more like a word theme, really

[32] of joys and covenants [Christmas 1B, CWM]

2012-01-01T19:53:00.002-05:00

First Sunday after Christmas Day

Psalm 148
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 2:22-40

[This is the text I preached off of. My delivery was more colloquial.]

of joys and covenants

Today, the 8th Day of Christmas, many Christian churches celebrate the circumcision of Baby Jesus. I was telling my friend Shoshana that I’d agreed to preach on this Sunday. Being Jewish, she talked about circumcision as covenant and various other covenant moments in the Old Testament. I said that while “circumcision” is a catchy hook into talking about the day, the Gospel reading is mostly about Simeon and Anna’s songs of praise -- and that the other assigned readings for the day follow this praise theme. She said she would still talk about covenant.

I didn’t really have a theme in mind, and this one grew on me as I thought through the lectionary. (Yes, I do like having other people write my sermons for me.) I realized belatedly that of the 3 lectionary options for today, I’d actually picked the one that’s for the first Sunday after Christmas Day, whose Gospel reading begins the verse AFTER Jesus’ circumcision.

Mary and Joseph have shown up at the Temple to offer purification offering, and to present Mary’s firstborn to God. These commandments hearken back to Leviticus and Exodus, the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, the Written Law. While the Law often gets something of a bad rap in Christianity, the Torah was a good gift from God, a guide for the people as to how to be in right relationship with God.

And this theme of covenant relationship continues in today’s texts.

Simeon was promised, “You will not see death before you have seen God’s Messiah,” and guided by the Holy Spirit, Simeon recognizes in this newborn baby, the Messiah, the one who will not only be for the glory of God’s people Israel but also a light for revelation to the Gentiles -- salvation prepared in the presence of ALL peoples.

Simeon is hearkening back to Isaic prophecies. Thursday’s assigned lectionary speaks to us from Isaiah: “It is not enough [...] to restore the tribes of Leah, Rachel, and Jacob and bring back the survivors of Israel; I will make you the light of the nations, so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” (Isaiah 49:6).

God’s salvation is not for a select few but is for the whole of creation. And this is a beautiful, wonderful, celebrative thing. Our reading from Isaiah introduces the language of marriage, but it stops before my favorite part:

Never again will you be called Forsaken. Never again will you be called Desolate. But you will be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land will be called Married. For HaShem will take delight in you and your land will be joined with God in wedlock. For just as a young couple marry, you will be forever married to this land; as a newly married couple rejoice over each other, so will HaShem rejoice over you. (Isaiah 62:4-5)

God will rejoice over this new relationship with us.

This helps me make some peace with the Galatians text. I’m really uncomfortable with the idea that we are adopted as God’s children through Christ -- because we are ALREADY God’s beloved children by virtue of our existence.

But the Isaic texts remind me that pre-existing relationships can change. People who are to be married are still in love and committed prior to the actual ceremony -- but the ceremony change something about that relationship, both for themselves and for their community. There’s an intensifying that happens there.

And that’s sort of like what happens with the Incarnation -- though in some ways it’s as much an expansion as it is an intensification. For a long time, the Israelites were God’s chosen people. And that doesn’t always work out well -- Israel frequently lusts after foreign gods, upset that HaShem, the supposed God of Israel, isn’t giving her what she wants. This comes up a lot in the prophets -- HaShem calling Israel a whore but saying, “I still love you.” So Promise #1 is that HaShem and Israel will finally work out their issues and get married. Promise #2 is that transformation and right relationship will extend not just to Israel but to the whole world. Yes, God is singing the “Boom De Yada” song -- “I love the whole world...”

Through Christ, we are adopted into God’s family in a way that is somehow different than we were before -- as children; and if children, heirs; heirs to a promise.

So what do we do with this promise we have inherited?

As Jeff Mansfield (Associate Pastor at First Church Somerville) pointed out, now that the anticipatory season of Advent is fulfilled, we are faced with the newness of the Christ child, so what are we going to do with it?

[This is where my text ended. I extemp'ed about being bearers of that already-and-not-yet salvation and reconiliation, about remembering that this is not just between us and God in an individually relational way but is about the whole world.]

***

Editing the NRSV was fairly straightforward (initially I de-gendered Simeon, but then that got too clunky, so I let the masculine pronouns recur partway through; and Anna remained female the whole time), but I really liked what I did with Psalm 148 (adapted from the NRSV, The Inclusive Bible, and Nan Merrill’s Psalms for Praying) and wanted to share:

1 Alleluia! Praise God! Give praise from the heavens, and from all the ends of the earth!
2 Give praise all you angels; give praise all you hosts!
3 Give praise, sun and moon; give praise, all you shining stars!
4 Give praise, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens!
5 Let them praise the Name of Love, by whose Word they were created.
6 God established the enduring pattern of Creation.
7 Give praise from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps,
8 Fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling God’s Word!
9 Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!
10 Wild and domesticated animals, creeping things and flying birds!
11 Rulers of the earth and all peoples, leaders of all nations, all the judges of the world!
12 Young people of all genders, old and young together!
13 Let them praise the Name of Love, which Name alone is exalted; whose majesty transcends heaven and earth,
14 And who has raised up a horn for God's people, praise for the faithful, the children of Israel, the people dear to God. Alleluia!

[Rest and re/New] "this is a day of new beginnings..."

2011-12-29T11:02:00.001-05:00

At Rest and re/New last night, Jeff Reflected on Psalm 98. He okayed the Inclusive Bible version (noting that it changed "strong arm" to "holy arm," which I found interesting given that it included "Ruler of All"). I refuse to "pronounce" the Tetragrammaton, and Keith suggested that instead of my usual "HaShem" I say something more accessible, like "God." Jeff suggested "Baby Jesus," and while this ultimately got ix-nayed, I thought it worked well, so:

1. Sing a new song to Baby Jesus,
who has worked wonders,
whose [] hand and holy arm
have brought deliverance!
2. Baby Jesus has made salvation known
and shown divine justice to the nations,
3. and has remembered in truth and love
the house of Israel.
All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation of our God.
4. Shout to the Most High, all the earth,
break into joyous songs of praise!
5. Sing praise to Baby Jesus with the harp,
with the harp and melodious singing!
6. With triumph and the blast of the shofar,
raise a shout to Baby Jesus, Ruler of All.
7. Let the sea and all within it thunder;
the world and all its peoples.
8. Let the rivers clap their hands
and the hills ring out their joy
9. before Baby Jesus, who comes to judge the earth,
who will rule the world with justice
and its peoples with equity.

***

Jeff talked about how after the season of waiting that is Advent, the Christ Child is come and what do we do now? What newness is breaking into our lives now?

I have become really cranky at church people talking about January 1 as "the new year" since hi, the church new year starts at Advent 1. (me: "secular Gregorian new year" / Shoshana: "Wasn't Gregory Pope?" / me: "... You with your logic." The Gregorian calendar was based on the Julian month system, though -- hay thar Wikipedia...) But Jeff's framing provides me a way to be thinking about newness in a way which overlaps with the dominant culture but is also authentic to the liturgical year.

[31] Hagar and Ishmael (CWM)

2011-12-04T19:50:00.004-05:00

This year, CWM is doing a (mostly off-lectionary) "Advent sermon series on rethinking texts that seem unjust...asking how there might be a re-thinking of the text in a way that provides a justice alternative to the solution that is offered." [read more here]

For the Sunday that Pastor Lisa would be away, I agreed to preach on the story of Hagar and Ishmael -- translation largely thanks to Phyllis Trible.

Genesis 12:1-3, 16:1-14, 21:9-21

(Gen. 12:1-3) God said to Abram, "Go forth from your native land and from your people and from your parents' house, to a land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation. And I will bless you and make your name so great that it will be used in blessings. I will bless those who bless you, and the one despising you I will curse. And all the families of the earth will bless themselves through you."

Fast forward, through stories including Abram, out of fear for his own safety while they are in Egypt, passing his wife Sarai off as his sister and letting the Pharaoh take her as a spouse.

(Gen. 16:1-14) For ten years, Sarai and Abram lived in the land of Canaan and remained childless. Sarai had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar and one day, Sarai said to Abram, "Behold, God has made me childless. Go, then, to my maid. Perhaps I will be built up from her." So Abram did.

And after Hagar became pregnant, Sarai became slight in her eyes. So Sarai said to Abram, "May the wrong done to me be upon you. I gave my maid to your embrace, but when I saw that she had conceived, then I was slight in her eyes. May God judge between you and me."

But Abram said to Sarai, "Behold, your maid is in your hand. Do to her the good in your eyes." [i.e., "Do to her what you deem right."]

And Sarai afflicted her. So Hagar fled from her. The messenger of God found Hagar in the desert near a spring on the road to Shur. The messenger said, "Hagar, maidservant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?"

Hagar answered, "From the face of my mistress Sarai I am fleeing."

The messenger said to her, "Return to your mistress and suffer affliction under her hand. I will so greatly multiply your descendants that they cannot be numbered for multitude." Then the messenger continued, "Truly you are pregnant and will bear a son. You will call his name Ishmael ("God hears"), for God has paid heed to your affliction. He will be a wild ass of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone's hand against him. And against the face of all his brothers he will dwell."

Hagar called the name of God who has spoken to her, saying, "You are El-Roi -- God of seeing. Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing God?" That is why the well is called Beerlahi-roi -- "Well of the Living One Who Sees Me."

Fast forward even more -- God renames Abram and Sarai Abraham and Sarah and makes them the parents of the covenant, through their son Isaac, the son of their old age.

(Gen. 21:9-21) Now Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian playing. Sarah demanded of Abraham, "Cast out this slave woman and her son, for the son of this slave woman will not inherit with my son, with Isaac."

This was very distressing in the eyes of Abraham on account of his son, Ishmael.

But God said to Abraham, "Do not be distressed in your eyes on account of the lad on account of your slave woman. Everything that Sarah says to you, heed her voice. For in Isaac will be named to you descendants. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him as well, since he is also your descendant. "

So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child. He sent her away, and she wandered off into the desert of Beersheeba.

When the water in the skin was gone, she laid the child under one of the bushes as if in a deathbed. Then she went and sat by herself in front of him, about a bowshot away.

As Hagar sat in front of him, she lifted up her voice and wept, "Let me not see the death of my child."

God heard the voice of the lad and said, "What troubles, you Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad and hold him by your hand, for I shall make him into a great nation."

Then God revealed to Hagar a well of water and she went to it and filled the skin with water and gave the lad a drink.

And God was with the lad; and he grew up and lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother took for him a wife from the land of Egypt.

Hear what the Spirit might be saying to the church.

In the Gospels we encounter Jesus saying to the other Jews of the day, "Do not say to each other, 'We are safe, for we are descendants of Abraham and Sarah.' That means nothing, for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham and Sarah." (Matthew 3:9, Luke 3:8)

Being descendants of Abraham and Sarah, inheritors of the promise, is a big deal. But in reading Genesis, I can't say that I'm too eager to claim Abraham and Sarah as my spiritual ancestors.

My friend Eda introduced me to the writings of Pauli Murray -- an African-American lawyer and activist, active from the 1940s, and in 1977, at the age of 66, the first African-American woman ordained in the Episcopal Church.

Pauli Murray grew up in North Carolina, and her maternal great-grandmother was a Cherokee Indian slave who was raped by a white man in the household in which she was a servant.

Murray says, "It was my destiny to be the descendant of slave owners as well as slaves, to be of mixed ancestry, to be biologically and psychologically integrated in a world where the separation of the races was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States as the fundamental law of our Southland." (p. 87, Pauli Murray: Selected Sermons and Writings)

Pauli Murray talks about the USA as an Ishmaelite nation -- all of us closer kin than we like to imagine with whomever the "Other" is, be it slave or slave owner.

She quotes from the diary of a white woman of the antebellum South, Mary Boykin Chestnut: "God help us, but ours is a monstrous system....Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives; and concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children." (p. 56, Pauli Murray: Selected Sermons and Writings)

Just as I don't really want to claim Abraham and Sarah as my spiritual ancestors, I don't want to claim slave-ownership as part of my history. But regardless of whether any of that is literally in my family tree, it is part of the history I have inherited as a citizen of this nation -- just as Abraham and Sarah are part of the history I have inherited as a Christian, whether I like it or not.

When Eda was telling me about Pauli Murray's thoughts on the USA as an Ishmaelite nation, I said, "That's really interesting, but Pastor Lisa's idea for this sermon series was finding justice-oriented alternatives to the unjust solutions offered in the text." I didn't really know what to do with all these interesting ideas, because they seemed to just be adding to the bad news of the text, expanding its scope.

Eda said that Pauli Murray's takeaway from the fact of the USA as an Ishmaelite nation is that we are all closer kin than we like to think that we are -- and that if we acknowledged that, not just acknowledged the trauma and injustice that are a part of our history (necessary though that acknowledgment is), but acknowledged our kinship with those we think of as "Other," recognized our shared kinship rather than segregating ourselves into falsely dichotomous identities, really radical transformation could occur.

Kate Bornstein Tweeted the other day: "[I] spoke last night about #radical #welcoming & #inclusion as an #activism leading to a #politic of #compassion."

Radical welcoming and inclusion as an activism leading to a politic of compassion.

Delores Williams says that "Hagar's predicament involved slavery, poverty, ethnicity, sexual and economic exploitation, surrogacy, domestic violence, homelessness, single parenting, and radical encounters with God." These issues are still very real and present today.

Do we recognize the Hagar in our midst? Do we recognize our kinship with those whose issues are not "our" issues?

Or do we instead perpetuate these systems of oppression?

Sarai took God’s promise of abundance and took it upon herself to bring that promise to fulfillment when God seemed to be dawdling – and took it upon herself to do so by exploiting a woman who was under her care. Once the promise was fulfilled in a way she liked better, she wanted to get rid of the second-rate version – nevermind that these were real human beings.

How often do we look at other people as expendable, existing only to serve our purposes?

Can we take from the story of Hagar and Ishmael a reminder of how intertwined our families are?

Today's assigned reading in Isaiah opens: "Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from God's hand double for all her sins."

Can we embody that message? A word of grace that enables us to forgive ourselves and others for the past and to move forward in love?

According to Gordon Lathrop, Advent and Christmas are "ways of speaking the word of God into the solstice festivals being celebrated today." (11) The solstice festivals -- celebrating light in the midst of darkness -- frequently have an element of upside-down-ness, of "midwinter protests" (7). Perhaps we can embrace some of this midwinter protest, to live into the world not as it is but as it should be, embodying the kindom which is both now and not yet.

Lathrop writes, "Advent in the church is intended as a time to feel the current reality of waiting in the world. Such waiting provides its own language for fully speaking the gospel of Christ, and it provides a realism and honesty that the human heart longs to hear." (12)

May we be bearers of the gospel -- preachers of realism and honesty and also of hope, of light against the darkness.

Amen.

"Therefore we should have priests appropriately ready to recognize and accept the Son of God when he returns as a daughter."

2011-11-27T15:52:00.002-05:00

FCS's Advent theme this year is "misrule" -- about holy upside-downings, "turning our ideas about power and privilege upside down," to quote from Molly's Advent and Christmas 2011 letter.

One of the themes of Advent is that Christ doesn't come in the way we expect.

I've told just about everyone about my best friend's lesbian Christology, but I was definitely pleasantly surprised to encounter something like it in my Pauli Murray reading.

Back in 1973, in my first interview with the suffragan bishop of Massachusetts. the Rt. Rev. Morris F. Anderson (known as "Ben"), in charge of candidates for Holy Orders, made a comment to me, and he repeated this comment at the time of his retirement in his reflections "On Being a Bishop" (Massachusetts Episcopal Times, November 1981, 7). He writes:
At New Orleans I made my first speech in the House of Bishops. I followed [Bishop] Kim Meyers [who has died since then], who was at the time speaking against the ordination of women. I said just as I envisioned the Second Coming of Christ in terms of a person of a different race, in order to proclaim the fullness of God and his love, I could envision the Second Coming of Christ as a member of a different sex. Therefore we should have priests appropriately ready to recognize and accept the Son of God when he returns as a daughter. This is a bit radical for the House of Bishops in those days.
-p. 49 of Pauli Murray: Selected Sermons and Writings, selected and edited by Anthony B. Pinn; from a sermon Pauli Murray preached on September 12, 1982, at the Church of the Holy Nativity in Baltimore, Maryland (located in the Pauli Murray Papers, box 65, folder 1106, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University)

things Christianity didn't quite invent, and theologies I don't quite have

2011-09-28T15:19:00.002-04:00

Velveteen Rabbi recently posted a round-up of selichot posts from previous years.

In one, she wrote:

At our selichot services, we'll be using the prayer as a lead-in to a meditation around the radical idea that every single time/place we've missed the mark in our entire lives is always forgiven. Whenever I seriously think about that, it blows me away. Everything I've ever done wrong, in my relationships with other people, in my relationship with myself, in my relationship with God: all of it is forgiven. What would it mean to truly understand that, and to let all of that old baggage go?

My immediate reaction, of course, was, "Gee, that sounds familiar."

I'm also reminded of the conversation Shoshana and I once started to have about the issue of God forgiving you for sins you committed against other people.

We did John 3 at SCBC last night, and I asked what does it mean to "believe in [Jesus]" (John 3:16) and didn't get a satisfactory answer -- nor do I have one myself (though I keep going back to Borg's point about "believe" meaning "to give one's heart to" and thus I move to an emphasis on relationship rather than doctrinal assent) -- though I continue to have discomfort with the idea of Jesus being necessary to save us from God sending us to eternal damnation (which was the idea that kept coming up from the other people in the group). Yeah, I'm reminded of my telling Pr. Lisa that no, I don't have anything written down about my Christology, in large part because I don't have a coherent Christology. And I'm still trying to make sense of Borg and Crossan's book on Paul.

"Beautiful Jesus"

2011-09-08T12:27:00.005-04:00

At morning prayer this morning, we sang "Beautiful Jesus" (TNCH #44). I told Ian T. that I wasn't a big fan -- that it's a "Jesus is my boyfriend" sort of a hymn. Afterward, Ian said he'd never heard the term "Jesus is my boyfriend" but that it certainly fit, that this song sounds a lot like something you would say to your lover. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but it's true.

I said that (and that this is because/indicative that I'm a Unitarian at heart) the word that primarily comes to mind for me for this hymn is "idolatrous." I said that the phrase "Jesus is my boyfriend" usually gets used to refer to contemporary praise music, but that I thought of it in this hymn because there's stuff about the beauty of Creation, and I'm into that, but then it's, "But Jesus is better -- he's prettier and he smells better." Ian laughed and said, "You're paraphrasing, but not by much."

I said I am pro-Jesus, but because of the work Jesus did in the world... Ian concurred.

Ian said the hymn is often titled "Fairest Lord Jesus" [warning for auto-play in that link] and that makes him think White and he was glad that at least we weren't singing something with the undertones of, "Jesus is the best because he's pretty -- and he's pretty mostly because he's White."

In thinking about the "Jesus is my boyfriend" trope, I thought of my best friend's love for Jesus and Her Church -- something I very much don't have.

When my best friend says, "Jesus is my Girlfriend," there's a lot going on with Incarnation and queer theology and body theology there.

So/and I'm hesitant to totally dismiss "I personally adore the person [pun intended] of Jesus."

Though I'm still uncomfortable with the adoration/worship of Jesus.

I'm not all that interested in worship/adoration of God of the, "Here, I will tell You how awesome You are," variety, period, because I don't think God needs ego-boosts (though I do think reminding ourselves of the goodness of God can be a valuable spiritual practice).

And -- perhaps ironically for someone who professes to be really uninterested in most social justice work -- I think God is happier when we are working to do God's Will in the world, to help embody the truth that "The kin-dom of God is at hand," than when we are just singing God's praises. (When you are in love with someone, you want to love what they love, right? You want to be passionate about the things they're passionate about. You want to work with them. You don't want to spend ALL of your time gushing at/about them. At least not once you're past the NRE stage.)

religious but not spiritual

2011-09-08T12:25:00.001-04:00

My best friend and I were talking on Saturday about last Wednesday's controversial UCC "devotional." [Edit for those who don't follow me on facebook (where I have commented in various threads, including one of my own): I have basically all of anger at this piece. /warning]

She mentioned that people have commented, "Nobody would say they were 'religious but not spiritual,'" to which she was like, "Uh..."

I said, "I am totally 'religious but not spiritual.'" I don't "experience" in worship. I have a strong commitment to Christianity, and I make a commitment to attend communal services (though I don't tend to think of this latter one as a conscious choice, such a creature of habit am I), but my commitment has always been and continues to be a primarily intellectual one.

My best friend commented that she has committed to a set of practices, including communal worship, which frequently do not result in spiritual experience, so the "spiritual but not religious" person might come across as saying, "Hey, I have spiritual experiences all the time, all by myself," which might be experienced negatively by someone for whom spiritual experiences are rare.

Whereas my reaction is more like, "Oh, that's nice for you that you so easily have these experiences which I don't have any strong desire to have" (there's an asexuality analogy here somewhere).

sekritly a social justice radical

2011-09-05T17:08:00.003-04:00

Last Tuesday night I was at a visioning session [and yes, I would like a less ableist term for that] for a group I've been involved with for much of this year, and I repeatedly said that social justice isn't where my passion is. And just about every time I said it, I felt a little twinge like I was lying -- because fat pol and disability pol and mental health pol ... these are all issues that have become very important to me. But they're not issues where people are going to say, "Yes, I'm totally on board with that -- or at least as a good liberal I feel like I 'should' be."

And so I frequently don't speak up and advocate for these things I care about, because I am, contrary to how I may appear, frequently a risk-averse confrontation-avoidant person. (Reasons I don't self-identify as an activist.)

So I am owning the things I care about.

I care about healthy sexuality -- and about being inclusive of various manifestations of sexuality, including the asexuality spectrum, polyamory, and kink.

I care about being inclusive of a variety of gender identities and gender expressions. (In a Christian context, I want the diversity of humanity to be represented in the ways we talk about ALL persons of the Trinity, because we are ALL created in the image of God, and we are ALL part of the Body of Christ.)

I am growing to care more about the negative effects of rape culture and cultural appropriation.

I care about disability, including chronic pain and mental illness. I care about accessibility and about resisting the culture of shame in which we live. I care about models of disability other than "you are broken, and you would be happier/better if you were 'fixed.' " I care about not using language like "lame" or "crazy" as synonymous with "deficient" or "ridiculous." (See also: "mental illness as boogeyman.")

I care about Health At Every Size -- about not treating weight numbers as indicators of health.

I care about DBT -- about not using "should" language, about recognizing that we always have choices in how we respond to situations but we can't magically wish ourselves out of those situations. (This latter piece I think has a lot of utility in justice work -- about working with what we have right now, rather than solely bemoaning that we don't live in a better world.)

I want to be aware of the multiplicity of human experiences.

And I can't help analogizing that to the radical hospitality that Christians are called to.

I care about drawing the circle wider.

As someone who has visited many churches, I care about making church as hospitable as possible -- clearly articulating our choreography, offering gluten-free Bread and non-alcoholic Cup, taking cues from people about their level of comfort with touch (Passing of the Peace!), etc.

Returning to social justice as more traditionally understood, I've been thinking recently about setting the terms of the debate -- about being proactive rather than reactive. ... And I don't have a useful conclusion to this.

[30] What are we asking for? [Pentecost +6(A), CWM]

2011-07-24T22:16:00.002-04:00

[This is the text I preached off of. The actual delivery was more colloquial.]

Proper 12A/Ordinary 17A/Pentecost +6
July 24, 2011

Genesis 29:15-28
Psalm 105:1-11, 45b
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

What are we asking for?

In between two really great Jacob stories -- the ladder last week and wrestling with the angel next week -- we have the purchasing of Leah and Rachel.

Not really my favorite story, even leaving aside the women’s total lack of agency. Jacob loves Rachel, agrees to work for SEVEN YEARS to marry her -- that’s like a doctoral degree (provided you’re not Scott, who got his in 2 years) -- and then gets bait-and-switched into marrying the older daughter. He still gets to marry the younger daughter, TOO, don’t worry. And yeah, I could say a lot about Biblical models of marriage here, but I won’t.

The triumph of the younger is a big theme in the Bible -- subverting the status quo, the triumph of the underdog. Jacob himself is a younger sibling -- who’s already used trickery to subvert the status quo. At least in today’s story, Jacob is more sinned against than sinning -- unlike in some of the Jacob stories.

Two weeks ago, the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, a friend told me about her pastor’s sermon on the story of Jacob buying Esau’s birthright. The sermon was basically, “This is one of the stories of our faith, so you should know this story. Also, what does this story tell us about God?” I said, “It tells us that God is a dick.” Because Jacob, who is kind of a heel, is the one who triumphs, is the one who becomes the father of the people Israel. Yes, we are an Abrahamic people, but it is Jacob who is renamed “Israel” -- struggling with God. At least in that story Jacob is upfront with Esau about what he’s doing -- the lectionary skips the story where Jacob uses outright trickery to steal the paternal blessing intended for Esau. But the point still stands that Jacob is not exactly someone I would be proud to say, “Yes, that is where I come from.”

I’m uncomfortable making grand pronouncements about the Good News this story tells us about God -- even though that’s my default response to Scripture, to wrestle good news out of it.

Perhaps it is the influence of Rachel Barenblat’s Torah poems. I have an unfinished sermon about the akedah (the binding of Isaac, second Sunday after Pentecost) which is heavily informed by her poems.

In the last of her 10-poem cycle on the akedah -- a "sermon in poetry" on the second morning of Rosh Hashanah last year -- Barenblat writes:

In this season of turning        and returning
we long for heroes    we want to be able to say
I take after my parents        with uncomplicated pride

But that’s not how it goes    our forebears had
marriages & children    relationships & arguments
sometimes they missed    even the widest of marks

All we can do        is tell their stories
around our campfire        around our festival table
with the polished kiddush cup    and challah round as the moon

all we can do is pray          for a year as sweet
as mother’s milk, a year    when we don’t make
the same mistakes    for the millionth time

or, when we do,    resolve not to wait
until next Rosh Hashanah    to seek forgiveness
All we can do        is remember

This story isn’t about God. It’s about us. It’s about us, about where and who we come from. Yes, these stories tell us about God, because everything tells us about God. But the main point of these stories isn’t necessarily to tell us about God.

But in rereading today’s Genesis passage on Tuesday, I was struck by this portion:

Jacob finishes his term of labor and asks for his agreed-upon reward.

29:22 So Laban gathered together all the people of the place, and made a feast.

29:23 But in the evening Laban took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob [... 29:25b] And Jacob said to Laban, "What is this you have done to me? Did I not serve with you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me?"

Maybe it’s just because I finally read Rob Bell’s Love Wins recently (my Sunday morning church is doing a sermon series), but I thought of the wedding feast and then the, “But I worked so hard! Why am I not getting what I thought was coming to me?” Rob Bell talks about the prodigal son’s older brother -- about the party that is right there and the free will we have to keep ourselves away. Bell says:

Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive ecstatic announcement of the gospel.

So are your goodness, your righteousness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.

(p. 187, “The Good News Is Better Than That”)

Now, I don’t want to say that Laban is a stand-in for God here, that being tricked into marrying someone is what the Kindom of God is like. Laban in fact directly represents a counter to God’s plan of lifting up the lowly and bringing down the mighty -- Laban says, "This is not done in our country--giving the younger before the firstborn,“ but in God’s country this happens all the time.

But I do think this disruptive moment is interesting.

Rest and re/New, my Wednesday evening church, is this month doing a series on “Winning, Losing, and Things in Between.” Our text this Wednesday was the story of the people freed from slavery in Egypt, complaining that they don’t have anything to eat and it would have been better if they’d just stayed in Egypt. Keith commented that sometimes after we get what we ask for, we’re not so sure it’s what we want after all.

What is it that we’re asking for?

Today’s complementary Old Testament reading is from 1 Kings, in which God asks Solomon, “What shall I give you?” and is pleased that Solomon asks, “Give me the skills to be a good leader of your people,” rather than, “I would like to live forever, have my enemies dead, and be really wealthy,” which suggests that one of the themes for today is asking for the right things -- aligning our will with God’s will. After all, the Gospel passage talks about the angels coming at the end of the age to separate the evil from the righteous.

So what is that we are asking for? Today’s Psalm reminds us that God will not forget God’s promises to us, and specifically invokes God’s promise to Abraham and Jacob -- "To you I will give the land of Canaan as your portion for an inheritance."

Yeah, that’s kind of problematic, huh? How much blood continues to be shed as people fight over land they insist was promised to them?

While I’m not well-versed enough in the Torah to speak to the question of whether those people Moses led out of Egypt asked for a land of their own, per se, but the Exodus story is certainly full of, “Is that really what you wanted?”

The promise God made, however, was not just about land. Last week we heard:

the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. (Genesis 28:13c-28:14)

All the peoples of the earth will be blessed in you and in your descendants. “A light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel,” we might say -- as Simeon does in Luke 2:32.

The land of Canaan, mentioned in today’s Psalm, frequently makes me think of the Indigo Girls song:

I'm not your promised land
I'm not your promised one
I'm not the land of Canaan

Do we go looking for our promised land in all the wrong places? Having been freed from slavery in Egypt, do we seek new bondage that is just as unhealthy -- not trusting God’s plans for us, or perhaps confusing the Will of others (ourselves included) for the Will of God?

When Jesus said, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Light, and no one comes to the Divine Parent except through me,” I think one of the things Jesus might have meant is that while God works all things toward the good, as we heard in today’s Psalm, the way to God is through Love Incarnate. And also that in order to fully access God, one is going to have to give up false dichotomies -- like Divine vs. human, like mine vs. yours.

So back to the Promised Land. The biblical land of Canaan already had people living in it when our spiritual ancestors showed up to claim it. That’s not necessarily the model I want for a land God has promised to me and to my family.

Where do we find our Promised Land?

Today’s reading from Romans is pretty awesome. Nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. That love is a place we can find a home -- now and always.

Again, might not be what we had in mind when we asked -- Paul is aware that, "For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered" -- but we are assured that there is no one who can bring any charges against us, who can condemn us, who can separate us from the love of God.

And this isn’t just about some post-death absolution. Paul tells us that, “the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

Paul was very familiar with the conflict between what we say we want and what we act as if we want. In the previous chapter of this letter to the Romans, Paul says, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. [...] For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7:15, 19)

But the Holy Spirit whom Jesus sent after the Ascension -- the Paraclete, the Advocate, the Helper -- this Sophia Wisdom and Love is always with us, always drawing us into closer relationship with God.

Now, speaking of relationship with God, I want to wrap with talking about the Kindom of God.

The Gospel tells a lot of parables about what the Kindom of God is like. Near the end of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus asks the disciples, "Have you understood all this?" and they answer, "Yes," at which I can only laugh, because, REALLY?

Rev. Russell at TheHardestQuestion.org suggested that the disciples had sort of tuned out during this litany of parables -- “Have you understood all this?” / “Yeah, totally, of course I get it.” [mime: “Totally didn’t get it. Did you get it?”]

My biggest problem is that Jesus does not seem troubled by unclear antecedents. Anyway. Let’s recap.

We start out well. "The realm of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in their field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." Great. The kindom of God is something that starts out so tiny and small but grows into the greatest of things and many creatures make their home in it.

Next: "The realm of heaven is like yeast that someone took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened." Great. The kindom of God is something that mixes in with our lives, lifts us up, grows us.

Third: "The realm of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in hir joy ze goes and sells all that ze has and buys that field.” Okay, a hidden treasure, which one is willing to sell all one has in order to obtain. We’re likely familiar with that imagery. Though in reading one bloogger’s sermon notes for today, I noticed that all we are told this person wants is the treasure, and yet the person buys the whole field. God is incredibly wasteful and extravagant in Hir love for us. This isn’t a marketplace transaction where the buyer tries to get the goods for the lowest possible price, this is God saying, “I want you and all that contains you, all that surrounds you.”

I’m reminded of Lee Harrington’s keynote at the Transcending Boundaries Conference last November. Harrington talked about the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma -- which I must admit I haven’t read. Harrintgon shared the story of Joel Salatin -- who raises cows and chickens but who describes himself as a grass farmer -- explaining that all 550 acres of land he has are important, refusing to let Michael Pollan privilege the 100 acres that happen to be “active farmland.”

We do not exist in isolation. Our relationship with God does not exist in isolation. Harrington says, “I live in a complex ecosystem of the heart."

The fourth parable sounds similar: "The realm of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, ze went and sold all that ze had and bought it.” Usually when we tell this story, the kindom of God is the pearl -- something that we are to sacrifice everything for -- but Jesus actually says the kindom of God is like the merchant. Does that make us the pearl of great value, whom God sells all that He has in order to ransom? Each and every one of us is a fine specimen, is of great value, is dearly beloved by God.

Fifth and last: “The realm of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad.” This gets followed up with the angels at the end of the age, coming and and separating the evil from the righteous. But Jesus doesn’t say the reign of God is like the fishers or even like the angels; Jesus says the reign of God is like the net. Which was thrown into the sea and caught fish of EVERY kind.

God always desires to be in relationship with us -- regardless of what we ask for or of what we think we want, God is still seeking us. And we can trust that at the end of the age, all wickedness will be purged and we and the whole of Creation will be restored.

Amen.

"Hello, my name is..."

2011-06-28T10:14:00.001-04:00

From the most recent slacktivist post:

“I rejoice with you, Tsion my brother, in the fellowship of Jesus Christ. Many have received him under our preaching here in Jerusalem. …”
The authors have decided to try to make Elijah sound authentically “biblical” by having him talk like the King James translations of the formal introductory parts of Paul’s epistles. Elijah didn’t talk like that. Even Paul didn’t talk like that. Just because he wrote formal salutations in his letters doesn’t mean he went around shaking hands with people and introducing himself in person that way:

“Hi, I’m Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“I’m sorry, ‘Paul’ was it?”

“Yes, Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for …”

“Good to meet you, Paul, I’m Bob. From accounting.”

The character of Elijah in this story apparently watches TV and knows how to use a telephone. There’s really no need for him to sound like the NKJV.

Now I want a "Hi, my name is..." badge with that whole !Paul paragraph :)

on DBT

2011-06-25T18:52:00.001-04:00

Via rydra_wong I saw the NYT piece about Marsha Linehan, developer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), coming out as someone who suffered from what would now be diagnosed as borderline personality disorder (BPD -- the diagnosis for which DBT is particularly used).

Reading the comments on her entry, I find it so bizarre to see people registering discomfort with DBT (often couched with, "Well, I don't have BPD, so perhaps it is just that it is quite literally not intended for me") since I have become such a convert to it -- I who have never had a DSM diagnosis (save "adjustment disorder," which was basically so as to give the insurance company a reason to cover my therapy).

La bff concurs that she thinks of DBT's applicability as being for struggling with overwhelming emotion -- which can come up in many mental/emotional health contexts, including non-diagnostic ones.

Some commenters talked about discomfort with the religious inflection of some of the stuff in DBT, which I found ironic since I remember having a visceral negative reaction to learning that the workbook includes the option for your Higher Power can be another person (my visceral reaction being because humans are fallible and will ultimately disappoint you -- plus are not infallible behavior models -- though the ways in which the workbook talks about that I find more palatable than when I simply first heard the concept).

[Clarification: The commenters had experiences w/ DBT which v. understandably led to that discomfort -- I just found it really ironic on first encounter given my experience early in learning about DBT.]

A woman I know from college posted the NYT link to facebook, commenting:

Dialectical behavior therapy works for people with borderline personality disorder & other "stubborn" clients [the article's word choice]. It's also used for other disorders not mentioned. Personally, DBT introduced me to mindfulness and gave me a useful set of skills. In an un-grounded society filled with "shoulda coulda woulda," I wish more people could do some DBT. Bless Dr. Linehan for her courage & her work.

on saying no

2011-06-22T11:04:00.002-04:00

GMA this morning had a segment on letting your teen have sex inside your home. I didn't watch the whole segment, but right around the point I tuned in [~4:30 in the video embed], a teenage female commented that if your boyfriend (or whomever) knows that your parents allow you to have sex in their house, you lose a huge way to say no. She literally asked, What am I supposed to say if I can't use the "no, I can't, my parents would kill me"?

edit now that I'm watching the embed [btw, ~3:50, there's a "slut" trigger; I was horrified]:

Interviewer: "If your boyfriend knows that you can just go home and it's allowed in your home, does that put more pressure on you?"
girls: "Absolutely... definitely..."
Girl1: "If your boyfriend knows, or whoever knows, that there is a perfectly open, available house, I think that takes away one of your big--"
Girl2: "Yeah, like how do you say no? Like a lot of times if they're saying, "Let's do it, let's do it," like, "It's time," you blame it on your parents. You're like, 'No, I can't, my parents would kill me.' But if that whole thing is gone, like what do you say?"

I, of course, muttered on the treadmill, "You say you don't want to. You always have the right to say no. Stand in your own power."

I reminded myself that saying No can be difficult as an adult and can be far moreso as an adolescent; I remember trying to use "my parents won't let me" as an excuse to get out of my then-best friend pressing me to I think go to the mall (knowing my parents as she did, she did not buy it at all). I was still sad that none of the grownups at least mentioned as a response to that question the unapologetic "I don't want to."

My primary takeaway is that we need to be better at raising children who can and will say no -- who can and will own their desires (including their desire to NOT do something).

[I also got kinda ragey at the wrapup back at the anchor desk -- particularly when one of them raised the issue of, "So if you do allow this, is it something you can take away as punishment? Like taking away the keys to the car?"]

***

My best friend and I had a conversation about the story of the baby named Storm whose assigned-at-birth-sex the parents aren't disclosing.

From the Yahoo! News article:

Because Jazz and Kio wear pink and have long hair, they're frequently assumed to be girls, according to Stocker. He said he and Witterick don't correct people--they leave it to the kids to do it if they want to.

But Stocker and Witterick's choices haven't always made life easy for their kids. Though Jazz likes dressing as a girl, he doesn't seem to want to be mistaken for one. He recently asked his mother to let the leaders of a nature center know that he's a boy. And he chose not to attend a conventional school because of the questions about his gender. Asked whether that upsets him, Jazz nodded.

We had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, we support not presuming someone else's self-identity. On the other hand, correcting people on such matters is a heavy thing for anyone, so that seems quite a load to lay on a 5-year-old. (We hoped that we were correctly inferring that the mom did indeed abide by Jazz's request that she inform the nature center staff.)

lobster arms

2011-06-22T11:02:00.001-04:00

Saturday evening, in conversation with Shoshana, I said, "I'm eating, but in my head I made rockstar arms and said, 'I win!' " She was confused. I picked up the toothpicks we'd discarded from our sandwiches, laid them out on a napkin, and then made an "o" with my fingers. She said, "Oh! I thought you said 'lobster arms.' " We both proceeded to dissolve into giggles.

Tuesday evening, I told Scott the story. I said I wasn't sure how to render lobster arms as an emoticon -- 2 lowercase f's? Scott commented that mirror-f's aren't on standard keyboards and suggested an f and an r. I said I'd totally forgotten about the mirroring requirement, and then pointed out that it could be a sideways facing lobster. He then suggested a capital F since lobsters have one claw bigger than the other. ♥

I don't actually know what a lobster arms emoticon would indicate. My first impulse is to want it to indicate amusement, given the aforementioned "dissolved into giggles," but I feel like "crankiness" or somesuch would make more sense given it's supposed to evoke lobsters.

Attempting to type them out now, I find that they look so much like words that I have difficulty parsing them as emoticons :/

fof
rof
Fof
foF

[vulnerability] on forgiveness and grace

2011-06-16T15:37:00.003-04:00

I've been feeling really worn out in recent weeks and unsure what to do about (e.g, another staycation? -- I just took a weeklong one a month ago). I'm starting to feel more enlivened.

On Monday, I listened to the audio recording of Liz Walker's sermon at the 2011 Boston Pride Interfaith service.

She quoted Fromm: "love is the solution to the problem of human existence."
She said that love is something you work at and that we have to learn to let go -- she talked about forgiveness and mercy.
She cited Nouwen on voluntary displacement -- "if love does not carry us beyond ourselves, it is not love [...] love is total abandonment to the divine," "the opposite of love is not hate, [... it is] fear."

Someone linked me to "If Grace is Received, It Must be Given". I don't love all of this essay, but I do really appreciate its challenge to us to love others as Deity loves us:

1. You won’t be shocked, disappointed, disillusioned, or angry when others mess up. You will accept them for who they are: sinners, like you, desperately in need of God’s grace and your love.

2. As a result, you will have no other choice but to love them unconditionally. You won’t love them for who they are, what they do for you, or what you hope they might become. You won’t reject them if they don’t measure up.

3. You will love them with specific grace. It is easy to love all Christians in a general way. It is quite another thing to love specific people for what they specifically are, in spite of their particular weaknesses, eccentricities, and shortcomings.

4. Your love will demonstrate irresistible grace. Such unconditional love will draw them irresistibly to the Christ who has filled you with such irresistible love. It will have an irresistible force drawing others who witness this love to the same Christ.

5. And this grace turned horizontal will persevere to the end. It will never forsake or abandon its commitments or covenants. It won’t run from those who frustrate, reject those who irritate, or wall off those who disappoint.

I listened to a bunch of Ani DiFranco -- but not the angry stuff; I started with her cover of "Amazing Grace" and then "sorry i am" and "not angry anymore" came up.

night falls like people into love
we generate our own light to compensate
for the lack of light from above.
every time we fight a cold wind blows our way,
we can learn like the trees, how to bend,
...how to sway and say

i, i think i understand
what all this fighting is for,
and baby i just want you to understand
i'm not angry anymore.
no, i'm not angry anymore.

-ani difranco

I'm in the midst of arguably 3 separate fraught relationships, and yesterday I was really pleased that I could respond dispassionately to one of my friends being really upset at me -- I lived into my knowledge that responding in the moment wouldn't help, I curbed my defensive impulses, I didn't internalize his negative emotion ... I don't know (since we haven't spoken since) how successful my eventual reply was in being appropriate, effective, etc., but I stand by the choices I made re: when and how I responded, and I'm not obsessing about whether/how I could have responded better and/or where things are at now.

Much of this emotional (non)response isn't stuff I can cause myself, so I'm grateful to the Divine for that grace. Similarly, I'm grateful for the grace of peace and letting-go re: the other 2 relationships -- i feel like I've said what I need to say, and I'm waiting on the other person's response but I'm not feeling anxious or obsessive about it, am not doing much in the way of pre-emptive defensive crafting of responses to things they might say.

At faith sharing this Tuesday, we didn't so much talk about creativity as we DID creativity.

Hilary led, and afterward she emailed the list 3 TED talks.

I wasn't impressed by the first one, but the second one, Sarah Kay: "If I should have a daughter..." I really loved the spoken word poem that opened the talk (sidebar: TED has both subtitles and an "interactive transcript" option -- though it took me a while to realize that one can in fact c&p from the latter), and the whole thing is quite good.

The 3rd one was Brené Brown ("Maybe stories are just data with a soul.") "The power of vulnerability", and I like that one a lot.

Excerpt:

And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection. Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection. The things I can tell you about it: it's universal; we all have it. The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough," -- which we all know that feeling: "I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough." The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability, this idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.

[...] if I roughly took the people I interviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness -- that's what this comes down to, a sense of worthiness -- they have a strong sense of love and belonging -- and folks who struggle for it, and folks who are always wondering if their good enough. There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe that they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it. They believe they're worthy. And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understand better. So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way, and just looked at those.

[...] And so here's what I found. What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word cor, meaning heart -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was that they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.

The other thing that they had in common was this. They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerability made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they talk about it being excruciating -- as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say "I love you" first, the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees, the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.

There's also a piece near the end that made me think of an Atlantic article that's been going around -- "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy: Why the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods."

Brown says:

And we perfect, most dangerously, our children. Let me tell you what we think about children. They're hardwired for struggle when they get here. And when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand, our job is not so say, "Look at her, she's perfect. My job is just to keep her perfect -- make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh grade." That's not our job. Our job is to look and say, "You know what? You're imperfect, and you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging." That's our job. Show me a generation of kids raised like that, and we'll end the problems I think that we see today. We pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people. We do that in our personal lives. We do that corporate -- whether it's a bailout, an oil spill, a recall -- we pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people. I would say to companies, this is not our first rodeo people. We just need you to be authentic and real and say, "We're sorry. We'll fix it."
(emphasis mine)

[Rest and re/New] on anger at God

2011-05-12T11:39:00.000-04:00

Last night's Rest and re/New theme was being angry with God.

James mentioned Jacob wrestling with the angel and Laura T. commented that she really likes that Jacob doesn't leave the encounter unscarred.
She also said that often we're wrestling with the wrestling, and that that just makes things worse for ourselves.

Have I mentioned that everything makes me think of DBT these days? I talked some about "radical acceptance" -- which I said is not my strong suit :) -- and "doing what's effective." I said that lots of us come from backgrounds that encouraged us to deny/repress our anger at God and that's definitely not healthy, and so we need to find a middle ground -- to experience our anger, but not dwell in it, and to do what we need to with it, that sometimes you need to go and yell at God and sometimes you need to go for a walk and try to let go of the anger.

Lisa talked about William Schultz's article "What Torture Has Taught Me." Apparently he has done a lot of work with Amnesty International with torture survivors and is also a minister and he found himself wondering... if those survivors showed up at his church, what would they think of the theology he espoused? would they find it naive? would they find it deep and meaningful?
I thought of Mariella at Art Night last week talking about someone saying that your theology shouldn't be anything you "can't say in front of burning children."

I Googled just now for [theology "burning children"] and yay, GoogleBooks:

Irving Greenberg's principle that no statement, theological or other, can be made "that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children."⁹ (p. 128, Long night's journey into day: a revised retrospective on the Holocaust by Alice Eckardt & Arthur Roy Eckardt)
9. Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke," p. 23
[which I think (doing more GoogleBooks search) is: Irving Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust," in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: KTAV, 1997), pp. 1-55]

In skimming through the footnotes, Moltmann's Crucified God, and possibly I have a new reading project...

P.S. Regular Google got me a top hit of a blogpost that opens with the quotation:

“No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.” Irving Greenberg

From the blogpost:

“Weep with those who weep,” St. Paul said, and indeed, sometimes as a chaplain that is almost all you can do. [...]

A theology that has everything figured out is not particularly helpful at such a time. My friend Jenny calls that “2 a.m. Theology” – and in fact, it was two in the morning – two a.m. theology cries in pain. It doesn’t have answers. Two a.m. theology just says, I don’t get it, but I’m here, and I believe you’re here, too, God. Even though I’m mad at you. Two a.m. theology believes God is crying, too.

My denomination is now the behindest.

2011-05-10T22:25:00.002-04:00

Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) approves change in ordination standard
‘submission to the lordship of jesus christ’ replaces ‘fidelity and chastity’

Yeah, I have lots of thoughts about that :D

[29] Resurrection is a Process (Easter Sunday sermon 2011)

2011-05-05T12:41:00.002-04:00

¹Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. ²So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid her.”

³Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. ⁴The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. ⁵The beloved disciple bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but did not go in. ⁶Then Simon Peter came, following, and went into the tomb. Simon Peter saw the linen wrappings lying there, ⁷and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. ⁸Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and saw and believed; ⁹for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that Jesus must rise from the dead. ¹⁰Then the disciples returned to their homes.

¹¹But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; ¹²and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. ¹³They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”

She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid her.”

¹⁴When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

¹⁵Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?”

Supposing this stranger to be the gardener, she said, “Please, if you have carried Jesus away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take her away.”

¹⁶Jesus said to her, “Mary!”

She turned and said in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).

¹⁷Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Divine Parent. But go to my siblings and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Parent and your Parent, to my God and your God.’”

¹⁸Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that Jesus had said these things to her.

(John 20:1-18)

Resurrection is a Process

“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb...” (John 20:1)

A couple Wednesdays before Easter, I learned that the West Somerville churches were having their Easter sunrise service at 6am. I balked, because sunrise on Easter Sunday was at 5:50am this year, and Easter sunrise service is supposed to begin in darkness, moving into light both liturgically and literally.

Ian T. suggested that the women would have waited until the sun was up before heading out to the tomb.

I said, "If the person I loved most in the world had died two days ago..."

"You wouldn't wait for the sun to rise?" Ian filled in.

"I don't think I would have been sleeping very much..." I said. I knew in the moment that it was a lie, as grief doesn’t tend to make me insomniac, but it seemed like the thing to say.

I’ve never had a desperate grief for a physical body -- my griefs have been for relationships...

But I can imagine being haunted by the image of the person you love most in the world dying -- cruelly, brutally, alone... You watched, but you could only watch from a distance -- you couldn’t hold their hand, place a cold cloth on their forehead, smooth the blankets, couldn’t do anything to ease their pain. Of course you would want to tend to their body after death -- to offer that care that you couldn’t offer in the last moments of their life.

So what do you do if you find that body gone?

Simon Peter and the beloved disciple -- they are content with the knowledge that the body of their lover is gone. They lock themselves in an upper room, hiding their grief away from those who had killed Jesus, curled up tightly with others who share their grief.

But Mary does not leave the tomb. Her grief is a gaping wound, as open as the empty tomb, no stone to seal it up. She weeps. Her grief will not be contained in an upper room, rather it pours out into the ground.

We hear, in verse 8, that “the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and saw and believed.” Now, I don’t know what it is that the beloved disciple believed, because the sentence continues: “for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that Jesus must rise from the dead.” But they certainly believe that the body is gone, that the tomb is empty.

Not Mary. She looks into the tomb again.

And this time she does not find it empty. She sees two angels. And they ask her why she is weeping.

Now, it’s arguably a foolish question. They are sitting by the very linen wrappings that mere days before were cradling a dead body. Surely they understand.

But perhaps they don’t. Perhaps they, like us, know the punchline of the story. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ is with us now. Alleluia. Alleluia! (Can I get an Amen?)

And what is there to grieve when this is the Gospel? Why are you weeping at this very evidence of resurrection and triumph over death?

In Luke, the angels send Mary away -- “Why do you look for the living among the dead? She is not here but has risen.” (Luke 24:5b-6)

But not in this story. No, in answer to Mary’s anguished plea, Jesus shows up. The Resurrected Christ, symbol of new life and triumph over death, shows up. Here. At this tomb.

I keep thinking of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5), who lived among the tombs. Jesus shows up in the places of death -- for “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Matthew 9:12, Mark 2:17, Luke 5:31).

So that is the first point I want to make: That God comes and meets us in our places of brokenness and grief. Maybe you feel full of resurrection life this Easter Sunday -- or maybe you are still deep in grief. Regardless of where you are, God meets you right where you are.

Jesus says to Mary Magdalene: “Noli me tangere. Because I have not yet ascended to the Divine Parent. But go to my siblings and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Parent and your Parent, to my God and your God.’ ”

This whole “ascending” thing makes me profoundly uncomfortable. Yes, Divinity is transcendent, but Divinity is immanent as well. Is the Good News that Jesus sends Mary out to be the first apostle with really, “Jesus is Ascending to God?”

Elijah was taken up into Heaven in a whirlwind with a chariot and horses of fire. Enoch did not die but got taken up by God. Ascension’s a pretty elite club, but I don’t think I’d call it Good News with capital letters.

But Jesus doesn’t say, “I will Ascend” -- though, spoiler alert, She will -- Jesus says. “I am Ascending.” Present participle. Progressive tense. It’s a process.

Jesus is back, but different, still in a liminal space.

“I am Ascending.” I am not here, I am not there, I am in transit.

Jesus sticks around for 40 days post-Resurrection -- a good Biblical number.

At faith-sharing group the Tuesday before Easter, I ostensibly led us in a discussion about Resurrection, and one thing I said, as we telescoped in time both before and after Jesus’ resurrection, was, “What if post-Easter Jesus stuck around not just to do trauma recovery grief work with the disciples but because Jesus didn't want to leave?”

It occurs to me now: What if Jesus stayed for 40 days because She wasn’t ready to leave yet -- not in an “I have unfinished business” kind of way, but in that way where preemies in incubators aren’t ready to leave the hospital immediately?

I’ve heard/read/discussed a bunch of Easter Sunday sermons this year, and one of the themes that has stuck with me is the idea that the Resurrected Jesus is unrecognizable.

I often invoke the image Tiffany used in a Children’s Time one Easter -- about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly … it is still the same creature, yet so incredibly different that you would never think they were the same.

It’s easy for us to imagine the Resurrected Jesus walking around on Earth as just the same as the pre-Easter Jesus, to interpret all the stories of the disciples not recognizing Jesus as being just because this is so surprising (the disciples expected to never see Jesus alive again), or because their eyes are still blurred by tears of grief (literally and/or metaphorically), or because Jesus is playing some game of hide and seek.

All of these explanations hold some appeal, but I also think Jesus genuinely looked different, in a very real way.

The Resurrected Christ shows up in locked rooms -- and also cooks fish on the lakeshore. She is both corporeal and non.

What if She is still in the process of becoming Her Resurrected self?

Nadia Bolz-Weber said, “when Mary Magdalene stood at the tomb she didn’t encounter some perfected radiant glowing spiritual Jesus that first Easter morning.” Nadia reminded us that Mary mistook Jesus for a gardener and said, “I like to think that Mary Magdalene mistook the resurrected Christ for a gardener because Jesus still had the dirt from his own tomb under his nails.”

She talked about how we clean up Jesus, and ourselves, for Easter -- just like we do for Christmas and all the other Sundays, but we seem to especially want to be shiny and impressive for Easter. We want to look nice. And she said, “God isn’t about making you nicer. God is about making you new.” Now, I’m not inherently opposed to outward performance of the resurrection life we know internally to be true -- and yes I realize I basically just called Easter bonnets a sacrament -- but I do think she has a point. Incarnation is a hugely important part of my theology, and Incarnation is not all shiny new clothes and perfectly coiffed hair. Incarnation is blood and sweat and tears. Incarnation is messy and breakable.

Nadia finished her sermon by saying:

if there is anything impressive about following Jesus it’s that you are loved so powerfully by God that God has swept you up into God’s own story of death and life and life after death. And if there’s anything impressive about Christians, it’s that we are a people who still have the dirt from our graves under our nails, while we stand here shouting Alleluia! Christ is risen.

We are a Resurrection people -- an Easter people in a Good Friday world, you may hear often this season. But Resurrection is a process. It’s not something that just happens one Sunday and boom, we are transformed once and forever.

At faith-sharing group that Tuesday, I mentioned the Harrowing of Hell. I grew up low-church Protestant, and I still don’t really believe in the Harrowing of Hell, but I’ve been coming to a greater appreciation of the power of story -- of the fact that Christianity isn’t a series of propositional statements but rather a collection of stories, stories that get told and retold and have so many different meanings and resonances to so many different people at different times in their lives. And the Harrowing of Hell is admittedly a pretty bad-ass story: Jesus descends into the place of death and darkness and oppression and suffocation and torture -- and Jesus busts open those looming wrought-iron gates that keep the people trapped, and Jesus cries out, “YOU ARE FREE!”

And that’s something like what happens to all of us with Christ’s resurrection -- God’s insistent and definitive “no” to death.

We are freed from the power and bondage of death.

Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, Jesus Herself likewise shared the same things, so that through death She might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. (Hebrews 2:14-15)

Now, this “You are free” is a performative utterance -- like, “I now pronounce you married.”

A new reality has been enacted. And you have choices about living into that new reality.

We have the fullness of Eastertide to begin that process, to journey with the Risen Christ and the surprised disciples.

And so I close with a quote from Mary Oliver:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
(from "The Summer Day")

"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do."

2011-04-11T20:00:00.001-04:00

In his most recent Left Behind post, slacktivist writes:

“What if I told you it doesn’t help?” the man asks as the woman packs up a truck with supplies for her shelter for at-risk youth. “What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it’s all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive and they will never let it get better down here? What would you do?”

“I’d get this truck packed before the new stuff gets here,” she says. “Wanna give me a hand?”

That scene comes at the end of a very long story. The woman has heard all this before. She’s said all this before. She knows firsthand about “forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive” who will “never let it get better down here.” But she’d also met a real hero who’d showed her different and so she changed her name and became a hero herself.

I recognized the reference early on and got all squeeful/gleeful.

***

Later in the post, relevant to my tendency toward (self-)righteous anger, he talks about the kind of wrath that is considered a Deadly Sin versus "the wrath of God," and how having just the one word often leads to confusion wherein we imagine a God who is guilty of Deadly Sin. He closes by saying:

“Hope has two beautiful daughters,” St. Augustine said, “their names are anger and courage.” The wrath of God, I think, is that kind of anger — the beautiful daughter of hope.

If you’re imagining the wrath of God as something other than an expression of the love of God, then you have taken a wrong turn, for God is love.

Ah, but isn’t God also perfectly holy? And thus wouldn’t it be possible to say that God’s wrath is an expression of God’s perfect holiness? That’s a slightly different, albeit very popular, wrong turn — imagining the holiness of God as something distinct from the love of God.

Very bad idea, going that route. Jesus had a great deal to say about the idea that holiness could ever mean anything apart from love. His response to that idea tended to be, well, rather wrathful.

John 4:5-42 (in which Jesus does not have to be male)

2011-03-29T16:29:00.003-04:00

I would like to tell you a story.

This story begins with a well. It’s called Jacob’s well. It’s in the Samaritan city of Sychar, near the plot of land that Jacob gave his favored child, Joseph -- Joseph who was the youngest but one of twelve sons, but the firstborn of Joseph’s favored wife, Rachel. The story doesn’t tell us why this well was called Jacob’s Well -- though its listeners might have recalled how Jacob met his beloved wife-to-be at a well. Tomorrow’s lectionary* brings us the story of Abraham’s steward finding a wife for Abraham’s beloved child Isaac at a well -- Isaac who would be Jacob’s father.

This story begins with a person named Jesus, tired from a journey, sitting by this well, at noontime.

This story begins with a Samaritan woman. She has come to the well at noontime to draw water.

Jesus says to the woman: “Give me a drink.” The teller of this story informs us that the disciples, those who have been companions with Jesus on this long journey, have gone into the city to buy food.

Now maybe this Jesus was a man -- and listeners’ expectations were that this would be a marriage story, like Jacob and Rachel, like Isaac and Rebekah. Maybe this Jesus was a man, and the woman felt unsafe, alone out there on the edge of town with a strange man.

Maybe this Jesus was a woman. Maybe the Samaritan woman felt safe from threat of violence because this was another woman. Maybe the Samaritan woman felt apprehensive, wondering what would bring a woman alone to this well at midday (her knowledge of why she came not keeping her from speculation about this stranger).

Maybe this Jesus was a large cat like C. S. Lewis would write about so many centuries later, and the woman was afraid, because Aslan is NOT a Tame Lion.

One might expect any of these things. But what this woman saw, the piece of Jesus’ identity that spoke to her so strongly that she spoke it aloud, was that Jesus was a Jew.

Jesus was a Jew, and she was a Samaritan. Both peoples claimed Mosaic lineage, but the two peoples had broken off long ago, and now they didn’t so much as speak to each other.

This woman says to Jesus, “YOU? ask ME? for a drink of water? Do you not notice who we are? We haven’t invented segregated drinking fountains yet, but that’s basically what’s going on here. What do you think you’re doing?”

Jesus patiently replies, “If you knew the generosity of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked me, and I would have given you living water.”

The woman bites her lip on the ridiculousness of this. She calls Jesus, “Sir,” or, “M’lady,” or some other honorific to soften the scoffing remark she is about to make -- “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and who drank from it with his children and livestock?”

Jesus says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

This sounds intriguing. A little impossible, but intriguing nonetheless. This time the woman’s use of an honorific is less sarcastic, more petitionary. “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Jesus smiles at her unreadably and says, “Go, call your spouse, and come back.”

A bit downcast now -- or perhaps a bit on-guard, a bit cagey -- the woman replies, “I have no spouse.”

Jesus says to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no spouse;’ for you have been married five times, and you are not married to your current partner. What you have said is true.”

Taking a deep breath and using the honorific one last time, the woman says, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.” And what do you do if you end up in conversation with a prophet? Why not ask them for a decision on the major schism in your religious life? So she says, “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but your people say that the place where everyone must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Jesus says, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Parent of us all, Maker of Heaven and Earth, neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we Jews worship what we know, for God's way of salvation is made available through the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Divine Parent in spirit and truth. Indeed, it is just such worshipers whom the Divine Parent seeks. God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.”

The woman says to Jesus, “I know that the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One, is coming -- who upon arriving will proclaim all things to us.”

Jesus replies, “I who speak to you am the Messiah.”

The dramatic pause here is interrupted by the return of the disciples. They are astonished that Jesus is speaking with this woman, but no one comes out and says, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?”

Taking her cue, the woman leaves her water jar and returns to the city. She says to the people, “Come and see someone who told me everything I have ever done! Could this be the Messiah?” The people leave the city and go to Jesus.

Meanwhile the disciples are urging Jesus, “Rabbi, eat something.”

But Jesus says, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”

So the disciples ask one another, “Surely no one has brought Jesus something to eat?”

Jesus says to them, “The food that keeps me going is doing the will of the One who sent me and bringing this work to completion.

“Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor at harvest time.”

As if to explain this saying of Jesus’, the story returns us to the people of the city. Many Samaritans from that city believe in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony, “This one told me everything I have ever done.” So when they come to Jesus, they ask Jesus to stay with them; and Jesus stays there two days. And many more believe because of Jesus’ word. They say to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

***

*For values of "tomorrow" that are true if you are using the RCL and are operating as if I'm telling this story on Sunday Lent 3A 2011.

One of these days I will have a sermon for Lent 3A 2011, but today is not that day.

My best friend’s lesbian christology is what first started me thinking of Jesus as other than always-default-male, and continues to be foundational in my continuing explorations of that.

For helping to spur and/or shape this particular retelling, thanks also to: Molly’s friend Val (who told a folktale at Molly’s Peach Fuzz Party on Saturday), Support Pastor Ian H., Chris D., and Julia W. (and Ian T. for Lenten weekday morning prayer).

Thanks to The Inclusive Bible and Eugene Peterson’s The Message for some phrasing assists (and to the NRSV for providing the base text).

on sympathetic satire

2011-03-07T16:55:00.000-05:00

Ari and I were talking about Jane Austen this afternoon (she recently reread Mansfield Park), and I came to the conclusion that I'm not really wired for sympathetic satire (as a creator or a consumer) -- AFAIC, if you're going to bitingly satirize someone, it's because you don't like them; if you do like them, you tell them that they are wrong so they can fix it. (Ari said: "Well Jane Austen was telling people -- she just thought they'd enjoy it more as a novel than as a diatribe." I said, "But if it's a novel, people can say, 'Oh, I'm not like that.' You need to write them a letter directly.")

I, um, sometimes tend toward strongly dichotomous paradigms...

on fear

2011-03-01T19:37:00.001-05:00

rydra_wong posted yesterday:

Z is for Zara, who knew her own strength

Two passages I found this morning, linked for thought-provocation. Krista thinks fear may not actually be the mind-killer:

You must chase fear from time to time.

You must dive in and come out the other side. You must risk this shame and humiliation. You must risk dropping the bar with a soul-shattering crash. {...}

And along the way, feel the edges of your spirit crisping up, growing into sharper focus. When I am truly afraid with a healthy fear that says I am having adventures and stretching the envelope of my secure life – that is when I am closest to gnawing on the juicy bones of my existence. I am sucking every last drop of nourishing marrow from that present-ness.

And in a sidethread at fandom_wank, ealusaid has some interesting things to say about agency (note: includes discussion of abuse):

It's my observation that some people who live with a lot of toxicity have absolutely no sense of their own agency.

{...} And I think what that also gives is no real sense of how hard you can punch, which leads to either under-or-over-evaluating one's own strength. I never, ever, ever showed social or verbal aggression when I was a kid, so when I learned how to hold my own in arguments when I was a teen, I spent a long time thinking if I said ANYTHING it would be THE MOST HURTFUL THING EVAR, so I would say in this halting little voice "I think, um, on this one point, you're not entirely correct."

Then I had a brief period where I went "...Waaaait, no, that's not working! I want my blows to hurt them as much as theirs hurt me! YOU FUCKING SHITSTICK, YOU WOULDN'T KNOW RIGHT FROM YOUR ASSHOLE, NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP." And friends kind of had to say "Honey? That was six times harsher than you needed."

Learning how to gauge hits is really hard. Especially if you have no idea that's what you're learning.

Commenting on rydra_wong's post, niqaeli said:

So, my thought on that first article is that fear, like pain, is a message. It is a non-neutrally coded message because it is meant to strongly hold your attention. And, like pain, sometimes the message is one that is not helpful or useful to you, and so you set it aside and do something other than what that message advises. And then again, sometimes that message's advice will save your life.

So: do not ever ignore fear. Ignoring fear is not bravery, it's stupidity. Evaluate your fear. Look at where it's coming from, what's triggering it. Fear is an emotion our body uses to guide us. And trying to go outside your comfort zone, whatever your comfort zone is, will almost always trigger it (get back by the fire, we know the fire, don't go out, it's not safe); don't ignore that either. Listen to it; it will give you a map to your mental geography. If you want to go outside your comfort zone regularly enough to expand it, you have to know where that comfort zone is. And your fear tells you, every time you venture up to the edges and outside.

And never ignore fear only because you cannot identify its source and an explanation for it; that fear may be the fear that will save your life. That fear may be the fear that your subconscious has generated by picking up a thousand tiny things and put them together and now frightens you badly, saying, leave, get out, run, anywhere but here.

I've ignored fear before and that's how I learned not to. I said, no, surely this makes no sense, I will hang out with this person anyway. Well, I didn't get axe-murdered (obviously) but I did get scared to utter hell and ended up quite literally running away from them. I don't honestly know what would've happened if I hadn't gotten the hell out, finally, when my conscious mind finally decided enough weird shit had been said and I started running; I just know that I never want to be that frightened again. And if I'd listened to the fear sooner, I never would've gotten to that point.

Fear isn't the mindkiller; it's really the shepherd dog of the mind. Whatever patterns the mind already knows, it wants to keep them intact (and it has no idea whether those patterns are good, bad, or indifferent). It drives the mind to the same path; maybe there's better pastures to graze, but it knowsthis path. It will sniff out coyotes and other predators and warn us away, also. But it's not good to be herded; and that's all down to how we choose to interact with fear. Better to have a dog that communicates with us things like "coyotes ahead," or "strange scent, dangerous," or "that's an unfamiliar path, don't know what's down it," and make the decisions for ourselves.

I have heard that idea before -- about fear being a message from our ~subconscious, a message that bears listening to but which we are to choose how to respond to. It's an idea I could certainly stand to be reminded of, though.

I really like the image of fear as a sheepdog -- the idea of "instinctive" responses being rooted in familiar patterns, and tending to keep us in familiar patterns, but (familiar) patterns of course aren't inherently good (or bad).

In a similar vein is willful_zephyr's comment:

I've always taken that as letting fear rule you, letting it make the decisions, that is the mind-killer.

Even further, being ruled by the fear of fear itself goes on to be the soul-killer.

To that end, you are correct in that it must occasionally be embraced. You need to learn your fear well enough to know when it is being wise and when it is full of crap. Mostly, we all need to learn to function while being afraid.

I like the non-neutrally coded message metaphor.

Krista in her post also has a really evocative story about how fear causes us to be much more attentive -- and how that isn't inherently a bad thing.

There is, indeed, much to fear in Arizona. Here, the terrain is baked hard.

This ground will chew you up and hork you out along with a mouthful of tobacco spit. The gravel crumbles underfoot and the rocks are spiky.

Everything has poky spines, from the saguaro’s skewers to the barrel cactus’ fish-hook harpoons, to the innocent-looking teddy-bear cholla’s pincushions. Even Camelback Mountain is named after a spine, which it resembles – all bony vertebrae and pithy humps. Our hiking guide carries pliers, in case our tender flesh might need a good yank or scrape. It’s a scary place.

I do this hike twice. The first time, I wear my tried-and-true Merrells, which are the stylistic equivalent of wearing Kleenex boxes on one’s feet. Like the old “It’s boxy but it’s good” slogan for Volvo, these are sturdy sensible shoes that any British Depression-era sanitorium nurse would have been proud to wear.

I clomp with impunity over hill and dale with these bad boys. I scarcely notice the danger. I dare a saguaro to piss me off – I will kick you in the effin face, cactus!! If I had a big gun like the Whole Foods peeps, I would blast baby animals like Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona.

The second time I hike, I wear Vibrams, essentially barefooting over Nature’s minefield. Now my senses are sharp. I am paying attention. My steps are different – I have to chart a course from step to step, dancing from rock to trench to crevice to slippery sand. My toes grip like a gecko’s. I am there, deeply present in the experience.

Fear has a way of capturing our attention.

Also from Krista's post:

Fear of negative evaluation: FNE.

I love me some TLAs. I’ve long been a fan of FMO – fear of missing out. FMO is what you experience when you can’t say no to things. ‘Cause, like, what if you miss something? What if something happens and you’re not there? What if there’s some crucial piece of information you don’t have?

If you have FMO you’re nodding right now, except you’re probably distracted because you’re also watching an instructional video and downloading an article and doing some committee paperwork, just in case.

Fear of negative evaluation involves constant preoccupation with other people’s potentially negative judgements of you. You do everything you can to avoid these judgements, because they scare the hell out of you.
You might be a people-pleaser. Approve of me! Approve of me!
You might be a pre-emptive self-criticizer – you shoot in like a ninja to crap on yourself before anyone else can. If you ninja crap yourself then you got there first, bitches!! You are the baddest and the best putdowner! Nobody else can hurt you with their slings and arrows like numero uno!
You might fret and worry and whittle your spirit down to a little nub. What if? What if? What if?
You might avoid situations where you could look bad or stupid. Looking bad or stupid is shameful and to be avoided at all costs. Consequently, of course, there is no juice in your life because to do anything fun or exciting or adventurous usually involves some potential element of silliness or screwups.
Notice what all these have in common? Two things:
Despite being focused on other people’s judgements, FNE is – ironically — incredibly narcissistic (What do they think of me? They must have noticed me! They really really give a shit about every tiny thing I’m doing and saying and thinking! They are so carefully observing me that they totally notice that extra piece of toast I ate!).
FNE leaches your life dry of every last bit of joy.

The f_w comment thread was also interesting, about how people develop responses that are sense-making and even relatively effective in toxic/abusive situations but which aren't so helpful/appropriate in other situations. In addition to the bit rydra_wong quoted, this comment from ekaterinv also felt resonant to me:

Plus if that's all you're used to, you don't know it's possible to deal with conflict in any other way. Things are either smooth and seemingly perfect or they're completely fucking out of whack and you're being blamed for everything that has ever gone wrong EVER, and are an evil, horrible, rotten brat from hell for not cleaning your room well enough. You feel you can either be a mouse or a rampaging lion, and rampaging lion looks a lot more appealing when you're angry.

"becalmed instead of stuck; drawn instead of driven"

2011-02-25T12:02:00.003-05:00

Through a series of links, I came to a blogpost titled becalmed instead of stuck; drawn instead of driven. (The synchronicity was kind of amusing, since we just assigned Chapter 3 of Pink's Drive for the day before yesterday's class).

Excerpt:

Stuck is an extension of our metaphorical drive thinking, it implies a linear process. Imagine a car stuck in the snow or mud - what do you do? You spin your wheels, you try to force it out by pushing from behind. You gun it, pressing down on the gas pedal as fast and as far as you can.

There is power in the words we use - the way we talk can bring us freedom and open us up, or it can close us down. To quote James Flaherty again, "Please start to notice when you begin speaking in a way that ties you up in knots, that leaves you with few options for action, that leaves you estranged from others [or from yourself- L], that leaves you distraught." I think that's what happens when we talk about being stuck.

I'm proposing an alternate metaphor to describe this state/process. In sailing the term used when the wind dies down such that the boat stops moving is becalmed. Becalmed. Be. Calmed. Whoa, how cool is that? That's a world away from stuck. Completely different energy in that word.

And what do sailors do when their boat is becalmed? Well, first of all they recognize that it's a partnership - the boat is not completely under their control - it moves due to a partnership between the wind and the sailor.They have techniques for ensuring they can make the most of any light wind that comes up, for allowing themselves to be drawn, rather than driven.

1. Lighten the weight - the heavier the boat, the more drag. What's weighing you down?

2. Move towards the centre of the boat. How can you move closer to that which moves you?

3. Seek the ripples - little ripples on the water tell you where the slightest wind is. What is making your heart flutter?

4. Minimize unnecessary movements - they rob you of momentum. Rest.

5. Use the current. Where is the deeper flow that you can tap into? Create rituals and routines that can act as your current.

6. Keep all movements slow and steady - quick, jerky movements keep your boat from gliding. Small steps.

7. Remember that even on the calmest days, a slight breeze always comes up as the sun begins to go down. Don't panic.

[28] "Your faith has saved you; go in peace." [Luke 7:36-50; H!PS: Luke & Us; Feb. 22, 2011]

2011-02-22T21:31:00.004-05:00

My friend Rae let me know about Hosanna! People’s Seminary, and so I’ve been a part of their Luke and Us women’s preaching circle since September. It meets once a month via the magic of technology, and I preached tonight.

Luke 7:36-50

³⁶One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and Jesus went into the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table.

³⁷And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that Jesus was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. ³⁸She stood behind Jesus’ feet, weeping, and began to bathe them with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing Jesus’ feet and anointing them with the ointment.

³⁹Now when the Pharisee who had invited Jesus saw it, he said to himself, “A prophet would have known who and what kind of woman this is—a sinner.”

⁴⁰Jesus spoke up and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.”

“Teacher,” he replied, “Speak.”

⁴¹ “Two people owed money to a creditor. One owed the creditor the equivalent of two years’ wages; the other, two months’ wages. ⁴² Both were unable to pay, so the creditor wrote off both debts. Which of them was more grateful to the moneylender?”

⁴³Simon answered, “I suppose the one who had the greater debt canceled.”

And Jesus said to him, “You have judged rightly.”

⁴⁴Then turning toward the woman, Jesus said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. ⁴⁵You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. 46You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. ⁴⁷Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”

⁴⁸Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

⁴⁹But those who sat together at the table began to ask among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”

⁵⁰And Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

-NRSV, edited with help from The Inclusive Bible and my best friend

A religious leader invites Jesus to dinner. While Jesus is reclining at the table, a woman identified only as a “sinner” shows up. She stands behind Jesus’ feet, weeping, and her tears fall on Jesus’ feet -- which are still dusty from the outside as we learn later that Simon was remiss in his host duties and didn’t offer Jesus any water for foot-washing (desert plus sandals? you get the picture). She washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and then dries them with her hair. She then goes on to kiss Jesus’ feet and anoint them with ointment.

This is a strongly embodied interaction. The woman doesn’t come to Jesus with an eloquent plea for forgiveness -- or an eloquent screed against the Pharisee -- or an eloquent statement of faith. She just shows up.

She draws near to this person Jesus, even though the atmosphere is hostile to her.

She stands behind Jesus, perhaps feeling hesitant, but she also doesn’t hide. When her tears fall on Jesus’ feet, she doesn’t apologize for the interruption, she moves with it into an offering of love.

Simon is appalled that this sinful woman is behaving so intimately with this rabbi, especially in public, and thinks this must be a sign that Jesus isn’t really a great prophet, because of course a prophet would have recognized her sin and recoiled from her touch.

Jesus, of course, has a very different perspective.

A couple chapters earlier, some Pharisees and other religious scholars asked, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” and Jesus replied, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Luke 5:30-31a).

Of course, all of us are in need of healing and forgiveness, but unlike Simon, the sinful woman in this story recognizes her need.

Whereas the woman experiences Jesus’ forgiveness like the debtor who had two years’ wages worth of debt forgiven, Simon would have experienced a statement of forgiveness as a much smaller burden relieved -- and, actually, I think it equally likely that Simon would have been insulted by the idea that he had anything he needed to be forgiven for.

The woman is transformed by this forgiveness. “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” She has been saved. The weight of all that sin and guilt has been lifted from her. Like the woman in Luke 13 [verses 10-17] who had been bent over for 18 years, this woman has been released from her bondage.

Being “saved” is not a simplistic transaction -- insert repentance, or statement of belief, or whatever … receive free pass to Heaven. Rather it is a transformation. We are released from the death-dealing forces which have kept us trapped, released into abundant life. The stress and turmoil which have weighed us down, which have confused our path … these are wiped away, like water washing dust and dirt off our feet. We are given a new lease on life -- except that a lease implies debt, and this new life is a gift, no repayment required.

However, while nothing is required of us, it would be inappropriate for us to sit smugly with our gift, making no motion to behave in a similarly gracious fashion toward others.

Jesus reminds us, “the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” It is easy for us to feel like the debtor forgiven of a relatively small amount -- and to therefore be stingy in our generosity toward others. Who invited you to this party? What will you buy with my spare change if I give it to you? We erect barriers to keep people in their place, administer tests to decide who goes where...

But God meets us where we are, just as we are -- and calls us to meet others likewise. God meets us in the dusty, dirty feet of Jesus. God meets us in the tears of an unnamed woman.

God meets us in all the mess of our bodies, in all the mess of our lives. And all God asks is that we show up, that we allow ourselves to touch and be touched in return -- to be transformed by that connection … and to live out that peace in our lives.

“Your faith has saved you” isn’t about statements of faith you sign onto, it’s about faith in the transforming power of God … faith in the power of that connection.

“Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Amen.

I have ALL of the excitement about this! \o/

2011-02-10T10:40:00.003-05:00

From: Marla
To: Samuel; Pr. Lisa; Elizabeth
Sent: Thu, February 10, 2011 10:33:11 AM
Subject: FYI: Disability Committee (NEUMC)

This went out in the weekly e-news from the Conference:
News from the Disabilities Committee

Stories Wanted!
We at Annual Conference are always looking to hear about how our conference is working to help reach out to more people as we Open Doors and Open Hearts in order to Open Minds. One way we do this is by making ourselves more open to the disabled populations and their families and caregivers. Recently, I heard on The Light (A Christian Radio Station in Vermont) on Jonnie and Friends that many disabled people do not attend church due to their disability.

Yet, churches are doing more to make themselves more open all the time and we don't hear about it because we tend not to advertise ourselves. Not this year! We are looking to hear from you about what you have done over the past two years in overcoming barriers to the disabled. We would like to hear from you about your story. If you have pictures, please include them. You may mail stories to Michael McShane at [email address redacted] or Bonnie Marden at [email address redacted]

Help Needed!
Do you have a background that can help people with disabilities? Would you like to be a resource the Disability Committee can use? We are looking for people not only to help with helping churches adapt to the physical structure but also think of what people with disabilities need. We are not looking at membership unless you have an interest in it. We are looking for the occassional helping hand. If you are willing to do so please contact Michael McShane at [email address redacted]. Thank you very much for your interest.

Submitted by: Michael McShane

on pastoring

2011-02-02T15:05:00.000-05:00

From "Practicing Resurrection - part three" (When Love Comes To Town blog):

The wisdom of Eugene Peterson's to pastors - your work is to be unbusy, subversive and apocalyptic - has been on my mind of late as another week of ministry comes to a close and I settle into my Sabbath.

[...]

Peterson writes:
People are not comfortable with God in their lives. They prefer something less awesome and more informal. Something, in fact, like the (traditional) pastor. Reassuring, accessible, easygoing. People would rather talk to the pastor than to God…

So (often) pastors, instead of practicing prayer, which brings people into the presence of God, enter into the practice of messiah: we will do the work of God for God, fix people up, tell them what to do, conspire in finding the shortcuts by which the long journey to the Cross can be bypassed since we all have such crowded schedules right now. People love us when we do this. It is flattering to be put in the place of God. It feels wonderful to be treated in the godlike way. And it is work that we are generally quite good at.

A sense of apocalypse (urgency) blows the whistle on such messianic pastoring. The vastness of the heavenly invasion, the urgency of the faith decision, the danger of the impinging culture—with these pouring into our consciousness accompanied by thunder and lightning, we cannot stand around on the street corners of Sunday morning filling the time with pretentious small talk on how bad the world is and how wonderful this new stewardship campaign is going to be. If we have even an inkling of apocalypse, it will be impossible to act like the jaunty foreman of a home-improvement work crew that is going to re-landscape moral (or immoral) garden spots. We must pray. The world has been invaded by God and it is with God we have to do.
We are NOT called to waste God's time. We are NOT called to distract our congregations with meaningless busy work that sounds holy but is all empty calories. No, we are called into the fierce urgency of now with tenderness and patience - trusting all the while that God is in charge and we are not.

today's wisdom from Molly

2011-01-19T09:34:00.000-05:00

From "No Thanks":

But I want to say one other thing, in case you ever go through a similar tribulation, and people overwhelm you with their kindness, and you start feeling, dare I say, burdened by the need to feel sufficiently, publicly grateful. When I was feeling that way, I told my spiritual director. And he told me—I will probably get this a little bit wrong—that monks in the order of St. Benedict, which is known for its hospitality, are not allowed to say thank you.

That’s right.

No thanks.

They are not allowed to say thank you, because the offering of hospitality is a rule; God wants us provide shelter and comfort and care to one another. So receiving comfort or hospitality from another doesn’t indebt us to them in any way, and therefore doesn’t require a payment in the form of socially-mandated gratitude.

Back in the Days of Many Gifts, I found myself wishing I had a handler, someone with much better handwriting than mine, and a more linear sense of the progression of stationery-stamp-mailbox, to write fervent thank yous to people. I didn’t know how to sort out the people who really secretly wanted to be thanked, who needed that thanks, from the people who are ok just knowing their gift may have helped in some way.

Now I find myself wishing we could all be the kind of people who know that No Thanks is necessary; that we are called by God to offer what comfort we can, when we can, and we are bound in inextricable webs of care, invisible to our eyes. And we might never get a beautifully written formal thank you for this or that kindness we did, but we can be satisfied knowing we have entered holy orders, we are lay Benedictines going about offering comfort and not needing any but God’s recognition for it. And maybe not even that.

"Your victory is my victory."

2011-01-04T10:59:00.003-05:00

From Molly's blog:

Months ago, Sara said something to me that I haven’t forgotten. She stands 4 inches shorter than me, I think, but is such a powerhouse that I felt like she was eye to eye with me when she took my shoulders and said this, “Molly, your victory is my victory.”

That is one of the deepest and most mysterious Christian truths, I think. It is the heart of communion, in which the ego-walls between us human beings collapse and we are revealed as all belonging to the same body. It is the heart of baptism, where the ego-walls between us and God collapse, we acknowledge our status as children of God, and we share in Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection—we follow God where no human has gone before.

It is the Christmas story, where Jesus comes down from heaven and takes on human form, game for whatever may come. It is the Easter story, where ‘made like Him, like Him we rise’ from the dead as the old hymn goes, and we learn to laugh at Death forever.

This might all sound like religious gobbledygook, but if you’ve ever had a Moment during your nephew’s baptism or while taking communion after a long absence from church, if you’ve ever let your guard slip during Christmas Eve or sunrise service and suddenly felt a lump your throat, you know that what I’m talking about is as real as anything.

Your victory is my victory. There is no “you” and “me” and “God” anymore, all tidy and separate, there’s no my cancer and her homelessness and God’s cool remoteness and your ability to sit there at work or at home and read these blog entries. There’s just all of us together, staggering toward victory.

Another thing I’m not proud of is the terrible Judgy Judger that lives inside of me. One kind of people I judge the most, interesting considering my hardness of heart against (some of) the homeless folks I meet, is people who spend their gold on what I deem to be silly or superficial or downright immoral, considering there is so much suffering and want in the world.

So Judgy Judger reared her head when I was in the locker room at the gym the other day. My gym in Medford is full of mostly young, mostly attractive, mostly white people. On this day, there were two young women getting dressed after their workout. I overheard one of them saying to her friend, “The facial cleanser was $150 but she gave it to me for only $70! Can you believe it? How do you like my new amazing blue headphones? Do you like them? Hey, do you want to go to Vegas in March? Dave wants us to go. I don’t know how I’m going to afford it but I’m going to go.” Maybe if you didn’t buy $150 facial cleanser, I thought…

I mostly can’t believe we live in a world where $150 or even $70 facial cleanser exists. Especially having just heard on the radio, moments before overhearing that conversation, that Haiti only received 2% of the foreign aid it was promised after the earthquake.

Anyhow, I was already kind of burning at their conversation, and walked over closer to the women so I could paint on my eyebrows in front of the mirror. Neither one even glanced at me, though the space was small and I was hard to ignore.

Maybe their ignoring was the result of long practice, a way of allowing strangers to have their privacy in a busy locker room. But I couldn’t help but feel, already fuming, that their act of ignoring me was intentional. Not an eye flicker, not a pause. “Don’t notice the bald woman without eyebrows. Whatever you do, DON’T SEE HER. If you notice her, she’s real. And if she’s real, then we live in a world where thin healthy young white women get cancer, and then I might get cancer. So just don’t acknowledge her, and it won’t be real.”

As I walked away, I noticed that one of them was wearing a Dana Farber marathon team tee shirt. I don’t know what that meant. It seemed ironic to me at the time. But then, you never really know what people are about.

I thought of all this. And I remembered the homeless woman from Harvard Square, from years ago, and how many people had passed her by before I, probably vulnerable to the Holy Spirit for a split second, stopped and gave her a dollar. And how grateful she was not for the dollar, but for the acknowledgment by one human being of another.

And I said a silent prayer for her, wherever she is.

My suffering is your suffering.

And my victory is your victory.

I give to just about every homeless person I pass now. I do it because I noticed, fairly recently (why did it take so long, when as a city dweller I pass homeless people just about every day? Because I, too, was stuffing and hiding and afraid, just like so many other folks), that when I didn’t give, I felt terrible after passing the person by. And I began to notice that when I did give, I never, ever felt that I had done the wrong thing.

I might have mixed feelings, giving cash, I might wonder if they would use my buck to do themselves further harm, but I wouldn’t have the sick, ashamed feeling (or the self-righteous feeling that is usually only masking shame) I almost always had for a few fleeting seconds when I ignored them. So, you might say I give for my own sake, my own well-being. But God is sneaky that way. She’ll use lots of tactics, like enlightened self-interest, to get us to be more human with one another, to love as we want to be loved.

-from "Your Victory is My Victory."

[27] "Incarnation in the holiday season" [Rest and Bread; Wed. Dec. 8, 2010]

2010-12-28T13:40:00.003-05:00

[Preached at Rest and Bread on Wednesday, December 8, 2010. Thanks to la bff for helping me select a Scripture passage.]

[Inspired by The Advent Conspiracy, Keith and I picked 4 alternative themes for Advent this year -- relationship, incarnation, sharing, and activation. Today is Incarnation.]

All you who are thirsty,
come to the water!
You who have no money,
come, buy food and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk,
without money, without price!
Why spend your money for what is not bread,
your wages for what fails to satisfy?
Heed me, and you will eat well,
you will delight in rich fare;
bend your ear and come to me,
listen, that you may have life
I will make an everlasting Covenant with you--
in fulfillment of the blessings promised to David.
-Isaiah 55:1-3, The Inclusive Bible

"You who have no money, come, buy food and eat."

What a message that is for this season, when so many are struggling with economic scarcity.

The kindom of God, for which we wait expectantly this Advent season and all days, is a place where sustenance and abundance are available for all.

This passage also speaks to the goodness of nourishing our bodies.

While this season is full of pressures to buy more stuff, our physical bodies, the very stuff that houses our spirit, often become our enemy. Facing the glut of holiday sweets, we are deluged with tips and tricks for how to not have "too much," how to not "overindulge." We are pulled in opposite directions -- retailers invite us to gift ourselves and our loved ones with chocolates from Godiva, fruit baskets from Harry and David, colorfully foil wrapped candies from Hershey's ... while the morning shows are full of advice about how to enjoy the ubiquitous holiday parties without using up all our Weight Watchers points.

Hear again the word of God: "Heed me, and you will eat well, you will delight in rich fare."

I'm not saying that God wants you to eat nothing but processed sugar, but God's table is a table of abundance. The Communion table there, around which we will all gather later in the service, holds bread and fruit of the vine ... food to nourish and sustain you, food for you to enjoy. And of the surplus you are invited to eat and drink more after the service is over.

Food is central to so much of Jesus' ministry. Jesus eats with everyone -- from the Pharisees (scholars of the religious law) to tax collectors (agents of the oppressive Empire).

In Matthew's Gospel, we read Jesus saying:

     What comparison can I make with this generation?
     They are like children shouting to others as they sit in the marketplace, "We piped for you but you would not dance. We sang you a dirge, but you would not mourn."
     For John the Baptizer came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, "He is possessed."
     The Chosen One comes, eating and drinking, and they say, "This one is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners."
     Wisdom will be vindicated by her own actions.
(Matthew 11:18-19a, The Inclusive Bible)

Jesus experienced the same opposing cultural pressures as we do today. Wear a cloak of camel's hair out in the desert and eat locusts and honey, and people will say you're possessed. Say you're not buying Christmas gifts for anyone this year, and people will say you have no sense of the holiday spirit. Share meals with those who are "socially unacceptable," and people will say all sorts of nasty things about you. Head directly to the chocolate fondue station at the office party, bypassing the veggies and low-fat dip, and people may call you a glutton (though probably not to your face).

Our culture gives us lots of conflicting messages about bodies. I want to give you one message to take home: God likes bodies.

God thinks bodies are so good that God said, "I will have one of these myself."

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."

This is what we anticipate and remember during the season of Advent -- that God, who had shown up in the world plenty of times before, in booming mountaintop and still small voice, in pillars of fire and cloud, chose to take on flesh, to be embodied...

{I extemporized an ending and as usual don't remember what I said -- I think it was about loving the bodies that God gave us, that God so loves, that God who formed us in our mother's womb called good.}

[26] "3 thoughts, approaching Advent" [Pentecost +25(C) Wednesday, Rest and Bread]

2010-12-28T13:29:00.001-05:00

[Preached at Rest and Bread on Wed. Nov. 17, 2010. Thanks to Scott for last-minute editing.]

Matthew 23:37-24:14

³⁷“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! ³⁸See, your house is left to you, desolate. ³⁹For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of our God.’”

24 ¹As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, the disciples came to point out the buildings of the temple. ²Then Jesus asked them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” ³When Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

⁴Jesus answered them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. ⁵For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will lead many astray. ⁶And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. ⁷For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: ⁸all this is but the beginning of the birthpangs. ⁹“Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. ¹⁰Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. ¹¹And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. ¹²And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. ¹³But the one who endures to the end will be saved. ¹⁴And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come.

One metaphor for Advent is that of pregnancy -- we, like Mary, wait in joyful (and perhaps more than a little fearful) anticipation for the Promised One -- Emmanuel, God With Us.

In today's reading, however, we are reminded that Christ is already mothering us. Jesus weeps over the city of Jerusalem, crying out, "How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" How familiar that must sound to parents of willful children...

Confident in her own power and security, Jerusalem has rejected the prophets God has sent to her, has refused the transformative calls from her God and Maker.

Jesus prophesies the destruction of the Temple -- the focal point of religious power and authority. The coming of the Kingdom of God on Earth means the overthrow of all the human kingdoms that are already here on Earth, even the ones we might have a strong personal investment in -- "Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down."

The disciples ask, "Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?"

Typical, Jesus avoids answering the question directly. Instead, Jesus cautions them not to be led astray -- and also not to be afraid. "Be not afraid" is a greeting we hear often from divine messengers throughout Advent and Christmas. When God shows up, you can be assured that you are going to be asked to make some radical changes in your life -- and the more we have to lose, the less that appeals to us (one of the many reasons God has a preferential option for the poor).

Jesus also cautions the disciples that there will be much conflict ahead. I don't think this is necessarily to be read as an assertion that all of this disaster will be a sign that the Second Coming is at hand -- famine and disaster are as old as the Fall; they predict nothing, though they indicate quite a lot. Rather, Jesus exhorts the disciples to endure; "you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet."

All this pain and suffering and disaster? This is not the end. "This is but the beginning of birthpangs."

I have never given birth -- and I really have no desire to, in fact -- but I have it on good authority that it can at times be an incredibly painful and difficult process. If that's true of bringing a regular human baby into the world, would we expect any less of bringing a whole new world to fruition?

And unlike pregnancy, where we have at least an approximation of a due date, we don't know when this Second Coming will be. We hear over and over again throughout the Gospels that no one knows the date or the hour, and so we must always be prepared. We can ask, "What would you do if you knew that Jesus was coming back next month?" or "What would you do if you knew that Jesus wasn't going to come back during your lifetime?" but the reality we have to work with is: "What would you do if you were assured that Jesus would return but you had no idea when that would be?" Every year, during Advent (and also during Lent) we take time to intentionally practice both waiting and preparing ourselves.

So as we approach the season of Advent, let's review Jesus' advice:
* you will not see me again until you say, "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of our God."
* Beware that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, "I am the Messiah!" and they will lead many astray.
* you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed
* the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

I'm intrigued by the twinning of these first two -- the second one is perhaps more salient, connected as it is with all the doom and gloom foreshadowing, but the first is no less important. Jerusalem is exhorted to proclaim: "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of our God." While we should be wary of those who claim divinity for themselves, we are also exhorted to be open to the presence and call of God in our lives.

Be not afraid. An exhortation used throughout the Advent and Christmas stories to assure us not to be afraid of the new thing God is doing in our lives and in the world -- but here we are also reminded not to be afraid of all that is happening in the world. For we have so great a hope... as we heard Paul proclaim on Sunday: "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus."

Do not let your love grow cold. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself." "Love one another as I have loved you." Over and over again we hear this exhortation, this love which is at the heart of the good news.

And so I invite you, as we move into this this season, to remain open to God, to be not afraid, and to not let your love grow cold.

[25] praying in tune [Rest and Bread; Wednesday, September 22, 2010]

2010-12-28T13:06:00.002-05:00

[I gave the Reflection at Rest and Bread on September 22, 2010 -- feeling tired, hungry, and ill-prepared; I extemporized the second half of my Reflection and I think it went okay, though after the service was over I couldn't tell you what I said.]

¹First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, ²for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. ³This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, ⁴who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. ⁵For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, Christself human, ⁶who gave Christself a ransom for all—this was attested at the right time. ⁷For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
(1 Timothy 2:1-7, NRSV)

We are exhorted to pray for everyone, even the rulers -- which I think also pointedly means, "even the people we don't like much."

Because there is one God and one Mediator -- and neither of them are us. In the prayer that Jesus taught us, we pray "Thy will be done" -- God's will, not ours. Yes, we are Called to be agents of God's Will here on Earth, but that doesn't mean we get to dictate the Plan.

Paul understands himself to have been commissioned to share this Good News. That there is one God -- and one mediator between God and humankind, which is to say, Christ.

We are not God. We are not even mediators between God and humanity. Now, many of us went on retreat in February to reflect on the topic of "prayer," and one of the things we discussed there was the idea that prayer changes God. The Jewish tradition that Paul and Jesus and most of the early Church had inherited was rich with a culture of arguing with God. And I support that. As does Paul, I think. After all, he lists intercessions and supplications in his prayer list.

But I think there's also an important lesson here about getting out of the way a bit. To remember that it is not all about us, that it does not all rest on us, and to shift our focus appropriately. Sometimes all we can do is pray, and sometimes the most useful thing we can do is pray.

One of the powerful images I have encountered for prayer is "getting in tune with God." Sometimes God is (or seems) out of tune, and that's where righteous arguing comes in -- but often we are the ones who are out of tune, and so we are exhorted to recenter ourselves in the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

grace

2010-12-28T02:50:00.000-05:00

My mom gave me a copy of Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith for Christmas, and I've been underwhelmed by it thus far, but I really liked her piece on "Grace":

     Jacob's theophany, his dream of angels on a stairway to heaven, strikes me as an appealing tale of unmerited grace. Here's a man who has just deceived his father and cheated his brother out of an inheritance. But God's response to finding Jacob vulnerable, sleeping all alone in open country, is not to strike him down for his sins but to give him a blessing.
     Jacob wakes from the dream in awe, exclaiming, "Surely the Lord is in this place -- and I did not know it!" For once, his better instincts take hold, and he responds by worshiping God. He takes the stone that he'd kept close all night, perhaps to use as a weapon if a wild animal, or his furious brother Esau, were to attack him, and sets it up as a shrine, leaving it for future travelers, so that they, too, will know that this is a holy place, the dwelling place of God.
     Jacob's exclamation is one that remains with me, a reminder that God can choose to dwell everywhere and anywhere we go. One morning this past spring I noticed a young couple with an infant at an airport departure gate. The baby was staring intently at other people, and as soon as he recognized a human face, no matter whose it was, no matter if it was young or old, pretty or ugly, bored or happy or worried-looking he would respond with absolute delight.
     It was beautiful to see. Our drab departure gate had become the gate of heaven. And as I watched the baby play with any adult who would allow it, I felt as awe-struck as Jacob, because I realized that this is how God looks at us, staring into our faces in order to be delighted, to see the creature he made and called good, along with the rest of creation. And, as Psalm 139 puts it, darkness is as nothing to God, who can look right through whatever evil we've done in our lives to the creature made in the divine image.
     I suspect that only God, and well-loved infants, can see this way. But it gives me hope to think that when God gazed on the sleeping Jacob, he looked right through the tough little schemer and saw something good, if only a capacity for awe, for recognizing God and worshipping. That Jacob will worship badly, trying to bargain with God, doesn't seem to matter. God promises to be with him always.
     Peter denied Jesus, and Saul persecuted the early Christians, but God could see the apostles they would become. God does not punish Jacob as he lies sleeping because he can see in him Israel, the foundation of a people. God loves to look at us, and loves it when we will look back at him. Even when we try to run away from our troubles, as Jacob did, God will find us, and bless us, even when we feel most alone, unsure if we'll survive the night. God will find a way to let us know that he is with us in this place, wherever we are, however far we think we've run. And maybe that's one reason we worship -- to respond to grace. We praise God not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the faith God has in us. To let ourselves look at God, and let God look back at us. And to laugh, and sing, and be delighted because God has called us his own.
     -pp.150-151

"comfort and joy..."

2010-12-28T02:49:00.000-05:00

me: [catches up on some blog reading]
me: [enjoys Loreena McKennitt's "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" {found here} {lyrics here} ]

Later...
Housemate: "I'm amused that this is the first time I've heard you playing Christmas music."
me: "You can't play Christmas carols before Christmas."
Housemate: "But Christmas was 2 days ago."
me: "The season of Christmas lasts for 12 days."
Housemate: "So you're going to play this on repeat for 12 days?"
me: "... No."

today's wisdom from Molly

2010-12-10T09:43:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I do wonder if the Mary-like ability to accept whatever reality comes my way (usually mingled with the spiritual temper tantrum in a winning combination) is not actually spiritual enlightenment, attunement with God, a state of grace, but rather an even deeper and more insidious need to control every little thing? Like, I’ll show you God, I refuse to experience pain or dissonance around this new wrinkle in my life?

I’ve talked about retroactive prayer here in this blog, what about retrofitted prayer? When we square whatever it is we really want with what we already have—shaving off the bits of desire and longing that stick out past the edges of the current reality?

Is this a real discharge of desire, sloughing of concupiscence (a good thing in mystical Christianity), a release of attachment (a good thing in Buddhism)? Or is it merely a denial of our shadow side?

Like daughter, like mother? Carmen has a lot of life-threatening food allergies, has since she was a tiny babe, so she’s never known what it was to eat whatever comes across her path. We’ve adapted, and so has she. Humans can get used to just about anything. People say, “oh, how hard for her not to be able to eat that bag of Chee-tos/bacon double cheeseburger/pounder bag of peanut M&Ms” but I say that she doesn’t know any different.

But that’s not strictly true. For years I got away with keeping a cache of homemade whole-wheat apple muffins in the freezer and grabbing one out when it was time to go to a celebration rife with allergenic treats. But she is almost five now, and she can see that a cupcake at a birthday party looks perfectly delicious, and is not equivalent to a whole-wheat apple muffin.

She has squared this paradox in her own way. If it is true that her mother loves her, and if it true that she it totally, totally worthy of the best possible treats, then the thing that she has MUST be as good as the thing that will put her into the emergency room. Therefore she will lean over to me at family parties and say, sotto voce, “My carob surprise is so much better than that old premium ice cream parfait with warm caramelized marcona almonds and Callebaut fudge drizzle, right?”

God our mother also loves us, and we also are totally, totally worthy of the best possible treats. But sometimes we still get carob surprise.

-from Let It Be With Me

beyond "It Gets Better"

2010-11-24T21:04:00.001-05:00

PUT THIS ON THE {MAP} is reteaching gender and sexuality to professionals such as school administrators, social workers, health care providers and juvenile probation staff. With youth voices at the forefront, our team of educators use dynamic, relevant and informative professional development trainings and workshops to shift the conversation about gender and sexuality in our communities. Find out more on this site about our award-winning documentary, our upcoming tour, and our professional development work.

Our current project Reteaching Gender & Sexuality is a message about queer youth action and resilience. The video was generated to contribute additional queer/trans youth voices to the national conversations about queer/trans youth lives. Reteaching Gender & Sexuality intends to steer the conversation beyond the symptom of bullying, to consider systemic issues and deeper beliefs about gender and sexuality that impact queer youth. We invite you to share the video with your friends, family and networks; we invite you to share with us what THIS issue means to you! The video was created by PUT THIS ON THE MAP!

"It's not easy being green."

2010-11-06T19:43:00.000-04:00

I have problems with the "It Gets Better" initiative, but KERMIT!

This makes me heartsick.

2010-11-03T21:15:00.002-04:00

So, I saw this post yesterday and meant to post about it (esp. in conjunction with it being All Souls' Day) but then I didn't.

nextian posted recently about FictionAlley and PepsiRefresh -- so while we're all thinking about places that money can do good...

God as Lover

2010-10-26T13:16:00.009-04:00

At Sacred Eros last night, we talked about language, and one of the topics we got onto was language for God. The facilitator mentioned America's Four Gods: What We Say about God--and What That Says about Us and the fact that one model that wasn't present was God as Lover.

One participant mentioned that she was raised Catholic and she thinks many of the greatest saints understood God as Lover. I was dubious/surprised and asked whom she would list. (In my head I thought, "Julian of Norwich? John Donne?")

She listed:
* St. Francis of Assisi
* St. Thérèse of Lisieux
* Thomas Aquinas (I might be remembering this one wrong -- could be another Thomas; edit: though another person has since confirmed his inclusion in this list)
* St. Catherine of Siena
* St. Faustina

The facilitator mentioned Milton.

In conversation today, bff listed:
* Gregory of Nyssa
* Teresa of Ávila

I'm now really curious whom else people might list -- and they don't have to be canonized saints (or even operating within the Christian tradition -- we discussed Sufi mystics a bit last night).

Feel free also to just discuss the concept of God as Lover -- historically, personally, whatever (bff and I discussed nuns as Brides of Christ, for example, which moved into discussion of women's sexuality and self-understandings thereof).

Edit: Running list of mentions by other people:
* Margery Kempe
* Hildegard of Bingen
* St. John of the Cross
* "My Beloved Is Mine and I Am His" by Francis Quarles
* St. Augustine
* Patti Smith
* Mechthild of Magdeburg
* Gertrud of Helfta
* Agnes Blannbekin
* Heinrich Seuse ("who is particularly interesting as one aspect of how he understands his relationship with Christ in terms of a knight serving a lady")
* the "Jesus is my boyfriend" subset of contemporary Christian music
* Robinson Jeffers's "Roan Stallion"

"In filling a role that is part pastor, scholar and community organizer..."

2010-10-25T22:29:00.000-04:00

Seen on facebook:

"Hendricks Chapel's first female dean is committed to social justice"

Jeremy: "Yea for T.L.!!"

Jeremy: "And wow...the comments are RIDICULOUS on that article."

Jeremy: "Oh man. Comment of the day RE: Cambridge Welcoming Ministries : "this group appears to be an informal front group for various labor unions and environmental groups." LOL!!!!"

Sean: "This is one of the best thing anyone has ever said about my church!"

***

I told my housemate, who literally went \o/ and said, "Yeah! You're a socialist front!" and told me I needed to blog this :)

requesting a timeout to say grace?

2010-10-12T20:38:00.001-04:00

I'm mostly good at asking whomever I'm eating with for a timeout so I can say a silent grace over my food -- when I'm in a one-on-one situation, anyway. I've mostly stopped telling the other person that they can go ahead and eat, because people always reply by insisting that no they'll wait. I'm not good at timeout-requesting when I'm with a group, though -- which is problematic because I'm really bad at tuning out noise around me. I went to a luncheon today, and when I arrived, a couple people were already talking, and I sat down and bowed my head and folded my hands in front of my face and the longer I sat there trying to say grace, the more I wanted to either pick up my food and move to a quieter part of the room to say grace or literally ask them to stop talking for a minute.

So the question I posed to facebook: Is it gauche to, in a secular setting, ask the people eating with you to stop talking so you can say a silent grace over your food?

So, I'm doing Magpie Girl's Power Stories class.

2010-09-30T11:01:00.001-04:00

The most recent one is, Lesson Fourteen: How to To Speak Your Truth. Period.

Tara Sophia Mohr writes:

There is the power of telling. Of saying. Of speaking your truth.

And then there is the power of ending your sentence. Stopping. Putting the period at the end of the words.

That second power is less talked about, but just as important. It goes like this:

“I am uncomfortable with the way you are speaking to me.” Period. Silence. Wait.

“I would like to work at home two days a week.” Period. Silence. Wait.

“I need more time on this.” Period. Silence. Wait.

“My heart is hurt.” Period. Silence. Wait.

In the silence, you give room to people, to life, to meet you. Standing in your power is finishing your sentence. It’s sitting in the silence.

I was already kind of trying to do that with an email I wrote Tuesday night -- trying to discipline myself express what I am feeling/what I need and then wait for the other person to respond, rather than pre-emptively responding to everything I think they might say in response -- but having it really clearly articulated like that I think will help me to hold onto that.

I was really struck by, In the silence, you give room to people, to life, to meet you.

She goes on to write:

1. Breathe. Connect to your body and your being.
2. Notice how you are feeling.
3. State a fact about your feelings, your needs, your experience, in less than 10 words. (Hint: those are always “I” statements, not “you” statements or “it is” or “we should” statements.)
4. Put the period on it. Sit in the silence. Wait. Now it’s their turn.

I used to be scared of that last step. It felt rude, almost. It felt rebellious – to simply say what I felt, to make a mess, to disagree, to cause an inconvenience, and then just leave it out there, on the table. To say it and not back-pedal. To say it not decorate it with flowers or put vanilla frosting all over it.

This isn’t working for me. Period. Silence. Wait.

No I won’t be able to attend. Period. Silence. Wait.

I am disappointed. Period. Period. Silence. Wait.

This is where I’ve given away my power for years. Making nice. Not wanting to create conflict. Being unable, physically unable it felt, to express dissatisfaction and leave it on the table, as is. I wanted you to like me, and I thought that would be put at risk.

Receiving the Care We Give

Little did I know that expressing dissatisfaction to someone and maintaining relationship with him or her rarely conflict. Usually, real expression deepens relationship.

When someone says to me something like, “this isn’t working for me,” I care. I respond civilly. I start talking about what we can do to fix it.

It was mind-blowing to me to realize others might meet me that way too. That I could be the one to state a need, a preference, and others might change to accommodate it. That they might even enjoy doing that.

(Erev) Yom Kippur

2010-09-17T21:28:00.001-04:00

From Kita:

"May all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who live in their midst, for all the people are in fault."

This year:

I am sorry for not being the person you thought I was.
I am sorry for being exactly the person you thought I was.
I am sorry for not being able to commit the way you needed me to.
I am sorry for not being able to fix things for you.
I am sorry for trying to fix things for you, when they were not my responsibility to fix.
I am sorry for letting you down.
I am sorry for expecting too much from you.
I am sorry for being unable to listen to your perspective with an open mind.
I am sorry for being unwilling to consider where you might have been coming from.
I am sorry that I can't forgive you yet.
I am sorry for not treating you with more kindness.
I am sorry for not treating myself with more kindness.

*

I forgive you for not being the person I wanted you to be.
I forgive you for your inability to give me what I needed.
I forgive you for making it all about you.
I forgive you for disappointing me, for angering me, for making me sad.
I forgive you for not being able to empathize with my perspective.
I forgive you for not treating me with more kindness.
I forgive myself for needing more time to let go of past hurts.

*

If there is anyone I have hurt, with words or deeds, this past year, I am truly sorry, and I ask for your forgiveness. You are not obligated to forgive me, but I sincerely hope you will think about it. If there is anything you would like to discuss related to this [...] I promise to be as respectful and considerate as you are.

wholeness is possible

2010-09-13T15:31:00.001-04:00

From "Teshuvah, In Three Acts: A rabbi reflects on the struggle to restore wholeness in the lives of three congregants" by Rabbi Ayelet Cohen (emphasis mine):

I ran into one woman outside of the sanctuary on Yom Kippur. She was sitting on the floor playing with her young son. She had lost her mother earlier that year. “I am furious at God,” she told me. “Ever since my mother died I have been furious at God. I have no intention of going in there and praying or saying anything to God.”

But she had come to shul anyway. It was Yom Kippur. She and her partner were raising a child. She was angry at God that her mother had not lived to know the grandson who would surely have brought her so much joy. But this woman and her partner were creating a family, continuing the chain of their Jewish families. They wanted their son to be a part of their Jewish community.

She didn’t go into the sanctuary that year. She may not have gone in the next year either. But she kept coming to shul, with her partner and their son. Even as she raged with God she knew that for her Jewish family, marking the holidays and coming to shul was essential. She wasn’t asking God for forgiveness. She wanted God to ask her for forgiveness, for taking her mother away before her son had a chance to know his grandmother. And it seemed like Yom Kippur was the right time for that.

Each year as the fullness of summer begins to wane and the moon of the month of Elul swells and subsides, the season of teshuvah returns. Teshuvah is a gift and a challenge. It is slow work. There is no magic formula that will suddenly heal all that has shattered in our lives. We build community; we explore and reconcile with Judaism; we search for God. Every year as we return to this season we are painfully aware of what is still broken.

But each year doing teshuvah reminds us that we may begin to repair what is broken. We may recover that which has been lost. Teshuvah reminds us that wholeness is possible.

[24] Pentecost +15(C) - Standing at the Gates of Repentance

2010-09-04T22:11:00.001-04:00

Proper 18C / Ordinary 23C / Pentecost +15 - September 5, 2010

Jeremiah 18:1-11
Psalm 139
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

Standing at the Gates of Repentance

We are coming up on the Days of Awe. In a few days is Rosh Hashanah. The Jewish New Year. The time when we release everything from the past year which has separated us from God -- including that which has separated us from each other and from our own best selves.

Rachel Barenblat (Velveteen Rabbi) talks about the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah, about the work we are called to do to prepare ourselves. She says that her teacher Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi calls the spiritual work of that month of Elul tikkun ha-sulam, "repair of the ladder." She recalls the Biblical story of Jacob’s Ladder, with angels that ascend and descend -- which begs the question of why the angels begin here with us on the ground rather than up in Heaven. One Jewish teaching answers that these angels are our prayers -- which begin where we are; and when we reach out to God, God reaches back to us. She writes:

Reb Zalman's teaching about "repair of the ladder" tells me that the work of this season is work of alignment. We're meant to be aligning that internal ladder so that our prayers can ascend without obstruction, and so that divine blessing can descend in return. If there are obstructions in our relationships -- with ourselves, with our partners, with our families and friends, with our communities, with other communities, with God God's-self -- then blessing can't flow as it should.

I was reminded of this when I read the Luke passage -- about building a tower on a foundation.

Jesus asks, "which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether you have enough to complete it? Otherwise, when you have laid a foundation and are not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule you, saying, 'This person began to build and was not able to finish.' "

Jesus, sensibly, exhorts us not to begin a project without a plan for how to bring it to fruition.

But this is counterbalanced by the God in Jeremiah who can rework the clay that is the substance of our lives into an entirely different shape than it is now or than we had planned it to be.

We are called to bring Jacob's Ladder into alignment, to free it of obstructions -- but we can also rest in the assurance that this work is not ours alone. God is the Potter, the Carpenter, the Shepherd. It is God's work that we are doing. And we do well to remember that we are only repairing the ladder -- it is God who has created it.

Ultimately, all our projects are only a part of God's greater project of Shalom.

Counterbalancing the importance of the work of repair, in a later post, Rachel quotes Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem," which I'll quote at slightly more length here:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

Jacob dreams this ladder when he is fleeing from his brother Esau, who is out to kill him because Jacob tricked him out of his birthright.

Throughout his life, Jacob has trusted in his own cleverness -- and the assistance of his mother -- to subvert the social order and to work situations to his advantage, despite his position as younger brother.

When we are wrapped up tight in our own doings, there is no space to let God in. We don't want to let God in -- we've got this all taken care of. God might have some different plans in mind, and who wants that?

But when our own devices have failed, when we leave the world we have known and venture into the wilderness to seek a new place, sometimes our self-assurance is a little bit shaken, and perhaps we let down some of our defenses, and some cracks open up in our shell through which the Holy Spirit can move.

Upon waking from this dream, Jacob says, "Surely God is in this place, and I did not know it."

God is with us not only when we have perfect offerings, when we have perfectly completed all the work of repair and have washed away all the grime of our labors, presenting our shiny clean and smiling faces before God.

God is also with us when we are fleeing the consequences of our own actions -- and is often even waiting with a blessing to offer us, as in this story, where God not only affirms that Jacob will inherit the promise made to Abraham, but also says, "Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go." Our lectionary elides this portion of the Psalmist's address to God, for reasons that are unclear to me:

⁷Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
⁸If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
⁹If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
¹⁰even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
¹¹If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,"
¹²even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

God is with us always -- always reaching out to us, patiently waiting for us to make a move toward ascending or repairing that ladder.

Jesus calls us to let go of all that we have in order to follow The Way which leads to eternal life. For none of us has the tools to build Jacob's Ladder, and so we are asked to surrender to the One who does.

We are asked to open ourselves up to being radically remade -- to give up our gropings for power and control, to let go of our belief that we can do this all ourselves.

"Come, go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words."

Bring your self -- your shaky, wobbly, misshapen, soft clay self -- to the potter's house ... a house perhaps built of strong timbers, on the edge of a wood, so you have to travel a bit out of the hustling bustling "civilization" to reach it ... and settle yourself there, perhaps a bit nervously, as you watch a pair of strong hands throwing clay and you wonder what it would feel like to be that clay on the wheel.

And as you settle yourself, the potter begins to speak to you, not taking her eyes off her work, but speaking directly to you, in a voice that is gentle but firm, perhaps a bit deeper than you had expected. She reminds you that She knew you and knit you in your mother's womb. And She tells you the story of your birth, of how you cried when you were pushed out of the amniotic fluid that had had been your home for months and into the harsh air. She tells you of how quickly your lungs and eyes and limbs adjusted. She tells you of the warm bodies, soft and firm, that held you close, that would not left you fall.

She tells you the story of your life -- of the times you fell, of the times you cried. She reminds you of the times when someone was there to pick you up, to bandage your wounds, to hold you as you cried. And She tells you that even when no human was there, when you felt abandoned and alone, that She was there beside you, watching you, and weeping with you.

And She tells you that She has such good plans for you -- plans to prosper you and not to harm you; plans to give you hope and a future. And you know that She loves you.

And so when She finishes the piece She is working on, when She has cleaned off Her wheel, and She looks at you invitingly, you nod.

We often express a desire for new life, but we frequently want it on our own terms -- we have a clear picture in our minds of what that new life would look like, and we just want God to make it happen. The story of the potter here reminds us that there is One with greater vision than ours.

In synchronicity with where we are in the Jewish calendar this week, today’s Jeremiah passage ends with God saying, "Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings." The Psalmist, in turn, ends by asking God, "See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."

Wikipedia informs me that:

In the Talmud tractate on Rosh Hashanah it states that three books of account are opened on Rosh Hashanah, wherein the fate of the wicked, the righteous, and those of an intermediate class are recorded. The names of the righteous are immediately inscribed in the book of life, and they are sealed "to live." The middle class are allowed a respite of ten days, until Yom Kippur, to repent and become righteous; the wicked are "blotted out of the book of the living."

I feel really disingenuous standing here before you extolling reconciliation -- because I am violently angry at someone. But as I was struggling with that disconnect, I remembered that above bit about Rosh Hashanah.

It would seem to make more sense for the New Year to come on or immediately after Yom Kippur, so that after all this work you start the year fresh, but no, you start the year and immediately you begin a period of concentrated work.

And the Days of Awe aren't just about apologizing and asking forgiveness for the things we have done to others -- faithful Jews are also called to forgive that which has been done to them (or so I am given to understand from at least one Jewish friend of mine, anyway).

I do not get to pursue reconciliation with this person I am violently angry with. Over and over again she has failed someone I care very much about, and the one time I tried to have a conversation with her about that, it did NOT go well. She got an apology from me for the ways in which I was arguably out-of-line in that situation, so she probably feels sufficiently reconciled -- but she has also made it clear that she is incapable of providing my friend with what she needs, and is uninterested in trying. So how do I achieve reconciliation with her? Pettily I want to scream at her and possibly punch her in the face; but much more than that, I want to change her, to help her grow into the vocation she is pursuing, to help her help my friend.

But I'm not the Potter. I don't have the power to reshape her, nor do I know what vision the Creator has in mind either for her or for my friend.

Jesus says, "None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."

Anger is a possession.

Bitterness is a possession.

Spite is a possession.

A desire to control is a possession.

In order to walk in the Way of the One who calls us to new life, we are called to let go of that which binds us to our old lives, that which keeps us twisted in on ourselves.

Letting go? Not one of my strong suits. So this isn't work I particularly want to do. But perhaps the impending Days of Repentance will help me to try.

As we move out into the world, I invite us all to open ourselves, even a little bit, to the transformation God wishes to work in us -- whether that means doing some work of reconciliation or perhaps some other work altogether.

Amen.

"all the past blotted out in the presence of the Living Present and the Eternal Future."

2010-08-13T20:05:00.002-04:00

I am not surprised that "In The Garden" is one of people's favorite hymns -- it gets requested at Singspiration all the time -- but I still kind of go, "bzuh?" because in my head it is a funeral song (my immediate thought is of my mom telling me that it makes her cry because it makes her think of the fact that it'll be played at her mom's funeral). Ari loves it because it is a Mary Magdalene/Jesus hymn. While I have heard the "Mary Magdalene at the tomb" inspiration story in preface to singing the hymn before, I didn't actually really read the words thoughtfully in light of that until tonight. It definitely makes the "Jesus sends me away" ending to the hymn make a sense that it doesn't if it's a story about going to Heaven. I guess most people's sense of the song is that it's a happy dream that you've had about Jesus? I don't really know. Mostly I just get cranky about the "And the joy we share [...] none other has ever known" -- 'cause yes, each individual's experience is unique and non-replicable, but aren't we singing/loving the hymn because the narrator's experience resonates with our own?

Edit: It also occurs to me that this being a facebook survey means the respondents are likelier to skew younger than if it were, for example, a print survey distributed through the institutional church.

I don't actually have a point here.

2010-08-13T16:33:00.004-04:00

So, there's "Women's Work" -- which points out a troubling theme(s?) about how women are portrayed on Supernatural.

And then there's "On the Prowl" -- whose subject is eroticized violence enacted on men. I am so not the target audience for this vid 'cause I'm like, "Ew! These scenes I have seen already? Squicked me the first time. These scenes I have not seen before? Squicking me now." And it keeps escalating (I started having to look away from the screen). People in the comments talk about how it problematizes the hurt/comfort trope and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that trope which has always held -- and continues to hold -- zero interest for me." [This is an interesting meta post on the two vids, though.]

This morning at the gym, I watched the CNN segment on "Love The Way You Lie" -- the Eminem & Rihanna & Megan Fox & Dominic Monaghan music video -- and then YouTubed it at the office. It's beautiful, both aurally (okay, Rihanna's voice, I mean -- I would gladly skip all the Eminem bits) and visually ... it's really compelling ... but yeah, the message it sends about domestic violence is really troubling.

[23] "what if no one's watching?" [Pentecost +11(C) Wednesday, Rest and Bread]

2010-08-12T12:00:00.000-04:00

Luke 12:41-48

      ⁴¹Peter said, “Do you intend this parable just for us, Teacher, or do you mean it for everyone?”
      ⁴²Jesus said, “It’s the faithful and farsighted steward that the owner leaves to supervise the staff and give them their rations at the proper time. ⁴³Happy the steward whom the owner, upon returning, finds busy! ⁴⁴The truth is, the owner will put the steward in charge of the entire estate. ⁴⁵But say the steward thinks, ‘The owner is slow in returning’ and begins to abuse the other staff members, eating and drinking and getting drunk. ⁴⁶When the owner returns unexpectedly, the steward will be punished severely and ranked among those undeserving of trust.
      ⁴⁷“The staff members who knew the owner’s wishes but didn’t work to fulfill them will get a severe punishment, ⁴⁸whereas the one who didn’t know them--even though deserving of a severe punishment--will get off with a milder correction. From those who have been given much, much will be required; from those who have been entrusted much, much more will be asked.”

[I extemporized some filler and largely improv’ed the last paragraph, but this is approximately my text.]

what if no one's watching?

There’s a lot going on in this parable, but the part I’m going to focus on is: But say the steward thinks, ‘The owner is slow in returning’ and begins to abuse the other staff members, eating and drinking and getting drunk.

I’m not interested in a “Jesus is coming -- look busy” Rapture theology. Rather, I want to talk about what we do when we think no one’s watching.

I work at a university, and during the summer? No one’s watching. And I’m reminded this summer -- as I am every summer, but apparently I need to keep being reminded -- that when I’m not accountable to anyone for the work I maybe should be doing, I don’t do the work. It’s easy to feel like it doesn’t matter -- because there are no consequences. Rationally, I may know that there will be consequences down the line, but when I’m not accountable to anyone in the moment, it’s really easy to ignore that.

And I think we live a lot of our lives like that. We’ve been given responsibility to be good stewards, but we start to slacken our responsibilities -- we focus on our own fleeting desires at the expense of the needs of others... We bend rules and cut corners in ways we never would if someone were watching.

I don’t endorse an imagining of God as angry judge in the sky, but I invite us to imagine that someone we love and respect is standing next to us, watching us -- because She is. And She loves us. And she has such amazing plans for us. We have been given responsibilities, but we have also been given a Promise. And so I invite you to remember both of those as you move through the next few days.

Amen.

why history matters

2010-08-06T13:44:00.002-04:00

From ephemere's post "Patalim" (trigger warning for descriptions of violence):

Freedom is not forgetting. And forgetting is not freedom. Look at what the loss of our memory has done to us. Look at it, and ask me whether we are better off acting as if the atrocities of the wars and colonizations never happened, as if we have no need for vigilance because the exertion of political and economic will of a foreign power over us cannot happen again, as if we have learned the lessons of the past so thoroughly we will be sure to fight for our rights and the rights of our people to speak and live free, as if we have so fully realized all the evils and all the complexities of power differentials and the abuse of wealth and the exploitation of resources and knowledge and people that we can now equip ourselves to fight against it, as if we recognize the importance of having and claiming our identities and our dignity and the burden and glory that is our history, as if we no longer stumble through the debris and ruin of so many broken institutions and fault ourselves for our own weakness and our own brokenness and the fact that we are not as good and wise and wonderful and wealthy as our former colonial masters. Look at it. Look at how well we have erased the graves, how so many of us go about our daily lives as if there are not more of us being killed every day, how we continue blithely on, the struggles our parents and grandparents and ancestors suffered through mere footnotes in the pages of our books, certainly things that no longer matter in this progressive story of the Philippines in 2010. Look at it, and go on. Ask me.

I don't want to erase this blood staining my legacy. I don't want to forget, as if it never happened. I don't want to keep coming across, "I didn't know the Philippines was a U.S. colony!" as if I do not bear the damage of American occupation written in my nerves and across my tongue. I don't want to see "deathmarching" used as a verb, the same way I deplore how "imeldific" is used as an adjective -- as if history were an erasable thing and words slipping into common parlance an apology or a healing of all these wounds. I don't want people to go on using this in a misguided attempt to remove the blood in it, because forgetting is what gives the evil behind this more power, by allowing the word to go unchallenged and slip under the veneer of acceptability, lightness, cheapening, banality. I don't want the atrocities of war to become equated with mundane things.

I don't want common use. I don't want a sanitized history. I want my stories, past and present, these stories of my people that we have lost and that we're on the verge of losing, held close to my heart and remembered. I want these stories told over and over again, because the need for them will never lift, not the necessity for memory and not the blatant spitting on the dignity of it. I want to claim them though I may choke on tears and tongue in doing so, though I surrender on so many other things daily and remain one frail and weak person still grappling with the fractures in her present and in her past. Because this, too, is part of who I am. Because every story told and every careless use challenged is defiance, is struggle, is me raising my head and saying, this happened, this matters -- is yet another blow against erasure, silence, the unmarking of graves.

[For more, especially on the specific incident that prompted this, check out, for example, fiction_theory/megwrites' post -- links go to LJ/DW, respectively. Also, manifesta.]

Gerasene demoniac!!!

2010-08-05T15:05:00.002-04:00

At Rest and Bread last night, Jeff V. reflected on the story of the Gerasene demoniac (Luke 8:26-39). I love this story so much. I think I was properly introduced to it by Amy-Jill Levine at Convo 2008 -- though I can't actually remember much of what she said about it.

Jeff talked about how people often fear the liberator (unknown) more than the oppressor (known).
He said that Tillich defines the demonic as that which we treat as God and which turns on us.
Jeff used the example of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico -- we all agree that what happened was a disaster, but the changes we would have to make in our lives and in society to wean ourselves off of oil seems to be much more frightening than this disaster. [Yes, I know there's no risk-free energy source, but I think the general point stands: that sometimes even when we can indicate a particular problem and a particular solution, we aren't willing to take the risks/make the sacrifices that solution would require of us -- which I think is a common story throughout the Gospels.]

In the shared reflection time, Ian H. said that while Tillich's idea makes sense for some of the demon stories, it doesn't work for him in this story, because Jeff's examples were money, success, etc. -- stuff which if this guy had, society would have welcomed him in. Ian said that this story reminded him more of PTSD -- demons that we created and which we then can't bear to be a witness to, and so we send them away.

Masha commented on the fact that while the man's words (which were really the demon's words) rejected Jesus, the man's physical actions drew him toward Jesus.

At JPLicks afterward, Masha talked about how she grew up in a context where the idea of modern-day miracles was taken for granted, and that she found the prospect of a miracle happening to her really frightening -- because it means we live in an irrational world (what ELSE you thought couldn't happen could?) and also there's the concern: what if there are strings attached?

In the post-service discussions, people kept mentioning the destruction of the swine herd. I pointed out that this story was being told to Jews about non-Jews, so for Jews it would make perfect sense that the unclean demons were sent into the unclean swine who were then sent over the cliff -- that this continuum would have made perfect sense to them (I think credit goes to the bff for this framing of it). [I love that the text Jeff gave me refers to the country of the Gerasenes as being "opposite Galilee."]

At JPLicks, either Al or Masha commented about how people fear that which they cannot understand/control -- in this case, both the demoniac and Jesus.

I read the Sacred Text aloud, both before and after the Reflection, and I am having the same problem now as I did at shared reflection time -- that I have so many thoughts that I don't know what to say.

I was struck by Jesus asking, "What is your name?" This man is afflicted and ostracized, and it feels so tender to me that Jesus asks him his name.
Other people mentioned the power of naming an affliction -- which is also a good point.

Oh, and one more thing: At JPLicks we talked about some about whether demons are real or not, and I said that whether this person was really possessed by demons or was mentally ill (leaving aside the issue of whether afflictions manifest differently depending on how a person's socio-cultural context understands them) or whatever, I felt like one of the major points of the story was that God through Jesus has the power to liberate us from that which oppresses us and keeps us in (nonconsensual) bondage, and can empower us to reintegrate into community.

The Old Spice Man meets FeministHulk = best ever

2010-08-04T22:10:00.000-04:00

So, when I first encountered "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" Old Spice Commercial, I was uncomfortable. I didn't have a coherent critique, and I wasn't interested in investing a lot of time/energy coming up with one, 'cause hey, advertising, lots of it is problematic.

And then it became a Thing, and yes, I enjoyed, "Study like a scholar, scholar" (while still having problems with it).

And then fandom sort of fell in love with The Old Spice Man. Which surprised me a little, 'cause hello problematic, but also wasn't that surprising ~~since when does fandom not fall in love with problematic stuff~~ since linguistically playful and/or highly performative provides lots and lots for fandom to play with.

rydra_wong informed the Internet that "Festibility (index post here) has just received the greatest prompt known to humanity." Which, trufax.

But then tonight, proving why fandom is one of my True Homes, my best friend pointed me to: The Old Spice Man meets FEMINIST HULK [for more about @FeministHulk, see the Ms. Magazine interview].

"i always feel i have to open my mouth / and every time i do / i offend someone / somewhere"

2010-07-28T10:24:00.001-04:00

I read Molly's "Bald" post Monday afternoon, but didn't have the energy to comment.

Excerpt (emphases mine):

People know that I have a cancer diagnosis and am undergoing chemotherapy, so that gives me a lot of permission. I tire easily, am often hoarse or have mouth sores, so they know I have to use words sparingly. But I’ve taken the permission further, extended it not just to quantity, but to quality of words.

I don’t beat around the bush in emails anymore. I keep it short and sweet. And in in-person conversations, I just come out and say what’s on my mind, what I need, what my family needs, what I can’t bear, what my limits are, what I think is really going on. It has been very, very helpful in establishing boundaries.

And it is such a RELIEF. Maybe it’s a relief to other people, too. Maybe they were very patiently waiting for me to get to the point all these years. Maybe it’s not a relief! Maybe it’s been hard on people, this newly bald me, and they’ll tell me so when chemo is over.

Because the new baldness in speaking also extends to telling people some truths (from my perspective) about themselves. One of my seminary professors, Ellen Davis, said when we were studying the book of Proverbs, which has a lot to say about straight talk, that ‘criticism is a gift.’ I never forgot her words.

And even though I myself for decades have delicately wrapped (constructive) criticism in layers and layers of tissue paper before handing over the gift, I find that I prefer mine given to me straight, even if it’s pointy. Because wrapped in so much tissue, you sometimes miss the gift. It is almost embarrassing to find out that you have been hurting someone, or not living out of your best and highest self in a way that others have been noticing for some time, and you only just figured it out.

You would hope that people who really love you, will tell you when you have food in your teeth. And that they will also tell you when your behavior is harmful or irresponsible or selfish, or just infringing on their boundaries. I myself have had people who love me confront me, baldly, a few times in my life, and even though it hurt like hell, I was so, so grateful for the gift. It’s not an exaggeration to say it quite markedly changed the course of my life.

[...]

So much of the time I think we (ministers especially! This is our fatal flaw!) are nice not because it is the ‘right’ thing to do, the holy thing to do, but because we are terrified people won’t like us if we aren’t. And they might not—that’s a risk we take. C.S. Lewis again: he said we are not called to be nice people, but to become new people.

The end result was, she was thoroughly apologetic and penitent (I think she hadn’t know about chemo, but still), and I bet she won’t forget her keys again. I probably embarrassed her very much. It’s partly my fault—I enabled her behavior for a long time, with my niceness, absorbing her irresponsibility at cost to myself and my family.

I’m not sure if I did the bald talk ‘right.’ It would have been better if I hadn’t been stressed, or if I’d sent a warning shot over the bow. I’ve been accused, and rightly so, of having no middle gear. But I don’t regret doing it. I want to practice doing it more!

We are never, never called to be cruel to each other, of course. That is self-indulgence and immaturity. But there must be a third way, between an enabling niceness that doesn’t call other people honestly to be the person (we believe) God wants them to be, and a disabling cruelty that undoes the other’s self-esteem.

There is something wonderfully refreshing about people just telling each other the plain truth. Not bursting forth in long-pent-up anger. Just enforcing boundaries or offering constructive criticism with brevity, and enough affect and kindness to keep it cool, but not so much that your ultimate meaning becomes obscured.

As I was first reading this, I was thinking, "But I've been growing in spiritual maturity learning NOT to be bluntly openly criticizingly honest all the time! How do you get to compellingly argue that I was right to begin with and shouldn't have been doing all this work?"

But of course as I read on, I was reminded that even "bald" honesty still needs to not be cruel.

I thought of how Laura Ruth commented that in the two years she's known me I've been able to be more gentle on myself and others -- not giving up on my own sense of what's right, but being more aware of the other people who are in the room with me and what their needs are.

I thought about my "Someone is WRONG on the Internet" impulse -- and how I want people to be correct "my way," often regardless of what their priorities/values/etc. might be.

My best friend recently related a conversation she had with someone about me:

Person: "All I heard from Elizabeth was complaining."
My best friend: "But that's how Elizabeth communicates."

We both, of course, know that that's not literally true all the time, but I refer you to ani difranco's "what if no one's watching":

we have to be able to criticize
what we love
say what we have to say
'cause if you're not trying to make something better
then as far as i can tell
you are just in the way

As I attempt to wrap up this post... I think of what Molly said about criticism being a "gift," and I think that'll be a helpful framework for me moving forward -- am I making this criticism because it will be a gift to the other person (and this includes clearly and firmly articulating and enforcing my own boundaries, because if people love and care about me then of course they don't want to harm me)?

This IS one of my spiritual gifts ;)

2010-07-27T19:10:00.000-04:00

I've been (slowly) reading They Like to Never Quit Praisin' God (which is growing on me), and I hit this on page 82:

The author was helped to understand the value of writing to quality and effective preaching upon reading A Writers' Time: A Guide to the Creative Process, from Vision through Revision.¹⁸ Though the book is written from the perspective of helping people write to publish, the insights about persuasive and effective writing, and the setting forth of methodology that leads to persuasive and effective writing, are an invaluable and immediate help for any preacher who desires to preach well. In the future, homileticians must give much more attention to the discipline of writing to help increase the effectiveness of sermons.

Yes, the fact that I literally felt excited about the prospect of reading the cited book, even with my tiredness...

And even with my tiredness Sunday afternoon (as I finished writing my sermon for that night), I had a period of hitting that groove where I really loved working with the text (hi, Holy Spirit!), and the preaching went better than I'd expected and CAUMC-Meredith can attest to the fact that I was a little bit radiant afterward.

[22] "Children of the Living God" [Pentecost +9(C), CWM]

2010-07-26T12:05:00.005-04:00

This is the text I preached off of. It was a draft, and I was tired, so what I actually preached had a lot more editorializing and extemporizing.

When I copied it from GoogleDocs into Word to print out for preaching, it erased the indenting I had put in to indicate notes I probably wouldn't use, so I ended up including some stuff I hadn't initially meant to. I've put those sections in small font and also edited them a bit to better reflect what I actually said (though for the most part I've left the text as-is, not editing it to be a verbatim of what I said aloud).

The Scripture texts (a mix of The Inclusive Bible and the NRSV) are at the bottom.

***

Proper 12C / Ordinary 17C / Pentecost +9 - July 25, 2010

Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-19
Luke 11:1-13

Children of the Living God

I did not realize, when I agreed to preach this Sunday, that the lectionary would be in Hosea at this point. I am stubborn in my desire to preach on all 4 lectionary texts, though. And I appreciate the way this passage ends:

"Yet the people of Israel will be as numerous as the sands of the seashore that can neither be measured nor counted. And one day, instead of it being said of them, 'You are not my people,' it will be said, 'You are the children of the living God.'"

Even in the stories of judgment, there is a promise of redemption.

This promise of redemption and provision is the theme of all of today's Scripture lessons.

The Psalm opens with a recollection of God's gracious favor -- and I don't mean "gracious" in the condescending sense of patronizing politeness; I mean full of grace. "The freely given, unmerited favor and love of God." God, you were favorable to your land and to your people, restoring their fortunes, forgiving their iniquity and pardoning their sin, withdrawing your wrath.

So where is that grace now?, the Psalmist begs. "Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations?" How long, O God, how long?

God, your love for us is steadfast. Grant us, we beg, salvation.

And Paul reminds us that we HAVE salvation.

The law that bound us, all of our sins and transgressions, these have been crucified. And unlike Christ, they are NOT resurrected. Their power over us is dead.

We share in the hope of the Psalmist. For Jesus promises us, just as you would provide food for your child, or a friend who stopped by unexpectedly, or a neighbor who is banging on your door, so much more will the Mother-Father who loves us beyond comprehension give us good gifts to nurture and sustain us.

The Lukan version of the "Our Father" is strikingly brief, at least to me who has grown up with the version complete with doxology.

I make no secret of the fact that I really don't like The Message version of the Bible, but I do kind of like some of how it articulates this prayer.

Father,
Reveal who you are.
Set the world right.
Keep us alive with three square meals.
Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others.
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.

This simplifies the prayer in a way that I think gets lost in the lengthier version I grew up with.

We call God by name -- a name that puts us in intimate comforting nurturing relationship with God. For some people that is "Father," or "Mother," or "Abba," or one of many other names. Jesus' purpose here isn't to give us the One True Name of God (the Jews who were listening to this already knew that name -- it was the Tetragrammaton) but to remind us of the kind of relationship with have with this God, to name that relationship. This name is just as holy as any of the others. The immanent God who is with us in the sticky, bloody, sweaty, muddy, weepy, mess of being human is just as holy as the transcendent God we contemplate in the ivory tower after a good night's sleep in the air-conditioning, when maybe we are comfortable enough to take our bodies for granted, comfortable enough to slip into that sin of forgetting that God created us as embodied beings and called that incarnation Good.

We call upon the God who birthed us and blessed us -- we call upon that same Spirit which moved over the waters at Creation and which moves in us now, keeping our heart beating even when we are deep asleep and not conscious of anything, even when we are so overwhelmed with all the stressors of life that the last thing we can remember to do is breathe. And we recognize this creative, embodying, power as good.

We ask for sustenance for our bodies -- just for today, just enough to sustain us for today, trusting that tomorrow carries enough of its own worry, asking for all that we need to make it through the day, trusting that God will provide.

And just as we acknowledge the needs of our bodies, so we acknowledge the needs of our souls. Earlier in the prayer we asked that God's kindom come -- that God's New Heaven and New Earth break in to our reality, radically transforming this broken world into a commonwealth of shalom, of peace and wholeness. At this moment in the prayer, we acknowledge our role as co-creators of this shalom. Like all Jews, we are called to tikkun olam -- the repair of the world. If we are to live in a world characterized by radical grace and forgiveness -- and who doesn't? I for one have much I need to be forgiven for -- then we need to forgive others as well. This is usually framed as a conditional -- "forgive us as we forgive others" -- which troubles me, because I need far more expansive forgiveness from God than I am capable of offering others ... and it doesn't square with my understanding of a God of grace for me to languish unforgiven until I've grown in spiritual maturity sufficient to be able to forgive others. The Inclusive Bible says, "forgive us, for we too forgive those who have sinned against us" -- forgive us because we forgive others; forgiving others is something even we flawed human beings can do, so certainly God should be able to do it. There's a long Jewish tradition of reminding God, "Hey, you're really righteous -- this threat you're making doesn't square with that -- wanna rethink the threat?" Here we remind God of Her obligation to forgive us -- and we also remind ourselves of our own obligation to forgive others. We are called to be the Body of Christ in the world, and if the heart of Christianity is radical grace and forgiveness, then we are called to forgive others as God would.

I like the way The Inclusive Bible rewrites the traditional, "Ask, and you shall receive," in the latter portion of Jesus' speech. Traditionally, it feels rather like magic words -- ask for anything and God will give it to you ("Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?"). And if God doesn't give it to you, it's because you don't have enough faith or whatever. But here, Jesus encourages persistence. I was initially somewhat uncomfortable with the story -- your neighbor (God) may not give what you need just because you're friends, but if you pester enough you'll wear her down. Though, okay, the Complementary reading today (we're in the Semi-Continuous) is Abraham bargaining with God -- moving God from, "I'm going to destroy this entire city," to, "Okay, if there are even ten righteous people in the entire city I'll spare the whole city."

But here, Jesus says, "Keep asking and you'll receive; keep looking and you'll find; keep knocking and the door will be opened to you." This is less about beating your head against the same door over and over again, and more about a spirit of persistence. The seemingly obvious places we look first may not provide us with what we seek, but God will provide. We may have to look in unexpected places, but we will find what we need.

The Psalmist describes in detail what the kindom promise looks like:

¹⁰Love and faithfulness have met;
justice and peace have embraced.
¹¹Fidelity will sprout from the earth
and justice will lean down from heaven.
¹²HaShem will give us what is good,
and our land will yield its harvest.
¹³Justice will march before you, HaShem,
and peace will prepare the way for your steps.

"Justice will march before God, and peace will prepare the way for God's steps."

We are called to prepare the way for God.

The NRSV says, "Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet. Righteousness and peace will kiss each other. God will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase." Righteousness will go before God, making a path for God, leading God to us -- and us to God.

But while we are co-creators, we are reminded that we are not solely responsible for this. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead of us -- building God's kindom of Shalom? Possibly above my paygrade.

Here I think Paul is useful.

Paul is responding to a situation in a church where new leaders have come in and set up all sorts of rules about how we are to be "good enough." Paul says, No, you have all you need in Christ.

Paul talks a lot about circumcision -- in his Jewish lawyer way. I'm going to talk about baptism.

In our baptism, we were buried with Christ. The first sermon I preached was on baptism -- on Jesus' baptism specifically -- and I talked about repentance, about turning away from our old life and turning toward God, about starting over. But Paul is much starker here. We die to who we were.

All that separated you from the love of God has been nailed to the Cross -- it is dead and has no power over you.

But we, we have been resurrected with Christ. And NOTHING can separate you from the love of God in Christ.

The fullness of Deity dwells bodily in Christ, and we have come to fullness in Christ.

So we are called to grow in Christ. Do not let anyone say that you are not worthy. All you are called to do is to grow, nourished by the lifeforce of the universe.

The NRSV phrases the end of Hosea as: In the place where it was said to them, "You are not my people," it shall be said to them, "Children of the living God."

"In the place where it was said of them..."

The places that have rejected you, that have said you are not worthy, that have said you do not belong... they will be transformed by the radical lifechanging grace of Jesus Christ.

We are empowered to help in that transformational process, and we are also blessed with communities that meet us right where we are, that love us for who we are and who we are becoming.

The good news is that we have communities that will provide for us.

The challenge is that we are called to BE that community.

My best friend's pastor once said that "church is not the place we pretend to be well."

We bring our whole selves, and together we are the wounded, resurrected Body of Christ. We show each other our wounds, and we remind each other of God's resurrecting power and grace.

Amen.

Hosea 1:2-10

      ²When HaShem first spoke to Hosea, HaShem said, "Go! Marry a prostitute and beget children of prostitution! For the land is guilty of the most hideous kind of prostitution by forsaking her God."
      ³So Hosea married Gomer bat-Diblaim, who conceived and bore a son. ⁴Then God said to Hosea, "Name him Jezreel, for soon I will take my revenge on the house of Jeru for the slaughter at Jezreel, and I will destroy the dominion of Israel. ⁵On that day, I will smash Israel's bow in the valley of Jezreel."
      ⁶Then Gomer conceived again and bore a daughter. God said to Hosea, "Name her Lo-ruhamah--'No Compassion'--for I will no longer hold dear the house of Israel, nor will I forgive them. ⁷But I will hold dear the house of Judah and will rescue them--not by the bow or by the sword or by battle or by horses or riders, but by HaShem their God."
      ⁸Once Gomer had weaned Lo-ruhamah, she conceived again, and bore another son. ⁹God said:
      "Name him La-ammi--'Not my People'--for you are not my people and I will not be your God.
      ¹⁰"Yet the people of Israel will be as numerous as the sands of the seashore that can neither be measured nor counted. And one day, instead of it being said of them, 'You are not my people,' it will be said, 'You are the children of the living God.'"

Psalm 85

¹HaShem, you were favorable to your land;
you restored the fortunes of Israel.
²You forgave the iniquity of your people;
You pardoned all their sin.
³You withdrew all your wrath;
you turned from your hot anger.
⁴Restore us again, O God of our salvation,
and put away your indignation toward us.
⁵Will you be angry with us forever?
Will you prolong your anger to all generations?
⁶Will you not revive us again,
so that your people may rejoice in you?
⁷Show us your steadfast love, HaShem,
and grant us your salvation.

⁸Let me hear what you have to say, HaShem--
for you will speak peace to your people,
to those who turn to you in their hearts.
⁹Your salvation is near for those who revere you
and your glory will dwell in our land.
¹⁰Love and faithfulness have met;
justice and peace have embraced.
¹¹Fidelity will sprout from the earth
and justice will lean down from heaven.
¹²HaShem will give us what is good,
and our land will yield its harvest.
¹³Justice will march before you, HaShem,
and peace will prepare the way for your steps.

Colossians 2:6-19

      ⁶Since you have received Christ Jesus, live your whole life in our Savior. ⁷Send your roots deep and grow strong in Christ--firmly established in the faith you've been taught, and full of thanksgiving. ⁸Make sure that no one traps you and deprives you of your freedom by some secondhand, empty, and deceptive philosophy that is based on principles of the world instead of Christ.
      ⁹In Christ the fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form, ¹⁰and in Christ you find your own fulfillment--in the One who is the head of every Sovereignty and Power. ¹¹In Christ you have been given the Covenant through a transformation performed not by human hands, but by the complete cutting off of your body of flesh. This is what "circumcision" in Christ means. ¹²In baptism you were not only buried with Christ but also raised to life, because you believed in the power of God who raised Christ from the dead. ¹³And though you were dead in sin and did not have the Covenant, God gave you new life in company with Christ, pardoning all our sins. ¹⁴God has canceled the massive debt that stood against us with all its hostile claims, taking it out of the way and nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵In this way, God disarmed the Principalities and the Powers and made a public display of them after having triumphed over them at the Cross.
      ¹⁶From now on, don't let anyone pass judgment on you because of what you eat or drink, or whether you observe festivals, new moons or Sabbaths. ¹⁷These are mere shadows of the reality that is to come; the substance is Christ. ¹⁸Don't let those who worship angels and enjoy self-abasement judge you. These people go into great detail about their visions, and their worldly minds keep puffing up their already inflated egos. ¹⁹These people are cut off from the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.

Luke 11:1-13

¹After Jesus had finished praying one day, one of the disciples asked, "Rabbi, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples."
      ²Jesus said to them, "When you pray, say,

'Mommy-Daddy God,
hallowed be your Name!
May your reign come.
³Give us each day
our daily bread.
⁴Forgive us our sins
for we too forgive everyone who sins against us;
and don't let us be subjected to the Test.'"

      ⁵Jesus said to them, "Suppose one of you has a friend, a neighbor, and you go to your neighbor at midnight and say, 'Lend me three loaves of bread, ⁶because friends of mine on a journey have come to me, and I have nothing to set before them.'
      ⁷"Then your neighbor says, 'Leave me alone. The door is already locked and the children and I are in bed. I can't get up to look after your needs.' ⁸I tell you, though your neighbor will not get up to give you the bread out of friendship, your persistence will make your neighbor get up and give you as much as you need.
      ⁹"That's why I tell you, keep asking and you'll receive; keep looking and you'll find; keep knocking and the door will be opened to you. ¹⁰For whoever asks, receives; whoever seeks, finds; whoever knocks, is admitted. ¹¹What parents among you will give a snake to their child when the child asks for a fish, ¹²or a scorpion when the child asks for an egg? ¹³If you, with all your sins, know how to give your children good things, how much more will our heavenly Parent give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?"

pastoral care: parishioners with mental illness

2010-07-18T16:50:00.004-04:00

I recently read Howard W. Stone's Depression and Hope: New Insights for Pastoral Counseling -- which I was optimistic about based on the table of contents, etc., but which failed to live up to that optimism.

From page 67:

Obviously some depression is so severe that it requires hospitalization. The vast majority of melancholics seen by ministers and other church professionals are only mildly depressed, however, and will benefit from skillful pastoral care. [...] As a rule of thumb, ministers do best to see mildly and some moderately depressed individuals, referring the more serious cases to pastoral counseling specialists or mental-health professionals. Both minister and congregation, however, still offer support and pastoral visitation to seriously depressed members who are on medications, have periodic psychotherapy, or are in and out of psychiatric hospitals throughout their lifetimes.

The author doesn't really elaborate on what this "support" would look like, and I am genuinely curious -- you who are in pastoral ministry or pursuing that vocation -- What do you do if you have a parishioner who struggles with severe depression that includes suicidal ideation and self-harm impulses? This hypothetical parishioner has a qualified psychotherapist they see weekly, is on psychiatric medication that seems to be working fairly well, and is "high-functioning" enough to hold down a steady job and present as "fine." But this person was also suicidal enough to go in-patient at a psychiatric hospital for a few days recently. As their pastor, what do you see as your role in their support system? (They have explicitly stated that one thing they need is more one-on-one time with you. How frequent do you imagine that one-on-one time to be? What do you imagine those pastoral care sessions might entail? What do you do if you have a lot of other time commitments -- e.g., a second job, a family, commitments to other justice organizations -- where do you place these pastoral care sessions in your prioritizing of your time?)

I would be hard-pressed to "define" pastoral care (though I'm developing ideas), and I am really interested in what actual pastors would say in answer to this question. (And also what parishioners might want pastors to say.)

permission to be ordinary

2010-07-07T15:33:00.003-04:00

I just read a post by Cat Valente, about how we all want to be Protagonists of a Big Exciting Story, and at the end of the post she says:

But every day it doesn't happen, and the water bill has to be paid, and the rent still goes up, and no one has a flying car, and we can't even see the magic of our handheld, world-networked devices because if we were living in the future it would be a better story, and no one would feel lost the way we do, and no one would be confused as to where they stood, and no one would be unsatisfied, or afflicted with ennui, and everyone would be a hero.

And if we were the final generation, cradled in the hands of an angry God, no one could ever say we were ordinary.

And my immediate reaction (channeling my best friend's sermon) was, "But the good news is that we are ordinary."

As I was reading Cat's post, I often found myself thinking, "I do not want the Apocalypse to come, because I have no useful skills in case of apocalypse, and it would not be a good experience at all." And when I got to the end and channeled the opening line of Ari's sermon, I thought that yeah, it is good news that we are ordinary. We do not have to be Exciting Protagonists. We just have to live our own lives, to live into who God created us to be.

And each of ours is a beautiful story. We are, each one of us is, a bright brilliant beloved child of God who is so so beautiful to behold. God gives us permission to be ordinary. God says that we are beloved just as we are.

(Interestingly, I was thinking about Christine Lavin's "Katy Says Today Is the Best Day of My Whole Entire Life" earlier today.)

I'm going to have to make this myself, too, aren't I?

2010-06-30T20:24:00.002-04:00

Thanks to a conversation with a friend, I now want a website with the official polity, judicial precedent, etc. of all denominations on full inclusion of GLBT persons (ordination, membership, etc.).

"I tore these out of your symbol, and they turned into paper"

2010-06-29T16:04:00.002-04:00

Catching up on blogposts today, I read:

Serendipitously, Adam Gopknik in the current edition of The New Yorker, writes that often the edgy spirituality of Jesus as recorded in the gospels sounds a lot like Jack Kerouac: not some programmatic radicalism of a national revolution, but "the Kerouac-like-satori-seeking-on-the-road" of the Beats at their best.

Having recently read (and been very affected by) Horsley's Jesus and Empire, I went, "No!" -- and then I went to look for the article ("What Did Jesus Do?: Reading and unreading the Gospel" by Adam Gopnik - May 24, 2010).

I don't agree with everything in the article, but I did find a lot of it striking.

Excerpts:

In Mark, the voice says, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased,” seeming to inform a Jesus who doesn’t yet know that this is so. But some early versions of Luke have the voice quoting Psalm 2: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” Only in Matthew does it announce Jesus’ divinity to the world as though it were an ancient, fixed agreement, not a new act. In Mark, for that matter, the two miraculous engines that push the story forward at the start and pull it toward Heaven at the end—the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection—make no appearance at all. The story begins with Jesus’ adult baptism, with no hint of a special circumstance at his birth, and there is actually some grumbling by Jesus about his family (“Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house, is a prophet without honor,” he complains); it ends with a cry of desolation as he is executed—and then an enigmatic and empty tomb. (It’s left to the Roman centurion to recognize him as the Son of God after he is dead, while the verses in Mark that show him risen were apparently added later.)

[...]

While accepting a historical Jesus, the scholarship also tends to suggest that the search for him is a little like the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes: there were intellectual-minded detectives around, and Conan Doyle had one in mind in the eighteen-eighties, but the really interesting bits—Watson, Irene Adler, Moriarty, and the Reichenbach Falls—were, even if they all had remote real-life sources, shaped by the needs of storytelling, not by traces of truth. Holmes dies because heroes must, and returns from the dead, like Jesus, because the audience demanded it. (The view that the search for the historical Jesus is like the search for the historical Superman—that there’s nothing there but a hopeful story and a girlfriend with an alliterative name—has by now been marginalized from the seminaries to the Internet; the scholar Earl Doherty defends it on his Web site with grace and tenacity.)

[...]

    To a modern reader, the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table can seem undermined by the other part of Jesus’ message, a violent and even vengeful prediction of a final judgment and a large-scale damnation. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet who is preaching the death of the world—he says categorically that the end is near—and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living. If the end is near, why give so much sage counsel? If human life is nearly over, why preach in such detail the right way to live? One argument is that a later, perhaps “unpersonified” body of Hellenized wisdom literature was tacked on to an earlier account of a Jewish messianic prophet. Since both kinds of literature—apocalyptic hysterics and stoic sayings—can be found all over the period, perhaps they were merely wrenched together.
    And yet a single figure who “projects” two personae at the same time, or in close sequence, one dark and one dreamy, is a commonplace among charismatic prophets. That’s what a charismatic prophet is: someone whose aura of personal conviction manages to reconcile a hard doctrine with a humane manner. The leaders of the African-American community before the civil-rights era, for instance, had to be both prophets and political agitators to an oppressed and persecuted people in a way not unlike that of the real Jesus (and all the other forgotten zealots and rabbis whom the first-century Jewish historian Josephus names and sighs over). They, too, tended to oscillate between the comforting and the catastrophic. Malcolm X was the very model of a modern apocalyptic prophet-politician, unambiguously preaching violence and a doctrine of millennial revenge, all fuelled by a set of cult beliefs—a hovering U.F.O., a strange racial myth. But Malcolm was also a community builder, a moral reformer (genuinely distraught over the sexual sins of his leader), who refused to carry weapons, and who ended, within the constraints of his faith, as some kind of universalist. When he was martyred, he was called a prophet of hate; within three decades of his death—about the time that separates the Gospels from Jesus—he could be the cover subject of a liberal humanist magazine like this one. One can even see how martyrdom and “beatification” draws out more personal detail, almost perfectly on schedule: Alex Haley, Malcolm’s Paul, is long on doctrine and short on details; thirty years on, Spike Lee, his Mark, has a full role for a wife and children, and a universalist message that manages to blend Malcolm into Mandela. (As if to prove this point, just the other week came news of suppressed chapters of Haley’s “Autobiography,” which, according to Malcolm’s daughter, “showed too much of my father’s humanity.”)

[...]

   As the Bacchae knew, we always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like.

[...]

    In Mark, Jesus’ divinity unfolds without quite making sense intellectually, and without ever needing to. It has the hypnotic flow of dramatic movement. The story is one of self-discovery: he doesn’t know who he is and then he begins to think he does and then he doubts and in pain and glory he dies and is known. The story works. But, as a proposition under scrutiny, it makes intolerable demands on logic. If Jesus is truly one with God, in what sense could he suffer doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, horror, and so on? So we get the Jesus rendered in the Book of John, who doesn’t. But if he doesn’t suffer doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, and horror, in what sense is his death a sacrifice rather than just a theatrical enactment? A lamb whose throat is not cut and does not bleed is not really much of an offering.
    None of this is very troubling if one has a pagan idea of divinity: the Son of God might then be half human and half divine, suffering and triumphing and working out his heroic destiny in the half-mortal way of Hercules, for instance. But that’s ruled out by the full weight of the Jewish idea of divinity—omnipresent and omniscient, knowing all and seeing all. If God he was—not some Hindu-ish avatar or offspring of God, but actually one with God—then God once was born and had dirty diapers and took naps. The longer you think about it, the more astounding, or absurd, it becomes. To be really believed at all, it can only be told again.

Christian resources re: mental illness?

2010-06-23T11:51:00.004-04:00

I've been disappointed by the books I have read thus far that offer a Christian response to mental illness. My therapist housemate's response to this is, "We should write a book together." I'm not sure how serious either of us is about that project, but I am really curious: What do you think such a book should include?

this evening's visit through the liturgical spectrum

2010-06-09T20:22:00.003-04:00

(1)

[Paten] Eastern Christian Usage

In the Eastern Orthodox and Greek-Catholic Churches, the Paten is called a diskos and is elevated by a stand (or "foot") permanently attached underneath. The diskos is usually more ornate than its Latin-Rite counterpart, and must always be made of gold or at least be gold-plated. The diskos may be engraved with an icon of Jesus Christ, the Nativity of Christ, a cross, or more frequently, an icon of the Theotokos.

When a diskos is made, it is usually accompanied by a matching asterisk (small, folding metal stand used to keep the Aër from disturbing the particles on the diskos), a spoon (for distributing Holy Communion to the faithful), and a spear (used to cut the Lamb during the Liturgy of Preparation).

For Christians of the East the diskos symbolises the Virgin Mary, who received Christ into her womb, and gave him birth; and also the Tomb of Christ which received his body after the Crucifixion, and from which he resurrected.

(2)

pre-filled communion cups, which Keith likens to coffee creamers

you can also scroll down for pre-cubed Communion bread (which according to the URLs is unleavened?)

"Product has a 6-month shelf-life and boxes are stamped with expiration dates." [After they expire, do the Elements resurrect? After Jesus goes bad, does He turn into Cassandra Nova?]

[21] "Transforming Love Into Healing" [Pentecost +2(C) Wednesday, Rest and Bread]

2010-06-09T19:59:00.004-04:00

Luke 8:42b-48

Jesus moved along, almost crushed by the crowd. In the crowd was a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, and though she had spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her. She came up behind Jesus and touched the fringe of Jesus' cloak, and immediately the bleeding stopped.

"Who touched me?" Jesus asked?

When no one nearby responded, Peter said, "Rabbi, it's the crowd pressing around you."

But Jesus said, "Someone touched me. I felt power leave me."

When the woman realized that she had been noticed, she approached in fear and knelt before Jesus. She explained in front of the crowd why she had touched Jesus and how she had been instantly healed.

Jesus said to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace."

Transforming Love Into Healing

In her book Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, Nora Gallagher writes: "In most of the other church seasons, we trace the life of Jesus--from expected arrival to resurrection, Advent to Eastertide. But in Ordinary Time we are in our own lives, living out the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost" (203).

In John 14:12, shortly before promising them the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, "Very truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these."

My best friend and I were talking recently about the hymn "They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love." She finds it illogical and arrogant. And it is. To say that people will see love in action and think, "Those must be Christians," is to say that no other belief system can inspire people to act with love; and we know that's untrue. But I can't help liking the song. For it reminds us that our most defining characteristic should be love.

We are called to live our lives such that we are reflecting the face of God to everyone we encounter, such that people who encounter us think, "That force that drives your life, I want to be connected to that, because it is so obviously a good and life-giving thing."

The woman we read about in today's story had been suffering from bleeding for 12 years, and all the medical professionals had been unable to help her. She has done everything she is "supposed" to do, to no effect. She recognizes in Jesus the power to heal her.

What do people recognize in us?

I don't think that Jesus' words mean that our faith gives us the power to effect medical miracles for ourselves or others, but I think that they do remind us that we, too, have been empowered by the Holy Spirit. My friend Scott articulated it as: we transform our faith into love, and we share our love, and that's how we heal.

I recently finished reading Susan Wendell's book The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, so I have a whole discourse in my head about "cure" and the social model of disability, but for the moment I'll just encourage you to think beyond the medical model of "healing."

This woman has been suffering for twelve years.

She has seen many physicians and none have been able to cure her. Have you ever been to a doctor who doesn't know what's wrong with you and doesn't know how to treat it? This is not usually the beginning of a beautiful friendship. More likely, the doctor sends you away -- possibly telling you there isn't really anything wrong with you, possibly telling you that your suffering is your own fault.

The woman's bleeding also renders her ritually unclean, severely circumscribing her community interaction.

She is likely hungry for human contact.

She is also hungry for contact with the Holy.

Ritual uncleanness means decreased access to the Temple, the dwelling place of the Holy.

So, you've been failed by or rejected by or turned away from .... the medical establishment, your community, your place of worship. Where do you go?

According to this story, you go to Jesus.

Jesus has returned to Galilee from the other side of the lake -- welcomed by an expectant crowd who likely know of Jesus' travels to towns and villages, proclaiming the good news of the kindom of God and healing people.

And so this woman reaches out, to touch some of that healing power.

Who has come to us for healing?

What were we able to offer them?

Did we offer them a kind word? Did we offer them a comforting touch? Did we offer them a safe space in which to be vulnerable and real?

As we move into a time of reflection, I invite you to reflect on moments when you have been able to offer healing to someone -- or when someone has offered healing to you -- and if you feel so moved, I invite you to share that aloud, lighting a candle.

on today's edition of "things that have made me cry":

2010-05-25T09:29:00.001-04:00

I hope that you know that you have people who love you like this.

Some of them you know about, some are a secret. I don’t wish for you to get cancer, or something else that looks terrible on the outside, so you get to find who your people are, the depth of their affection, love, faith, ability to show up. Miles deep.

But aren’t you curious?

-Molly, "You People Are Amazing"

***

In another post, she mentioned the MUGA test, which they keep calling her Muggles test :) and the pastor at the UCC church in my hometown commented:

Actually, you do have magical powers: alchemy. You're taking seemingly random and disconnected events and turning them into a parable. Amazingly good news. Keep telling the story.

I was reminded of the definition of Christianity I once heard: "Gather the people, break bread, and tell stories."

"People they come together / People they fall apart"

2010-05-22T22:18:00.000-04:00

So, Molly started a blog for her journey with cancer.

I was really struck by her entry "How You Can Pray for Me." Excerpt:

So, every cancer patient needs a way of thinking about healing, and curing, their cancer. I read a great book many years ago, Love, Medicine and Miracles, written by a doctor who started a program in the 80s for “Exceptional Cancer Patients.” He found that the patients who were not just ‘positive’ but really had a deep imagination for curing their cancer, had much better outcomes—not all of them lived, but they had less pain, lived a lot longer, and many of them did survive.

[...]

For a lot of people, fighting imagery works—they imagine a little shoot-em-up video game inside their bloodstream, their affected organs. I’m so glad this works for them. It’s saved countless lives, given courage and confidence and faith where it was needed most.

But this is not very me. I claim to be a pacifist—well, I’d like to be. My family, on the front lines of my irritation and anger, when I get irritated and angry, know otherwise. But, I can’t personally invest in violent imagery to cure my cancer. I don’t think this cancer is evil, it’s an anomaly in my body, but it’s its own thing, maybe even good in itself—just misguided, misdirected, it’s something that’s where it doesn’t belong. It’s lost.

There are 3 or 4 or 5 ways things get out of the body (this is where it becomes apparent that I have not taken much science since 9th grade biology). Perspiration, excretion, and respiration come to mind. For the cancer to get out, it needs an exit point.

This is where the Holy Spirit Portal comes in. This is how I am praying the cancer out of my body, and how you can join me, if you wish.

First, you know (or maybe you don’t) that the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity (Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit). Jeff Von Wald and the re/New team led an amazing worship at church last weekend all about the Holy Spirit, Hebrew name Ru’ach, Greek name Pneumos—the ancient word that means wind or breath. Maybe I can get Jeff to post some of the quotes they read aloud at re/New to describe the HS. Or maybe you’d like to post your own description below—please do!

Now, this is the prayer. Take a deep, deep breath. What you are breathing in is pure Holy Spirit. Doesn’t matter if you’re in traffic on Storrow, on the T at the end of a humid Boston day at rush hour with all kinds of interesting smells in the air, or in a dewy meadow in the early morning of Vermont. Underneath the human and industrial muck is God’s own breath. Breathe it in. Imagine it going all the way down to your toes.

Now as you get ready to exhale, imagine it as a vacuum, sucking out one or two or perhaps ten of my free-floating cancer cells. Let your exhale accelerate, and WHOOSH! Set the cells free. Send them away, tell them there is a place for them, where they do belong—not in any other human or animal body, perhaps in deep space. God has a place for them. Because Ewing’s cells are called “blue cells” I have been (smile) imagining that they are flying off to a distant galaxy to start a superrace of humanoids called the Na’avi, a peaceful people.

Do this breath three times. Hopefully it’ll help you, too—you don’t have to be a yogi to know how cleansing and grounding and healing it is to stop what you’re doing and breathe.

The good thing about a prayer like this, is that it doesn’t take long to do, and it feels complete. You don’t have to worry that it was “enough.” God knows, we all have enough we are worrying about already.

The part that made me cry, though, (for reasons unrelated to Molly) is from her post "The Best Part":

Here’s my takeaway—at least, the first of many takeaways from this whole experience: I was ashamed to want surgery, to want relief. I felt like it was a personal failure to ask for it. But if I hadn’t, it would have taken many more months to discover and diagnose my Ewing’s. How’s that for a holy spirit portal?

[Explanation of why she began calling it a "Holy Spirit Portal" here.]

[BADD] we live in a culture of shame

2010-05-03T21:07:00.001-04:00

Today I emailed a friend of mine (who is queer and mentally ill), Subject "~closeting," telling her about how a casual friend and I were having a conversation on Facebook Wall about making plans to get together, and she suggested next week and I thought, "I don't know when my therapy appointment next week is," and I opted to move the conversation to private message rather than continuing it on our Facebook Walls. (Yes, some of that was about a desire to streamline the conversation, but that was only part of it.)

The friend I'd emailed said: "I have been really impressed that you posted about therapy both on FB and LJ."

I was so thrown by this. I mean, I have posted barely anything about the substance of the therapy I've had (all ~10 sessions in ~4 months), so it's not like I'm revealing much at all by publicly disclosing this information.

But if anyone were to ask me about my being in therapy, my honest answer would be something along the lines of, "Well, I'm experiencing a lot of grief and transition." This isn't anything that's going to make anyone think me less employable. This isn't anything that's going to make anyone uncomfortable to be around me.

People would in fact be sympathetic. I woudn't be perceived as "broken" or "less than" or "other."

There would in fact be a sense that I don't "need" to be in therapy -- that it's sort of a luxury item, like going to a spa or something, a nice thing to do to take care of oneself.

I would be perceived as still being a healthy, whole, high-functioning person at base.

But I wouldn't be perceived as someone who "isn't really sick" and is cheating the system. (This is connected to race, class, etc. privilege that I have.)

My "luxury item" doesn't preclude me doing my job. Would people's stance change if I had a condition (mental health or otherwise) that required specialist care far away and so I had to miss a lot of work?

Possibly a better title for this post would be, "we live in a culture of perfectionism."

Last Friday, Scott and I were talking about how chronic conditions are stigmatized, whereas temporary injuries aren't. But even so, I think there's a sense (at least in white, middle-class, culture) in which even when you're only temporarily "broken" you're not supposed to ask for "too much" in the way of "special accommodations." And that's one of the ways in which dis/abism affects all of us. If resources aren't provided for "those people" and then you become one of "those people," whether temporarily or permanently (and yes, I'm thinking of physical disability now, but you can make the parallel for mental health, too), you suffer too.

There's other stuff I want to talk about, too -- particularly about the "joking," dismissive, and pejorative things people say about people with mental illness (and with physical disabilities -- especially invisible ones) -- but that's a whole nother post.

Blogging Against Disablism Day 2010 was this past Saturday (May 1, as it is every year), and I had some posts in mind which I never made, so this is in some ways this my post for that day (even though there is a sense in which every day should be Blogging Against Disablism Day).

[sermon 20] Easter 4C - Shepherding Community

2010-04-26T22:31:00.003-04:00

[This is the text I preached off of -- though definitely not the verbatim text that actually came out of my mouth; for that, click the mp3 link at the bottom if you want. The Scriptures were all an adaptation of the NRSV and The Inclusive Bible -- with Annie playing Marty Haugen's "Shepherd Me, O God" for Psalm 23 -- and are at the bottom, just before the audiolink.]

Easter 4C - April 25, 2010

Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30

Shepherding Community

Will you pray with me?

Jesus, three times you said to Simon Peter, the rock on whom you built your Church: "Do you love me? Feed my sheep." May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be filled with love for you and for each other, may they be food that will nourish and sustain us. Amen.

I promise not to rehash Sean's sermon from last week; I just love that particular bit of lectionary.

I'm not actually going to talk about sheep at all. When I first read today's lectionary, they seemed the obvious connecting thread -- except for the Acts passage -- and I think maybe my literature major self got stuck there. My friend Sophia, in contrast, after I'd told her about my lack of inspiration, read through the assigned lectionary texts and said: "I feel like there's something there, but it's sort of scattered and hard to get at beyond the obvious bent of the lectionary towards 'Jesus shows She is God by healing people, restoring them to community, and freeing them from fear and sorrow, and then bestowing on Her followers the ability to do the same.' "

I kinda just wanna leave it at that and sit down now 'cause that preaches all on its own, but that's a bit of a cheat. So let's dig into this idea a bit more.

Jesus restores people to community and empowers Her disciples to do the same. Okay, that's not exactly what Sophia said, but it's equally true.

At Lenten morning prayer this year at First Church Somerville, UCC, we read through most of the Gospel of Mark, and so when I read, "Tabitha, get up," in today's reading from the Book of Acts, my first thought was of Jesus saying, "Talitha, cum" -- "little girl, get up" (Mark 5:41).

That story is actually strikingly similar to the Acts story we read today. In Mark we read, in part:

They came to Jairus' house and Jesus noticed all the commotion, with people weeping and wailing unrestrainedly. Jesus went in and said to them, "Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping." At this, they began to ridicule Jesus, and Jesus told everyone to leave. Jesus took the child's mother and father and those who had come with Jesus and put them outside and entered the room where the child lay. Taking her hand, Jesus said to her, "Talitha, koum!" which means, "Little girl, get up!" Immediately the girl, who was twelve years old, got up and began to walk about. At this they were overcome with amazement. Jesus strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat. (Mark 5:38-43)

Both times, those who loved the deceased woman are weeping and mourning, and someone begs a healer to come, and having arrived, the healer sends everyone else away and invites the deceased to rise -- as if she had only been sleeping. The healing occurs one-on-one, in private. But after the person is restored to life, the rest of the community re-encounters her. Being restored to life means also being restored to community.

Tabitha, or Dorcas, is identified as a disciple, and my HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible says that this is the only time in the entire New Testament that the female word for "disciple" is used. That's kind of a big deal.

But restoration to community doesn't only happen to "good" people.

The Acts passage last week was the story of Saul's conversion. In persecuting those perceived to be heretics, Saul was serving God the best way Saul knew how. But God appears to Saul in a vision of the Risen Christ and says, "You're persecuting ME."

Christ doesn't just convert Saul on the spot, though. Christ incapacitates Saul and then sends the disciple Ananias to heal Saul.

Ananias, knowing Saul's history of persecuting followers of the Christ, says, "Are you kidding me? This person has authority to KILL us and you want me to not only bring myself before this person but also to bring this person back to full capacity?"

And Christ says to Ananias, "Go anyway. Saul is the instrument I have chosen to bring my Name to Gentiles, to rulers, and to the people of Israel" (The Inclusive Bible).

The resurrection of Tabitha comes in between the story of Saul -- who after his conversion will continue to declare his strong Jewish credentials in many of his letters -- and the story of Peter's vision of clean and unclean food -- the beginning of Peter's ministry to the Gentiles.

Joppa is one of the oldest port cities in the world -- now known as Jaffa, in Tel Aviv.

Port cities are liminal places, right?

Tabitha is singled out both in the Book of Acts and in the lectionary as someone whose discipleship is particularly remarkable. So in some ways we could see her as an "insider" in the early Christian movement.

But she's also identified with both an Aramaic and a Greek name. My friend Sophia wondered whether she was mixed-race, or mixed-identity in some other way. What liminal spaces does she occupy, living here on the edge of the land, known by two different names? Sophia suggested, "There are lots of ways for her to have trouble communicating her whole self to the people around her."

In my reflection the first week of Easter, I reminded us that resurrection changes things -- the risen Christ is not the same as the human Jesus who was crucified. Coming out is also a resurrection idea. We emerge from the oppressive darkness that has kept us from full life and we are transfigured, able to be transparent to the ground of our being, to shine with the light of divine love.

I don't think that any of us are empowered to literally bring people back from the dead, but we are empowered to help people communicate their whole selves to those around them.

In our Welcome here at Cambridge Welcoming Ministries, we often say: "You are welcome here not 'in spite of' who you are, but because of who you are." We invite you to bring your whole self, and hopefully the practice of doing that every week here strengthens us to do that out in the world the other six and a half days a week -- to be honest about our whole selves and to be open to the whole selves of other children of God, including the parts we maybe don't personally like so much in ourselves and in each other, to create a safe space where people can BE their whole selves.

A pastor recently commented to me that being present with people is the essence of pastoral care. Reflecting on that later, I thought about how being present with people in a truly genuine and loving way enables them to be their authentic selves, to live into the fullness of who God created them to be.

And so in these resurrection stories, the healer is genuinely attentively present with the other person, and is empowered to restore them to individual life and to community life, and I think implicitly to a life that is richer and fuller than the one they had before.

In today's Acts passage, we hear that because of Peter's action, many came to believe in Jesus Christ.

They didn't come to believe in Peter -- who was the one who actually showed up in the flesh and raised this woman from the dead. They came to believe in Jesus Christ. They saw the power that Peter had, the power to restore to abundant life, and they gave their hearts to the Source of that power and love. For "credo," which we translate "believe," doesn't mean an intellectual assent to a set of propositions but rather to give one's heart to.

The Mark story I recalled for us earlier contains one of many instances of Mark's Messianic Secret -- Jesus saying, "Don't tell anyone about this." There are a lot of possible explanations for Mark's Messianic Secret, and one of them is that Jesus wanted the focus to be on the good work that was being done, not on the particular human being who was doing it.

In some ways, I think today's John reading echoes the Messianic Secret. People keep hounding Jesus to proclaim, "I am the Messiah," and Jesus says, "You don't get it, do you? You seek declarations in words, but my deeds testify to who I am. It's not about the titles bestowed on me, but about what I do."

Throughout Eastertide we read excerpts from the Acts of the Apostles. Not the "statements of belief" of the apostles. Not the "codified doctrine" of the apostles. But the Acts of the apostles.

In the book Loving Jesus, Mark Allan Powell proposes that "The mission of the church is to love Jesus Christ; everything else is just strategy" (178). And last week's lectionary reminds us that we do this by feeding each other.

A commentary I once heard on the 23rd Psalm that really stuck with me was on the ambiguity of "You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies." That the intuitive interpretation is that you get to have a table prepared for you while your enemies look on, displeased at your good fortune, with an implication that your enemies are not partaking of this bounty -- because they're the defeated foe. But what if you were all at table TOGETHER?

This table here, this Communion table, is open to ALL.

That table over there, those tables we will bring out for dinner after our worship service is over, those tables are open to ALL.

There's a quotation I'm always attributing to Corrie ten Boom, but the Internet informs me that the correct attribution is Joanna Macy, a Ph.D. in comparative religion. The quotation is, "The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe." Apparently the source is a meditation exercise she developed to help people respond to the world's pain. Describing an exercise called "Breathing Through," she writes, "If you experience an ache in the chest, a pressure within the rib case, that is all right. The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe. Your heart is that large. Trust it. Keep breathing."

Have you ever had that feeling that you feel like your heart is so full -- be it with sorrow or with joy -- that it's going to break your very chest open?

I wonder if that's what God feels like all the time.

God so loved the world that God Incarnated to be with us more fully, and the Incarnate God suffered as humans suffered, even unto death, and conquered death so that we might all partake of the abundant life that God has always desired for us. This is the joyous mystery we celebrate every Easter, every Sunday, and every day. And part of this mystery is that we are empowered to continue Christ's work -- to conquer the forces of death and bring people, ourselves included, into life abundant.

Today's Revelation passage originally says, "washed in the blood of the Lamb," which I suspect you already knew. One of the things that this church, with its discomfort with blood atonement theology, has taught me is to swap out "love" for "blood" in, for example, hymns. You might be surprised at how little this changes the meaning. For God, in the incarnate person of Jesus the Christ and always, pours out abundant love for us.

And Divine Love is sufficient to make anything new -- to make clean and fresh that which has been stained by suffering and pain.

And there is a way in which divine love is poured out like blood shed, because God suffers with us. When we are wounded, God is wounded, too. This reminder both comforts us when we feel alone and also reminds us not to hurt others, for they are beloved children of God just as we are.

Carolyn reminded me that this is Earth Sunday. We are reminded in today's lectionary readings that God's kindom includes green pastures and still waters. God's kindom is a place where no one will suffer scorching heat but will be led to springs of the water life. God's kindom is a place where no one will hunger or thirst.

We're called to bring about that kindom here on Earth. We are called to prepare tables of abundant welcome. We are called to protect all inhabitants of the planet from heat that scorches and kills. And we are called to do all this in love.

And so I send you forth, assured in the love that God has for you, and challenged to share that love with all.

Amen.

Acts 9:36-43

³⁶Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity. ³⁷At that time she became ill and died. They washed her body and laid her in an upstairs room. ³⁸Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two messengers to Peter with the request, “Please come to us without delay.” ³⁹So Peter got up and went with them, and upon arriving was taken to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside Peter, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them. ⁴⁰Peter put all of them outside, and then knelt down and prayed. Peter turned to the body and said, “Tabitha, get up.” Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. ⁴¹Peter gave her a hand and helped her up. Then calling in all the saints -- including the widows -- Peter showed her to be alive. ⁴²This became known throughout Joppa, and many believed in Jesus Christ. ⁴³Meanwhile, Peter stayed in Joppa for some time with a certain Simon, a tanner.

Revelation 7:9-17

⁹After this I looked, and there was a great multitude beyond number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. ¹⁰They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God, who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” ¹¹And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, ¹²singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

¹³Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?”

¹⁴I said to the elder, “You are the one that knows.”

Then the elder said to me, “These are the ones who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the love of the Lamb. ¹⁵For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship day and night within the temple, and the One who is seated on the throne will shelter them. ¹⁶They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; ¹⁷for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

John 10:22-30

²²At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, ²³and Jesus was walking in the Temple area, in the portico of Solomon. ²⁴The Temple authorities gathered around Jesus and said, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

²⁵Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Parent’s name testify to me; ²⁶but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. ²⁷My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. ²⁸I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. ²⁹What my Parent has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Parent’s hand. ³⁰The Parent and I are one.”

audiofile: download or stream (21.4MB, 15:34min)

[sermon 19] Easter 2C - Wounded Healer

2010-04-12T21:16:00.001-04:00

[written as if preached on the actual date]

Easter 2C - April 11, 2010

Acts 5:12-16
Psalm 118
Revelation 1:9-19
John 20:19-31

Wounded Healer

Last Sunday, my friend Cole commented, "During the Easter season, we read from the Acts of the Apostles, the only book in the Bible aside from the Gospels and Revelation to actually include Jesus as an explicitly present character."

In fact, each Sunday in Eastertide we read from Acts AND Revelation -- no Old Testament reading other than the Psalm, no Epistle. Our daily lectionary gives us great Old Testament stories of triumph -- David and Goliath, Esther, etc. -- but we don't read any of them on Sundays.

Last Sunday, Cole commented on Easter Sunday being as much the birthday of the Church as Pentecost is -- perhaps moreso, with Pentecost being "more of a coming into adulthood than a birth."

And so our Eastertide lectionary offers us glimpses of the toddling, gurgling, early church.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day -- the Jewish observance of Yom HaShoah. Or tomorrow, rather, as it never falls on a Sunday.

It's the 27th of the Jewish month of Nisan. Sixty years ago, when the date was being decided, Orthodox Jews disliked the positioning of a day of mourning during a traditionally joyous month.

But Jews, like all humans, know that grief is not bound by lectionary dictates, that sadness falls in even the happiest times.

So too, our Easteride, our season of Resurrection, is not without pain and sorrow.

The disciples encounter the risen Christ; but Thomas, who was not present for this encounter, is skeptical of their story.

Thomas says, "I will not believe until I have put my hands in the Crucifixion wounds."

Thomas does not say, "I will not believe until I hear again the voice of this One who loved me for so long."

Thomas does not say, "I will not believe until I again experience the charisma of this One who lived life so attuned to the rhythm of the Holy."

Thomas isn't looking for the Divinity Incarnate, the perfected humanity they all followed for so long. Thomas is looking for a broken body. Thomas wants proof that this is the One who suffered on the Cross. Thomas says, "If you want me to believe that the Beloved One has conquered death, then I need proof that this One really did suffer death as all humans do. If this One came back unscathed, then that is not a true journey. If Jesus isn't scarred by that trauma -- isn't irrevocably changed -- then how can Jesus' suffering mean anything to me?"

The story of Thomas reminds us that we believe in the resurrection of the body.

The risen Christ still bears the physical wounds of the Crucifixion.

The Revelation passage, however, reminds us that Divinity is far beyond our human comprehension. I'm using the Roman Catholic lectionary option because I like it better today, but it erases part of John of Patmos's opening description of the Child of Humanity, so I'm revising it to put that back in.

I, John, your sibling who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kindom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, "Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches [...]." Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Child of Humanity, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across hir chest. Hir head and hir hair were white as white wool, white as snow; hir eyes were like a flame of fire, hir feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and hir voice was like the sound of many waters. In hir hand ze held seven stars, and from hir mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and hir face was like the sun shining with full force. When I saw hir, I fell at hir feet as though dead. But ze placed hir hand on me, saying, "Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of the underworld. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this."

I love the intensity of this imagery -- so much light and metal, so much power.

I have become this person who has become uncomfortable with masculine pronouns for the Godhead (though an assortment of gendered pronouns in quick succession is fine -- we are created in the image and likeness of God, so God has many many genders), but gender-neutral pronouns seem particularly appropriate for this vision. John has a vision of the Second Person of the Trinity, a vision, as The Inclusive Bible says, of "a figure of human appearance" (Rev 1:13). Of human appearance but decidedly not human. Beyond human. This is the Second Person of the Trinity, after all.

Just after the lectionary ends, we would have read the Alpha and the Omega saying to John, "As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches" (Revelation 1:20).

In chapters 2 and 3, we read these letters. Each opens the same way: "To the angel of the church in [thus-and-such place] write: These are the words of [so-and-so]:"

Each letter names the figure who is speaking to John in a slightly different way.

The Inclusive Bible articulates them as follows:
"The One who holds the seven stars in hand and walks among the seven gold lampstands" (2:1)
"The First and the Last, who died and came to life" (2:8)
"The One with the sharp, two-edged sword" (2:12)
"The Only Begotten of God, who has eyes like a blazing flame, and feet like burnished bronze" (2:18)
"The One who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars" (3:1)
"The One who is holy and true, who holds the key of David, who opens what no one can close, who closes what no one can open" (3:7)
"The Amen, the Witness faithful and true, the Source of God's creation" (3:14)

The Divine is so far beyond our comprehension. What does it mean to say that someone is "the Amen"? "Amen" means certainty, means truth. It's used as a responsory indicating assent, and I often think of it as meaning, "So let it be written [or stated], so let it be done." Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary says of "amen," "It is found singly and sometimes doubly at the end of prayers (Ps. 41:13; 72:19; 89:52), to confirm the words and invoke the fulfillment of them" [dictionary.com].

So what is the Word that the Risen Christ is confirming and fulfilling? Well, the Christ *is* the Word.

In John, we read about the risen Christ twice appearing to the disciples in a locked room. Christ says, "Peace be with you." Christ's "Amen" is peace. In the midst of our fear and uncertainty, including our fear and apprehension following trauma and tragedy, we are always offered the peace of our Rock and our Redeemer.

The risen Christ next tells the disciples, "As our Father and Mother, our God and our Creator, has sent me, so I send you" (John 20:21). Earlier in the Gospel of John we would have read Jesus saying to the disciples, "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Divine Parent" (John 14:12).

In Acts, we read that many came to the apostles and many came to believe.

People came to the followers of Jesus, because the apostles brought real healing.

After Jesus says, "I send you," we read: "Having said this, Jesus breathed on the disciples and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained' " (John 20:22-23). I still don't entirely know what to do with this whole forgiving/retaining sins thing -- one of the most appealing aspects to me of Divine Grace is that my forgiveness is not dependent upon other humans who can be flawed and petty. But this Lent I read Richard Horsley's Jesus and Empire, and Horsley talks about Jesus' releasing people from sin as being part and parcel of the many ways in which Jesus released people from that which oppressed them. Recall the story (also from John -- Chapter 9) where Jesus and the disciples encounter someone who was blind from birth, and the disciples ask Jesus, "Rabbi, who sinned that this person was born blind -- the child or the parents?" and Jesus answers, "Neither this person nor this person's parents sinned." Horsley writes:

Galileans and others of Israelite heritage explained their suffering as punishment for their own or their parents' sins in violation of covenant commandments. As Jesus heals his paralysis, he declares to the man lowered into the house by his friends, "son, your sins are forgiven" (Mark 2:1-9)---thus freeing up the life energies that had previously been introjected in self-blame and dysfunctional paralysis.
(p. 109-110)

The Acts passage we read doesn't say anything about the apostles forgiving or retaining sins. Instead we read that, "A great number of people would also gather from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those tormented by unclean spirits, and they were all cured" (Acts 5:16).

The disciples received the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit which sustained Jesus' own life and ministry now moves through them.

And so they go out and heal people. The Risen Christ finds them in a locked room, hiding from those who would persecute them, and today we find them, in the Book of Acts, together out in Solomon's Portico. Apparently no one else dared to join them, but the people held them in great esteem.

Sometimes we feel very lonely and abandoned -- out there all on our own. But often we have support we don't even realize.

We are called out of the closed rooms in which we are hiding -- called out into the towns around the Holy City, to cure those who are sick and tormented. We have encountered the Risen Christ, we have been empowered by the Holy Spirit, and we are called to bring that new resurrection life to the world.

We are called to proclaim peace and liberation, healing and abundance.

We, who still bear the marks of our own sufferings -- perhaps not as deep or as visible as the wounds of the Risen Christ, but marks all the same.

We are called to be vessels of God's healing.

Returning to Psalm 118 for the third Sunday in a row, we read:

God is my strength and my might and has become my salvation. (14)
I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of my God. (17)
God has punished me severely, but did not give me over to death. (18)
God, I thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation.
The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
This is God's doing; it is marvelous to behold.
This is the day that our God has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. (21-24)

Amen.

[18.2] Easter Sunday (1C) - "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

2010-04-09T20:26:00.003-04:00

[written as if preached on the actual date]

Easter C - April 4, 2010

Isaiah 65:17-25
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
I Corinthians 15:19-26
Luke 24:1-12

"Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

"Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

Why do we seek the wells of salvation, the water that will never leave us thirsty, in a graveyard? Why do we torture ourselves hanging on to that which was and that which might have been, when up ahead of us beckons the risen Christ, calling us forth into new life?

I've talked a lot this Lent about letting go of that which does not nourish me, of that which does not give me life.

On Easter morning we visit the tomb where we laid to rest the broken body of the One we thought would save us. This One is dead, can no longer save us, but still we return. Where else would we go? Perhaps we just want to honor this One who meant so much to us, who touched our lives so powerfully. Perhaps in our deep grief we have that desperate hope that we will find that the past few days have been only a bad dream.

And this is a good thing -- honoring our grieving. We anoint the dead body with sweet-smelling spices, because bodies matter. We attend to the tombs of those who have gone before us to say, "I have not forgotten you. The effects of your life did not cease when you breathed your last."

And sometimes it is in graveyards that we find peace -- that we are able to reconnect with the spirits of those who have gone before us in ways we can't do so in the noisy hustle of everyday life.

But we do not actually find our loved ones in graveyards.

We must not seek the living among the dead.

Yes, living water will spring up anywhere -- this morning we recalled that God fed the Israelites in the desert with water from the rock.

But we are called out into life.

There's an old hymn that goes: "We serve a risen Savior -- [S]he's in the world today." We serve a risen Savior. And Christ is in the world today.

We are Christ's body in the world. The body that was broken on Good Friday has been re-membered in us, the Church universal.

Teresa of Avila wrote:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which [Christ] looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which [Christ] walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which [Christ] blesses all the world.
[...]
Christ has no body now but yours

We are the Body of Christ in the world -- co-creating God's vision of peace and justice for all.

At Cambridge Welcoming's Good Friday service, the cross on the altar was draped with black mesh, which reminded me of nothing so much as a widow's veil. And so if Christ is the one who is mourning, then it is Christ's bride -- the Church, that is to say, us -- who is wounded.

So often we cannot find our way out of these graveyards, and Christ mourns for us. Mourns for Her lost sheep who cannot hear Her calling their name, who cannot see Her light beckoning them on, who cannot feel that sweet tug of Spirit leading them through the garden.

The angels proclaim, "Do you not remember? You were told that this is what would happen. There would be death, but there would also be resurrection." Yet how often are we like the eleven and the rest, thinking this merely an idle tale?

We are called to be witnesses to resurrection.

On the first day of the week, in the deep dawn, the women came to the tomb, and they found that that which was to keep it safe from all who would defile the memory laid there had been rolled away, and the One whom they came to honor was gone. And the light of the Word of God came upon them, and they bowed their faces to the ground, and words filtered into their understanding through their fear -- "Why do you seek the living among the dead? The One you seek is not here but has been raised. Remember? You were told that this would happen. You knew." And the women remembered. And they told those others who were mourning Jesus. They proclaimed the Good News to those who most needed to hear it. And they were not believed. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb.

Even when we are not believed, sometimes our words have an effect -- sometimes they still move people to resurrection despite their dismissal of us.

We are called to proclaim resurrection truth.

Which means we have to know the resurrection ourselves.

When we are in the graveyard we have to be able to recognize the presence of those light-bearers -- those whom we in no way expected to encounter. We have to be able to receive their message. We have to be able to move through our deep grief, to cast back into the waters of our memory and dig out some of the buried truths that we know -- for our grief is true and real and valid, but it is not the only truth we know.

Last year, Tiffany exhorted us to "practice resurrection." She talked about how resurrection is not resuscitation, is not just breathing life back into the old, but is rather a radical transformation.

I've talked a lot in Lent about how it's scary and difficult to let go of our old ways, but that God calls us to do so because God has such newer and greater things for us.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God says, "I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating." No more shall anyone have cause to weep or be distressed. No one shall die in infancy -- all will live to healthy old age. People shall live in the dwellings they build, shall eat of what they have planted -- no longer will people be sharecroppers, feeding someone else's luxury while living in scarcity themselves. People shall enjoy the work of their hands. This new Creation does not mean the end of labor -- but it means the end of labor that is not fulfilling.

The apostle Paul says, "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Cor 15:19). If we thought that Jesus was going to overthrow the Roman government, to become a new king like all our earthly rulers only better, we are so so mistaken. We saw this King of the Jews nailed to a tree like so many other rebels against the Roman Empire before and since. We heard the taunts and jeers directed at this One as death drew closer through the pain and anguish. We saw the disciples huddled in the distance, scared to be associated with this One. We felt the midday darkness descend and the veil of the Temple rent in half. This was not a triumphal earthly revolution, but it was an overthrow all the same. God has not come to make the best out of broken systems, but to effect radical transformation -- like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

According to Wikipedia, there are two main types of metamorphosis in insects -- a gradual kind where the youngster is a smaller, less-developed, form of the adult; and a complete kind where the youngster is wholly transformed. Wikipedia cheerfully informs me that insects which undergo this complete metamorphosis "pass through a larval stage, then enter an inactive state called pupa, or chrysalis, and finally emerge as adults. [...] Whilst inside the pupa, the insect will excrete digestive juices, to destroy much of the larva's body, leaving a few cells intact. The remaining cells will begin the growth of the adult, using the nutrients from the broken down larva." That is some radical, radical change.

And perhaps this is some of what the anguish of Good Friday, and the quiet fearful waiting of Holy Saturday, are about.

All that we had before is turned into pulp -- but from those nutrients grows something new, something more mature, something with capabilities its predecessor never dreamed of.

Two weeks ago, on Lent 5, I commented that: In Trina Paulus' book Hope for the Flowers, we learn that in order to become a butterfly, "You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar."

On Easter Sunday we are confronted with an empty tomb. All that we thought we had known and loved is gone. But there is something new in its place. For we are never abandoned, we are never forsaken.

We return today to Psalm 118, which we read some of last week, on Palm Sunday. Both Sundays we are exhorted:

O give thanks to God, for God is good; God's steadfast love endures forever!
Let Israel say, "God's steadfast love endures forever."
(vss.1-2)

Know, believe, and proclaim, that God's love endures forever -- endures even through death.

Paul tells us that for as all die in Adam and Eve, so all will be made alive in Christ (1 Cor 15:22).

The resurrection truth is for ALL people.

The resurrection is for you, and for me -- for all who are gathered here this moment and for all who are not.

Receive again this message of Easter hope. Receive it, and believe it, and stake your life on it.

Live the resurrection -- being a witness for all who need it.

Amen.

[18.1] Easter Wednesday reflection - "It's spring, even at night."

2010-04-07T21:27:00.004-04:00

Weeks ago, Keith invited me to offer the Reflection at Rest and Bread on this date. It took until late this afternoon for this sermon to finish coming together, but as I've been writing catchup sermons in recent weeks, I've come to appreciate that a sermon I write today I couldn't have written last week or last month, that things happen that inform my engagement with a particular text, and that sermons don't have to be posted on the exact Sunday their lectionary is for. My friend Scott said a while ago (IIRC), that a foxtrot is still beautiful even when it's to waltz music -- that I don't have to keep exactly to the lectionary calendar. (Though this is one of the daily lectionary readings for today -- which is why I picked it in the first place.)

John 20:1-18

¹Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. ²So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken Jesus out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid the body.” ³Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. ⁴The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. ⁵That disciple bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but did not go in. ⁶Then Simon Peter came, following the other disciple, and went into the tomb. Peter saw the linen wrappings lying there, ⁷and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. ⁸Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and saw and believed; ⁹for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that Jesus must rise from the dead. ¹⁰Then the disciples returned to their homes.

¹¹But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; ¹²and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. ¹³They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Jesus, and I do not know where they have laid the body.” ¹⁴When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. ¹⁵Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing this person to be the gardener, she said, “Please, if you have carried Jesus away, tell me where you have laid the body, and I will take it away.” ¹⁶Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). ¹⁷Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Parent. But go to my siblings and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Parent and your Parent, to my God and your God.’” ¹⁸Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Christ”; and she told them that Jesus had said these things to her.

(NRSV, edited)

"Do not hold onto me."

Jesus calls Mary of Magdala by name, and she responds in recognition, and then the next words the risen Christ proclaims to her are: "Do not hold onto me."

The whole point of Easter is that even death cannot keep Christ from us -- that She loved us so much that She passed through even death to bring us through to salvation with Her.

Easter, more than of the other holy days, is about abundance.

We vigil through the night. We hear again the story of how God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them -- the seas and the lands, the plants and the animals, the fish and the birds, humankind -- and proclaimed ALL of Creation GOOD. We hear again the story of how the Israelites just freed from Egypt cried out "It would have been better for us to be slaves to the Egyptians than to die here in the wilderness," and in response God proclaimed "The captors whom you see today you will NEVER see again" and parted the sea so that the Israelites could cross through, never again to taste Egyptian slavery. We hear again the story of the prophet Ezekiel's vision of dry bones growing sinew and flesh, moving once again with the breath of God -- of the whole house of Israel being brought up from the grave. And after hearing all those stories, perhaps we commemorate the sacrament of baptism -- welcoming catechumens into the new and abundant life that is the Body of Christ. And it is at that moment -- after we welcome the newly baptized into the Body of Christ that is the Church universal, that we declare, though it still be dark night on Holy Saturday, "Alleluia. Christ is risen!" (Audience: "Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia.") We have increased the wholeness and fullness of the Body of Christ, and in that way we resurrect the Christ anew. The dark of Lent is over and the light of Easter is come. Having baptized this catechumen in a dark sanctuary, we now turn on all the lights -- for our light has come.

Some hours later, we greet the rising sun (with a "u") with alleluias for the risen Son (with an "o").

We co-opted a pagan celebration of spring for this holy day of ours [edit: or possibly we didn't]. We consume foods rich with fat and sugar -- those things that we have been lacking all Lent because in our forebears' time, here in the Northern Hemisphere, we wouldn't have had any this late in the winter -- fat and sugar in the shape of bunnies and eggs, more symbols of fertility.

The weary world rejoices that death does not last forever -- that life always triumphs over death, life abundant and life everlasting.

The One who has loved and led us returns, to love and lead us for all eternity.

And yet the Christ who has, in some traditions, literally been to Hell and back on our behalf, says, "Do not hold onto me." I have work yet to do, work I cannot do if I stay here with you in the way that I was with you before.

I've talked a lot this Lent about letting go of things. Things that do not feed us, that do not give us life.

I find it interesting that the Easter story is about letting go of our leaders, of our saviors.

I will soon be saying goodbye to my second pastor in less than six months.

It doesn't really make me feel any better to know that Mary had to say goodbye to someone who was so much more to her than Tiffany or Laura Ruth have been to me.

John is not especially helpful here. We just hear that "Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, 'I have seen the Christ.' " We don't read any more about Mary's mourning for the Jesus she has lost.

My best friend points out that Mary's loss -- the loss of the Jesus she had journeyed with for so long -- was made tolerable BECAUSE she had encountered the risen Christ.

Those who have touched us, who have changed our lives -- that effect doesn't end just because their physical presence departs from us.

I don't get to keep my pastors forever, but I can carry with me the things they have taught me, and I am indeed a new creation because of them (and because of lots of other people as well, of course).

We are an Easter people -- forever transformed by our experience of the resurrection. And so we are called to be an Easter people not just on Sunday, not just in church, but every day and every where -- to carry that new life to the world, to carry into a wounded weeping world the assurance that new life DOES come ... and to carry that assurance into our own wounded weeping souls as well.

There's a poem I read today -- "Black Dress" by Laura Kasischke (from Gardening in the Dark) -- and here is part of what it says:

When Herod sat down at the dinner table, the roasted
bird flew from the platter crying, "Christ lives! He is alive!"
It's spring, even at night.

Amen.

Rite of Blessing (Easter sunrise)

2010-04-04T20:25:00.000-04:00

Molly invited me to represent CWM in the Somerville multi-church Easter sunrise service this year.

How about the Rite of Blessing--sprinkling the crowd with baptismal water, using a budding branch (lots of homage to our Pagan roots), to symbolize our new life. If you say yes, I'll send you the order I usually use to do it, which you can adapt as you wish.

[...]

I tell people that this is one of the more ancient rites of the church, a reminder of baptism.

I take a big bowl of water (sometimes I'll use local water--say, from the Mystic, or even better, salt water from the ocean), dip a branch in it (all the better if it's budding). Say one of the following prayers.

Then I walk around the circle sprinkling people with the branch dipped in water and telling them in turn (maybe 3-4 at a time) that they are God's beloved, with whom God is well pleased.

I took the longer prayer of the two she sent and ... almost entirely rewrote it.

I was telling Ari this yesterday, and she said isn't it great that we both have church communities where we can be given a text in advance and entirely rewrite it and that's okay.

After the service was over, I thanked Molly for inviting me to participate in the service.

She said, "Thank you, for being one of our ministers."

♥

------------------------

my prayer:

O God, Source and Breath of all being,
receive the prayers of your people:
We celebrate our creation and redemption;
receive our prayers and bless this water
which gives fruitfulness to the fields
and refreshment and cleansing to all people.
After you led your people to freedom through the Red Sea,
You satisfied their thirst in the desert with water from the rock.
In the waters of baptism and blessing, we are renewed and transformed;
we are washed clean of our old lives,
of all that obscures the spark of Divinity within each of us;
we are brought through darkness and water
into the light of new life.
May this water be a reminder to us of the covenant You have made
with each of us and with the whole communion of saints.
May this water bring us up from the ground of stagnancy and death,
into the light and breath of new life,
of life abundant,
of life everlasting.
We ask this in the name of God our Creator,
Jesus our Redeemer,
and the Spirit our Sustainer.
(and the people of God said) AMEN.

***

the prayer Molly sent:

Lord God almighty,
Hear the prayers of your people:
We celebrate our creation and redemption
Hear our prayers and bless + this water
Which gives fruitfulness to the fields
And refreshment and cleansing to all men, women and children
You chose water to show your goodness when you led your people to freedom
Through the red sea
And satisfied their thirst in the desert with water from the rock.
Water was the symbol used by the prophets to foretell your new covenant with man
You made the water of baptism holy
By Christ’s baptism in the Jordan
By it you give us a new birth
And renew us in holiness
May this water remind us of our baptism
And let us share in the joy of all who have been baptized at Easter
And who will be baptized today, this easter
We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord
AMEN.

[sermon 17] Palm Sunday C - Hosanna (Save Us)

2010-04-03T16:53:00.000-04:00

[written as if preached on the actual date]

Liturgy of the Palms C - March 28, 2010

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
Luke 19:28-40
John 12:12-16

Hosanna (Save Us)

I was surprised to see in today's lectionary that there's only a Psalm portion and a Gospel reading (albeit two of the latter to choose from). We're basically just handed the Palm Sunday story, as if to say, "No explanation necessary."

We do have a Psalm -- reminding us that God's steadfast love endures forever and offering us great liturgical lines like, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone" (v. 22), "This is the day that our God has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it" (v. 24), "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of our God" (v. 26a).

This Psalm also offers us the plea, "Save us."

Which is what "hosanna" originally meant -- from the Hebrew "hosha'na," likely derived from Yeshua, meaning "salvation, deliverance, welfare." (Matthew 1:21: "She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus (in the Greek; Yeshua in the Hebrew) for he will save his people from their sins.")

We utter "hosanna" in celebration, a meaningless collection of sounds we learned as children, but when we utter it we are crying out, "Save us" -- acknowledging our own need for salvation and also acknowledging Christ as one who can save us.

In John we read:

The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Yeshua was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Yeshua, shouting, "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of our God—the Sovereign of Israel!" Yeshua found a young donkey and sat on it; as it is written: "Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your sovereign is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt!" Yeshua's disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Yeshua was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of and done to Yeshua. (John 12:12-16)

As so often, the disciples don't understand. But the great crowd does.

"Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion."

The phrase "daughter of Zion" makes me think of "Daughters of Jerusalem," which in turn makes me thing of Song of Songs.

"I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, tell him this: I am faint with love" (Song of Songs 5:8).

The people of Jerusalem and of all Israel have been faint with desire for a savior. In the book Jesus and Empire, Richard Horsley writes, "By the time of Jesus, the Galilean, Samaritan, and Judean people had lived under the rule of one empire after another for six hundred years, except for one brief interlude of less than a century" (16). The Assyrians. The Babylonians. The Persians. The Greeks. And finally the Romans.

Having grown up in white middle-class twentieth-century America, I'd never really thought about the New Testament characters as living under Roman rule. All of the stories seemed to be about religion. Sure, there's wee Zaccheus the tax collector, the ruling officials who mark in historical time the date of Jesus' birth, and so on, but the occasional times they show up they seem like set pieces. All of Jesus' conflicts seem to be with religious leaders.

But Biblical Palestine didn't have the separation of church and state that is so much a part of my personal experience. Nor was it wholly theocratic in a way that meant that Judaism was the dominant power structure affecting the people's lives.

In Palestine, as in many of its conquered lands, the Roman Empire utilized the native structures of rule to keep control over the lands and people it had conquered.

Horsley writes:

Herod retained the high priesthood and Temple apparatus as part of his regime. After eliminating the last members of the Hasmonean family, he installed high-priestly families of his own choosing, even families from the diaspora in Egypt and Babylon. Even more ominously, he completely rebuilt the Temple in grand Hellenistic fashion. "Herod's" Temple became one of the "wonders of the world," famous as a tourist site for wealthy Romans and a pilgrimage destination for well-off Jews from diaspora communities in the Hellenistic cities of the eastern empire. That meant, however, that the Judean, Samaritan, and Galilean peasants who had previously lived under only one set of rulers, the Hasmonean high priests, were suddenly subject to three layers of rules and the economic demands of all three: tribute to the Romans and taxes to Herod on top of the tithes and offerings to the temple-state. Herod (and his successors) also took steps to integrate Palestine into the larger imperial economy.
(p. 32)

After Herod's death, the Romans left the high-priestly rulers in place under the watchful eye and political-military backing of Roman governors in Judea (and Samaria). The governors usually held the power to appoint their own nominee to the high-priestly office itself, hence the high-priestly incumbents were directly beholden to the governors.
(p. 33)

So not only were the Jews subject to the rule of an occupying government, but that occupying power also controlled the religious establishment.

We read in Luke:

As Yeshua rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As Yeshua was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the sovereign who comes in the name of our God! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!" Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Yeshua, "Teacher, order your disciples to stop." Yeshua answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out." (Luke 19:36-40)

Here the disciples do get it -- though I'm unclear if the gathered crowd is being conflated with the smaller group of disciples who have traveled the countryside with Yeshua these many months -- but I'm more interested in Yeshua's declaration: "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out."

The Savior has come, and all creation knows it. And perhaps the Pharisees know it, too. Yeshua will be crucified by the end of the week -- a punishment the Romans used on rebels. The Pharisees are saying, "Keep it quiet. Don't draw attention to yourself. Don't look like a rebel leader. What, are you trying to get yourself killed?"

Four weeks ago we read:

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to Yeshua, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." Yeshua said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.' Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of our God.' " (Luke 13:32-35)

It's easy to miss, given all that comes later in the passage, but this passage opens with the Pharisees saying, "Herod wants to kill you -- get away from here." The Pharisees are warning Yeshua.

Yeshua says, "I'm not trying to get myself killed, but I am going to confront the very center of this domination system, which I know probably will get myself killed -- but do you not see that I am doing this to save you?"

And indeed, the gathered crowds at that entrance to Jerusalem do recognize it. They cry out, "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of our God!"

And it is so easy for us to get caught up in that celebration, to move from celebration to celebration -- Yeshua's celebrated entrance into the holy city at the time of festival, Yeshua's triumphant emergence from the empty tomb on Easter.

But we're still a week away from Easter.

We are still on this Lenten journey, drawing ever closer to that final confrontation and overthrow.

I know of a pastor who said, two weeks ago, on Lent 4, "Next Sunday is the last Sunday in Lent, and then it's Palm Sunday."

And indeed we are no longer in the desert -- we have entered the city of Jerusalem. So our Lenten desert days are at an end, so to speak.

We don't sing that (h)alle-- word yet, but we do shout loud hosannas -- celebrating the coming of Yeshua, coming from that itinerant Galilean ministry in to the city, in to the heart of the religious institutional life.

But we are not at Easter yet. Last Sunday was not the last Sunday in Lent. It's important to me to remember this. This is not the end of the story. We are still preparing for Easter.

I've never been very good at Lent -- probably in part because I grew up so Low Church that I didn't even know some Protestants did Lent until I was in college -- but the idea of Lent as a time when we consciously draw closer to the Divine -- shedding that which separates us and cultivating that which unites us -- has been seeping into me.

Laura Ruth, in response to an update email I sent her last weekend, said to me: "Lord, you know when Jesus said you have to give up your life to gain your life, maybe he meant give up the part of life that gives no life."

Lent this year has coincided with my relinquishing -- or beginning to relinquish -- various things that do not give me life. Relationships that are not possible. Communities that only frustrate and do not feed me. Material goods that fill my space but never get any actual use.

It's a journey that's definitely not over yet. This weekend, for example, I had a resurgence of grief over a relationship I know it is healthiest to let go of but which I still crave having in my life.

Letting go of our old lives is hard. And it is like death in a way. Yeshua says, "Whoever loses their life for my sake will gain it." Whoever is willing to give up old ways of being in the world, old habits of living, will find a new way of living. "And whoever wants to save their life will lose it." If the waters are rising up around you and you are trying to save from the floodwaters something too heavy for you to carry, you will drown unless you let go.

That first crowd which welcomed Yeshua into Jerusalem cried out, "Save us!" Is that what we cry? Do we recognize how much we are in need of salvation, of being lifted up out of the mire of our habits and our addictions, how much we long to have oppressive yokes lifted from us? Or are we just looking for someone to pass us by on their way to somewhere else, to leave us alone, to not call us into radical risk-taking new life? Are we comfortable where we are, happy to wave palm branches from the sidelines and then return to our old lives?

I've heard a lot of talk this Palm Sunday weekend about Jesus' "triumphal" entry into Jerusalem. This throws me, because the rejoicing on Palm Sunday feels expectant -- the Savior has come, and we are so excited about what zie will do here in Jerusalem, here at the center of religious and political power. We are so looking forward to an overthrow of all the earthly powers that oppress us. And of course, Yeshua is forever confounding expectations. Yeshua submits to the authorities, submits to betrayal, abandonment, suffering, and even death. The triumphal moment is Easter morning -- when Yeshua arises having confronted death and demonstrating that death need not hold us captive forever.

To see Palm Sunday as a triumphal moment seems premature to me. We know the hard work that lies ahead. It is the work of confronting the death-dealing forces of the world and ultimately death itself.

One sermon I heard this Sunday suggested that this week -- Holy Week -- we begin a journey into the heart of that which oppresses us.

Does that journey change us? Do we decide that this struggle isn't worth the cost?

We encounter a crowd crying out again on Good Friday, but this time they are not crying "Hosanna!" but rather, "Crucify!"

In their book on Holy Week, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan suggest that the crowds in front of Pilate, the crowds who call for the release of Barrabas, were hand-picked by the authorities -- that they are not the peasants who have been following Yeshua and who rejoiced on Palm Sunday.

Pilate asks, "Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews [that is, Jesus]?" But, Mark tells us, the temple authorities "stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead" (15:11).
Almost certainly, this is not the same crowd that heard Jesus with delight during the week; Mark gives us no reason to think that crowd has turned against Jesus. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that the crowd from earlier in the week would be allowed into Herod's palace, where this scene is set. This crowd, the crowd stirred up by the chief priests, must have been much smaller and is best understood as provided by the authorities (somebody had to lead them into the palace).
(144)

The interpretation I'm used to merely assumes that the welcoming rejoicing crowd turned on Jesus -- just as Judas, one of the Twelve, betrayed Jesus; just as the disciples will abandon Jesus at the Cross. Either way, the question remains: which crowd are we in?

Rodney A. Whitacre, in a book on the Gospel of John, notes that according to some manuscripts of Matthew 27:16-17, Barrabas's personal name was Jesus. "So the crowd had to choose between two men, both of whom were named Jesus and were identified as 'son of Abba' yet who represented two different understandings of God's salvation." The NRSV tells us that, "Barrabas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder in the insurrection" (Matthew 15:7). Certainly a different kind of action against the forces of oppression than Jesus' -- but can you blame an occupied people for finding that appealing? Which kind of Savior are we seeking? Which crowd are we in?

Where are we when Yeshua celebrates the Passover seder? Where are we when Yeshua goes to pray and asks the disciples, "Stay here and keep watch with me"? Where are we when Pilate asks, "Whom do you wish me to release to you?"

Are we in that Upper Room, close at table with Yeshua and so many friends, partaking of the fruit of the vine, of the parsley dipped in salt water, of the unleavened bread, of the bitter horseradish and the sweet haroset?

Do we understand that when we commemorate that Last Supper we are echoing God's deliverance of the Hebrews from the Mitzrayim, the tight places, of Egypt, and also declaring God's deliverance of all of us from our own Mitzrayim?

Borg and Crossan's book on Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, and closes with a reiteration of the questions, "Which journey are we on? Which procession are we in?"

For at the same time as Yeshua was entering Jerusalem on a donkey, Pilate was entering by another way.

Borg and Crossan summarize:

From the East, Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers. Jesus was from the peasant village of Nazareth, his message was about the kingdom of God, and his followers came from the peasant class. They had journeyed to Jerusalem from Galilee, about a hundred miles to the north [...] On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. (2)

"Which journey are we on? Which procession are we in?" Do we journey through peasant villages, casting out the demons that oppress and afflict people, healing them of their ailments? Do we cross the sea, going back and forth "to the other side"? Do we feed the hungry, making abundance out of scarcity?

Or do we come from places of power? Are we representatives of an occupying power, of death-dealing forces? Do we come to keep the peace ("and where they make a desolation, they call it peace," says a Caledonian chieftan of the Roman Empire, in Tacitus) or to bring true peace ("The opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation" -- RENT)?

The early followers of Yeshua were called followers of The Way. The Way. Not a stagnant commoditizable item, not a single moment, but a journey.

When we cry, "Hosanna!" are we celebrating the entrance of a triumphant king or a humble savior?

"Which journey are we on? Which procession are we in?"

Let us carry these questions with us as we journey through Holy Week.

Amen.

[catchup sermon (16)] Epiphany Sunday 2010

2010-03-27T16:03:00.000-04:00

Epiphany [to have been preached on Sunday, January 3, 2010]

Isaiah 60:1-6
Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12

"Arise, shine; for your light has come."

"Arise, shine; for your light has come."

I really like that idea -- that we are called to shine because our light has come.

Christ has come to transform our lives -- to lift us out of the darkness and into the light.

And we are called to then reflect that light into the world -- to be filled with divine light and carry it with us through the world, illuminating the darkness through which we travel.

On this Sunday of the Epiphany, we celebrate not only God's light breaking through in the person of the Christ child but also that Magi from afar sought out this Light.

Matthew's story of the adoration of the Magi purposely echoes Isaiah -- "Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. [...] They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Holy One" (Isaiah 60:3, 6b).

The Magi make the long journey from the East, asking, "Where is the child who has been born sovereign of the Jews? For we observed this child's star at its rising, and have come to pay homage to this child."

I don't imagine the Magi themselves were Jews, but they recognized that something special was happening -- in a land far from theirs, in a tradition and culture foreign to theirs, but important nonetheless.

Maybe they just wanted to build a political alliance. After all, they stopped at King Herod's rather than going directly to Bethlehem. Did they do a bad job of following the star? Did they think that the star wouldn't be the most efficient guide (traveling by night is surely suboptimal) and so they wanted some more explicit human directions?

Regardless, they follow the star to the place where the child is, and "when they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy" (Matthew 2:10). Their long journey is over. They have found what they were seeking.

Sometimes it is a long journey to that which will save us.

And sometimes we get sidetracked along the way -- we seek guidance from institutional leaders who turn out to want to destroy that which will save us because it threatens their power and stability.

But we always have stars to guide us.

The Magi were likely trained astrologers. They had been trained to read the signs in the sky. Thankfully for us -- particularly those of us living amidst air and light pollution -- we don't need to be able to read the night sky in order to find the Christ.

So how do we find Christ? The Psalm offers us some guidance.

In today's reading, the Psalmist invokes God's blessing on a sovereign, praying that this ruler may be righteous and have a reign which endureth.

May this one judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.

May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness.

May this one defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.

May this one live while the sun endures, and as long as the moon, throughout all generations.

May this one be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.

In the days of this one may righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is no more.

[...]

May all rulers fall down before this one, all nations give this one service.

For this one delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper.

This one has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy.

From oppression and violence this one redeems their life

(Psalm 72:2:-7, 11-14a)

Over and over again, words of a concern for the poor, the weak, the needy.

This is how you shall know the rightful ruler -- righteousness will abound. Our thoughts will be filled with metaphors of abundance -- of rain, of verdant mountains.

And there is the hope that rulers from far away will come and bring tributes of gifts and service -- not because of the power and might of this ruler but because this sovereign delivers those who have no advocate, redeems them from oppression and violence. There is a hope and a prayer that this be the model that the world will respect.

Of course, we know this is not exactly how it works.

Surely others had seen this strange new star in the East. The Magi are the only ones we hear about who cared enough to actually venture out -- to venture out on faith, I dare say -- and seek this new sovereign.

How often do we see signs that God is doing a new thing in the world -- proclaiming release to the captives and healing for the afflicted? And how often do we join our energies with those efforts? How often do we work for the freedom of all who are imprisoned and oppressed, for the healing of all those who have been broken by the world, for the full inclusion and participation of all who are different from us?

Epiphany Sunday reminds us not just that Christ reached out beyond borders of religion, nationality, and culture, inviting all into God's abundant grace, but that we are called to follow. We are called to leave our ivory towers, to not just study the stars but to go out and follow them. We are called out into the world -- out of our comfort zones and into the frightening and sometimes even dangerous world.

And it's worth it.

"On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary the mother; and they knelt down and paid homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh" (Matthew 2:11).

An infant -- or anyone in a peasant family -- arguably has little use for precious metal or resins for incense and perfume, but those were the finest things the Magi had. They opened their treasure chests and poured out the contents in abundance. Similarly, we are called to let our hearts crack open, to pour out the abundant treasure of our lives and ourselves.

What gifts do we bring? How can we use those to honor the One who is the Source and Breath of all life? Can those of us who make friends everywhere we go find ways to make the stranger in our midst feel welcomed and beloved? Can those of us with contemplative spirits help teach the community the deep practice of listening for that still, small voice? Can those of us who are passionate about social justice out in the world find ways to light a fire for justice in our siblings here in the church, and help connect them with other bodies who are already doing work that will feed their souls and feed the world? Can we find ways to stretch ourselves, to grow in leadership and ministry in ways we might not have expected? Can we support each other so that no one burns out under the burden of trying to do too much? Can we challenge each other to trust in the sustaining power of the Triune God? Can we remind each other to take sabbath rest?

Paul writes, "Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ" (Ephesians 3:8).

The boundless riches of Christ. Just as the Magi poured out their riches to honor the Christ child, so Christ desires to pour out on us the abundance of God's grace and mercy.

And we, all of us, even the least of us, are given the grace to bring to all the good news of the boundless riches of Christ. We are called, not to insist that people conform to a rigid doctrine, but to bring the good news of abundance to all. We are called to invite people into community life where they will be beloved for their whole selves. Where they can be honest about their struggles with mental illness, with unemployment, with painful family relationships, with grief. Where they can celebrate new lovers, milestones of sobriety, adopting a baby, finally getting a drug cocktail that works, their family of origin finally using the correct pronoun for them. Where they can be their whole, authentic, selves.

Christ calls us into new life.

A new life no longer imprisoned by cultures of shame around sexual orientation, gender identity or presentation, mental illness, "invisible" disability, class, immigration status, race or ethnicity, or anything else which our world tells us makes us "not good enough."

A new life in which we are all one body -- the Body of Christ. We are created in the image and likeness of God. That night two millennia ago, scholars perhaps from Persia (modern-day Iraq) saw the Face of God in an infant born to a peasant family in a small town in Palestine. We, today, as the Body of Christ, in all our diversity, reflect the Face of God to the world. We are the infant body of Christmas. We are the baptized body. We are the transfigured body. We are the feasting body. We are the fasting body. We are the broken body of Good Friday. We are the resurrected body of Easter.

We are fat, and we are healthy. We are thin, and we have dangerously high blood pressure. We are losing weight because we're too depressed to eat. We are gaining weight because we're now being properly medicated for our hyperthyroidism. We take the elevator because we travel in a wheelchair. We take the elevator because we have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. We don't always come to church because our social anxiety is so bad. We always come to church because it is the one place we know we will be safe. We are Deaf and blind -- not in the metaphoric ways that imply an inability or refusal to access the Truth but in the literal physical way.

We are the Body of Christ.

At the end of today's Gospel lesson, we read of the Magi that "they left for their own country by another road."

In other translations, "They returned by another way."

As a historical event, I am doubtful that encountering a human infant was a particularly transformative experience for them, but as myth, it's powerful -- they encountered Emmanuel, "God with us," and so they returned not through the way of the powerful of the world (Herod in Jerusalem) but by another Way. They returned transformed.

And so we are called to be transformed by our encounters with the Divine. My best friend's pastor says that we come to church because it is here that we "touch the face of God."

We are called to make our churches a place where everyone present can touch the face of God, and we are invited to be transformed by that experience, to go out and be the face of God for all whom we touch in the world.

This is the Good News: that your light has come. Now arise, shine.

[sermon 15] Lent 5C - Preparing for the Desert Rain

2010-03-20T14:44:00.001-04:00

Lent 5C - March 21, 2010

Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8

Preparing for the Desert Rain

I can tell we're nearing Holy Week.

And not just because we've stepped out of Luke for a detour into John with the foreshadowing of Jesus' betrayal and death (and resurrection).

Through Isaiah, God proclaims, "I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert" (Isaiah 43:14). We often talk about Lent as "desert days." We give up things that bring us passing pleasure to help us draw closer to the Source and Life of Being who brings us true joy and peace. We practice resisting temptation just as Jesus resisted temptation during 40 days in the literal desert. In the Northern Hemisphere, Lent begins during the end of winter, when the sky is still dark and the land is still hibernating, not yet bearing fruit. In the Southern Hemisphere, Lent begins during the end of summer, so the parched land very much echoes desert.

But rain will fall in the desert. Such rain that there will be rivers.

Okay, this is a bit of an uncomfortable statement here in the Northeastern USA where we had so much rain and wind last weekend that many roads and schools and workplaces shut down, where many people stayed home not just because it was unsafe to travel but because their basements were flooding. One of my friends who works in graphic design lost huge portions of her high school and college art portfolio when her parents' basement flooded while they were out of town.

But this is not that kind of unwelcome river -- well, maybe it is. God is not always welcome in our lives. "My ways are not your ways," we heard God say two weeks ago (Isaiah 55:8).

This week, God says, "Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old" (Isaiah 43:18). That is difficult. My friend who lost much of her portfolio? One of her friends commented: "Jim Morrison once permanently destroyed all of his writing by intentionally setting it on fire. He said it gave him the freedom to write new things that were completely original. I've thought about doing the same to everything I have before, but never had the guts..." She said, "I like that thought... freedom to create new things. I'll keep that in mind, thanks," but I don't imagine that was easy.

This past Wednesday, Laura Ruth reflected on the passage in Luke (9:1-6) where Jesus empowers and commissions the disciples. Jesus' instructions end: "If people do not welcome you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave their town, as a testimony against them" (Luke 9:5). Laura Ruth talked about transitions -- about how difficult it is to know when to move on, to not leave too quickly and to not labor too long. She wondered whether the disciples got the hang of it after a few times -- if these pairs of disciples had conversations like, "I think we should go -- I think we're not welcome here any more" / "What are you talking about? We're definitely still welcome here." I'd never thought about that part of this passage -- that it's one thing to not be welcomed into anyone's home and to shake the dust off your feet on your way out of town rather than try to wheedle your way under someone's roof for the night, but once you have lodging somewhere you still eventually have to leave. At morning prayer this Lent we're following the PC(USA) lectionary, which Gospel readings take us through all of Mark, and earlier this week I commented on how every day or every other day we read that Jesus and the disciples got in the boat and went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee -- Jesus is forever leaving communities, moving on to new communities that also need to hear the proclamation of the dominion of God and to feel the healing touch.

As I said at Rest and Bread this Wednesday, I'm really bad at letting go of things. I want to stay and try to fix them, even long after they have ceased to nourish me. I'm kind of a control freak, and I want things done my way, and so I keep coming back and trying to make them better, to make them more like I want them to be. I'm not good at shaking the dust off my feet and letting go -- moving on to places or people that might be more willing to receive me. Oh, I'm happy to make my home in those communities that love me, that nurture and challenge me and allow me to nurture and challenge them in return. But I still try to work in these other places as well -- struggling along in ill-fitting garments, in unfruitful lands.

In our Gospel reading today, we read about Mary (sister of Martha and the resurrected Lazarus, I presume) anointing Jesus' feet with a costly perfume made of pure nard, and wiping them with her hair. Judas is outraged and points out that this perfume could have been sold for three hundred denarii (a year's wages) and the money given to the poor, but Jesus replies, "Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial" (John 12:7). There will always be opportunity to provide for the poor, but I, Jesus, will not always be with you.

In their book on Holy Week, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan talk about the version of the story in Mark (14:3-9) and argue that the woman is the first to really realize what Jesus is saying.

"She has done what she could," says Jesus, "she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial" (14:8). She alone, of all those who heard Jesus's three prophecies of his death and resurrection, believed him and drew the obvious conclusion. Since (not if) you are going to die and rise, I must anoint you now beforehand, because I will never have a chance to do it afterward. She is, for Mark, the first believer. She is, for us, the first Christian. And she believed from the word of Jesus before any discovery of an empty tomb.
(p. 104)

I'm intrigued by how to use this in my own life -- to create rituals that allow me to prepare for leaving, that prepare me for the deaths that are a part of life.

I show up at the door (of someone I have dwelt with before) and I am told, "I cannot receive you right now." And I want to say, "But what about later? Is there a time I could come back? And can we talk about why you can't receive me? I don't have to stay at your house; I could come in for just a little while, drink a glass of water and then leave. Let's talk." But the door is shut. And I want to come back, to knock again, to have this clarifying conversation. And I know that's not a good idea. That I need to shake the dust from my feet and leave. There are others in the village who know me, so if this person wants to welcome me back at some later date, they can find me. I suspect they won't -- that even if circumstances change such that they would be willing to welcome me in, they won't be willing to make the effort to track me down and invite me back. But I have to risk that. For God is doing a new thing.

How do we pay attention for the signs that death is approaching? That change is coming. That our welcome is waning and it is time for us to move on.

I think one way to do this is to check in with ourselves regularly about whether the work we are doing is feeding us. Has the earth we were tilling turned into desert somewhere along the way? Yes, God is making a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, but that means we have to actually follow that way, to move from our old patch of earth to a new one along the banks of the river.

The Psalmist tells us:

May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.

Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.

(Psalm 126:5-6)

I appreciate this reassurance. That God will restore our fortunes, our mouths will be filled with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy (Psalm 126:1-2).

The opening of this Philippians passage is familiar to me -- Paul establishing his credentials -- but I was struck when I hit verse 10: "I want to know Christ."

"I want to know Christ and the power of Christ's resurrection."

Wow.

That's such an incisive summary of what it is to be a Christian -- of why we are Christians. That deep desire to know Christ and to know the power of Christ's resurrection.

What greater desire could there be than that -- to know the one who is the very face of God and to know the power that has defeated even death? We're not at Easter yet, but there is always a certain cognitive dissonance in Lent (as in Advent) because we are anticipating an event which has already happened. During Advent, we anticipate the coming of the Christ child alongside Mary and Joseph, who have had angelic visitors and even if they hadn't could certainly perceive the child gestating in Mary's womb. In Lent, we are reenacting Jesus' forty days in the wilderness, which fall between baptism and the beginning of public ministry, so chronologically it's entirely out of order for the weeks leading up to Jesus' death and resurrection, but of course it makes a great deal of sense psychologically -- although Jesus' disciples continue to Not Get It about what awaits them, Jesus knows what's coming, and so we are traveling with Jesus, trying to be faithful companions, to be attentive to Jesus' teachings.

And what awaits us at the end of that journey?

Betrayal, death, and resurrection.

Not necessarily literally (though yes, death is the literal end of our journey until the resurrection), but there is a sense in which Christ calls us to die to our old lives so that we can be resurrected in Christ.

There are lots of parables about that -- you can't patch an old wineskin with new cloth or it will burst and the wine will run out and be ruined, instead you must put the wine in new wineskins (Luke 5:36-39); a seed must fall and die and break open in order to become more than just the single seed that it is in itself (John 12:24). We could come up with our own parables -- like the caterpillar who metamorphoses into a butterfly.

In Trina Paulus' book Hope for the Flowers, we learn that in order to become a butterfly, "You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar."

Lent is about learning to give up being a caterpillar -- and about learning to want to fly. Learning to give up the things that keep us attached to this desert ground so that we can soar, as we were always meant to.

Lent is about preparing ourselves for that new thing which God is desiring to do in our lives. About preparing the desert places in our souls for God's quenching rain -- uprooting the weeds so that new life can blossom.

And so I send you forth -- back into the desert, back into the wilderness, back into wherever you are in the world -- to continue preparing for the rain which God is preparing to send, so that you may have resurrection life.

Amen.

[catchup sermon (14)] Christmas 1C - Did You Not Know That I Must Be About My Heavenly Parent's Business?

2010-03-18T11:01:00.003-04:00

[written as if preached on the actual date]

Christmas 1C - December 27, 2009

1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26
Psalm 148
Colossians 3:12-17
Luke 2:41-52

Did You Not Know That I Must Be About My Heavenly Parent's Business?

We celebrated the Nativity only two days ago, and already we're reading about twelve-year-old Jesus. We'll jump back to infant Jesus at the Epiphany of the Magi next Sunday, but in this in-between space we're pulled away from the picturesque domestic scene in Bethlehem, into the city of Jerusalem -- at the time of the Passover no less, when Jews from all over fill the city.

We're not meant to spend too long cooing over the the nonthreatening infant. We are called to real engagement.

"Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"

My best friend was recently looking up the Greek, and apparently it's more like, "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's things?" so the alternative translation, "Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?" is more accurate than "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"

We read that Jesus' human parents did not understand this response -- which is interesting since Luke has already told us about the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary and sending shepherds to adore the infant, and about Simeon and Anna coming out and prophesying about the baby Jesus after the circumcision. One might think that Mary and Joseph would at least understand Jesus' affinity for the temple.

Perhaps it is intended as a reminder to the reader -- that sometimes even when the Divine is speaking directly to us we fail to understand.

Whenever we think we have Jesus safely ensconced in our caravan of familiar friends and family, Jesus slips away from us to wrestle with the Divine. And in so doing, Jesus leads us back to the Divine.

My first thought upon reading today's lectionary was: "Jesus, like Samuel in a way."

Samuel was born to Hannah after years of childlessness, in response to her fervent prayers. Hannah had promised God that if she bore a son she would dedicate that child to God, and so after Samuel was weaned, Hannah brought Samuel to the house of God at Shiloh, "And the child Samuel grew up in the presence of God" (1 Samuel 2:21b). Similarly, Jesus is born to Mary miraculously, and we know that Jesus grows up always intimately connected to the presence of God -- closer to God than any other human being.

Our Hebrew Scripture and Gospel readings close with very parallel verses:
"Now the child Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with God and with the people" (1 Samuel 2:26).
"And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor" (Luke 2:52).

But in looking back in Luke, I read also, after Jesus' family goes home after Jesus' circumcision, "The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon Jesus" (Luke 1:40). So perhaps the real point here is growing up.

In today's Gospel text, Jesus, along with many friends and relations, has come to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. When the Passover is ended, everyone starts to return home. Except for Jesus. Jesus spends three days in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions -- and apparently answering some, too, since it is reported that all who heard were amazed at Jesus' understanding and answers.

After the exchange between Mary (and Joseph) and Jesus, we read, "Then Jesus went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them" (Luke 2:51).

They didn't understand Jesus, but Jesus went back with them -- didn't argue the case further to try to force their understanding, didn't insist on staying longer, just went back with them and was obedient to them.

Maybe Jesus thought, "Okay, I'll come back to Jerusalem later. Perhaps next year my family will let me go off and do my own thing."

Maybe Jesus realized that the temple was not the only place to be to learn about God. For Jesus isn't reported as returning to Jerusalem until a Passover some twenty years later which will end in suffering and death -- and resurrection, but I get ahead of myself.

Just as we are not to linger overlong at the manger, neither are we to linger overlong at the temple.

We are called back to Nazareth, to Galilee -- to our families and friends, to our communities, to the world outside the small group of people who live and breathe these texts. (Which is, of course, not to say that scholarship isn't a valuable vocation.)

We are called to bring the Good News to the world. To be evangelists.

evangelium
euangelos
eu - good (like euphoria), angelos - messenger

We are called to be messengers of the good (news). To be angels.

Paul exhorts us: "As God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God" (Colossians 3:12-16).

This is admittedly more an attitudinal blueprint than a bullet point plan of action. But given what a bad name evangelism has in progressive circles these days, I think it's worth reflecting on.

The Nativity event was world-altering. The Source and Life of all Being incarnated -- became enfleshed -- to live and dwell among us more fully. To model for us how to walk in the Way of God.

This is the Good News. God loves us and wants to be a part of our lives. God knows intimately the human experience and wants to journey with us.

We are called to share this good news.

Not by arguing with people -- though healthy debate of course has its place -- but by living into the truth that Christ is come. That the kindom of God is near.

We are called to be compassionate, kind, humble, and patient -- bearing with each other and forgiving each other just as God has forgiven us.

Through Christ we are called into one body with many members, so we are called to live together in peace, bound together by the Love which is above all loves.

Teaching and admonishing each other with wisdom. With gratitude, praising God.

This is Paul's blueprint for living out our lives as God's chosen ones.

I know Paul is speaking to a particular church community, but I think this model still holds for how we are to interact with the broader world. We are called to proclaim the kindom of God, and we are to do this in deeds as much as if not more than in words.

The Psalmist exhorts all of Creation to Praise the one God -- for God commanded and they were created. But at the end of the Psalm, we learn that it is not just that -- "God has raised up a horn for God's people, praise for all God's faithful, for the people of Israel who are close to God. Praise God!" (Psalm 148:14). God has created us, and God has also saved us.

Christ is come. And we celebrate this. But we are also called away from the manger, away from the temple, to share this Good News -- to live out the truth of this Good News in community.

We are on the third of the Twelve Days of Christmas. I invite you to extend the Christmas spirit -- the true Christmas spirit, not the spirit of frenetic stress -- throughout the remainder of the season.

We need to be in our Divine Maker's presence. We need to be about God's business.

And so I send you forth, in the name of God our Creator, Jesus our Redeemer, and the Spirit our Sustainer. Amen.

more like a word theme, really

[32] of joys and covenants [Christmas 1B, CWM]

[Rest and re/New] "this is a day of new beginnings..."

[31] Hagar and Ishmael (CWM)

"Therefore we should have priests appropriately ready to recognize and accept the Son of God when he returns as a daughter."

things Christianity didn't quite invent, and theologies I don't quite have

"Beautiful Jesus"

religious but not spiritual

sekritly a social justice radical

[30] What are we asking for? [Pentecost +6(A), CWM]

"Hello, my name is..."

on DBT

on saying no

lobster arms

[vulnerability] on forgiveness and grace

[Rest and re/New] on anger at God

My denomination is now the behindest.

[29] Resurrection is a Process (Easter Sunday sermon 2011)

"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do."

John 4:5-42 (in which Jesus does not have to be male)

on sympathetic satire

on fear

"becalmed instead of stuck; drawn instead of driven"

[28] "Your faith has saved you; go in peace." [Luke 7:36-50; H!PS: Luke & Us; Feb. 22, 2011]

I have ALL of the excitement about this! \o/

on pastoring

today's wisdom from Molly

"Your victory is my victory."

[27] "Incarnation in the holiday season" [Rest and Bread; Wed. Dec. 8, 2010]

[26] "3 thoughts, approaching Advent" [Pentecost +25(C) Wednesday, Rest and Bread]

[25] praying in tune [Rest and Bread; Wednesday, September 22, 2010]

grace

"comfort and joy..."

today's wisdom from Molly

beyond "It Gets Better"

"It's not easy being green."

This makes me heartsick.

God as Lover

"In filling a role that is part pastor, scholar and community organizer..."

requesting a timeout to say grace?

So, I'm doing Magpie Girl's Power Stories class.

(Erev) Yom Kippur

wholeness is possible

[24] Pentecost +15(C) - Standing at the Gates of Repentance

"all the past blot­ted out in the pre­sence of the Liv­ing Pre­sent and the Eter­nal Fu­ture."

I don't actually have a point here.

[23] "what if no one's watching?" [Pentecost +11(C) Wednesday, Rest and Bread]

why history matters

Gerasene demoniac!!!

The Old Spice Man meets FeministHulk = best ever

"i always feel i have to open my mouth / and every time i do / i offend someone / somewhere"

This IS one of my spiritual gifts ;)

[22] "Children of the Living God" [Pentecost +9(C), CWM]

pastoral care: parishioners with mental illness

permission to be ordinary

I'm going to have to make this myself, too, aren't I?

"I tore these out of your symbol, and they turned into paper"

Christian resources re: mental illness?

this evening's visit through the liturgical spectrum

[21] "Transforming Love Into Healing" [Pentecost +2(C) Wednesday, Rest and Bread]

on today's edition of "things that have made me cry":

"People they come together / People they fall apart"

[BADD] we live in a culture of shame

[sermon 20] Easter 4C - Shepherding Community

[sermon 19] Easter 2C - Wounded Healer

[18.2] Easter Sunday (1C) - "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

[18.1] Easter Wednesday reflection - "It's spring, even at night."

Rite of Blessing (Easter sunrise)

[sermon 17] Palm Sunday C - Hosanna (Save Us)

[catchup sermon (16)] Epiphany Sunday 2010

[sermon 15] Lent 5C - Preparing for the Desert Rain

[catchup sermon (14)] Christmas 1C - Did You Not Know That I Must Be About My Heavenly Parent's Business?

"all the past blotted out in the presence of the Living Present and the Eternal Future."