Do not be afraid

In 1998, Nancy, Sarahbeth, Miles and I moved to Hampton, VA, where I had been called to First Christian Church. Soon, everybody but me went to school. Miles went to pre-school in the neighborhood. Nancy started her Master’s program at Hampton University, and Sarahbeth attended Forrest Elementary.

Forrest Elementary — it took me a while to notice that Forrest was spelled with two r’s, and that it wasn’t referring to the wonderful place where all kinds of small things flourish and grow under the canopy of mature trees. Forrest was somebody’s last name. I still remember the moment when driving by the school one day I said to myself, “No, wait… There’s no way they would name a school after a leader of the KKK,” but I wasn’t sure. I looked it up, and was relieved to learn that the school was named after Alfred S. Forrest. Perhaps he was a local leader, who knows, perhaps a teacher—I don’t remember if I found out who Mr. Forrest was. The school board’s governing documents stated, “Elementary and middle schools will be named in honor of persons who have rendered outstanding service to mankind in their community, state, and/or country.”[1]

A couple of years later, Sarahbeth graduated and went to middle school, Jefferson Davis Middle School. In a letter to the principal and the school board I asked what “outstanding service to mankind” Mr. Davis had rendered. I thought it was a curious way to teach young people the meaning of citizenship by having them recite, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands…” in a school named after the former president of the Confederate States. I never got a response. However, when doing a little research this week, I was glad to read that in 2018, in the aftermath of the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, the school was renamed Cesar Tarrant Middle School after a Hampton slave and Revolutionary War hero.[2]

Here in Tennessee, in 2018, the City of Memphis sold two parks to a non-profit, just to be able to remove statues of Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest. In response, the state legislature not only changed the law to explicitly prohibit such sales, but also cut a $250,000 appropriation to the city for its bicentennial celebrations.[3]

I wasn’t born here. I wasn’t raised here. I’m a resident alien still trying  to sort out where I am and how to proclaim the kingdom of God in a state that has more dedicated historical markers linked to Nathan Bedford Forrest—a slave trader, war criminal, and Klan leader—than to all three former U.S. Presidents associated with Tennessee combined: Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson.[4] To honor such a man is not merely unwise or unfortunate, it is idolatrous. To elevate such a man, to literally put him on a pedestal in public places across the state, is to idolize his dehumanizing violence. To do so also declares emphatically that the lives of those so violated, and the lives of their descendants do not matter.

State law currently instructs the governor to issue proclamations for six separate days of special observation, three of which pertain to the Confederacy: Forrest Day on July 13; Robert E. Lee Day on January 19; and Confederate Decoration Day on June 3, otherwise known as Confederate Memorial Day and the birthday of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.[5] Forrest Day is still on the calendar, but the General Assembly voted this year that the Governor no longer has to make the annual proclamation.[6] And that’s as far as Tennessee elected officials are willing to move even now—inches, when we have miles to go.

Some of them are afraid their constituents might torch their vehicles if they voted to remove the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Capitol building.

Tell me, what do you find more distressing: the fact that apparently such terrorist threats are being made, or the fact that some Tennessee legislators bury empathy, reason, and conscience for fear of losing their vehicle or the next election?

On Thursday, a bill was before the legislature that asked for $3,500 to move the bust from the state Capitol to the Tennessee museum. The bill was voted down. That’s when woman wearing a clerical collar stood up and raised her arms and said loudly, “I bring good news! I am Rev. Neelley Hicks and I have good news that we have the $3,500 needed to move the statue.” She didn’t remember what else she said when I talked with her on Friday morning, but she vividly recalled how she and Rev. Ingrid McIntyre and several others began praying, “Our Father, who art in heaven…”

They were gavelled down and asked to be quiet, but they continued to pray. State troopers were ordered to remove them. After Amen, they were faced with armed troopers asking them to leave. Neelley got up, and on her way out she said to the troopers, “This is sinful. This is wrong. God came to earth in a brown body. Forrest killed brown and black men. Your mama taught you better. Shame.”[7] She said it to the troopers, but she said it loud enough for the people on the floor to hear her, the ones who really needed to hear her, “Your mama taught you better. Shame.” Some of them had gotten up during the Lord’s prayer and bowed their heads during the holy interruption, suddenly aware that this was a moment not just for political calculus and fear, but for reverence in the presence of God.

“Prophets … are intent on making us see the truth about ourselves, which can result in our feeling humiliated and shamed,” writes Megan McKenna. Prophets aren’t concerned about coming across as judgy. What God sees, looking at their society, the prophets must tell, and they cannot not tell. Jeremiah said,

Whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.

Reproach and derision all day long, but the prophet cannot not tell. The prophets, writes Megan McKenna,

never let up until we change, or until we make a choice, or until we attack back, or until what they say comes to pass, or until they disappear or die. … They go after everyone indiscriminately, but especially governments, the economy, the military, leaders, other prophets … They turn on us as a people and on us as individuals … They lay our lives bare, down to the bone, marrow, and soul. They break through our well-planned worlds to say that we are the problem.[8]

“Your mama taught you better. Shame,” Neelley declared on her way out of the assembly, trusting that her words would find a way to break through layers of complacency and fear, and touch the soul of one or two.

“You shall go to all to whom I send you,” God said to Jeremiah, “and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.”[9]

Do not be afraid, for I am with you, has got to be one of the most beautiful commandments in all of scripture.

The power of a life drenched in God’s love threatens the powers and principalities of this world, but do not be afraid of them: they will not prevail.

Centuries-old entanglements of dehumanizing brutality and smug justifications may take generations to dismantle, but do not be afraid: the justice of God will prevail.

“It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher” and we all have a long way to go when it comes to that likeness, but do not be afraid to do the next right thing, for the kingdom of God is near.

Jesus didn’t come to bring easy peace, comfortable and convenient, but a sword that cuts through lesser loyalties than those to God and God’s reign. But do not be afraid, for nothing is greater in all of history and eternity than God’s loyalty to you and your neighbor and all creation.

To be a disciple is to be a learner, not a teacher. “It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher” — which doesn’t mean holy and perfect, but growing in holiness and fearlessness. Kingdom work and witness can be dangerous because it messes with demons and idols and powerful interests, but do not be afraid: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account,” says Jesus. “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”[10]

John Lewis wanted to be a preacher when he was a little boy in Troy, Alabama, and he famously practiced preaching by offering words of comfort and challenge to the chickens in the yard. When he was a young man, his mama told him not to get in trouble, and he loved his mama, but she had also taught him to love the Lord. And so he did get in trouble: good trouble, necessary trouble, kingdom trouble. He got in trouble right here in Nashville where he went to college and where he met James Lawson and Diane Nash.

The civil rights leader and U.S. Representative for Georgia’s 5th congressional district for more than thirty years, turned 80 in February. Cynthia Tucker writes,

It’s at once remarkable and tragic that Lewis’ legacy — his lifetime of patient, optimistic and non-violent resistance to systemic racism — remains so relevant. He has given 60 years to the work of trying to build the “beloved community” only to arrive at a moment when that work may seem naive, that community farfetched, the dream a child’s fantasy. … His undying hope for America lies not in any sense of its imminent perfection but rather in his conviction that the “beloved community” will one day come to fruition only if those who are committed to justice and equality keep on keeping on, one step at a time, … no matter how brutal the forces on the other side.[11]

“It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher” — and we all have a long way to go when it comes to that likeness, but do not be afraid to do the next right thing, for the kingdom of God is near.

[1] https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/hampton/Board.nsf/Public#

[2] https://www.dailypress.com/news/education/dp-nws-hampton-school-board-davis-0124-story.html

[3] https://patch.com/tennessee/memphis/tennessee-house-punishes-memphis-confederate-statue-removal

[4] Loewen, James W. , Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 237.

[5] https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2020/01/17/tennessee-nathan-bedford-forrest-day-rep-files-bill-end-observation/4499963002/

[6] https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/10/bill-lee-no-longer-proclaim-nathan-bedford-forrest-day-tennessee/5336437002/

[7] https://www.facebook.com/neelleyhicks/posts/10222196742096398

[8] Megan McKenna, quoted in Feasting, Year A, Vol. 3, 149; my emphasis.

[9] Jeremiah 1:7-8

[10] Matthew 5:11-12

[11] https://bittersoutherner.com/2020/the-way-of-john-lewis-cynthia-tucker-black-lives-matter

Intolerable trouble

“Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time,” was the opening line of “A Talk to Teachers” James Baldwin gave in October, 1963.

That year, Medgar Evers, a leading civil-rights figure and N.A.A.C.P. state field director, was murdered in his driveway by a white supremacist in Jackson, Mississippi. It wasn’t the first time shots had been fired at his house. A few years ago, I stood in the hallway of what used to be his family’s home, looking into the children’s bedroom: the mattresses were on the floor—not because they didn’t have beds, but because white men would drive by the house at night and shoot through the windows, and having the children sleep closer to the floor reduced their risk of getting shot, the docent explained.

That year, 1963, four young girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—were killed when Klansmen bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama.

That year, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in his motorcade through downtown Dallas.

“Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time,” James Baldwin told a group of educators in October 1963.[1]

Black [people] were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that [black people] were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. . . . This is why America has spent such a long time keeping [black people in their] place. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh.  And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.”[2]

Intolerable trouble. That was the year I turned three, and it reads like it could have been written last week.

Five days after President Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a Joint Session of Congress, saying, “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”[3] The bill passed the House in February of ’64, but in the Senate it was debated for two months, including seven Saturdays with several attempts to filibuster the bill. It still is the longest Senate debate in U.S. history. On June 19, the Senate adopted an amended bill and on July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the bill into law.

A month later, on August 4, the FBI found the bodies of three missing civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Earl Chaney had disappeared on June 21 while volunteering for the voter registration drive in Mississippi. They had been shot and buried. During the investigation it emerged that members of the KKK, the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office, and the Philadelphia Police Department were involved in the incident.[4]

That was the year I turned four. Somebody will say with a knowing smile, Well, that was Mississippi, that was Alabama, that was over fifty years ago. George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis on May 25, that was three weeks ago.

I know, I’m not preaching; this is my lament. I look back and weep, and I don’t know whether to give in to the urge to scream or fall silent altogether. “[Lament] takes many forms,” says Brad Braxton.

Guttural groans, copious tears, long stretches of silence, fits of rage, quiet questioning, bittersweet remembering, tension-riddled tossing and turning. We lament because people matter to us, because values such as dignity and the presumption of safety matter to us. We do it because there remains somewhere in us a faint hope that today’s pain will not completely swallow tomorrow’s possibilities.[5]

Sitting with the Gospel reading for today, my hope was fed with the milk and honey of Jesus attention and compassion:

Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Sitting with these words, I was reminded that God is the healer of our every ill. Jesus is teaching in our churches, I trust, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom—and he will not make our trouble a little less intolerable or tolerable enough. The God we worship will not rest until the promise of creation is fulfilled in peace.

Jesus sent the disciples to join him in the work of teaching, proclaiming, and healing. Say, ‘The kingdom of God has come near,’ he told them. Cure the sick. Raise the dead. Cleanse the lepers. Cast out demons.

There’s a whole new world that begins to shine through and take shape in the presence of Jesus, a world where everything that gets in the way of life’s flourishing in fullness is overcome.

Raise the dead, he said, and I assume he meant it.

Are we to go to Birmingham and tell death to return Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley to their families? Are we to go to Jackson and tell death to let go of Medgar Evers? Are we to go to Neshoba County, and Ferguson, and Minneapolis, and Glynn County, Georgia and raise the dead? I don’t suppose Jesus meant to instill in us illusions of divine grandeur, when he told us, “Raise the dead.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his Christmas letter in 1942, sent from a Nazi prison,

We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes and showing real compassion that springs, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. Christians are called to compassion and action, not in the first place by their own sufferings, but by the sufferings of their brothers and sisters for whose sake Christ suffered.[6]

What I hear in Jesus’ commandment, “Raise the dead,” is “Do not let their names sink in dust and ashes along with their bodies.” What I hear is a commandment to speak their names and hear their stories and honor their lives by building the kind of communities where they would be at home.

On May 8, one of our neighbors posted on Facebook,

I am a Black man who jogs.

Given the tragic ending to the life of Ahmaud Arbery, yesterday’s run felt different. As I was preparing for my normal pre-run ritual, I added a new step; I kissed my wife and kids before heading out. . . . As soon as I left our apartment to start the run, I burst into tears. I had a moment of fear in thinking about Ahmaud. I wondered if that would [be] the last time, I saw my family. I almost gave in to that fear and went back inside.

. . .  As I broke the border of campus to set out, I placed my playlist on shuffle and the first song to come on was “How Great is Our God.” That song and the circumstances surrounding Ahmaud’s untimely ending took something that I do almost every day and turned [it] into a therapy run, not just for me, but for our country. I didn’t stop crying until mile 3.

. . . I slowed down when I approached another Black man on a corner selling copies of “The Contributor” . . . I slowed down because as I approached him, he started yelling and cheering. It took me completely by surprise. Because of the distance between us and the music in my ears, initially, I could barely decipher what he was saying.

. . . I have never heard more encouraging words yelled at me as I ran. In that strange moment when our eyes connected, he yells, “do it for Ahmaud” and proceeded to give me the raised Black Power fist with his right hand. That set me off emotionally and physically to a place where I felt like I left my body and this run had become so much bigger than just another run. . . .

I am a Black man who jogs.

However, to others, I’m their deepest fear and can become the object of their hate. . . . The senseless end of Brother Ahmaud’s life is a tragic and triggering reminder to my people that your status, titles, degrees, wealth, etc. can’t shield you from the physical and psychological effects of racism. I’m a 44-year-old, married, Black male with two beautiful kids. My wife is a neonatologist; my daughter Jordan loves to randomly ask me to dance with her; and my son Rosevelt, thinks his dad hung the moon.

I have a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, where I have been a professor for the past 18 years. . . . I love photography, DIY projects, data analytics, and spending time with my family. I’m a very active person. In addition to being a member at Title Boxing Club, Orange Theory Fitness, and the Vanderbilt Rec Center,

I am a Black man who jogs.

Before yesterday, my “bio” was something I never thought about during a run. But yesterday I had to; while I may see myself as all those things, to someone with ill will in their heart, none of those things matter. Just as Brother Ahmaud’s bio didn’t matter. . . .

Today, I will run again in Ahmaud’s memory. And like yesterday, and every day moving forward, before I leave our apartment to start my run, I will kiss my wife and kids because

I am a Black man who jogs.[7]

I didn’t know about that post until Thursday, when we got an email from the man who wrote it:

To Whom It May Concern:

I am a Black man who jogs and I wanted to say thank you for recognizing Ahmaud Arbery on the sign outside your church. Mr. Arbery’s death had a profound impact on me. At the height of my frustration, anger, and confusion about his murder, I wrote the attached post. Because of how he died, I stopped running around the streets of Nashville. Instead I started running on Greenways and Trails, such as Shelby Bottoms or the Harpeth River Trail, because I felt safer in these environments. After a month long hiatus from running on the streets, I decided to return today. My run this morning took me in front of your church. When I looked up and saw, “Ahmaud Arbery” on your sign, I said to myself, “How great is our God.” Thank you for raising awareness about the unjust ending of his life and for restoring my faith in running the streets of Nashville. I pray for God’s continued mercy, favor, and grace for you and your congregation.    

Sincerely,

Rosevelt Noble

Intolerable trouble James Baldwin called it with prophetic clarity of eye and voice. I pray that each of you and all of us together will continue to stand and march with those committed to cast out the demons of slavery and topple every false idol. God raised our brother Jesus from the dead, and therefore we stand firm in the hope that the pain of centuries will not completely swallow tomorrow’s possibilities.

[1] Delivered on October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child – His Self-Image”; published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

[2] https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/baldwin-talk-to-teachers

[3] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25988&st=&st1

[4] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-murder/

[5] Brad Braxton https://www.christiancentury.org/article/reflection/james-baldwin-reminds-us-not-be-surprised

[6] Letters and Papers from Prison, as quoted in Kelly, Geffrey B. and F. Burton Nelson. The Cost of Moral Leadership: the spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publ., 2003, 46.

[7] https://www.facebook.com/rosevelt.noble/posts/10102746323527478

Our crisis and work

We just read the entire first chapter of Genesis, which, to some of you, may have seemed a little over the top, a little extravagant perhaps. Words poured out like precious perfume that could have been put to more careful, measured use, verse by verse, line by line, phrase by phrase. But the pouring out, far from being wasteful, may well be the only appropriate way to take in this grand liturgical poetry that opens our Bible. It’s the whole story of life, from first light to the seventh day when God contentedly rests amid the wondrous whirl of creation. A little extravagance of speech and attention is called for in trying to echo the lavish fullness and awesome orderliness of creation.

The biblical scholars remind us that the chapter, in its entirety, was composed as a “prequel” to Exodus 15, the story of Israel’s salvation at the sea, when God ordered the waters to part so the Hebrew slaves could escape the deadly threat of Pharao’s military and cross over on their journey to the promised land. The chapter was composed in exile, after the kingdom had fallen and the Temple had been destroyed and the ancestral land had been devastated by Babylon’s armies. With bold, assertive speech, the exiles claimed that the God who set them free and led them out of the brick yards of Egypt was the creator of heaven and earth. The orderliness of the composition reflects a deep orderliness of life with words that reassured a people far from home. The rhythms of evening and morning, of weekday and sabbath, pointed those who recited and heard them to cosmic orders that the chaos of foreign captivity could not erase or subdue. Creation had a beginning and a goal, and the story of life from empty nothingness to fulfillment in sabbath peace was spoken by the God of Israel, not the gods of Babylon.

God speaks with sovereign power, and the word accomplishes God’s purpose and succeeds in the thing for which God sent it.[1] God speaks. God makes. God names. God observes and delights. “And God saw that it was good,” is one of the refrains of this poem of life.

The first day. The second day. The third day. God doesn’t snap the divine fingers to bring forth light and land and life; God makes time and takes time. And at the end of each day, God, like an artist, steps back from the detail, to behold the whole as it is taking shape. Good. Good.

God pauses to observe closely how the earth brings forth plants yielding seed of every kind and fruit trees. The fourth day. God notices how the waters swarm. God sees how birds fly across the sky and where they build their nests. God lingers with delighted attention over every movement of every wing. The Carolina Wren, the eastern Goldfinch, the Belted Kingfisher, the Mourning Dove, the Great Blue Heron. The fifth day.

God speaks. God makes. God observes and delights. “Why so many forms?” asks Annie Dillard.

Why not just that one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely and wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.[2]

According to the opening chapter of Genesis, human beings are latecomers to creation. We are creatures of the sixth day.When Carl Sagan came up with his now famous model for the age of the cosmos, he didn’t count days, but he  arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the late arrival of humankind. Sagan first popularized the idea of squeezing all the time of the universe not into seven days, but a single year, beginning with the Big Bang on January 1. On March 15, the Milky Way galaxy was formed. The sun and planets came into existence on August 31. The first multicellular life on earth appeared on December 5, fish on December 18 and birds on December 27. Human beings arrived on the scene about 8 minutes before midnight on December 31. And we started writing only about half a second ago in cosmic time.

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” we ask with the Psalmist. Humans have a special place in creation, but we’re not that special. We don’t even have our own separate day set aside. We are latecomers to the miracle of life, creatures of the sixth day who arrive in the afternoon, as it were, after cattle and creeping things and wild animals of every kind.

Let us make humankind, God said, in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over all this, as far as the eye can see. What kind of a mandate is that, dominion? We have a long history, particularly in the West, of confusing dominion with domination. And that history is not a long-gone past, but our present crisis and work.

We — and by “we” I mean first and foremost men of European descent — have been taught to view ourselves as “superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.”[3] In that profound misunderstanding of dominion as domination, the full humanity of women was questioned, and the question was answered in the negative; people of the first nations of the Americas were labeled innocent or savage, and when they resisted efforts to remake them in the image of their European “masters of civilization,” they were killed or marched off to shrinking reservations; the full humanity of people of African descent was brutally denied in order to keep labor costs down on plantations and the markets for cotton and sugar strong, and article 1, section 2, clause 3 of the Constitution defined a slave as 3/5 of a person. Women and all people of non-European descent were assigned their place “in nature” by European men who viewed themselves as superior to nature, contemptuous of it, and willing to use it for their slightest whim. This, we have been taught, is what dominion looks like — domination with a touch of contempt. The knee of a white man crushing a black man’s throat.

Sometime in 1938 or 1939, Bertolt Brecht, a German writer in exile in Denmark, wrote,

Truly I live in dark times!
A sincere word is folly. A smooth forehead
Indicates insensitivity. If you’re laughing,
You haven’t heard
The bad news yet.

What are these times, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds.[4]

Truly I live in dark times, when my morning psalm of praise for the Osprey and the Belted Kingfisher and the Great Blue Heron, for the flowering Oak Hydrangea and sweet Magnolia blooms, when such a song is almost a crime, because it implies silence about so many horrors of domination.

Peniel Rajkumar writes about the life-giving word of Genesis 1 becoming flesh and assuming an identity as “Jesus, the incarnate word who chooses to pitch his tent among human beings in an act which can be described as radical solidarity,” and he asks, “Where do our words pitch their tent today? In the safety and security of power or in the vulnerability of and solidarity with those disadvantaged by power?”

In Genesis 1, God’s word creates life, God speaks the world into being, and “on the seventh day, when the text states that God chose to refrain from all of God’s work, what seems to be implied is that God was silent on the seventh day. But an important aspect of this ‘silence of God’ is that God could afford to be silent because God saw that ‘everything was very good’.”[5]

On that great sabbath, God will rest amid the wondrous whirl of creation, and we will all sing in the one great symphony of life. Until then, God will continue to speak, and we will choose where our words, inspired and formed in the company of Jesus, will pitch their tent.

Until then, we will sing whenever we catch a glimpse of life’s wholeness; and we will stand and speak in solidarity with those whose full humanity as creatures made in the image of God continues to be denied, and we will work with them in dismantling the structures of domination.

Dominion is not a license to define and oppress and exploit — it is a commission to see as God sees, and care as God cares, and delight as God delights.

We together, humankind in all its diversity, and each of us in our unique expression of our shared humanity, are made in the image of God: entrusted to represent God’s dominion among each other and in our relation to the non-human creation. We have been given the capacity to see in astonishing detail how God’s creatures are all fearfully and wonderfully made, and how each is connected with the others in a single fabric of mutuality.

May our eyes be clear and our speech truthful.

[1] See Isaiah 55:11-12

[2] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1988, 137.

[3] Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” Science vol. 155, no. 3767, 1967, 1203-1207.

[4] “An die Nachgeborenen,” translated by Peter Levine https://peterlevine.ws/?p=18077

[5] Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar https://politicaltheology.com/speech-and-silence-the-politics-of-genesis-1-24-peniel-jesudason-rufus-rajkumar/

Worried kids

It was the night when they were having their last meal together. Judas had already left the table and gone out, and the others didn’t know where he’d gone or why. That’s when Jesus said, “Little children, I am with you only a little longer.”[1]

Sometimes he sounds like a mom or a dad, doesn’t he? Little children he called them, and I imagine that’s how they felt. Not like grown-up friends, not like adults who know that sometimes life can take unpredictable turns and you just deal with it, but like kids. Like worried kids.

That night he also told them, “Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other.” But Peter and the rest of them weren’t quite ready to hear those words. When you feel like a kid, it’s really hard to love like a grown-up. They worried what would become of them. “Lord, where are you going?” they asked.[2] When will you be back? What are we supposed to do without you? Why can’t we come with you?

Little children he called them, and that’s how they felt. Worried kids, not at all excited about the prospect of having the entire house to themselves with no one around to tell them what to do. “I go to prepare a place for you,” he told them, “so that where I am you may be also.”[3] And he went on like this for a very long time, telling them everything they needed to know before he left them.

“I will not leave you as orphans,” he promised, but all they could hear, I imagine, was, “I will leave you.” I will not leave you comfortless, but I’ll be gone, nevertheless.

Barbara was the eldest of three daughters and the designated babysitter in her family.

“From the time I was twelve, I was the one my parents left in charge when they went out at night. First my father would sit me down and remind me how much he and my mother trusted me—not only because I was the oldest but also because I was the most responsible. This always made me dizzy, but I agreed with him. I would not let the house burn down. I would not open the door to strangers. I would not let my little sisters fall down the basement steps. Then my mother would show me where she had left the telephone number, remind me when they would be home, and all together we would walk to the front door where everyone kissed everyone good-bye. Then the lock clicked into place, and a new era began. I was in charge.”

Turning around to face her new responsibilities, what Barbara saw were her sisters’ faces, looking at her with something between hope and fear. They knew she was no substitute for what they had just lost, but since she was all they had they were willing to try. And so was she.

“I played games with them, I read them books, I made them pimento cheese sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off. But as the night wore on they got crankier and crankier. Where are mommy and daddy? Where did they go? When will they be back?”

She told them over and over again. She made up elaborate stories about what they would all do together in the morning. She told them to go to sleep and promised them that she would make sure mommy and daddy kissed them good night when they came in.

“I tried to make everything sound normal, but how did I know? Our parents might have had a terrible accident. They might never come home again and the three of us would be split apart, each of us sent to a different foster home so that we never saw each other again. It was hard, being the babysitter, because I was a potential orphan too. I had as much to lose as my sisters, and as much to fear, but I could not give in to it because I was the one in charge. I was supposed to know better. I was supposed to exude confidence and create the same thing in them.”[4]

When Jesus prepared his disciples for his departure, he called them little children. Having washed and fed them, he sat them down to give them his instructions and left them in charge. So we’re the responsible ones now, the ones he has trusted to carry on in his name.

But what about the times when we feel not quite grown-up enough for the responsibility we were given, when we feel abandoned, desolate, vulnerable, frightened—in a word, orphaned?

What about the moments when our little brothers and sisters look to us for a story to comfort them, for a brave song that will keep the monsters from coming up the basement steps; when they look to us for assurance that all will be well in the morning?

What about the moments when we worry about what will become of us and of the world—aren’t we supposed to exude confidence and create confidence in the ones who look to us?

“I will not leave you orphaned,” he promised. And he kept his promise.

The first disciples were anxious because the most important relationship in their lives, the relationship that redefined from the ground up how they saw themselves and each other, how they saw and knew God and all things, the most important relationship in their lives was to come to an end. They were anxious about the prospect of their relationship with Jesus soon to be reduced to mere memories of him. How would they love him after his return to the Father?

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth.” In other translations, this Spirit of truth, the Spirit who continues to make available the truth Jesus embodied and revealed, is called another comforter, counselor, or companion. Jesus promised them that he would not leave them like orphans. His return to the Father didn’t mean he’d be absent, but rather that they would encounter him differently, in and through the Spirit, in and through each other. They would continue to love him, not by clinging to their cherished memories of him, but by continuing to live in his love.

While Jesus was with them as the Word of God incarnate, his mission was limited to the one place where he was at any given time, and to the people he encountered then and there. With his resurrection a new era began. His friends, the disciples, every generation of disciples, were given the Spirit and became the community of love where the living Christ, the living God is at home.

We’re the responsible ones now, the ones he has trusted to carry on in his name, gifted with all that is needed. We worry, because we think it’s all up to us now, and there’s so much to do, and we already have so many things to do, and how much more can we do, and do we really have all it takes to do all that? And we worry, because we think it’s all up to us now, and there’s so much to do, and we feel like we can’t get anything done, stuck at home, stuck in uncertainty, lonely or wondering how much longer we can stand constantly living on top of each other.

We’re so used to letting ourselves be defined by what we do and how much or how little we accomplish. But doing is not the whole truth, it’s not even half the truth, it’s not who we are. Who we are, who we really are and who we come to see ourselves to be in the company of Jesus, is God’s loved ones. And any good we can do, any good we can possibly do, will flow, not from anxiety, but from knowing that we’re not orphans.

The Spirit of truth, the comforter, the advocate, the counselor, the one called to our side is a living presence among us, not merely the memory of one who once was present a long, long time ago.

“Those who love me,” Jesus said that night, “will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” The divine presence the first disciples encountered in Jesus, the divine presence we seek and so often question, that presence is promised to those who abide in love and keep Jesus’ commandments by loving each other as Jesus has loved them. In this love, God is at home in the world and we are at home in God.

[1] John 13:33

[2] John 13:36

[3] John 14:3

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine, 80-81.

The house that love builds

Today we celebrate and thank the women whose love has surrounded us through the years so we would thrive and flourish, our mothers and grandmothers, and for some of us, it’s our godmothers, aunties, and big sisters we honor on this day. The lectionary for this Sunday includes, quite appropriately, though nobody thought about Mother’s Day when the readings were assigned — the lectionary includes one of the very few passages in the Apostolic writings that speak of infants and milk. In First Corinthians and Hebrews, milk is mentioned as baby food for baby Christians who haven’t matured enough in their faith to digest the solid food of weightier teachings.[1] Here in First Peter, though, we hear a different theme. Here it’s not about the contrast between milk for newborn infants who’ll eventually become meat-and-potatoes Christians.

First Peter is addressed to believers who often struggle with how to live the new life of faith, the new life of hope and love in a world that often gives more reason for fear and despair. The Apostle points to babies as perfect examples because they are new to the miracle of life and they simply know what’s best for them when it comes to eating and thriving: You pick them up and you cradle them in your arm, and if they’re even just a little hungry, they’ll turn their little face toward you, and with their mouths open they begin to feel their way to the source of all goodness and fulfillment.

“Since you have tasted that the Lord is good,” the Apostle writes, since you have tasted sweet mercy and rich wisdom and abundant grace in the community of believers, long for that milk, that new-life milk, that pure, whole-life milk. Get rid of all ill will and all deceit, pretense, envy, and slander and whatever else they serve at the former-life bar; that stuff has zero nutritional value. It doesn’t nourish you, but rather consumes you and those around you. Look at an infant: that’s you in the arms of Christ. Like a newborn baby, desire the pure milk of the word. Drink the love that will not let you go, drink the life given for the life of the world. Nourished by it, you will grow into salvation.

Penelope Duckworth is an Episcopal priest, and she’s also a mother; or perhaps she would say she’s a mother and also an Episcopal priest. She wrote a poem about the sacrament of nursing, titled simply, Milk (For Clare).[2]

Pulled by your cry, it surged out.

Welling from the nipple’s pores, it was thin,

bluish, sprayed in tiny streams,

caused a slow, dull, homesick pain.

We laughed in astonishment as it kept coming

until your shining mouth let go

and you drowsed in sunlit bliss.

You, at seven months, nurse and pedal

rhythmically, your hands explore the air.

I fill to meet your whitest need,

The hind milk now, grown thick and creamy,

will hold you sleeping with its weight.

Dame Julian, in her mystic state,

perceived Lord Jesus as her mother

offering to nurse us all,

milk flowing from his giving breasts.

It is a glory, this feeding from the body:

Take and eat this simple meal.

This is my body given for you.

…

We know there’s a vast difference between a body given and a body taken, between life freely given and life violently taken.

Wanda Cooper-Jones is a mother. Her youngest child was born on Mother’s Day 1994, and she named him Ahmaud. And this week, the men who killed him were finally arrested, 74 days after grabbing their guns and chasing her unarmed 25-year-old son in their pickup truck.

Terri Hord Owens, our General Minister and President, and also a mother, shared her lament:

Enough, America. Enough. We are tired, we are heartbroken, we are angry.

There is an historical record that is hundreds of years old documenting the horrors of violence upon black lives and black bodies. Generational trauma which began from the time of the Middle Passage is yet being inflicted upon black lives today.

My great-great grandfather was borne of the trauma of a white slave master raping a black woman.

My great-grandfather grew up in the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan and knew the trauma of constant terrorization of his community.

My great-grandmothers suffered the indignities of having to enter the back door when they worked as domestics in white homes.

My grandfather faced death threats when he fought for desegregation.

A family member was beaten up when he stopped to help a fellow college student whose car had broken down because he had spoken to a white girl a few days before.

In elementary school, I was called “nigger”, and told that “if it hadn’t been for us white people, you niggers would still be slaves”. I was then slapped in the face and my glasses were shattered, leaving shards of glass on my cheeks.

My son was accused of stealing his own jacket from the school cateferia when he returned to retrieve it. He asked, “did they think that because I am black?”

My husband and son have both been stopped over and over by policemen for no reason, given no tickets, simply because they drove a certain kind of car in predominantly white neighborhoods.

I am grateful that none of these family members died, but all around them, others did. Too many lynched. Too many beaten and killed. Too many shot by police, and by people assuming the right to be judge and executioner. Too many dead as a result of escalated response that was unwarranted. Too few of the killers have been arrested, and too few have been convicted. Too many black and brown people are dying of COVID-19; too many black and brown people are in poverty and are low-income and underemployed. Too much pain and injustice, too much blood spilled, too many bodies battered, too much indignity to bear, too little justice and reparation.

And so, I ask you, America: when will it be time for justice? How can I be sure that you are not raising your children to devalue and kill ours?

There are no words, no emojis for the heaviness of this pain, frustration and anger.

Let me lament for now... I will rise to fight... another day.

I got nothing to say unless and until I have heard her out, so I can even begin to feel the heaviness of her pain, her frustration and anger, and begin to bear it with her.

Michele Norris, also a mother, wrote,

I am so tired of seeing black death on small screens. Exhausted by the constant reminder that black bodies immediately represent a threat. Anguished because when I look at these videos, I see the people I love — my husband, my sons, nephews, my people. I am reminded that, despite their accomplishment and commitment to civic life, they can so easily encounter men who will see none of that, men who will feel justified in extinguishing a perceived threat. … This country will never confront the attitudes, the fear of black bodies, the slow roll of justice for black lives cut short too soon unless and until enough people who don’t see their sons and husbands and loved ones in that grainy footage work up enough umbrage and will to do more than just issue condolences on Twitter.”[3]

I got nothing to say unless and until I feel the full weight of the scandal that I can watch that grainy footage and not immediately see my son or my nephew or myself in the place of the victim.

When Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,”[4] he doesn’t mean do not let your hearts be touched or shaken or broken.

Quite the contrary. Trust in Jesus. Trust in God. Trust that you are worthy of saving, not because you are great, but because you are loved. Trust the promise of reconciliation and the hard labor of love it inspires. Trust that the way of Jesus is indeed the way of life.

We live in the house that slavery built. We live in the house where every corner, every rafter reeks of injustice and exploitation. And whenever we feel like we have finally renovated a few rooms in the colors of freedom and equality, we turn around, and violence and fear have added a whole new floor of hurt. But this house is not our home.

“Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a house whose cornerstone is Christ, a house whose every dimension and angle is determined by the vision of life that Jesus embodied and served with his whole being. First Peter and all the words of scripture give us only glimpses of a house under construction, not a complete set of drawings and 3-D models built to scale. But we can trust the master builder: The house that love builds is a house where justice is at home. In the house that love builds we name without fear the fatal dreams of supremacy, and we hear each other’s stories, the whole story of each of us and all of us, and we see each other, we really see each other, and together we grow into salvation.

[1] 1 Corinthians 3:2; Hebrews 5:12-13

[2] Penelope Duckworth, “Milk (for Clare),” Congregations 30, no. 3 (2004), 19.

[3] Michele Norris https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ahmaud-arberys-mother-will-take-part-in-a-very-different-mothers-day/2020/05/08/2913c5dc-916c-11ea-9e23-6914ee410a5f_story.html

[4] John 14:1

Fullness of joy

I love listening to Iris DeMent sing a song. She’s written a few of her own, but she’s also recorded some of the songs she grew up with in the Pentecostal church, like Sweet Hour of Prayer and Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. I’ve heard others sing those songs, and all I wanted to do is run for the doors. When she sings them, she takes me to places I’ve never been, and I fall in love with them and the people who live there. She said, a “thing that I learned from my parents, who had pretty difficult, challenging lives, to put it mildly: I saw my parents use music to survive. They had to have that music. My mom had to sing and my dad had to go to church and he had to hear that music washing over him and through him. It wasn’t a, “Oh, this is nice”; it was a, “I’m not going to make it if I don’t have that.”[1] He needed that music like bread. It was medicine for his weary soul.

When my dad died, we met at the house where my siblings and I had grown up and where my mom still lives, and the pastor came, and we sat around the table in the dining room. I don’t remember any of the details of the conversation or what time of day it was, but I can still see the surprise in his eyes when he asked about songs for the funeral, and we said, In Dir Ist Freude. It’s a Reformation hymn from the late 1500s, and we regularly sang it in worship, and Bach had written a chorale on it that my brother and I had sung a few times with the choir.

In dir ist Freude in allem Leide,

o du süßer Jesu Christ!

Durch dich wir haben himmlische Gaben,

du der wahre Heiland bist;

hilfest von Schanden, rettest von Banden.

Wer dir vertrauet, hat wohl gebauet,

wird ewig bleiben. Halleluja.

Zu deiner Güte steht unser G’müte,

an dir wir kleben im Tod und Leben;

nichts kann uns scheiden. Halleluja.[2]

We loved this song and thought it was very appropriate for a funeral. There’s an English version and it goes like this:

In Thee is gladness amid all sadness,

Jesus, daystar of my heart!

By thee are given the gifts of heaven,

thou the true Redeemer art!

Our souls thou wakest; our bonds thou breakest.

Who trusts thee surely has built securely

and stands forever: Allelujah!

Our hearts are longing to see thy dawning.

Living or dying, in thee abiding,

naught can us sever: Allelujah![3]

On the day of my dad’s funeral, we did sing that song or rather most of the people who gathered outside the cemetery chapel that day did. I didn’t. I stood there with my eyes closed, crying and swaying, and the song washed over me and through me, and the waves of grace and joy lifted me up and carried me. I don’t remember a word the preacher said that day, but the song they sang was consolation and hope and the communion of saints, that song was the gospel.

It doesn’t happen often that I lose myself in a song. “Doxology is difficult for the overly analytical,” says Thomas Steagald. “Even a mild case of scepticism affects the vocal cords, pinches the nerve of praise, makes it hard to stand and sing.”[4] And who doesn’t have at least a mild case of scepticism? It doesn’t happen often that a song becomes a world I enter without asking questions at every turn, and I let go and let the Spirit lift me up and hold me. It doesn’t happen often, but often enough for me to think I know why Iris’s dad had to go to church.

There’s something about singing together that can’t be recorded, mixed, and played back, and it’s just one more thing I miss terribly these days, more than I thought I would. For the next few weeks, there will only be three or four of us in the sanctuary for Sunday worship, and so beginning today we’re following an even humbler liturgy. A humbler liturgy means there will be less singing; perhaps you wonder why. Just about all of us can sing like nobody is listening but God when we’re standing amid the congregation and many others are singing with us. And it’s wonderful to sing like nobody is listening when you’re out in the middle of the lake by yourself early in the morning and you can safely assume that nobody can hear you but God and the ducks. But singing in an empty sanctuary with just two or three others, with a camera running and mics recording, is probably about as awkward for us here as trying to sing along at home with your tablet or phone is for you. So what do we do?

Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. The passage we heard from First Peter begins,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Even those who believe they can’t carry a tune in a bucket want to shout their Alleluias in a crowd, because the great mercy of God calls for our joyous and grateful response!

Even though you do not see him now, writes the apostle, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy!

God has raised our brother Jesus from the dead! God revealed that nothing will get between us and the life for which we have been created — neither fear, nor guilt, nor shame! God’s desire for life in communion with us is not limited, neither by the number of years we are given on earth, nor by our falling short of the glory of God, our failure to love God and our neighbor faithfully. God’s desire for life in communion with us even reaches beyond the ultimate horizon we perceive death to be. We want to sing, we want to shout, we want to clap our hands — good God, we may even want to dance a little with the saints in glory in indescribable and glorious joy… but not yet… and until then, until we will gather again, let’s practice the songs that rise in solitude: let’s name each ordinary thing we once took for granted and now recognize as essential; let’s join the doxologies of the hills and trees even from our windows and our decks; let’s behold the lilies of the field and the lilies in the pot; let’s greet the loons that left for the north, the owls that stayed, and the hummingbirds that have started to return; let’s hear the manifold witness of all living things, reminding us how we’re all connected in the miracle of one creation. One Easter song is to let our praise of God burst forth, another is to let creation’s praise of God sink in and astound us.

Our ancestors have given us the psalms, songs that have been chanted and sung, spoken and quietly read, listened to and meditated on by multitudes, generation to generation. The psalms, like few other texts in Scripture, remind us that even when we cannot come together in worship, we live and pray and sing with a great cloud of witnesses. And the words our ancestors in the faith have passed down to us show that they have been where we are – in seasons of profound disorientation and uncertainty, seasons of fear and isolation – and that in those seasons they discovered new dimensions of God’s fidelity.

Today’s psalm contains a single petition, “Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” Then unfolds, in line after line, the relationship between this refugee and the God of Israel, a relationship of deep trust and intimate knowledge between the divine You and the human I.

You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you.

Because you are at my right hand,

I shall not be moved.

I am particularly drawn to the closing verses, where trust blooms into fullness of joy:

Therefore my heart is glad,

and my soul rejoices;
my body also rests secure.

This is what those who seek refuge in the God of Israel may hope to find: gladness and joy and peace. At the end, the psalmist affirms,

You show me the path of life.

In your presence there is fullness of joy;

in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Fullness of joy, that is the life into which Christ rose, the life into which he draws us. Fullness of joy is not somewhere, sometime, somehow, but now and forever in the presence of God. And that fullness does call for songs of loudest praise as well as words of quiet joy, found and practiced in solitude.

Notes:

[1] Iris DeMent on Fresh Air https://www.npr.org/2015/10/21/450521621/for-iris-dement-music-is-the-calling-that-forces-her-into-the-spotlight

[2] Text: Cyriakus Schneegaß 1598 / Johann Lindemann 1598; tune: Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi 1591. The second verse: Wenn wir dich haben, kann uns nicht schaden Teufel, Welt, Sünd oder Tod; du hast’s in Händen, kannst alles wenden, wie nur heißen mag die Not. Drum wir dich ehren, dein Lob vermehren mit hellem Schalle, freuen uns alle zu dieser Stunde. Halleluja. Wir jubilieren und triumphieren, lieben und loben dein Macht dort droben mit Herz und Munde. Halleluja.

[3] Translation by Catherine Winkworth https://hymnary.org/text/in_thee_is_gladness_amid_all_sadness The second verse: Jesus is ours! We fear no powers, not of earth or sin or death. He sees and blesses in worst distresses; he can change them with a breath. Wherefore the story tell of his glory with hearts and voices; all heaven rejoices in him forever: Allelujah! We shout for gladness, triumph o’er sadness, love him and praise him, and still shall raise him glad hymns forever: Allelujah!

[4] Feasting, Year A, Volume 2, 391.

I will see you

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb, and all she saw was that the stone had been removed from the tomb. She had spent the sabbath at home, but it had not been a good sabbath, not a day of holy rest. It was nothing but an endless stretch of empty time and numb silence, interrupted only by moments when memories welled up and her tears just started flowing.

Mary was heartbroken and sad. She was angry at the world and the powers that ruled it with selfish ambition and such violence. It hadn’t been that long that Jesus had given her the courage to imagine a world where masters wash the feet of servants, where the blind see and the lame dance, where the hungry are fed, and all who mourn are comforted.

She had allowed this man to awaken hope in her, bold, boundless hope. Because of him, she had begun to lean into a world of possibility: the possibility of forgiveness, the possibility of belonging to a community shaped by mutual love, the possibility of life abundant for all, young and old, brave and timid, friend and stranger.

And now he was dead; and with him, her hope had died. Mary found herself lost in a void that swallowed up light and life like a black hole. All she had were memories — and the garden tomb where Joseph and Nicodemus had laid his body.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb. She came by herself — she wanted to be alone, I suppose, or she could have asked one of her friends to come with her. She came to the garden and she saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. Talk about a black hole — this gaping mouth of death, it was all she saw. The body was gone. Mary had already lost so much, so much of what gave her joy and confidence and hope, and now even that last place of tangible connection with Jesus’ body had been violated. 

She ran back and told the others, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” They — whoever they were — had not only quenched the light of his luminous presence in the world, they had managed to make his absence unbearably complete. It was as though the pre-dawn darkness became even darker.

And at this dark moment, the story turns into comedy. We hear about the curious footrace between Peter and the other disciple, and who got there first, and who saw what first, and who was the first to believe, and how the two of them — and how’s that for a resurrection punch line — how the two of them went home. It’s like we get this close to holy Easter laughter erupting in the garden and spreading throughout the world — but no, the two went home.

Mary stood outside the tomb, weeping. “Woman, why are you weeping?” the angels asked her, and their question sounds a tad insensitive, doesn’t it? Had Mary had any strength left in her, I imagine she would have said to them, Why am I weeping? Why aren’t you? Haven’t you been paying attention? Don’t you see what is going on here? Don’t you see how they take away everything that is beautiful, destroy everything that is promising, and pile up ugliness and death on every side? How can you not weep when the light of the world has been snuffed? They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.

And here the story turns into comedy again, with a moment of mistaken identity. Mary turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. “Woman, why are you weeping?” the stranger asked, sounding just like one of the angels. “Whom are you looking for?” She thought that perhaps he was the gardener, while some of us are wondering what he was wearing, since John was so very careful to tell us that the graveclothes were still in the tomb.

“Sir,” she said, “if you have carried him away, please tell me where you have laid him.” At this point, you almost want to step in and say, Mary, can’t you see? 

No, she can’t, not yet, and I for one am glad, because she helps me understand that seeing the Lord is not a matter of being at the right tomb at the right hour.

On the night before his arrest, Jesus told the disciples, “A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me.”  They said, “What does he mean by this ‘a little while?’” and he responded, “You will weep and mourn, you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice.” And there in the darkness before dawn Jesus did see her, but she didn’t see him, or saw him but didn’t recognize him — until he spoke her name, “Mary!” That was when light and life returned to the garden, and joy and confidence and hope. “Rabbouni!” she said, calling him what she had always called him, and then she went and told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” 

A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me, he had told them. We know a thing or two about “a little while” feeling like the longest time, and not just because we haven’t seen each other face to face, in person, in what feels like forever. The vision of God’s kingdom on earth awakens hope in us, but the powers of this world destroy and bury that hope. We mourn, we weep, we seek to reconnect with what we once knew, wondering who has taken it away, struggling to know where we might go and find it. We seek answers, we plead, we run back and forth, and most of what we see is ambiguous.

And so we keep searching and waiting, until we hear the familiar voice calling us by name, and we see him, and somehow we know in our bones that nothing and no one can extinguish the love that makes us one with God and one another, the love that gives us the courage to live and love and hope, the love and life and light revealed in Jesus Christ.

I hear a lot of talk, and you do, too, about “when life will return to normal.” I hear a lot of talk about that in my own thoughts and longings. But the resurrection is not the triumphant return of what was. It is the beginning of what shall be. When the first followers met Jesus, he asked them, “What are you looking for?” and he invited them to come and see. When Mary stood outside the tomb, weeping, he asked her, “Whom are you looking for?” He called her by name, and she came and saw, and he sent her to go and tell.

Like them, we listen for that voice and call and we follow, we seek, we find, we lose, we see without seeing, we hear our name, we want to hold on, and we let go for the promise of life’s fulfillment in the love that has found us in Christ. We do hold on, though not to the way in which we once knew life or ourselves or Jesus, we hold on to the promise that he will not leave us orphaned, the promise that he will see us and we will see him. 

A couple of weeks ago I said that every Sunday is a little Easter. I’m not going to take that back now; it’s true, and not just for liturgy nerds. But the greater truth is, every day is the third day now.

Every day, he sees us, speaks our name, and the Friday darkness of buried hope gives way to the light. Every day, the Risen One breathes on us, and the Spirit gathers us into the intimacy and joy of real community — even when love demands that we do not gather, touch, hug and hold hands for a little while. Every day, the Risen One doesn’t so much burst forth with the sound of rolling timpani and bright trumpets, as he tiptoes onto the scene, silent as light, barely recognized at first, emerging from the deep shadows of sorrow like the dawn.

Humble king

Every morning I read the paper, and I still call it the paper even though I read it on a tablet. The pictures look a lot better in high resolution than they used to in smudgy print, as do the fonts — sharp and clear against a flawless white background — but I miss the touch of rough newsprint and the smell of ink on paper. That smell, blended with the fragrance of coffee, is lodged in my memory as an essential, sensory part of a good morning.

Every morning I read the paper, and the other day I slowly scrolled down the home page, all the way to the daily mini crossword puzzle, without tapping any of the headlines. I kept scrolling because there was really just one story: the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on life on the planet. Politics, the economy, science, the arts, education, sports, technology, parenting and even cooking tips — every article told this one story from every angle of human experience. There was a brief moment when I said to myself, It’s quite remarkable how this global crisis has brought us together — but the moment didn’t even last long enough for me to finish my thought.

I don’t want to deny that this public health crisis has brought us together in well-coordinated responses, from the local to the international level, and that there are countless stories of human kindness and generosity and sacrifice to be told, but the crisis has also shone a bright light on our divisions, nationally and globally, especially between rich and poor.

When I feel trapped in my home, I don’t want to forget what a privilege it is to have a home to feel trapped in. I don’t want to forget that there are hundreds of thousands of people in refugee camps in Syria and on the streets of Los Angeles, Mumbai and elsewhere for whom social distancing is simply not an option. I don’t want to forget that there are millions around the world and in this country who don’t have access to good medical care. This public health crisis can help us see that the healing we need goes deeper than finding a vaccine, urgent and critical as that is. The healing we need is a deep mending of the fabric of community.

Today we celebrate Palm Sunday. Today we greet the Lord Jesus at the gates to welcome him into the city, singing with joyful exuberance, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” We sing, because we do want him to rule and to make all things right and whole and beautiful. 

When I read today’s passage from Matthew earlier this week, the first detail that caught my attention was the “very large crowd” gathered to greet the humble king, and how very different loud Hosannas sound when sung and shouted by a crowd — and how much I miss being with you all. Perhaps it’s inevitable that I read everything with a Covid lens. But the spiritual challenge of this moment is of course to look at our situation through a Christ lens and to let the light of Christ’s reign illumine our seeing, our thinking and doing.

So let us notice how poor he is: he doesn’t even own a donkey — but a borrowed one will do for this inaugural parade. And let us notice that the donkey is simply given to the One who needs it, and what a kindness that is. Matthew quotes from the prophet Zechariah to describe the scene, “Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” But let us notice that Matthew doesn’t quote the whole verse; that he drops the big words “triumphant and victorious” so all that remains is, “Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey.” In the sermon on the mount, the same word, here translated “humble,” is translated “meek”: Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. The meek, in the company of their humble king, will inherit the earth. And inheriting the earth is not at all the same as accomplishing world domination, because the humble king doesn’t rule with brutal force like builders of empires do. Nothing about him is coercive. We call this week ‘holy’ because we enter the mystery of God’s power as it is revealed in the life and death of Jesus.

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” the Apostle Paul urges the church in his letter to the Philippians. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit … Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Such words were rare and foreign in a city like Philippi. The citizens of Philippi cherished their connections to the imperial household and their privileges as friends of Caesar. Roman culture valued force, competition, and honor-seeking. Humility was not considered a virtue. Roman society, much like ours, was built on the pursuit of status. You move up, and you socialize with the people who can help you move up even higher. You look around only to check out the competition with a quick glance over your shoulder. You press on, your eyes on the next rung of the ladder, leaving behind those who cannot keep up.

Jesus moves in the opposite direction — love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down. Jesus emptied himself, Paul tells us. He humbled himself. He “made himself of no reputation,” as the King James Bible rendered the words so beautifully. He climbed down the ladder, nothing but the will of God on his mind, loving us all with a passion and a vulnerability for which we have no words. We call this week ‘holy’ because the final days of Jesus’ life on earth reveal to us the heart of reality, and it’s not relentless competition in the pursuit of status, but relentless love in the pursuit of true community. Jesus climbed down, all the way down, for love’s sake.

“Were you there when they crucified my Lord,” we sometimes sing, as though we could say, “They did it. It was the Romans, it was the Jews, it was the fickle crowd — it wasn’t me.” But the cross is our doing. This is what we do to each other in the name of religion or in the name of justice or convenience. 

The cross is the culmination of our desire to be like God, the culmination of our rebellion against life as creatures made in the image of God. But this dark Friday truth has a glorious, hopeful side: God raised Jesus from the dead and gave him the name above every name. And because God raised Jesus from the dead, we can look to the cross and see more than the culmination of our rebellion against the life God has intended. We see love that goes all the way for the life of the world, for the sake of communion with us.

The palm branches we have cut from paper and colored with crayons or markers, and the green branches we are waving in our imagination today or holding in our hands, proclaim our allegiance to this humble king and his vision for the world: relationships rooted not in selfish ambition, but in care and concern for each other, at every level of neighborhood in our life, from the folks next door to the generations of our grandchildren and their grandchildren. 

We enter this holy week under circumstances few of us could even imagine a couple of months ago. But we enter it nonetheless, praying that the Risen Christ will continue to convert our hearts and minds, so that all of us may grow in faith and hope, and participate in mending the fabric of community, in his name and by his love.

Please know that we will not gather online on Good Friday, but we will share an audio recording of a service of prayers and songs, readings and music, and you are invited to participate in it without the ever-present screen.

Lazarus laughs

On the church calendar this is the fifth and last Sunday in Lent; at the other end of this week, Holy Week awaits—on the church calendar. The liturgical year of the church’s worship is tightly woven into the cosmic rhythms of the earth’s movement around the sun and the moon’s movement around the earth, and the ancient rhythms of seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night. This year, Lent will have a few more Sundays, and we find ourselves waiting for Easter with the deep longing of those who await the redemption of the world. This year, we don’t know when Easter will come, but we know it awaits us on the other side of this long Lent; and many of us can feel our souls reaching and stretching toward the dawn.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;

my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning—

more than those who watch for the morning.

Looking out our windows, we are like watchmen on the city walls for whom morning meant that the threats and dangers of the night lay behind them. I am grateful for the psalms, the words of ancient witnesses, words of joyful praise and mournful lament we are invited to speak with our own lips, from our own lives, with our own faith, our own doubts, our own longing.

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.

Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!

Many of you are in the depths right now. You don’t know how you’re going to pay rent for April. You don’t know when you’ll be going back to work. You have a loved one in the hospital and you can’t even go and see them. You can feel depression creep in, your anxiety has flooded in like the tide and washed over you. You are in the depths right now, and I hope you hear the opening lines of this psalm as a powerful affirmation of your voice and your place before God, no matter how helpless you may feel in this weird storm. The depths can crush us, but crying out to God we continue to breathe the life-giving breath of God, and with it, hope and courage and faith.

Our ancestors in the faith invite us to affirm with them that with the Lord there is steadfast love, and … great power to redeem. Amid all the disruptions this pandemic has caused, the uncertainties and sufferings it has unleashed, and the divisions it has exposed, the ancestors tell us we can count on the steadfast love of God. This loyal love is solid ground to stand on and the power we can rely on for the world’s redemption.

Perhaps this whacky year will help us to know more fully that Easter is not a date on the calendar but a whole new reality: it marks the end of death’s reign over life in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Every Sunday is a little Easter, a joyful celebration of the new life given to the world in Jesus, a celebration of God’s steadfast love prevailing over all that might come between us and the life for which we have been created – be it sin, fear, guilt, shame, or any of death’s many other faces. God’s steadfast love is the power that redeems us and draws us into life that is nothing but life.

John tells a great story about this love. Lazarus was ill, and his sisters sent word to Jesus who had crossed the Jordan to escape his arrest. “Lord, he whom you love is ill,” they let him know. But instead of heading to Bethany right away, Jesus stayed two days longer on the other side of the river. And instead of healing his friend Lazarus from afar like he had done with the royal official’s son who lay ill in Capernaum when Jesus himself was in Cana, Jesus stayed two more days.[1] It wasn’t healing he had on his mind. Then he said to the disciples, “Let’s go across to Judea again,” telling them in the ensuing conversation that he was going there to awaken their friend Lazarus, who, he told them, was dead.

When they arrived in the area, they found that he had already been in the tomb four days, somebody must have told them. Martha heard he was coming and she went to meet him. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” she tells him. And Jesus says to her, “Your brother will rise again.” And she responds, “Oh, I know that, he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”

And Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

“Yes, Lord,” Martha declares. “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

Then Martha went to call her sister Mary, and they were still not in Bethany, not in the village. So Mary came and knelt at his feet, weeping, and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Verbatim what her sister had said. But Jesus doesn’t tell Mary what he told Martha, he shows her.

They finally get to the tomb. “Take away the stone,” says Jesus, and Martha gets to say what everybody there already knows, that there is a stench because he has been dead four days.

The sisters’ grief, the neighbors’ weeping, the tomb, and now the stench – the story makes it quite clear that this is where death reigns.

And Jesus shouts, “Lazarus, come out!”

And he does. And it is Lazarus, not some zombie. And Lazarus laughs as he hugs Jesus and Martha and Mary and every neighbor who’s come to the cemetery four days after the funeral. He laughs while many of us wonder, “Could something like this really happen?”

He laughs, because the real question is, “Do we believe in God who speaks light and life into being?” Do we believe in God whose desire for life in communion with us is not temporary or conditional, but at the heart of who God is and who we are? Do we trust in God’s faithful love and power to redeem, and that they are indeed greater than anything that might come between us and the life for which we have been created?

According to John’s gospel proclamation, Jesus is not merely the recipient of God’s resurrection power, he is this power. He is the resurrection and the life of the world. He is the steadfast love of God incarnate. And through him, through the life he embodies, the life of intimate communion with God and with others and with all God’s creatures, the fullness of life, the true life that is nothing but life, is ours to live and to know, now and forever.

Easter is not just a date on the calendar. It is the triumph of God’s steadfast love over anything that might separate it from the wholeness and fullness it seeks. And so we will celebrate a little Easter on April 12 with all the joy our spatially distanced lives give us room for.

And we will celebrate the resurrection of the Lord at the end of this long Lenten journey, when the love that now demands that we do not gather for our neighbor’s sake, will again call us together – and we will be like those who dream. Then our mouth will be filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy – because nothing will come between us and the life for which we have been created.

[1] John 4:46-54

You are not alone

Hearing the words of the Psalm, and perhaps speaking them in the beautiful rhythm of a responsive reading, what drew you in? Hearing the story of the blind man and Jesus, and perhaps reading along, where did you want to linger? The story begins with a question: Who sinned? That’s where I said to myself, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” The question is asked rather casually, “Was it him or his parents?” Like it’s got to be somebody’s fault that he was born blind. The assumption on the part of the disciples in the story is that illness and ill fortune are occasioned by sin, and that sin is about wrongdoing.

The assumption is persistent. You’ve probably been in a conversation where somebody tells you and some friends or co-workers about a friend who just learned that they have lung cancer. And everybody comments how sad that is, and then there’s that brief silence before somebody asks, “Did she smoke?” Because lung cancer for a non-smoker is just terribly unfair. And for a smoker? “Well, she shouldn’t have smoked, right? It’s like she asked for it, isn’t it?”

I find it curious how quickly we jump from empathy to blame. Like it’s got to be somebody’s fault. Friends of mine of Taiwanese and Korean descent told me how people over the past few weeks started looking at them with suspicion or yelled at them across the street, “Go back where you came from!” And then I saw pictures of people who had been physically attacked, solely because of their facial features—as though a virus had a nationality or ethnicity. Our desire to find causality runs deep, and it can lead to great research, but apparently also to great foolishness.

I notice that Jesus shows no interest in a conversation about sin and causality. His focus is entirely and solely on doing the works of the one who sent him, eye-opening work, life-restoring, community-healing work. Michael Lindvall writes,

Blindness is not just not seeing; it is also not seeing everything, the whole of truth, all the nuances of reality that can be seen only from perspectives outside the familiarity of our comfort zone.[1]

Jesus’ eye-opening, vision-restoring, community-healing work is for all of us who struggle with seeing more than we can see or are comfortable looking at. I notice that Jesus doesn’t say,“I am the world’s eye doctor.” He says, “I am the light of the world.” He himself is the light by which we perceive God and world, self and other, everything, all the nuances of reality.

But as much as I was drawn to this story and how it unfolds in this and the following chapter, the Jesus I have heard calling in these days of uncertainty and fear is the Jesus who, according to the Gospel of Matthew, “saw the crowds and had compassion for them, for they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”[2]

I was drawn to the Psalm for today, or rather I was drawn not just to it, but into it: I was drawn into its world of complete trust. Rolf Jacobson calls Psalm 23 “an essential text for living the Christian life — and especially for living the Christian faith when the bridges have been washed out by a flood of troubled waters.”[3] The psalm is a poetic expression of profound trust in God, speaking to us from over 2000 years ago, bridging the great distance with the beauty of language, the power of testimony, and with the wondrous opportunity to make these words our own, and in doing so to discover this depth of trust and confidence and hope in the company of the Shepherd God.

In Israel’s imagination the shepherd is a rich and complex figure. Moses was keeping the flock when the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush, and he received God’s call to go to Pharao and to lead God’s people out of Egypt.[4] Young David was keeping the sheep when Samuel came to anoint him king.[5] The prophets accused corrupt leaders with powerful words, drawn from the world of shepherding,

Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.[6]

The prophets knew a God who would hold Israel’s shepherds accountable for their lack of attention and just action, because they knew God to be the Shepherd of Israel and God’s people the sheep of God’s pasture.

In this psalm, the rich imagery of the divine shepherd and the long history of what the God of Israel had done (and what Israel’s leaders were supposed to do) has become a very personal affirmation of faith. And so this psalm became the prayer of rulers who desire God’s guidance, as well as the prayer of those who know that to trust in princes often means building a house on sand.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall lack nothing.

You, Lord, are my shepherd, I have everything I need.

I fear no evil, for you are with me.

You are with me.

God said to Isaac, “Do not be afraid, for I am with you.” When Moses asked, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” God said, “I will be with you.”[7] When Moses passed the mantle of leadership to Joshua, he said to him, “Be strong and bold, for ... it is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear ...”[8] And when Israel was in exile, the prophet Isaiah gave God’s word to an anxious people, “Do not fear, for I am with you.”[9]

Generation after generation of God’s people were given the promise, and in the shepherd psalm a response rises from the depth of human trust, “I fear no evil, for you are with me.” You are with me in the long valley of darkness. You are with me in the day-to-day confusion and loneliness. You are with me in the suffocating place of isolation, the place of dancing alone, the place of longing for touch and embrace: You are with me. You know this place and you are moving through it with me to the other side where we all fall into each others arms and laugh.

The words of the psalm invite the king, the governor, the mayor and the senator to lead from this depth of trust. The words urge the widow, the orphan and the migrant whose cry for justice might go unheard in the courts to stand firm in this depth of trust. And the words teach every child of God to live with confidence and hope, because regardless of circumstances, we are not sheep without a shepherd.

I am not alone, we learn to affirm, cheered on by generations of witnesses. I am not alone, for you are with me. Trusting that you are walking with me, I begin to walk with you. Resting in your presence, my soul is restored. And now my heart is free to imagine how I can be part of embodying your presence for others and with others, and we become for each other what you are to us, faithful shepherds.

Like yesterday, when I was preparing my notes for this morning while Nancy, my wife, was having a virtual happy hour on FaceTime with a friend who is in self-quarantine. They clearly enjoyed their time together. I heard Nancy shout ‘croissant’ a couple of times, and I thought they were talking about French baking until Nancy sent me a text from the sun room, telling me that she needed a refill.

Walking to the fridge I started to hum, My shepherd you supply my need… but she insisted on calling me ‘garçon’ – and let’s not talk about the stark contrast between her cup running over and my empty tip jar.

My point is, we can make real connections with phone calls, texts, virtual happy hours, and handwritten notes. Yes, many bridges have been washed out by a flood of troubled waters, but not all of them—and we can build new ones, bridges we barely dreamed of before the pandemic stranded us on our islands of isolation.

We are not alone. What we knew in our minds, we now know in our bones: we are each other’s shepherds, because the God we know is dependably ours.

Take good care of yourselves. Take good care of each other. You are not alone.

[1] Michael Lindvall, Connections, Year A, Vol. 2, 92.

[2] Matthew 9:36

[3] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3185

[4] Exodus 3

[5] 1 Samuel 16

[6] Ezekiel 34:2-4

[7] Genesis 26:24; Exodus 3:11-12

[8] Deuteronomy 31:7-8

[9] Isaiah 41:10; 43:5