer him or her the nurture of the Christian church?"

Instead I’d ask, in front of God and the whole congregation, "Do you promise to get him or her out of bed, dressed and here every Sunday morning for the next 18 years, even when you’ve had a long week or you’d rather sleep in or there’s a soccer match or when this darling infant has grown into a surly, tatooed teenager who thinks church is ‘dumb’?"

I’ve never been that honest about baptismal vows. I bet Joshua would have been. When people join the church, Joshua would have asked more than a rote "Do you renounce the powers of evil and seek the freedom of new life in Christ?" After the unsuspecting new member said yes, Joshua would have followed with, "So when you buy your next car, will you resist all the commercial hype that encourages you to overspend on something that eats up resources and pollutes the air?"

Had Joshua presided at my ordination, I doubt he would have let me get by with a simple vow to study, pray, teach and preach. He probably would have demanded, "Will you give up your personal gods of procrastination, perfectionism and the pursuit of trivia?"

As a pastor, of course I’d like to beef up the traditional vows of baptism or membership. But then I’d need more assurance in dealing with Joshua’s dire consequences of covenant-breaking. For many people in my congregation, the primary experience of covenants -- marriage, family, church affiliation or job -- has been their endings. How do I capture Joshua’s passion for keeping covenant with God without sounding judgmental and damning of persons whose human covenants have been broken, either by design or default?

Joshua’s uncompromising stance on the exclusivity of the covenant poses another challenge. Even as a child growing up Congregational in the Southwest, I knew the history of violence and devastation that faithful Protestants inflicted on Native Americans and Catholics when they encountered those people’s "foreign gods."

Yet when I moved back west after a ten-year sojourn among Connecticut Yankees, the spiritual smorgasbord of Santa Fe felt overwhelming. Like other New Age centers, it seemed filled with Anglo spiritual dilettantes, people who had grown up Protestant or Catholic and then tried every spiritual path from Buddhism and Native American practices to Sufi dancing and Hindu chant. When they landed at the United Church of Santa Fe, they often felt lost and disoriented, as if they had gone through multiple intimate relationships. At the same time, they were wary and uncertain about committing to any faith tradition.

I resonate with Joshua’s willingness to affirm what he believed, but I want to do it without damning other faiths. How do I retain the essence of his covenant without its exclusivity?

A chance encounter with Martin Marty taught me how. In 1989 Marty was speaking on religious pluralism at the University of New Mexico. I almost didn’t go -- I’d had my fill of spiritual "options." But I’d enjoyed his columns in the CENTURY for years, so I made the two-hour trip. What Marty said that night has been a plumb line for my ministry. When I asked, "What advice do you have for a United Church of Christ pastor serving a church that isn’t sure it wants to be a Christian church in the New Age capital of Santa Fe?" He paused. "The United Church of Christ?" he asked. I nodded. "You have the blood of the Puritans in you! Claim your inheritance." But then he said, "If you go deep enough into any faith tradition, you find the common ground with all other traditions. That’s why a Baptist preacher like Martin Luther King could learn from Gandhi the Hindu, or why a Capuchin like Thomas Merton was in conversation with Buddhist monks."

"I think that’s what all of us are seeking," he continued. "We want that common ground. But we have to go deep into our own tradition to find it. You need to tell your people that."

It’s been almost 15 years since that night, but there’s seldom a day I don’t remember Marty’s words. "Go deep," he said. It sounds like Joshua’s "Choose this day whom you will serve." Either way, it takes grit. Either way it leads to life and to God.

Deborah: Judge. Prophetess. Wife or "spirited woman," depending on how you translate the Hebrew. Powerful woman who advised generals and led troops into battle. Creative woman who composed songs of victory. Wise woman who "sat."

As a seminarian, I was impressed by Deborah’s many roles and responsibilities. She was a leader of men when women could only be wives, sisters and mothers. A judge, when a woman’s testimony never counted as much as a man’s. On the front line, when a woman’s place was in the home.

I am still impressed by all that. But 20-plus years later, as a minister with a considerable number of roles myself, I’m equally impressed with the phrase; "She used to sit." I think it’s the most radical thing she did, especially as a leader. We leaders organize, plan, execute, strategize. We lead. We don’t sit.

My mother used to sit. As a widowed parent to four children, a science teacher and a volunteer for church and 4-H, she had little time to sit. Yet every morning before we got up, she’d sit in her chair in the living room, a cup of coffee in one hand, the Bible in the other. If the afternoon permitted it, she did the same, although with a cup of tea or a can of beer (if the day had been really long), and with the newspaper instead of the Bible. We kids knew the time was sacred and did not disturb her with "What’s for dinner?"

I think we knew that sitting made all the other activity possible. It didn’t solve all our problems as a family, of which there were many, or guarantee order out of chaos. But sitting offered my mother a chance to catch her breath, to remember life was more than the task at hand, and to tap into some sense of peace in the midst of the maelstrom.

I suspect that was true for Deborah as well. Leaders need wisdom and courage and can’t find those qualities if they’re always out front leading the charge. Sometimes they need just to sit.

Sitting is usually the last thing I want to do, or that I think others expect me to do. As the minister of a growing church, I’ve spent the last 15 years as a strategic planner, organizer, cajoler, counselor, preacher, even construction supervisor. Those roles grow as the church grows.

Although I value those roles and take my responsibilities seriously, I increasingly yearn to sit in silence. There are even times when I wonder if I have any word to offer, which is almost blasphemous for a United Church of Christ minister. Sitting in silence is for Quakers, not UCC pastors. But then I remember Deborah under her palm tree and my mother with her morning coffee. And I remember Joan Forsberg.

Joan, a UCC minister, was dean of students at Yale Divinity School during the ‘70s and ‘80s, a time when women were finding their voices and leadership in the church in new ways. As a mentor and role model for women students, Joan was a top candidate to speak at the first women’s reunion at YDS. As Women’s Center coordinator, it was my job to talk her into it.

We met over supper at a neighborhood café. After I affirmed the importance of her preaching, however, Joan told me that she couldn’t accept the invitation. "You can’t preach if you don’t have something to say," she said. "You have to have some word to offer. Right now, I don’t have one"

"Every woman of your generation would know what you were talking about," I added, "and most of the men too. And those of us still in school need to hear that word, too, because sooner or later, we’ll find ourselves sitting in that silence."

Joan did decide to preach at the reunion. She talked about being silenced by one’s life and having to sit without words or answers. She urged us not to fight the silence nor to castigate ourselves for it, but to let it teach us what it would. Except for sighs and sniffles, there wasn’t a sound in the chapel after she finished.

I don’t know how old Deborah was when she was a judge in Israel, but I’m now the age my mother was when I was a teenager and the age Joan was when we shared dinner that night. The longer I stay in ministry, the more grateful I am for the example of powerfully wise women who lead, counsel, advise, preach -- and sometimes just sit in silence.

As a child, I studied many different images of the Good Shepherd. I saw the official version every Sunday in the stained glass window above the altar at First Congregational Church in Tempe, Arizona. That shepherd was a tall, friendly-looking, 30-something man, fair of skin and eye with long, flowing, goldish-brown locks and soft hands. Dressed in a full-length white robe, he seemed remarkably clean for someone who supposedly spent his time chasing sheep. A little lamb nestled in his big, strong arms, while more sheep rested at his feet.

That image in the window, in its various versions, is probably the most familiar representation of the Good Shepherd, the one who, in the words of Ezekiel, will seek out the lost, bring them back from the darkness and lead them to good pastures. Yet as beautiful and peaceful as that image was, it didn’t jibe with my own experience.

I’d like to suggest some additional models for Good Shepherd pictures. Perhaps an artist could paint one of the men who wintered their sheep in the alfalfa fields a few blocks from the new subdivision to which my family moved in 1960. No long flowing robes for these sheep herders -- the material would have caught on the first cactus they encountered. Their jeans and flannel shirts were far more practical. These would be well worn, muddy and stained with sheep balm. (Like Ezekiel’s shepherd, these sheepmen spent a good deal of time binding up the injured and hurt.) Unlike the stained glass Good Shepherd, their skin was brown and weathered, their eyes bloodshot from the Arizona sun, and their hands callused and cracked.

Ezekiel’s shepherd is often on the move, but as any sheepherder will tell you, the times of search are the exception rather than the rule. Herding sheep involves long stretches of standing around watching the sheep eat. Often as not, I’d see one of the migrant sheepherders squatting under the one lone tree in the field, keeping an eye on the flock while taking a long drag on his cigarette.

A weather-beaten Good Shepherd with stained jeans and a Camel in his fingers will probably never make it into a church window. Yet it would represent a lot of God’s job with us human beings -- waiting around, watching what we’re doing, hoping we’ll stay out of trouble, and getting us out of it when we don’t.

Another childhood experience was envying 4-H friends who lived on the outskirts of town and could raise a lamb or two in their backyards. My 4-H projects were limited to cooking, sewing, collecting insects and working on home beautification. At demonstrations and contests, the little shepherds got to wear jeans and cowboy boots and hang out in the barns. I was stuck in my homemade uniform with its pleated skirt and button-down blouse, and resigned to defending the virtues of chocolate chip cookies and a well-kept house. But my envy turned to empathy when, at the end of the spring fair, the young shepherds’ woolly family pets were sold to the highest bidder. I saw more than one small shepherd sit on his hay bale, cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes as he buried a tear-stained face in his arms.

Idea for a window: a nine-year-old Good Shepherd weeping and holding on for dear life to his soon-to-be-lost lamb.

And one more. When I was seven, my mother gave me a book titled Little Herder in Autumn and Winter, The first of a series of children’s books written in both English and Navajo, it told the story of a little Navajo girl, her family and their sheep. The book’s cover showed the traditional Good Shepherd cradling a lamb with a serene, sure look. But the shepherd in the book was a seven-year-old, and the lamb was almost as big as she. Her face was round, her jet black hair was pulled back in a pony tail, and she wore a long, flowing skirt and a velvet blouse.

The story offered an image of a shepherd not unlike Ezekiel’s. "It takes many steps to keep up with the sheep," says Little Herder ("Na’nikkaadi Yazhi"). "The way is long, the sand is hot, the arroyos are deep. We walk until the day is done." In the winter when the snow covers everything, Little Herder and her parents take wood from their own dwindling pile in the hogan to build a fire to melt snow for their sheep. And one day, when a ewe is lost, the little girl searches until she finds both it and its new lamb. Even though it’s late, she’s hungry and the lamb is heavy, Little Herder carries it all the way home because it’s too young to walk quickly and a coyote is howling. Ezekiel’s Good Shepherd (or Isaiah’s or Matthew’s) has nothing on Little Herder.

Say "Good Shepherd" to most Christians, at least in this country, and chances are we see the stained glass window that I saw as a child. But Good Shepherds come in all sizes, shapes, ages and colors. As Ezekiel himself would argue, it’s the care for the sheep and the goodness of the shepherd that counts.

A weathered brown-skinned man with sheep balm on his jeans and a cigarette in his callused hand. A boy pulling his cowboy hat down over his eyes so you can’t see his tears. A little Navajo herder holding the lost lamb she’s keeping safe from the coyotes. All are images of Good Shepherds, and according to Ezekiel, all are images of God. Any stained glass makers around?