A danger more dreadful than any invasion

She was five,

sure of the facts,

and recited them

with slow solemnity

convinced every word

was revelation.

She said

they were so poor

they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

to eat

and they went a long way from home

without getting lost. The lady rode

a donkey, the man walked, and the baby

was inside the lady.

They had to stay in a stable

with an ox and an ass (hee-hee)

but the Three Rich Men found them

because a star lited the roof.

Shepherds came and you could

pet the sheep but not feed them.

Then the baby was borned.

And do you know who he was?

Her quarter eyes inflated

to silver dollars,

The baby was God.

And she jumped in the air

whirled round, dove into the sofa

and buried her head under the cushion

which is the only proper response

to the Good News of the Incarnation.

John Shea wrote down this smiling observation over forty years ago and he called it Sharon’s prayer.[1] Not many of us, I suppose, dove into the sofa in response to the good news of the word become flesh, and yet, I hope, we each entered, however briefly, that moment of wide-eyed wonder that, when entered fully, washes us with joy like a shower of stars. The baby was God—Sharon, sure of the facts, couldn’t say another word after announcing the Christmas gospel.

We told the story and we heard it, we sang the carols, and we lit our candles, little flames held high in the silent night to greet the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. In the morning, surrounded by the joyous rumpus of children and a sea of gift boxes and wrapping paper and years of memories, we laughed and talked, we watched the Christmas movies, we played and ate the casseroles and the cakes, and eventually we all fell asleep, the little ones dreaming about their new toys, and the grown ups still humming the tunes that make us happy with tears in our eyes.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

Matthew tells us Christ was born in the days of king Herod, and he leaves little room for sentimentality. Here we are on the first Sunday after Christmas, and Matthew reminds us how very vulnerable human babies are and how very ruthless human rulers can be. Matthew makes sure we won’t sit too long in a warm, nostalgic tub, forgetting that Jesus wasn’t born in a little village of collectible, Victorian houses. Matthew tells us that a king was born, but there already was a king, and there is always only room for one on the throne. It doesn’t get any more unsentimental than that. The birth of Christ truly took place in our world, and so the little town of Bethlehem lies still only until the shouts of soldiers and the cries of terrified children break the silence. The streets are dark and they are filled with the wailing and loud lamentation of mothers and fathers.

Stanley Hauerwas writes,

Perhaps no event in the gospel more determinatively challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas than the death of these children. Jesus is born into a world in which children are killed, and continue to be killed, to protect the power of tyrants.[2]

Jesus was born into a world of terror and tears—a world whose rulers recognize few if any limits when power is at stake. Herod the king, in his raging, the Coventry Carol goes, chargid he hath this day / his men of might / in his owne sight / all yonge children to slay. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and Herod was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him, and in his fear the king unleashed brutal violence—and still the world out-Herods Herod.[3]

“What could be more innocent than the birth of an artisan’s child?” Auden the poet has Herod ask himself, and the king continues,

Today has been one of those perfect winter days, cold, brilliant, and utterly still, when the bark of a shepherd’s dog carries for miles, and the great wild mountains come up quite close to the city walls, and the mind feels intensely awake, and this evening as I stand at this window high up in the citadel there is nothing in the whole magnificent panorama of plain and mountains to indicate that the Empire is threatened by a danger more dreadful than any invasion of Tartars on racing camels or conspiracy of the Praetorian Guard.[4]

A danger more dreadful than an enemy invasion or a military coup — that is what the dawn of God’s reign represents to the power arrangements of the Empire. And so Herod and his death squads take centerstage, but the little Messiah slips through on the edge of the scene, a child of refugees, fleeing the terror and the violence.

Matthew tells the story so we hear clear echoes of another: Pharao, king of Egypt, was building an empire on the backs of slaves and wanted to keep it that way. Afraid that the Hebrew slaves might become too numerous to control, he told their midwives to kill all Hebrew boys at birth and let only the girls live. But the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, obeyed God rather than the calculating king, and many boys lived—among them Moses who grew up to lead his people from slavery to the promised land. Moses had to flee, and he lived far from his people as a refugee until the Lord said to him, “Go back …, for all those who were seeking your life are dead.” Moses returned, and the liberation of God’s people began.

Jesus and his parents were refugees in Egypt, when an angel of the Lord said to Joseph, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” Matthew wants us to hear these resonances between the story of Moses and the story of Jesus—he wants us to know that God is putting an end to the persistent story of terror and death to bring about liberation and life.

We all know that those sitting on the thrones of power did eventually have their way with Jesus and his proclamation of God’s realm. The ultimate confrontation between God’s way of ruling and the world’s was the cross, erected not very far from Bethlehem. Another Herod was on the throne, yet the methods of oppression hadn’t changed; Jesus died because Herod was frightened and all the occupants of earthly thrones with him. To their take on power—to our take on power—the life of Jesus poses a danger more dreadful than an enemy invasion or military coup: a world where love reigns and righteousness is at home.

Pam Fickenscher says about today’s passage from Matthew,

You could make a good argument that we should save this story for another day—Lent, maybe, or some late night adults-only occasion. But our songs of peace and … displays of charity have not erased the headlines of [terror and persecution and parents fleeing with their children crying in their arms, clinging to their backs, or gripping their hands]. This is a brutal world.[5]

Christmas and the cross belong together, and the dark streets are very dark indeed in which shineth the everlasting light—but shine it does.

There is another memory Matthew stirs up with his story of the massacre of the infants. Jeremiah comes to mind, and the days when the Babylonian army sacked Jerusalem and the inhabitants of Judah were sent into exile.

A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.

Rachel was the mother of Israel, one of the great matriarchs, and her tomb was on the way to Ephrath, that is, Bethlehem.[6] Rachel weeps for her children who have been persecuted, murdered, exiled, sent to death camps, and crucified—and she weeps inconsolably. In Jeremiah, God addresses Rachel, but Matthew doesn’t quote those lines here—it is too soon. But he doesn’t want us to forget them, either; perhaps he wants us to carry them with us, hidden away in our hearts like seeds of hope in this brutal world. According to Jeremiah, the Lord said to Rachel, Keep your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears; … they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future; your children shall come back to their own country.[7]

Nothing less will do. They shall come back from the land of the enemy. The enemy shall not keep them, not one of them. Jewish mystics taught that only one place on earth would be suitable for the coronation of God’s Messiah; not a high place like Jerusalem, but that lonely place by the road, where Rachel weeps for her children.

The exile of God’s people would come to an end when the Messiah would come to lead them home.

Where shall this be?

On the way to Ephrat

At the crossroads,

Which is Rachel’s grave.

To mother Rachel he will bring glad tidings.

And he will comfort her.

And now she will let herself be comforted.

And she will rise up

And kiss him.[8]

Nothing less will do, and Matthew knows it. He wrote his Christmas story long after Easter. He wrote his Christmas story with the bold hope that the Messiah who was born in Bethlehem and crowned on Golgotha, is Immanuel, God with us until the end of the age.

We have heard the story. We have sung the carols with joy and longing. And we let our candles be lit, little flames held high to greet the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Little flames held high enough to see his face in the faces of the hungry and give him food, his face in the faces of the thirsty and give him something to drink, and his face in the face of the stranger and welcome him.

[1] John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected (Allan, TX: Argus Communications, 1977), 68.

[2] Matthew (Brazos 2006), 41.

[3] Robert Lowell; the phrase may be Shakespeare’s (Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2)

[4] From Herod’s soliloquy in W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, in: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 391.

[5] http://www.danclendenin.org/Essays/20071224JJ.shtml

[6] Genesis 35:16-19

[7] Jeremiah 31:16-17

[8] Zohar 2.7-9; quoted by Fred Strickert, Rachel Weeping (Liturgical Press 2007), 32.

Real life

Pastor Kimberly was sitting on the rug with a group of children. She showed them a small statue of a lion lying down, with a lamb resting on its outstretched paws. She asked them what they thought of this. Brandon, one of the youngest theologians in the group, said, “Well in the Bible it says they will rest together. But in real life the lion would eat him!”[1]

The vision is glorious—real life is something else. “On the day the lion and the lamb lie down together, only the lion is going to get back up,” as Woody Allen once dryly remarked. Real life is something else. Real life, young Brandon has come to understand, follows its own rules and patterns, and in the world of real life, the words and visions of the prophets are strange announcements.

Isaiah was no stranger to real life and its patterns, though, as Brandon will soon discover, assuming he continues to hang out with Pastor Kimberly. Isaiah was fluent in the language of legislation and judicial proceedings and economic analysis.

“Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees,” he declared, “who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey!” When orphans become prey, the predators who eat them up aren’t lions or wolves.

“What will you do on the day of punishment,” Isaiah shouted into their dens. What will you do “in the calamity that will come from far away? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth, so as not to crouch among the prisoners or fall among the slain?”[2] In Isaiah’s vision, the calamity from far away had everything to do with the local habits of oppression and loveless accumulation.

“Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger,” he declared, channeling with passion God’s own anger—“the club in their hands is my fury!”[3] “Look,” he announced, “the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts, will lop the boughs with terrifying power; the tallest trees will be cut down, and the lofty will be brought low. He will hack down the thickets of the forest with an ax, and Lebanon with its majestic trees will fall.”[4] Big trouble in the form of Assyria’s soldiers was on its way south, approaching Jerusalem, and the lopping and chopping, cutting and hacking in Isaiah’s sentencing speech was at once an accurate description of the devastations warfare was inflicting on the land and the divine verdict against Jerusalem’s leaders. Isaiah may have been walking through the streets of Jerusalem or the outer court of the temple, but in his sad and furious and broken heart, he was stumbling through a devastated, clear-cut, and trampled landscape, with not a tree left standing, only stumps.

I read about the Amazon in the paper this week, and, having walked with Isaiah for a while, I saw a landscape of judgment:

When the smoke cleared, the Amazon could breathe easy again. For months, black clouds had hung over the rainforest as work crews burned and chain-sawed through it. Now the rainy season had arrived, offering a respite to the jungle and a clearer view of the damage to the world. The picture that emerged was anything but reassuring: Brazil’s space agency reported that in one year, more than 3,700 square miles of the Amazon had been razed — a swath of jungle nearly the size of Lebanon torn from the world’s largest rainforest.[5]

With devastation on that scale, no one counts trees; it takes a space agency to assess the damage. When the smoke was still rising above the Amazon, the prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, was getting his hands in the dirt and he got much of the nation to join him. On a Monday in July,

Students, farmers, urban professionals, foreign dignitaries, environmentalists and government officials planted [more than 350 million] seedlings … in what the government said was the largest one-day tree-planting effort in history. It was part of Mr. Ahmed’s campaign to plant four billion trees in Ethiopia before the fall to combat deforestation and global warming.[6]

In the early 20th century, about one-third of Ethiopia was covered in forests, but that had dropped to just 4 percent by 2000. 

To plant a tree is an inherently hopeful, life-affirming act, and I’m not surprised that those who did the planting in Ethiopia, wanted to make sure that every seedling would be counted, every single one.

Isaiah had walked amid the devastations of injustice and unneighborly rule for who knows how long, and having declared God’s judgment against those in power, he saw another vision. He saw a stump, and from under the bark a tiny green shoot had emerged. It was a glimpse of a promise of new life, and Isaiah spoke a new word. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,” he said, “and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” Jesse was the father of king David, and David, according to the covenant promise of God, was the king whose house and kingdom would be established forever. [7]

Forever, however, assumes the kind of rule congruent and resonant with the intention of God, the kind of rule described in Psalm 72:

Give the king your justice, O God,

and your righteousness to a king’s son.

May he judge your people with righteousness,

and your poor with justice.

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,

give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.

Isaiah saw and declared the failure of the Davidic dynasty to reign with justice and righteousness, a failure that resulted in the land of promise becoming a wasteland. And yet, the prophet asserted, a shoot, a sprout, a scepter would come up from the stump of Jesse, and it would be a fruitful branch. This royal figure would, in time to come, enact all that the Davidic kings thus far had failed to accomplish. This ruler would be different because the spirit of the Lord would rest on him, would inspire, guide, and empower him. And all this newness would not stop with Jerusalem and Judah, it would extend to peoples and nations and beyond: this ruler would establish God’s heavenly reign of righeousness on earth.

The language of city and nation and neighborly social order doesn’t have the range needed to speak of a newness that stills every terror, every fear in all creation. Isaiah names wolves and lambs, leopards and kids, cows and lions, and a young child tending this mongrel herd of predators and prey. And none of them shall be afraid. Infants playing with snakes, and nursing babies with their hands reaching into the lairs of vipers, and none shall be harmed. Who has ever heard such a thing?

Isaiah saw it, and he has insisted ever since, and inspired countless others to insist, that real life has this outsized hope spoken into it: real justice, real love, real community. For us, Isaiah’s vision, Isaiah’s words, illuminate who Jesus is: God’s reign in person. God’s word in our flesh. The lamb of God who is the lion of Judah.

Andrew Delbanco, in a series of lectures turned into a book, argued that, “our hopes are a measure of our greatness. When they shrink, we ourselves are diminished.”[8] He thinks that America’s hopes have shrunk considerably since early, colonial days when the Puritans set their hope in God. Yes, he does use a rather broad brush that paints over significant details like the hopes of Native Americans or the fact that not all settlers were Puritans, but let’s save that argument for another day and see what he wants to show us. In the early days, America’s horizon of hope was God. In the nineteenth century, America placed hope in the nation—“the last best hope of mankind,” as Abraham Lincoln put it. But in the late twentieth century, America’s hope began to be focused on the self. “The story of American hope over the past two centuries is one of increasing narrowing,” he writes. The late twentieth century “conspired to install instant gratification as the hallmark of hope of the good life. By that time the horizon of hope had shrunk to the scale of self-pampering.” And that was long before the arrival of the portable, personal screen and same-day delivery.

You would think that the civil rights movement, the moon landing, and the internet would have expanded our horizon of hope, but that’s not what I’ve been picking up lately. Have you? What seems to be expanding are anxiety, fear, and despair, and hope can barely breathe. What young Brandon has learned to call real life is shrunk-horizon life, diminished life.

Isaiah saw a world expanding into the vast horizon of God’s promise, and he wants us to see it. His vision stood, and continues to stand, in direct contrast to the terror, brutality, and inequity that pervade our world. He insisted, and inspired countless others to insist, that real life has this outsized hope spoken into it: real justice, real love, real community. The Apostle Paul, working in the same vein, wrote,

whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

Young Brandon has some concerns about the lion and the lamb. We are here to encourage him to lean into that outsized hope with us, to trust with us that love abides, and to help us live in accordance with Christ Jesus.

[1] See Journal for Preachers Vol. 28, No. 1 (Advent) 2004, 6.

[2] Isaiah 10:1-4

[3] Isaiah 10:5

[4] Isaiah 10:33-34

[5] Matt Sandy https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/world/americas/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-photos.html

[6] Palko Karasz https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/world/africa/ethiopia-tree-planting-deforestation.html

[7] 2 Sam 7:16

[8] Andrew Delbanco,  The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)

Fierce, roaring compassion

One day back in September, in a small event space in Brooklyn, 19 people gathered and sat in a circle. They included an immigration lawyer, a therapist, a climate protester, an artist and a reporter. They were there for a workshop called “Cultivating Active Hope: Living With Joy Amidst the Climate Crisis” — to the reporter, the title sounded wildly optimistic. “Have you ever known someone who cited the Anthropocene in a dating profile?” she asks in a story she wrote about the experience. “[Someone] who doled out carbon offset gift certificates at the holidays? Who sees new babies and immediately flashes to the approximately 15 tons of carbon emissions the average American emits per year? Who walks around shops thinking about where all the packaging ends up? You do now.”

Her name is Cara Buckley. She knows the planet is in trouble. She does what she can: She donates to environmental and humane causes, eats vegan, composts, takes public transport, carries around bamboo utensils, buys second hand and stocks up on carbon offsets — and yet none of it has been balm. “I [feel] complicit by merely existing,” she writes. “After all, I [belong] to the species that [is] taking most of the other ones down.” A friend suggested that her climate angst was an extension of her melancholic leanings, which struck her as plausible, but not quite right. “We know that the future is looking bad, that the present already is, and that inaction, especially here in America, is making it all worse. But how are we supposed to live in our hearts and souls with such an existential threat?”

What she took away from the workshop was more or less a prescription for learning to live with hope. The facilitators taught her ancient wisdom: to seek out a spiritual path to forge gratitude, compassion and acceptance. She learned that operating out of denial, fear, anger, and blame only burns us out. And she began to see that what is needed is a way to move to a place not of tacit acceptance, but of fierce, roaring compassion.[1]

Fierce, roaring compassion — she clearly wants to infuse the wise teaching with a bright taste of resistance and a strong dose of activist energy — and yet, it was compassion she was taught to practice.

Jesus and the disciples were in Jerusalem during the final days of his ministry, and they spent much of their time there in the temple. Jesus overheard people speaking about the building’s magnificent size, its breathtaking beauty, the splendor of all the gifts dedicated to God, and with great calm, I imagine, he said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” The temple was still under construction then. It was one of Herod’s biggest and most ambitious projects. Begun in the year 19 B.C.E., the temple itself was completed in less than two years, but work on the outer courts and decorations continued until 64 C.E.[2] It was an enormous complex. Scholars estimate that the outer court could hold 400,000 people, and that during pilgrimage festivals it frequently held crowds of that size. And the decorations were magnificent. The first-century historian, Josephus wrote,

The exterior of the building wanted nothing that could astound either mind or eye. For, being covered on all sides with massive plates of gold, the sun was no sooner up than it radiated so fiery a flash that persons straining to look at it were compelled to avert their eyes, as from the solar rays.[3]

It was a glorious space, designed to reflect in its splendor the very glory of God. It was also a space that didn’t reveal at first or second glance how it was being funded. In the same chapter, Luke 21, just before this scene, we read about Jesus seeing rich people putting large gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.”[4] The church has long held up this impoverished woman as an example of generosity and complete trust in God, but she also reminds us that Herod’s grand project came with a price tag: she put in all she had to live on, but it would still be his name associated with the magnificent structure. The Jewish people knew it was a house for the name of God to dwell, but they also knew that Herod had reasons for building it that had little to do with God’s name and a lot more with his own.

“As for these things that you see,” Jesus said, “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” The disciples wanted to know when; they asked him for a forecast, for details of time and circumstance, for knowledge that would put an end to their uncertainty. They weren’t the first, and certainly not the last, to worry about the news of wars, earthquakes, famines and plagues and to look at them as though they were the scheduled stops on an apocalyptic train ride to the endtimes.

Do not go after them who tell you that it all makes sense, Jesus said. You will go through times of blow after blow of heartbreaking and soul-draining news, and inevitably there will be those who tell you that it all makes sense, that each event is a mile marker along the tracks to the great and final day, but don’t trust their calculations. Do not go after them. Follow me. Stay with me. Trust me. Don’t confuse the kingdom of God with beautiful stonework or with neat systems of thought that fit together seamlessly like blocks in the temple wall. The days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down. Where you are standing in awe today will then be a heap of rubble. The thoughts you have of God and the purposes of God and how they are being fulfilled — pretty buildings, all of them, they will collapse. Follow me, he says, and learn to trust the faithfulness of God more than your best ideas. Learn to trust the creative possibilities of God beyond the limits of your own imagination.

Follow me, he says, and he points to the city without tears of which Isaiah sang,

No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in the city or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime. No more shall they build and another inhabit; or plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent—its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

Isaiah’s bold vision carries echoes of the beginning of our story in God’s garden, of the great promise of life in the blessed conviviality of God’s creation. He sings of the tree and the serpent, but his song is not the all-too-familiar tune of the fall, it is the older and forever new tune of God’s faithfulness: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,” says the Lord. It is the song of a city without tears and without temple, the song of creation finally being the home for all creatures and their creator, in righteousness and peace. It is the sound track of Jesus’ life and ministry. Follow me, he says, beware that you are not led astray. Do not be terrified. Do not worry. Trust the path I have cleared in the world and follow me.

As to that deep trust, most days, I notice more than a little hesitation in my step. It’s not that I don’t like the song — it’s quite beautiful and moving — but a world without violence, without terror and fear is just a bit much to wrap my skeptic mind around. Most days, I find it much easier to imagine the whole world heating up and flooding in denial, ignorance, selfishness and fear.

G. S. Galbraith wrote,

Only the young possess the simplicity

To accept a truth transcending rote and rule,

So that, like star-led shepherds, children see

The fact of miracle.

But logic, the sophist, clouds the maturing life, 

Caution replaces the fearless face of youth,

Till the sceptic mind prefers a plausible lie

To a fantastic truth.[5]

Plausible lies are things that appear to be real and permanent like thick temple walls. Plausible lies are lies because they continue the illusion that life can be mastered and that we are the masters. And plausible lies are plausible because they push the promises of God out of mind.

Walter Brueggemann suggests that the vision in Isaiah “is outrageous because the new world of God is beyond our capacity and even beyond our imagination. In our fatigue, our self-sufficiency, and our cynicism,” we remain convinced “that such promises could not happen here.”[6] But Jesus points to that promise, tirelessly, and he embodies the fantastic truth of God’s profound solidarity with sinful humanity and with all God’s creatures. That scene in the temple, that teaching about the collapse of our religious constructs was among his final teachings before his arrest. What followed were rejection, betrayal, denial, ridicule, torture and execution. Every lie, every injustice, every self-righteous illusion, every hateful word and angry blow — we let him have it. And he died because he bore it all.

But God, in fierce, roaring compassion, on the first day of the new creation, raised Jesus from the dead. What a fantastic truth. What a path to follow — for me, for you, for Cara. What a love to live.

[1] Cara Buckley, “Apocalypse Got You Down? Maybe This Will Help”, New York Times, November 15, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/sunday-review/depression-climate-change.html

[2] Six years later in a Jewish uprising against the Roman occupation the entire structure was razed by Roman troops, leaving only portions of the outer wall standing.

[3] Josephus, Jewish War 5.222

[4] Luke 21:1-4

[5] G. S. Galbraith, “Fact and Wonder” Christian Science Monitor, Nov 25, 1959, in Peter Gomes, The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2002) p. 116

[6] See Lectionary Homiletics Vol. XV, No. 6, p. 61

Outside the white houses

The days are getting shorter, and when the whole city is covered with a grey blanket of clouds, it feels like it’s late afternoon from sunrise to sunset.

The days are getting shorter, the lights have started to go up around the neighborhood, and we find ourselves sitting in traffic, or looking out the airport windows, dreaming about being at home, cozy and warm, with a hot drink under our nose, listening to the music we have fallen in love with over the years, and we think about baking cookies, wrapping presents, and lighting candles.

The days are getting shorter, and many of us are already looking forward to the long night when shepherds hear the angels sing, “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” We look forward to finding the child lying in the manger, and to asking again, with hushed wonder in our voices, What child is this who, laid to rest, on Mary’s lap is sleeping? Whom angels greet with anthems sweet, while shepherds watch are keeping? “This, this is Christ the King…”we will respond with great joy.[1]

Toward the end of Second Samuel, we read an old man’s last words, written down so that generations to come would know and remember:

One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of the morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.[2]

The hope for one who rules over people justly goes back as far as human memories can take us. It is a hope as old as the sad reality of rulers who abuse their position for their own ends. The prophet Jeremiah accused the king of Judah,

Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbors work for nothing, and does not give them their wages; who says, “I will build myself a spacious house with large upper rooms,” and who cuts out windows for it, paneling it with cedar, and painting it with vermilion. Are you a king  because you compete in cedar? Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness?[3]

It wasn’t the king alone whom Jeremiah accused in the name of God:

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture![4]

The prophet held the entire city and temple leadership responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of God’s people, but the scattering didn’t begin when the captives were taken to Babylon or the refugees fled to Egypt. The scattering had begun when families were driven off their land because they couldn’t make their debt payments, and when the workers who built the spacious houses and paneled them with cedar were not paid their wages. The scattering had begun when the king and the court officials attended to their own real estate interests instead of pursuing justice and righteousness. The scattering had begun when personal desires and ambitions pushed the needs of others to the margins of attention—and this is where the prophet’s indictment concerns us all: we can’t deflect its force to hit somebody else or pretend it will remain safely enclosed in a long-ago past, in a country far, far away. God’s people are scattered when our attention is absorbed by our own needs and desires until there is no time left, no energy, no love to attend to the needs of others, particularly those left to fend for themselves.

God’s commandments, again and again, draw our attention to widows and orphans and strangers, to those whose lives are vulnerable and fragile and whose position in the community carries little influence, but whose wellbeing is the measure by which the community as a whole is judged.

Jeremiah’s phrase, scattered captures well how fragmented our common life as well as our individual lives have become. And while this scatteredness is the result of past injustice, it is also the reason why injustice continues and spreads.

I was on a three-day pilgrimage to Washington last week with a group of Rabbis and Jewish lay leaders and fellow pastors from various backgrounds. We visited the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum and the Museum of African American History and Culture, and we began processing the overwhelming experiences together—in light of our respective faiths and in the shadow of our daily experiences of division and scatteredness. I brought back with me the words of a Holocaust survivor, and the disturbing questions his words raise for me and for us. He wrote,

I try to repress much, but one thing lodges especially in my memory, very deep in memory. These were the marches, the daily marches upon which we shifted from the camp to work in the tunnels, and, especially later in the afternoon, tired, utterly exhausted, dehumanized, on the way from work in the tunnels into the camp. On the left side, on the right side these white houses. I was so frightfully cold. I tried to dream of all that lay behind these walls. And I tried to think, perhaps a mother and children live in this house, but always I was awakened by the shouts of the SS: “Move on! Move on!” But again and again, every day when I left the camp, I tried to have these momentary dreams. That has remained so alive in my memory.[5]

There were people living in those white houses. Surely they looked out the window occasionally? Surely they witnessed the daily march of horror? The camp prisoner thought of the people living in those houses almost longingly, as icons of happy home life, as a link to the normal life that had been brutally denied him. But outside of his dream, the silent spectators in those white houses epitomized one of the most horrifying realities about the Holocaust: it was not just carried out by other human beings, but tolerated by countless others. Historian Victoria Barnett writes,

To those suffering in the camps, these anonymous witnesses were invisible, almost unimaginable. Who were they? the victims asked themselves. More importantly: Where were they? Why did they do nothing?[6]

Could it be that they, like most of us, were far more preoccupied with maintaining the normal rhythms of their lives than with the wish to become involved—perhaps at some risk—to alleviate the suffering of others? Could it be that to them, the “normal rhythms of their lives” simply included this daily march of tired, utterly exhausted, and dehumanized human beings stumbling past the living room window, one way early in the morning, and back the other way at night? Could it be that they saw and knew and simply had other things to worry about? The narrator of Elie Wiesel’s 1964 novel, The Town beyond the Wall, says,

This, this was the thing I had wanted to understand ever since the war. Nothing else. How a human being can remain indifferent. The executioners I understood; also the victims, though with more difficulty. For the others, all the others, those who were neither for nor against, those who sprawled in passive patience, those who told themselves, “The storm will blow over and everything will be normal again,” those who thought themselves above the battle, those who were permanently and merely spectators—all those were closed to me, incomprehensible.[7]

Incomprehensible. Comprehensible, perhaps, only as a symptom of the terrifying reach of our scatteredness.

Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. 

Jeremiah accused the Jerusalem leadership—the king, the priests, the court prophets—for the scattering that found its fullest expression in exile, and we gladly, and perhaps with a little relief, follow his lead by placing the blame for the world’s ills on political and corporate leaders and their PR meisters.

But we are the ones living in the white houses. Our choices matter. Our voices, as people, count. We are each other’s shepherds. The Lord promised,

I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and … I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.

For us, these words, and the promise of a righteous branch who shall reign as king and execute justice and righteousness, point to Jesus. They point to the curious king who builds his spacious house not on slavery or stolen labor, but with living stones: a house to gather in all of us scattered ones. On the night of his birth, the angels sang and we were glad to join their heavenly anthems. Then the air was filled with song and possibility; the small cradle was big enough to hold all our hopes and expectations. But on the day of his crucifixion there were no anthems, only a cacophony of scorn: “Let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God!” the leaders stated with a smirk. “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” the soldiers mocked. Even one of the two men crucified with him joined them in taunting Jesus, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” The scene Luke has painted for us looks like an obscene joke, with the punchline written on a sign and nailed over Jesus’ head, “This is the king of the Jews.” Amid the abuse and the clamor Jesus remained silent. “Father, forgive them,” he prayed, “for they do not know what they are doing.”

Forgive whom—the soldiers who, as always, were only following orders? Forgive the leaders who, as always, assure us they only act with the best interest of the state or the temple or the church or the nation in mind? Forgive those who stood by and watched? Forgive all of us scattered ones acting in our scattering ways?

This kingdom, the reign of the crucified Christ, is not a new and improved version of the kingdoms of the world, it is their end. It is the end of our royal ideologies and the dreams of domination that feed them. It is the gathering of the scattered in the shepherd’s reign of  justice and righteousness. It is the life of Jesus alive in us. We are the sheep of his flock and, because we are his, we  are each other’s shepherds.

[1] What Child Is This, Chalice Hymnal #162, words by William C. Dix.

[2] 2 Samuel 23:3-4

[3] Jeremiah 22:13-15

[4] Jeremiah 23:1

[5] A survivor of Mauthausen quoted in Victoria J. Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and complicity during the Holocaust (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1999), xiv.

[6] Barnett, Bystanders, xiv.

[7] Barnett, Bystanders, xv; quote from Elie Wiesel, The Town beyond the Wall (New York: Avon, 1969), 159.

Light from which time fell away

The year is winding down, and the scripture readings for these November Sundays nudge our hearts and minds toward considering endings. It’s not a difficult thing to do this time of year when we drive home in the dark most days, and, during the shortening hours of daylight, watch the leaves turning and falling from the trees, revealing growing patches of blue between the naked branches. Richard Wilbur, who died two years ago at age 96, left us a beautiful poem he wrote, called “October Maples, Portland.”

The leaves, though little time they have to live,
Were never so unfallen as today,
And seem to yield us through a rustled sieve
The very light from which time fell away.

A showered fire we thought forever lost
Redeems the air. Where friends in passing meet,
They parley in the tongues of Pentecost.
Gold ranks of temples flank the dazzled street.

It is a light of maples, and will go;
But not before it washes eye and brain
With such a tincture, such a sanguine glow
As cannot fail to leave a lasting stain…[1]

In October, even in Nashville, maples like gold ranks of temples flank the dazzled street until, in November, the killing frost arrives at night and throws its icy blanket over everything. Soon the glorious light of maples will only be a memory.

We don’t think much about time in the spring when everything around us is beginning, blooming, bursting into life. In the spring, time is the friend that reveals the wonder of life to us – but in the fall we look at life from the other side. In the fall, unless we’re safely at home with a new baby, the world reminds us of time as the relentless taker, ever eroding, dissolving, swallowing, and burying. “Time, like an everrolling stream, soon bears us all away,” Isaac Watts wrote; “we fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”[2] It’s a November song, with a touch of melancholy, and yet, even in acknowledging the everrolling stream, with this song we also sing of waking up in the morning of a day beyond time, when dreams give way to the wonders that abide.

The song teaches our anxious hearts to trust the faithfulness of God in the winter of life. “What will become of me when I die?” we ask ourselves. Can it be that it all just ends? What about my life, my relationships, my dreams, my longing for all to be well – will it all just fall like leaves and be blown away?”

Those of you who were in the room when someone you loved was dying, remember the deep sense of absence you felt after they breathed their last. The body was there, but the person you knew and loved was not. In an instant, everything about them turned into memories in the lives of those whom they had touched with their presence. The body was there, but you wondered, “Where is he now? Where is she?”

We understand intuitively how, across cultures, ideas emerged that describe human beings as consisting of body and soul, with the body returning to the earth at death, and the soul flying into the world beyond. In old pictures, the soul is often shown as a tiny winged human being, winged so that after the death of the body, the soul, no longer weighed down by earthly concerns, could fly into the freedom of heaven. Many Greek and Roman philosophers even thought of the soul as entrapped in the prison of the body, so that death would come as its liberation.

The ancient Israelites had little use for such ideas. They affirmed the goodness of the body as God’s creation, intricately woven, fearfully and wonderfully made. Human life was embodied, or it was neither human nor life. In ancient Israel, a good life meant living to a ripe old age and seeing one’s children grow up and one’s children’s children. A man’s name lived on in his sons, and family memories of parents and grandparents became stories about the ancestors, passed down from generation to generation. In Genesis we read of Abraham’s death, “he breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his ancestors.”[3] The story continued with his sons Isaac and Ishmael, and the web of relationships across generations was a source of comfort and hope for the living. For them the crucial question was, “What if a man dies childless? How will his name and memory continue?” In the Torah it is written,

When brothers reside together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her, taking her in marriage, and performing the duty of a husband’s brother to her, and the firstborn whom she bears shall succeed to the name of the deceased brother, so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.[4]

This family arrangement was to make sure the name and memory of the deceased man continued. It also made sure his property stayed in the family and his widow was protected and taken care of.

The Sadducees in today’s gospel passage referred to this tradition to make fun of the notion of resurrection. What if there are seven brothers, and each dies without an heir, and each marries the woman in turn? To whom will she belong in the resurrection?

The Sadducees were part of the wealthy aristocracy in Jerusalem; they held leadership positions at the temple. Politically they were pragmatists, committed to maintaining the institution, regardless of what power happened to claim Judah as its territory. Theologically they were strict traditionalists. In contrast to the Pharisees, they accepted only the written Torah, not the oral tradition of its interpretation in the debates of the great teachers. The Sadducees rejected newfangled beliefs like the resurrection of the dead, because they couldn’t see a scriptural basis for it in the five books of Moses. The story suggests that they had fun painting this scene of a woman in the world to come, looking at seven brothers, wondering whose wife she would be.

Perhaps you noticed that, with the exception of the poor woman widowed seven times, women and girls were strangely absent from these reflections on life and death and memory. It would appear that they were put on earth for the sole purpose of providing men with sons. It’s men who have names, women have children. Things didn’t look any better in Greek philosophy where women’s status as fully human was in question, since learned men weren’t sure if women even had a soul.

Jesus, in his response, surprised these privileged gentlemen by pointing out that the resurrection life is not a mere continuation of life in this age. “Those who are considered worthy of a place in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage,” he said, “for they cannot die anymore.” There’s no need for marriage arrangements to secure offspring and property and memory. In the resurrection, men and women live as children of God, whether they were married or not, whether they had children or not. In the resurrection, they live in relationships no longer distorted by our great capacity for self-centered injustice; they live fully and solely in the life of God, the life of life. They live in the light of light, brighter and even more glorious than the light of maples, and November comes no more.

But you can’t convince Sadducees with visions of beauty and justice. “We can’t find this resurrection in our texts,” they say.

“Moses himself showed it,” Jesus said to them, “in the story about the bush.”

The voice of God out of the burning bush didn’t say, “Many generations ago, I used to be Abraham’s God, and then also Isaac’s and Jacob’s, and now I’d like to be yours.” No, the voice said, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” The voice of God didn’t refer to a past reality that was gone, but to a living relationship that time and death had not been able to tear apart. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive to God, according to Jesus.

Now that is a highly imaginative reading of the text, perhaps a little too imaginative for Sadducees and for some of us, but without Jesus-shaped imaginations we may never see the new thing God is doing in our midst.

November’s killing frost threw the coldest blanket on Jerusalem, putting an end to Jesus’ life of grace and truth and compassion – and time, like an everrolling stream bore him away, and it was like the light had vanished from the world forever.

We know it wasn’t the Sadducees who began to speak of his resurrection — the women did. Mary Magdalene and the others who had followed him from Galilee barely had words to speak of what they had seen and heard, but they spoke. They spoke of Jesus, they spoke of his body and his voice, and of life, embodied life no longer subject to sin, suffering, or death, but glorified and fulfilled in beauty and justice. They spoke about this new beginning God had made in the world and for the world, a beginning that would not merely be yet one more episode in the everrolling stream of episodes, but a gate through which all of life flows into fulfillment like a river flows to the sea.

Soon the disciples didn’t just talk about the life of Jesus, they began to live it with humility and boldness, as brothers and sisters of Christ.

There is an exuberance in this proclamation of new life and new hope that is easier to catch in the spring. But November is the season when we say with Paul, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life ... nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[5] November is the season when amid the falling leaves and the descending darkness we sing of the faithfulness of God and of life fulfilled in justice and beauty and joy. So let us sing.

[1] Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943-2004 (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004), 274.

[2] O God, Our Help in Ages Past, Chalice Hymnal #67

[3] Genesis 25:8

[4] Deuteronomy 25:5-6

[5] Romans 8:38-39

A world without empire

On Halloween we do many strange and wonderful things. We tap into a variety of traditions, but still central to our various observances is the liberating experience of making fun of what we fear — we walk through neighborhoods haunted by ghosts and goblins, vampires and zombies, and not only do we get away with laughing at death, but we return home bearing gifts of caramel and chocolate, gummi bears and sour worms, a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.

Daniel didn’t go to see a scary movie. He had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in bed, and what he saw troubled and terrified him. The four winds of heaven were  stirring up the great sea, and out of the sea, four great beasts came up. The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings. Another beast appeared, a second one, that looked like a bear. It had three tusks in its mouth among its teeth and was told, “Arise, devour many bodies!” After this another appeared, like a leopard. It had four wings of a bird on its back and four heads. After this he saw in the visions by night a fourth beast, terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron teeth and was devouring, breaking in pieces, and stamping what was left with its feet.

Daniel saw scene after scene of terrifying destruction, wreaked by monstrous beasts, unleashing chaos in the world. And he couldn’t close his eyes or hide under the cover or run away, because what he saw was his own fear and helplessness overwhelming his imagination. This was no haunted house, it was a haunted world about to crush his soul.

We know what that’s like, a little bit, don’t we? Great, chaotic beasts arising we don’t know from where, but we can see them devouring, breaking in pieces, and stamping what is left with their feet? Whether that’s watching a loved one in the grip of addiction and spiraling down a dark stair case toward self-destruction or witnessing the rise of chauvinistic nationalism around the world and the death of refugees at sea, in the desert, or abandoned in locked trailers. We know sleepless nights when fearsome scenarios keep our minds churning, we know what that’s like, Daniel, to face the monsters and to struggle against the fear of what may be, fear of fires and storms and rising oceans, fear of deepening divisions in our families, our nation, our world, fear of what we know and don’t know, fear of orderly life descending into chaos.

“My spirit was troubled within me,” Daniel wrote, “and the visions of my head terrified me.” Thankfully, also present amid the troubling visions, was an attendant whom Daniel approached to ask him the truth concerning all this, and the attendant disclosed to him the interpretation of the matter: “As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth.” The beasts were embodiments of political reality, imaginative representations of the experience of life under foreign powers.

King Belshazzar, mentioned in today’s passage from Daniel, is fictional, but Babylonian rule over Judah was not. The stories in Daniel portray the kings of Babylon commanding the worship of idols and imagining themselves in the place of God. This arrogant impiety could not stand, Babylon must fall, but still the Judeans were not free. In the 6th century BCE, Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon, and the former subjects of the Babylonian Empire, including the Judeans in captivity and at home, became subjects of the Persian Empire.

The book of Daniel was completed in the 2nd century, presenting history as revealed in visions generations ago. Another empire would follow that of the Persians, and the people of Judah would continue to suffer under foreign rule. In the 4th century, the Macedonian general Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, including Judea, and after his death, his successors fought to establish their own kingdoms. His generals Ptolemy and Seleukus each founded an empire, and Judeans were subject first to one, then to the other.

The Seleukid king Antiochus IV profaned the temple in Jerusalem, halted the regular sacrifices to the God of Israel, and persecuted his Judean subjects when they resisted. The Jewish sources, especially Daniel and 1 and 2 Maccabees, describe a program of state terror, murder, and enslavement and the outlawing of Jewish identity, scriptures, and worship.

It was in this climate of terror that chapter 7 of Daniel received its final form. In the verses omitted from today’s reading, Daniel shares his vision of one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven to whom kingship would be given and whose dominion would be everlasting. The vision offered hope to a people who had been subject to foreign rule for over four centuries and now were victims of state terror and persecution. Even as they saw their houses burned to the ground, their loved ones tortured and slaughtered, and their sanctuary profaned with idol sacrifices, Daniel’s vision allowed them to see something else: the end of empires and their own future kingdom, brought about by the sovereign power of God. The king who persecuted them would soon pass away. His kingdom, portrayed as a monstrous beast, would perish, just as the kingdoms before it had done. And in its place God would establish a new and everlasting kingdom that would not pass away. And while the other kingdoms had been characterized by violence, distruction, exploitation, and oppression, the final, eternal kingdom would inaugurate the rule of God’s justice on earth.[1]

“As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth,” the attendant told Daniel. “But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever.”

In response to the evil perpetrated by empires and the suffering of God’s people, God gave sovereignty to this long-expected human one whose reign would not be portrayed as a monstrous beast with iron teeth and claws of steel, but as holy, that is to say, truly and fully human.

In the Gospel according to Luke, the first words Jesus speaks, are words he reads from the book of the prophet Isaiah,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[2]

It was Jesus’ mission statement, his inaugural address for the kingdom of God, given in the days of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee. Amid the representatives and institutions of yet another empire, Jesus lived and proclaimed a kingdom based not on coercion, but on compassion and solidarity, on welcome and service.

Looking at a group of his followers who had left everything – house and land, nets and boat and kin – who had left it all behind for the sake of this kingdom, for the sake of him who brought good news to the poor, for the sake of the promise that life was meant to be and would be different from the daily oppression, the poverty, the hunger, and the tears they knew – looking at this group of followers Jesus said,

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.

The words still puzzle us; he sounds like he is completely out of touch with the way things work around here — and then it dawns on us that he is completely in touch with God’s reign, and that he came to finally put an end to how things work around here. And it bears repeating that he didn’t say that poverty is blessed, or hunger, or weeping, hate and defamation. “God has a preferential love for the poor,” says theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, “not because they are necessarily better than others, morally or religiously, but simply because they are poor and living in an inhuman situation that is contrary to God’s will. The ultimate basis for the privileged position of the poor is not in the poor themselves but in God.” [3]

In the world the poor and the hungry are pushed to the margins of attention and influence, that’s the way things work around here, but Jesus embodies and proclaims God’s reign. The good news proclaimed to the poor is that the kingdom of God is theirs, and not the property of those who think they own everything worth owning in the world. The good news proclaimed to the poor is divine solidarity, the assurance that God is for them and with them—and not sometime, some day, but today. And the good news is more than a word spoken with conviction; it is a word lived by the followers of Jesus, a word embodied by the community of saints who bear the name of Christ. The good news is lived by you who understand that Room in the Inn is not just a volunteer emergency winter shelter program, but blessed moment after blessed moment of Christ the host welcoming Christ the stranger.

In the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus speaks the Beatitudes, not as part of the sermon on the mount, but on a level place – some refer to it as the sermon on the plain. I like to think of the level place as the place where every valley has been filled and every mountain and hill has been made low, where the crooked has been made straight, and the rough ways smooth.[4] The level place where the powerful have been brought down from their thrones, and the lowly lifted up.[5]

On the level place, face-to-face with us, all of us, the whole company of saints and sinners, recognizing one another as kin, leaning into God’s future together, a world without empire, where love reigns.

[1] With gratitude to Anathea Portier-Young http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2668

[2] Luke 4:18-19

[3] Quoted in Culpepper, Luke (NIB), 145

[4] Luke 3:5

[5] Luke 1:52

With hands outstretched

Two men went up to the temple to pray. Luke has let us know in an introductory comment that Jesus told this parable particularly to those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt. Luke’s gospel mentions regarding others with contempt twice: here and again later when Herod and his soldiers mock and abuse Jesus.[1] So the parable serves as a subtle reminder that the people we regard with contempt are in the blessed company of Jesus. Contempt for others is widespread these days, and perhaps the memory that the people so regarded, or rather disregarded, are in the company of Jesus, can yet teach our hearts a better way.

We have heard the little story for centuries, and we know that it is quite dangerous. Pharisee and tax collector have become “religious stock figures” to us, stereotypes of the self-righteous, rule-bound religious hypocrite, lacking in compassion and insight, in contrast with the contrite, meek and humble tax-collector.[2] We have learned the lesson, we know it’s all about being humble, and, irony of ironies, “as soon as we have arrived at a suitable state of humility, we … take pride in our accomplishment.”[3] The little story is dangerous because it plays with stereotypes, and it is dangerous because it sneaks up on us and traps us in our very genuine desire to be good people who do the right thing and enjoy being recognized for it — and if it’s the halo of humility we are to reach for, we will, thankful that we’re not like other people, especially this Pharisee. We want to be good, we want to do right, and we can’t escape our inclination toward regarding others with contempt.

Two men went up to the temple to pray. One of them was a good man, and he knew it. He took his religion seriously. He observed the prayer times diligently, he studied scripture daily, he gave generously to help the needy, and when it came to fasting and tithing he went beyond what law and tradition required. He was the kind of dedicated person of which every congregation and every community needs a few. People like him hold any community together with their leadership and their example. People like him know what is good and right, and they do it.

The other man, in stark contrast, was not a member of the community by any stretch of the imagination. He collected taxes, which doesn’t mean that he had a degree in accounting and worked for the IRS. He worked for Rome. He had crossed the line, he had put himself outside the bounds of belonging by collaborating with the occupying power. He had let himself be turned into a cog on the gears of the empire, making a living by squeezing the local population for cash.

The Roman way of tax collection was a simple and effective franchise system: regional brokers bid for the contracts and hired locals to raise set amounts from specific areas. The local collectors were given their quota, and those higher up in the extraction scheme didn’t really care how they went about meeting those goals — and whatever they collected in addition to their quota was theirs to keep.

You can imagine they didn’t have many friends. When you walked down the street and you saw one of them coming toward you, you crossed to the other side. Nobody you knew, nobody who cared about justice and righteousness, wanted anything to do with them. The tax collector was outside of all that was honorable, honest, and holy. He was a sinner, and he knew it.

Two men went up to the temple to pray, and they did, and then they went home, one of them declared righteous by Jesus. The next morning, for all we know, they each returned to the life they knew. One got up to collect a little more than his quota, give to Caesar what was Caesar’s, and keep the surplus to pay the bills and save for retirement. The other man returned to his life of careful, religious observance and communal responsibility. Nothing had really changed, except, hopefully, our assumptions about what constitutes righteousness.

Jesus doesn’t tell us this story to flip our expectations only to redirect our contempt to the new outsider. He stands with those whom we regard with contempt and he draws our attention to God’s mercy.Jesus steps outside the  bounds of what we consider honorable, honest, and holy, not to shame those who desire to live honorable, honest, and holy lives; he steps outside those bounds to help us see that God’s righteousness does not exclude the sinner, but overcomes sin for the sake of communion with all who live under the power of sin.

The Pharisee’s prayer opened beautifully, “God, I thank you.” With his heart’s attention focused on the open, generous hands of God, he would never run out of things to name with gratitude. But his eyes were on his own hands and all that he had to show, and the only gratitude he could offer was for not being like other people. He looked around and compared himself to those who have nothing to show, and he was pleased with the difference, but he had lost sight of the open, generous, welcoming hands of God.

The tax collector didn’t even look up. His eyes lowered, gazing at his toes, he  stood far off to the side, but his heart’s attention rested on God. Standing outside all that is honorable, honest, and holy he had no one to look down upon. All he saw was God, and hunger for God’s mercy was his entire prayer.

Jesus dares us to reimagine community in ways that are both ancient and new. Instead of a community of righteousness whose boundaries are defined and maintained with the granting or withholding of mercy, he dares us to imagine a community of mercy that reshapes how we practice and think about righteousness.

The two men who went up to the temple to pray remind me of two brothers. We know them from another story Jesus told in response to people who were grumbling about his habit of welcoming sinners and eating with them. It’s the story about a father who had two sons; the younger went to a distant country and burned through his inheritance while the older stayed at home and did everything he was supposed to. You know the story and how it ends with the father standing outside, pleading with the older son to come in and join the banquet. To the older son, righteousness is something he possesses and his brother doesn’t, something he has worked hard to uphold and his brother has squandered. He can’t see that mercy has prepared a feast for all. He can’t see yet that all of us need more love than we deserve. He can’t see yet that mercy heals our wounded, broken lives in the joy of communion with God.

Karl Barth, in one of his many prison sermons, said,

We are saved by grace. That means that we did not deserve to be saved. What we deserve would be quite different. No one can be proud of being saved. Each one [of us] can only fold [our] hands in great lowliness of heart and be thankful … Consequently, we shall never possess salvation as our property. We may only receive it as a gift over and over again with hands outstretched.[4]

With hands outstretched not only to God, I would add, but to one another.

The Pharisee, assuming that the tax collector had situated himself beyond God’s mercy, outside the bounds of righteousness, regarded that sinner with contempt. Perhaps he did pray with hands outstretched, but not to receive with gratitude the gift of God – he presented himself with hands outstretched, holding in them all his impressive accomplishments. He had no use for his brother other than as a dark foil against which his own light would shine even brighter.

The tax collector, with empty hands, fully aware that he had nothing to show, threw himself into the arms of God’s mercy. Did he know, I wonder, when he went down to his home, that he did so justified? How could he know, unless there was somebody who, with hands outstretched in welcome, embraced him as a brother? That is how Jesus welcomes us, one and all, and that is how we welcome one another as siblings in his name.

Righteousness is not a status we possess as our property, it is the gift of all things made well among all of us; it is mercy received and shared with hands outstretched to God and to one another. In the eyes of mercy, we are all like other people: made in the image of God, beloved, and worthy of saving, and much of our salvation is about learning to say “we” again without the need to exclude “them” as beyond the reach of God’s grace. Much of our salvation is about standing on the common ground of our equal dependence on God’s mercy, standing in the company of sinners, knowing that Jesus has come to stand with us and to bring us together in the beloved community where we recognize and welcome each other as kindred.

Now some of you will say,

Mercy, OK, I get it. But what about justice? What about the oppression and exploitation in which the tax collector participated and from which he profited? What about telling the truth about collaboration? What about restitution or reparation? Are you suggesting we just whitewash it all with a few buckets of cheap mercy? What about repentance?

Those are my questions too. And the most hopeful answer I have found in the gospel is a story in the next chapter of Luke’s gospel. It’s the tale of a man named Zacchaeus who was a chief tax collector and was rich. Jesus invited himself to his house, showering him with honor. All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”

Touched by hands outstretched with mercy, he responded with acts of joyful repentance.

[1] Luke 23:11

[2] Marjorie Procter-Smith, Feasting, 213.

[3] Ibid., 215.

[4] Karl Barth, Deliverance to the Captives (Harper, 1961), p. 39

To see and sing

“Aging calls us outside,” wrote John Updike in his memoirs. I wonder if he was onto something there. I used to spend a lot of time outside, days and nights, when I was young, but I hadn’t slept under the stars in a very long time. I was drawn to it, though, and so I packed the necessary things in my kayak and went on the river for a few days—and it was glorious. One morning, I paddled around a river bend and glided into what felt like a hug, like being embraced by wooded hills dressed in glowing late-summer colors under the bluest sky, as I floated in a dimension between the world and its perfect reflection in the mirror of water. I closed my eyes and I could feel the weight of the stunning silence—and for a moment my whole being was joy and gratitude. Updike wrote,

Like my late Unitarian father-in-law am I now in my amazed, insistent appreciation of the physical world, of this planet with its scenery and weather—that pathetic discovery which the old make that every day and season has its beauty and its uses, that even a walk to the mailbox is a precious experience, that all species of tree and weed have their signature and style and the sky is a pageant of clouds. Aging calls us outdoors, after the adult indoors of work and love-life and keeping stylish, into the lowly simplicities that we thought we had outgrown as children. We come again to love the plain world, its stone and wood, its air and water. “What a glorious view!” my father-in-law would announce as we smirked in the back seat of the car he was inattentively driving. But in truth all views have something glorious about them. The act of seeing is itself glorious, and of hearing, and feeling, and tasting.[1]

Yes, the lowly simplicities of the plain world and the glories of seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, and tasting do indeed invite our awe and rejoicing. Walter Brueggemann wrote that

Praise is the duty and delight, the ultimate vocation of the human community; indeed of all creation. Yes, all life is aimed toward God and finally exists for the sake of God. Praise articulates and embodies our capacity to yield, submit, and abandon ourselves in trust and gratitude to the One whose we are. Praise is not only a human requirement and a human need, it is also a human delight. We have a resilient hunger to move beyond self, to return our energy and worth to the One from whom it has been granted. In our return to that One, we find our deepest joy.[2]

We worship God because there’s something about life that calls us to respond to the miracle and gift that it is and to the wondrous reality of our being part of it. We worship God because we want to say thank you, sing thank you, and live thank you. John Burkhart reminds us that,

What matters … is not whether God can be God without our worship. What is crucial is whether humans can survive as humans without worshiping. To withhold acknowledgment, to avoid celebration, to stifle gratitude, may prove as unnatural as holding one’s breath.[3]

Martin Luther was once asked to describe the nature of true worship. His answer: the tenth leper turning back.

Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem when he was approached by ten men with leprosy. Luke writes Jesus was traveling between Samaria and Galilee, only there wasn’t any land between the two—there was, however, a line. There was no border, no wall, no checkpoints, but there was a line, a sharp line drawn between two groups of people who hadn’t been friendly with each other for generations, Jews and Samaritans. The enmity between them was entrenched and old. They disagreed about things that mattered most to them: how to honor God, where to worship, what set of scriptures to receive as sacred. The line between them wasn’t so much on the land as it was in their hearts and minds, their imaginations. They did what they could to avoid contact with each other.

Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, traveling between Samaria and Galilee, when he was approached by ten men with leprosy. Leprosy was dreadful. It was the name given to any skin blemishes that looked suspicious and triggered fear of contagion. Leprosy was a sentence to exile. These men who approached Jesus had been banished from their homes and villages. We don’t know how long it had been since they had felt the loving touch of spouses, children, parents, friends. It no longer mattered which side of the line they once claimed as home or which community they claimed as their own or who they used to be or dreamed of being—now they were lepers. Whoever saw them didn’t see them as persons, but as no-longer-persons, as untouchables pushed out and left to beg and wander in the borderlands between Samaria and Galilee. “They shall live alone,” the law of Moses declared; “their dwelling shall be outside the camp.”[4]

The ten who had been dwelling outside the camp for who knows how long approached Jesus, crying out for mercy, and Jesus saw them, heard them, and responded. “Go, show yourselves to the priests,” he said. The priests were the ones responsible for determining if a rash was leprous or not. The priests were the ones who would examine the skin and decide, after the blemish had faded, if a man or woman could return from their exile. “Go, show yourselves to the priests,” Jesus said to the ten, as though it was time for their return to life. And as they went, they were made clean.

Made clean meant they would belong again. Made clean meant they could touch and be touched, embrace and be embraced, hold the baby, kiss the children, hug their wives, do their work, hang out with their friends. The ten had encountered Jesus in the land of not-belonging and they were restored to life, restored to wholeness. One of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice, and he thanked Jesus. One of them, when he saw that he was healed, saw something the others didn’t. Nine of the ten got their old lives back. One found new life. And he was a Samaritan.

Again it was a Samaritan who saw what others didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t see. At the beginning of his journey to Jerusalem, Jesus told a story about a man who fell into the hands of robbers on the Jericho Road. You know the story. A priest happened to come down that road, and when he saw the victim, he passed by on the other side. Next a Levite came to the place and saw the man, and he passed by on the other side. And then a third man came near, and when he saw the man, he was moved with pity. And he was a Samaritan.

It was an outsider whose actions revealed what being a neighbor is about and it was an outsider who recognized Jesus as an agent of God’s mercy. It was outsiders who saw what others didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t see. Ten cried out for mercy. Ten did what Jesus told them to do. Ten were made clean. Nine went home and lived happily ever after; nothing suggests that their healing was revoked for their lack of gratitude, nothing like that. God’s mercy is unconditional. One of the ten, though, turned back and gave praise to God at Jesus’ feet.

In Jesus, the kingdom of God has come into the region between where exiles dwell or rather wander, longing for redemption and crying out for mercy. Leprosy meant exclusion and isolation, and that makes it the perfect symbol for all the ways in which human beings experience being cut off from life. For some of us, complete isolation may be difficult to imagine, but to the degree that we are not at one with the world, not at one with each other and with ourselves, we all know what it means to wander the roads outside the camp, longing for life that is nothing but life.

It was the Samaritan, the outsider, newly liberated from the exile of leprosy, who recognized that with Jesus the reign of God had entered the world. He saw an embrace so wide and welcoming, it wouldn’t create yet another camp in this broken, divided world, but one redeemed humanity, made whole by God’s mercy.The Samaritan saw grace so deep, mercy so wide, his whole being  became gratitude and praise.

“Get up and go on your way,” Jesus said to him; “your faith has made you well.” This wellness is about healing, but goes beyond it. This wellness is about redemption and restored community, but goes beyond it. This wellness is about our deliverance from any blindness, any fear, any self-centeredness, anything that inhibits grateful praise. Burkhart wondered whether humans can survive as humans without worshiping, without losing ourselves in wonder, love, and praise. I don’t think we can, and we need to stop trying.

Jesus was on the way to Jerusalem, on the way to the cross. He traveled through the vast region between, his feet tracing the many lines that divide us from each other, from our fellow creatures, and even from ourselves, he traveled with his hands stretched out to either side in the most vulnerable gesture of welcome. He went all the way to the cross, erected outside the city gates, outside the camp—and there the deep divide between us and God was revealed, the violent pride of God’s human creatures presuming to be beholden to no one but themselves.

And there, in that ultimate act of human rebellion against God’s reign, God chose to remain faithful to the Beloved and to us. Such mercy. Such a passion for life. How can we not sing? How can we not praise the One whose we are?

[1] John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Random House, 1989), 246-247.

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1988), 1. The first sentence is a quote from Geoffrey Wainwright, “The Praise of God in the Theological Reflection of the Church,” Interpretation 39 (1985), 39.

[3] John Burkhart, quoted in A Sourcebook about Liturgy, ed. by Gabe Huck (Chicago: LTP, 1994), 148.

[4] Leviticus 13:46

To let ourselves be found

It’s nobody’s business whom you invite over for dinner. You send out your invitations, you turn on the front porch light, you open the door, and when the last guests have arrived you close it, and soon everybody gathers in the dining room.

Chances are, nobody cares whom you invite for dinner, unless, of course, they expected to be on your guest list and never got an invitation. They drive by your house at night and see all the cars parked along the curb on both sides of the street and they see silhouettes of people in every window, and they turn to each other wondering, why weren’t we invited? Or they drive by and see all the cars and notice two vehicles belonging to people they would never want to be seen with, and now they’re relieved they weren’t invited and they make a mental note never to invite you to their house again since you’re hanging out with those people.

Imagine a house where every time you drive by a banquet is in full swing, the lights are on and the door is open, and whoever wants to come in is welcome. What do you do? Do you just park the car and join the party? Or do you notice the cars belonging to people you don’t’ approve of?  

This is the house where Jesus is the host. And people who have become used to being left standing outside most circles are welcome at table with Jesus. People who have been labeled as outsiders for so long, they almost forgot what it means to belong, are flocking to him. They eat and drink with him, and they listen. “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him,” says Luke. Not just a few, but all, he says. They were coming because Jesus lived and told a story that counted them in, a story of God’s reign in the world. They were coming because in Jesus’ story everything was illumined by God’s mercy. They continue to come near to listen because at Jesus’ table they can sit down and not feel out of place.

Some folks drive by the house grumbling, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” A friend of tax collectors and sinners they call him, and they don’t think that’s a good thing.[1] What do you think? Your answer may depend on where you see yourself on the grand scale of righteousness, if there is such a scale. Is there?

Jesus tells us a story. Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? Do any of you own sheep? None? That’s what I thought. So let me tell you about Simba. Not long ago, Simba had his picture on utility poles up and down Woodlawn. Simba is a mighty name for a cute Jack Russel whose energy you could feel just from looking at the photo and you didn’t even have to stop and take a closer look. Simba was lost, and his picture was posted all over the neighborhood because Simba is loved. Somewhere between West End and Woodmont there was a home that wasn’t complete without Simba.

You wouldn’t expect a home with a hundred little dogs, though, whose owner noticed that one of them was missing, would you? And she left the ninety-nine at the dog park and went after the one that was lost, stopping by Kinko’s on the way to have the posters printed? Jesus’ story isn’t quite as fantastic, but it does stretch the imagination already with the opening question: Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? It sounds like he’s asking a rhetorical question, like it’s so obvious that anybody would do that. I don’t know. I can easily imagine hearing somebody reply, “Nobody in his right mind who has one hundred sheep and loses one, leaves the ninety-nine to the wolves, the thieves, and the coyotes, and goes combing the hills for the missing one. You cut your losses and go on with the ninety-nine.” Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

And I can see that Simba’s owner would call together her friends and neighbors to celebrate the day she got the call that little Simba had been found, but “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost” sounds a little over the top for a sheep owner who was able to track down a missing sheep, a little over the top – unless that particular one was extra special. Was it?

In an early Christian text not included in the collection of apostolic writings, this story is told with a different slant. According to the Gospel of Thomas, “Jesus said: The kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep; one of them, the biggest, went astray; he left the ninety-nine and sought after the one until he found it. After he had labored, he said to the sheep: I love you more than the ninety-nine.”[2] That’s a very different story than the one Jesus told according to Luke. In Luke’s version, there’s no room for favoritism, only for determined love and great joy.

And there’s another take, moving the action from the pastoral to the domestic:What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?

Most women I know would not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search all day for a coin; they have other things to do. A coin is missing? Well, that’s just too bad. It’ll turn up eventually, probably in the washer or under the sofa cushion. But in Jesus’ story, the woman drops everything, she calls the office to tell them she’d have to take a personal day; then she gets the flashlight and the broom, and she sweeps the house, every floor from the attic to the basement, and she searches carefully – until she finds this one coin. And that’s not the end of the story. She gets on the phone, calls her friends and neighbors saying, “Come on over, let’s celebrate; I found my lost coin.”

Both stories end with the hope for shared joy. What the man and the woman are doing borders on foolishness, because they will not stop searching until what is lost has been found, and what is incomplete has been made whole, and until all their friends and neighbors rejoice with them. This is how God looks at people. This is how God looks at you. This is how committed God is to finding every last one of us. Every single one counts. And the world isn’t complete until you and I and everyone else are at the banquet in God’s house.

Jesus’ offensive table manners were performances of God’s will to redeem us and restore us to wholeness. And the proclamation of a God determined to find us and bring us home is the other side of Jesus calling us to repentance.

Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.

So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”

“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”

The Runaway Bunny, a children’s book written by Margaret Brown, was first published in 1942, and it has not been out of print ever since. A little bunny threatens to run away from home in an imaginary game of shape-shifting. The loving and steadfast mother promises to find her child each time he threatens to escape by doing some shape-shifting of her own.

“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.”

“If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said his mother, “I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”

Some parents are uncomfortable with some of the mother rabbit’s  responses – words like “creepy”, “obsessive” and “possessive” were used in some online comments.[3] “While the emotional tone is one of love,” wrote one reviewer, “the mother rabbit’s refusal to let her child explore could be seen as stifling — a midcentury ‘helicopter parent.’”[4] But then we turn the page to the little bunny saying,

“I will be a bird and fly away from you.”

“If you become a bird and fly away from me,” said his mother, “I will be a tree that you come home to.”

It is not easy for us to find words for a love that will not let us go – not because it doesn’t want us to go and explore, but because it does want us to run and swim and climb and fly knowing that we belong, knowing that we can trust the bonds between divine lover and beloved creation.

Jesus’ opponents called him a friend of sinners, not knowing that with that derogatory term they had stumbled upon the heart of Jesus’ life and mission. And why wouldn’t we who have been touched by his friendship, why wouldn’t we leave behind whatever scales of righteousness we carry around with us, and begin to see ourselves and each other as equally and joyfully dependent on God’s loyal love? Joan Chittister tells a story about this kind of friendship, without sheep or coin, puppy or bunny:

Once upon a time a Sufi stopped by a flooding riverbed to rest. The rising waters licked the low-hanging branches of trees that lined the creek. And there, on one of them, a scorpion struggled to avoid the rising stream. Aware that the scorpion would drown soon if not brought to dry land, the Sufi stretched along the branch and reached out his hand time after time to touch the stranded scorpion that stung him over and over again. But still the scorpion kept its grip on the branch. “Sufi,” said a passerby, “Don’t you realize that if you touch that scorpion it will sting you?” And the Sufi replied as he reached out for the scorpion one more time, “Ah, so it is, my friend. But just because it is the scorpion’s nature to sting does not mean that I should abandon my nature to save.”[5]

I see in the Sufi’s actions a reflection of Jesus’ friendship with sinners,  of God’s love reaching out to every last one of us with great mercy. And our true nature – our true nature – is not to sting, but to let ourselves be found by the love that will not let us go.

[1] Luke 7:34

[2] Gospel of Thomas 107.

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58922.The_Runaway_Bunny

[4] Taylor Jasmine https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/book-reviews/the-runaway-bunny-by-margaret-wise-brown

[5] Joan Chittister, National Catholic Reporter, March 16, 2001

Clay with a mind of its own

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.”

God didn’t just tell the prophet the words God wanted the people to hear. God didn’t just start a dictation of divine speech right there, wherever Jeremiah was at that moment. And God didn’t tell Jeremiah to go to the temple, or the mountain, or the desert — none of the places we would associate with receiving divine instruction.

God sent Jeremiah to the workspace of an artisan, and there the prophet watched the potter at work. He saw a lump of clay on a fast turning wheel. He saw skilled hands gently and firmly centering the clay into a cone. He watched the clay rise, guided by the potter’s touch, and open like the bud of a flower. It was like watching a dance: potter and clay moving together, the rhythm of the foot kicking the flywheel, the vessel rising from inanimate clay like a living, growing thing, the transformation of thick mud into an object of beauty and purpose. To the prophet, it looked effortless, fluid, but he also noticed the artisan’s focused attention and how the earthen stuff on the wheel followed the master’s touch as though submitting to it willingly. Then he saw how the vessel the potter was making was spoiled in his hand, and how he, without missing a beat, reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. It was then that the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. It wasn’t when the prophet looked at rows of beautiful pots drying on shelves by the wheel, or when he saw the finished pots on the other side of the shed, transformed by fire, shiny and smooth, ready for market. God spoke when things did not work out as intended: God spoke when the vessel on the wheel was a mess in need of remaking — and the potter did just that.

I have watched potters at the wheel off and on since childhood, and my admiration for their craft only grew when, years ago, I learned the basics of throwing a pot myself. I took classes with the Clay Lady out in Bellevue, at a small workshop at Red Caboose Park. The wheel was driven by a motor, so I only had to focus on coordinating my eyes and hands, and not a kicking foot as well. How hard could it be …

Well, the seemingly effortless motion of pulling a pot from a lump of clay turned out to be the hardest thing I ever tried to do with my hands. And the results of my considerable efforts, even when they looked OK, sort of, never resembled what I had in mind when I sat down at the wheel. My teacher told me that to some extent the clay would always determine what would be made from it. “Clay has a mind of its own,” she told me, “and you must learn to respect that; neither you nor it entirely determine the result. If you try too hard, it gets tired.”

“What do you mean, tired?”

“It simply collapses.”

Mary Richards, a teacher and potter, connected with Black Mountain College in North Carolina, wrote:

You can do very many things with [clay], push this way and pull that, squeeze and roll and attach and pinch and hollow and pile. But you can’t do everything with it. You can go only so far, and then the clay resists. … And so it is with persons. You can do very many things with us: push us together and pull us apart and squeeze us and roll us flat, empty us out and fill us up. You can surround us with influences, but there comes a point when you can do no more. The person resists, in one way or another (if it is only by collapsing, like the clay).[1]

Clay has a mind of its own. God knows that. God has been working with humans for a very long time. The image of God as artisan is among the first we encounter in the scriptures. Genesis 1 portrays God as the first poet, designer, metalworker, and landscaper, as God speaks, divides, fashions, and populates heaven and earth. In Genesis 2:7 God first shapes clay, sculpting and forming humankind from earth. As God’s hands knead and smooth the moist dirt, God breathes life into God’s new creation, so that the human being is simultaneously grounded by this connection to earth and animated by the very breath of God.[2] We are made with divine intention and purpose, all of us collectively, and each of us individually.

Israel, Jeremiah tried to remind the citizens of Judah and Jerusalem, had a particular purpose as God’s covenant partner; they were meant to be vessels of divine light in the world, but they were forgetful, easily distracted by their own purposes and ambitions, just like we are. The clay has a mind of its own, a mind not always in tune with the mind of the maker.

God spoke to the prophet when the vessel on the wheel was a mess in need of remaking — and the potter did just that. Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

God is a God at work, hands-on, hands in the dirt. The pot on the wheel is a work in progress. The vessel is in the potter’s hand — although spoiled, it still is in the potter’s hand; it can be remade, re-formed into a vessel fit for its divine purpose. As the potter’s wheel continues to turn, there is hope. God isn’t sitting back watching the world collapse. God is a God at work. Creation isn’t something God did for seven days at the beginning of time. It is a work in progress. Humanity is a work in progress. Israel is a work in progress; the church is a work in progress; each and every one of us is a work in progress. And as the potter’s wheel continues to turn, there is hope that we will all be what we are meant to be.

Jeremiah reminds us that we’re not passive, malleable material in the cosmic artisan’s hands. God knows we are clay with a mind of our own and wants it that way. We’re not objects turning out just so in a deterministic universe where everything turns out just so. Mary Richards described how the clay changed her in the process of turning a pot:

It is the physicality of the crafts that pleases me: I learn through my hands and my eyes and my skin what I could never learn through my brain. I develop a sense of life, of the world of earth, air, fire, and water (…) which could be developed in no other way. And if it is life I am fostering, I must maintain a kind of dialogue with the clay, listening, serving, interpreting as well as mastering. The union of our wills, like a marriage, it is a beautiful act, the act of centering and turning a pot on the potter’s wheel.[3]

I listen to these words and I hear her speak of God who not only fosters life, but creates and sustains it, maintaining a dialogue with the clay, listening, serving as well as mastering. I listen to these words and they remind me of God’s limitless willingness to embrace life, including its uncertainty and pain. Her words remind me of Jesus Christ in whom the union of divine and human wills was and remains complete.

The psalm for this Sunday speaks from a place of intimate knowledge between human and creator. You have searched me and known me. You are acquainted with all my ways. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. To me these are words of profound trust in the One who made us, the One we have the privilege to know and address as “you”. It was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. Here too, God’s knowing is imaged through physical, hands-on action — knitting, weaving, touching — and the human knowing of this reality leads to wonder, awe, and praise.

The psalm speaks of the vastness of God’s reality that is far beyond our words and concepts, greater than what our minds can grasp — but not unknowable.

We can know ourselves as intimately known by God – every moment, every thought, every word, every habit, every fear – we can know ourselves as intimately known by the One who made us, and in that intimacy, through that intimacy come to know ourselves more fully.

At the end of the psalm – the verses were not included in today’s reading – we are encouraged to join the psalmist in saying, Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

The psalm begins with the words, “Lord, you have searched me and known me,” and it ends with us speaking of our desire to be so known – fully, completely, intimately – in order that we might know ourselves for who we really are and live the life God desires for us. That was the hopeful reality Jeremiah saw and received in the potter’s house: a people fully responsive to the presence, vision and touch of God.

[1] Mary Caroline Richards, Centering In Pottery, Poetry, And The Person (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 19.

[2] See Anathea Portier-Young http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2972

[3] Richards, Centering, 15.