God of my seeing

Hagar is what some call “the other woman” in the story of Abram and Sarai. Abram, whose name means “exalted father,” is the head of the household, the one who has all the authority. Sarai, whose name means “the princess,” is his wife. And Hagar, whose name in Hebrew sounds like “the outsider,” is Sarai’s Egyptian slave.

The wife’s life revolves around her husband, and her slave’s life around her. Both women’s lives, though, revolve around the man, the “exalted father.” This shared situation, however, does not unite them, does not make them allies. Far from it. It makes them unequal rivals vying for status in the household. “Biblical co-wives,” writes Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “even blood sisters like Rachel and Leah, are such rivals that the Hebrew word for ‘co-wife,’ … is also the word for ‘trouble.’”[1]

Remember, it was Abram whom God called, Abram who received the divine promise, “I will make of you a great nation,” Abram who tried to imagine descendants as countless as the stars.[2] Nothing in the promises given to him specified who the matriarch of the great nation to come would be, not until ch. 17. And in ch. 16, after years of waiting have gone by, Sarai takes matters into her own hands.

In accordance with documented ancient Near Eastern practice, she offers her female slave as a surrogate mother. Abram accepts. Neither one mentions obtaining the enslaved woman’s consent. If that ties your stomach in knots and raises your heart rate, good. It should. Ancient societies broadly accepted slavery as a regular part of social life. And just as an enslaved person’s muscles and skills can be utilized for the good of the master, so can an enslaved woman’s womb. In Sarai’s plan, Hagar’s womb is simply a legal extension of her own. “Go in to my slave,” she tells Abram; “it may be that I shall obtain children by her.”[3]

Abram agrees. He sleeps with her and she gets pregnant. Throughout, neither Sarai nor Abram call Hagar by her name. In their plan, she doesn’t appear as a person; she’s merely a “womb with legs.”[4] But now Hagar is pregnant, and she knows it, and she makes sure Sarai knows. “She looked with contempt on her mistress,” it says. “What sort of girl do we imagine Hagar to have been?” Lore Segal wonders.

Beautiful? Young? Was it a native meanness in her that made her kick the other woman where she knew her to be sore? Was it the primitive triumph of pregnancy? I think the Egyptian slave must have grabbed at the opportunity for once to take it out on the mistress who ordered her into the master’s bed. Why would she not have hated her Hebrew overlords the way the Hebrews would come to hate the Egyptians?[5]

Sarai confronts Abram about Hagar’s contempt, and he tells her, “Your slave is in your power; do to her as you please.” The narrator tells us that Sarai dealt harshly with her, without further details, but there are echoes from Exodus and Deuteronomy where Israel remembers how “the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us.”[6] And like Israel, Hagar runs away. An angel of the Lord finds her by a spring and speaks to her. “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?”

“I am running away from my mistress Sarai.”

“Return to your mistress, and submit to her.”

Some of us already swallowed hard when the angel called her, “Hagar, slave of Sarai” as though that was her identity. And now she is to return? Return to her mistress? Return to oppression and abuse? If that ties your stomach in knots and raises your heart rate, good. It should.

“You shall not return to their owners slaves who have escaped to you from their owners,” is what biblical law demands. “They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they choose in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not oppress them.”[7] And the angel of the Lord tells her to return, in accord with ancient Near Eastern laws and the laws of this country before the Civil War, laws in which property rights trump the liberty and dignity of creatures made in the image of God. And Hagar? She goes back. Tikva Frymer-Kensky writes,

She neither argues nor avoids the request. But before she gives up her autonomy, she exercises it by naming God according to her own experience. God called Hagar by name, the only character in the story to do so, and Hagar responds, naming God El Roi, “God of my seeing,” which can mean both “the God I have seen” and “the God who sees me.” … [Hagar] leaves her mark upon how people remember God.[8]

I want to believe, I have to believe that Hagar went back, not because she gave up, or because she was so used to doing what she was told, but because in the solitude of the wilderness, she saw something like promise, something like hope. In a way, I want to believe that in that wilderness moment, Hagar doesn’t go back, but forward into the promise. She gives birth to Abram’s firstborn son, Ishmael.

The story continues with today’s reading, after God told Abraham that he would have a son from Sarah. The story continues after 90-year-old Sarah laughed incredulously at a birth announcement she overheard from the entrance of the tent and soon laughed with unbridled joy at the birth of Isaac. The story continues with a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned, but the happy scene quickly deteriorates from celebration to envy and eviction.

“Cast out this slave woman with her son,” Sarah says to Abraham with cold clarity, “for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” She does not speak their names, in her thoughts there’s room for only one name, Isaac. Renita Weems writes,

For a black woman, the story of Hagar is a haunting one. Even if it is not our individual story, it is a story we have read in our mothers’ eyes those afternoons when we greeted them at the front door after a day of hard work as a domestic. And if not our mothers’ story, then it is certainly our grandmothers’ story. For black women, Hagar’s story is peculiarly familiar. It is as if we know it by heart…

She continues,

At some time in our lives, whether we are black or white, we are all Hagar’s daughters. When our backs are up against a wall, when we feel abandoned, abused, betrayed and banished; when we find ourselves in need of another woman’s help… we, like Hagar, are in need of a woman who will ‘sister’ us, not exploit us.[9]

In the first act of Hagar’s story, she runs away from oppression. In the second act, she is cast out by her wealthy husband and left to try and keep his child alive by herself. It’s a devastating story, and a powerful one that shines its light on the devastations we commit against each other’s dignity as God’s beloved. Phyllis Trible wrote many years ago, in her classic, Texts of Terror,

Kept in her place, the slave woman is the innocent victim of use, abuse and rejection. As a symbol of the oppressed, Hagar becomes many things to many people. Most especially, all sorts of rejected women find their stories in her. She is the faithful maid exploited, the black woman used by the male and abused by the female of the ruling class, the surrogate mother, the resident alien without legal recourse, the other woman, the runaway youth, the religious fleeing from affliction, the pregnant young woman alone, the expelled wife, the divorced mother with child, the shopping bag lady carrying bread and water, the homeless woman, the indigent relying upon handouts from the power structures, the welfare mother, and the self-effacing female whose own identity shrinks in service to others.[10]

I love how Renita Weems uses ‘sister’ as a verb that hints not only at caring action and loving commitment, but also at shared resistance against whatever prevents human beings from seeing each other as siblings in the struggle.

In just a few minutes, we will hear from some of the youth who just returned from an immersion trip to Tucson. They went to the border to learn. What forces drive persons and families to flee their homes? What, or who, casts them out like refuse? What small steps can we take toward breaking those patterns of oppression? And where is God in all of this? Their desire to learn, their desire to create and live in beloved community, gives me hope.

One last observation. When the water in the skin was gone, Hagar sat and wept, and waited for her child to die. In that gut-wrenching moment, God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. The life-giving water was already there, and now she saw it. The God Hagar named El Roi, “God of my seeing,” is the God who opens eyes. In the wilderness, in the parched places of our days and of our world, may God open our eyes.

[1] Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Hagar, My Other, My Self,” Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 225-226.

[2] Genesis 12:2; 15:5

[3] Genesis 16:2

[4]   Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Sarah and Hagar,” in: Talking about Genesis: a resource guide, Public Affairs Television (New York: Main Street Books, 1996), 95.

[5] Lore Segal, “The Story of Sarah and Hagar,” in: Genesis: As it is written, ed. by David Rosenberg (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 134.

[6] Deuteronomy 26:6

[7] Deuteronomy 23:15-16 NRSV

[8] Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Hagar, My Other, My Self,” Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 231.

[9] Talking about Genesis: a resource guide, Public Affairs Television (New York: Main Street Books, 1996), 98.

[10] Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 28.

Sarah shall have a son

Does anyone care what Sarah’s thoughts might be? Is anyone interested in what she might say, how she might respond to the promises of God? God makes big promises: The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great.”[1] We know the story. We love it. We’ve heard it more times than we can remember. The story of the new beginning after Babel. The story of God’s persistent desire to have a covenant people to bless the world. The Lord said to Abram, “Go!” and Abram went and he took his wife Sarai. Did the Lord speak to Sarai? If so, nobody cared to weave it into the story. Sarai was barren; she had no child – and for all we know, she never said a word when the Lord said ‘go’ and Abraham went.

A few adventures later, God again spoke to Abram, and this time Abram pushed back, gently, saying, “You have given me no offspring, so a slave in my house is to be my heir.”

No, said the Lord, “No one but your very own issue shall be your heir. … Look toward heaven and count the stars … so shall your descendants be.”[2]

God makes big promises. “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her and … give you a son by her… and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”

“Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac.” And the Lord was very precise, saying, “at this season next year.”[3]

Within a few verses, we arrive at the next scene, Abraham sitting at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He sees three men, runs to meet them, greets them, invites them to stay, hastens into the tent to tell Sarah to make cakes, runs to the herd and takes a calf and gives it to the servant who hastens to prepare it – its a whirlwind of hospitality, and then Abraham takes the food and sets it before them and watches them eat. This was a very nice meal, the best he had to offer. Welcoming the three guests, he had promised a little water, rest, and a little bread – this was a feast: choice ingredients, freshly prepared, fragrant and plentiful.

“Where is your wife Sarah?” they asked. Perhaps before Abraham had been curious to know who his three guests might be, and where they came from, but now he had to wonder how they knew her name. “There, in the tent,” he said. Few words. Noticeably few, especially after the rush of words pouring from his lips when he welcomed his guests. Who were they?

“I will surely return to you in due season,” one of them said, “and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” Did anyone care what Sarah thought about the prospect of a pregnancy in the sunset years of her life? Did anyone even consider telling her about it? Clearly not. She overheard the words, listening at the tent entrance. “Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age,” the narrator tells us, like we needed reminding. “It had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women,” the narrator tells us, and we notice that we are being told the most personal details about her, but she doesn’t have a say in this conversation among men about her body, her womb, her role in the unfolding of the story of God’s promise.

She laughs – not out loud, no, she laughs to herself, wrapped in this cocoon of silence. She can’t believe what she just heard – and we realize that Abraham must have never told her about the divine promise that she would give rise to nations, that kings of peoples would come from her womb. Why is nobody talking to Sarah, except for Abraham who tells her to make cakes, but doesn’t seem to be the least bit interested in her reaction to the promise of a son?

And now the Lord speaks. “Sarah, come and join us. Forget about menopause. The years of waiting are coming to an end. Come, mother of nations. Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? Come, let us hear you laugh for joy!”

You know it’s not what the Lord said. The Lord speaks to Abraham, asking him why Sarah laughed, asking him if anything is too wonderful for the Lord, and repeating to him the promise, “At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.”

And Sarah, still only overhearing a conversation rather than having a voice in it, denies having laughed, out of fear. One scholar writes, “That God would descend to a ‘no, I did not’ / ‘yes, you did’ squabble hints that this narrative is supposed to be funny.”[4] Do you think it’s funny? Abraham falling on his face, laughing at the prospect of a trip to the maternity ward when mom is 90 years old and dad 100, that is funny. Sarah chuckling, that is funny, but her alone being questioned for her incredulous response, that is far from funny. That is wrapping the cocoon of silence a little tighter. That is fear invading a space where hope and joy are supposed to erupt. It feels cramped and suffocating. It feels like the Southern Baptist Convention telling female pastors and all women that God did not and will not call them to ministry, because God may have poured out God’s Spirit upon all flesh on Pentecost, except for the Spirit of prophecy, proclamation, and pastoral leadership – those gifts, according to the Southern Baptist Convention and a few other assemblies, are poured out exclusively on male flesh. Women are to stay in the tent and wait for their husbands to tell them about the promises of the Lord.

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? The question waits for an answer, and invites those who might ponder it, invites us, not just once, but again and again, to respond with a confident ‘No! Nothing’s too wonderful for the Lord!’, to err on the side of trust, to err on the side of joyful expectation, to err on the side of wonder. Does anyone care what Sarah’s thoughts might be? Is anyone interested in what she might say, what perspective she might add to the conversation, how she might respond to the promises of God? And what about others whose voices and perspectives are habitually excluded: is anyone interested in what they might say, how they might respond to the promises of God?

Back in 2005, David Foster Wallace gave a now famous commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. He shared some thoughts about worship and slipping into default modes that have nothing to do with who or what we might think we worship.

There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. … If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. … Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.

On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

The serious lack of curiosity about what women might be thinking or the refusal to pay attention to what they are saying – those are default settings, born of the worship of power, thousands of years old, and amply reflected even in our most sacred texts. But those ancient, sacred texts also challenge us to question those default settings in the light of God’s promises, the light of Jesus’ teachings and ministry, the light of the Spirit poured out on all flesh. Wallace said,

The so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.[5]

I thought I would speak this morning about Jesus sending us into the so-called real world as messengers of the kingdom. We are sent to be compassionate disrupters, practicing a hospitality as generous as Abraham’s in our encounters with others, attentive to them, their needs, and their thoughts, seeking to keep the promise and truth of God’s coming reign up front in daily consciousness.

I thought I would unpack that some more, but not today. Today we stop by the maternity ward to celebrate, because the Lord did for Sarah as the Lord had promised. Sarah conceived and bore a son, at the time of which God had spoken. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”[6] The chuckles of incredulity, tinged with sadness and cynicism gathered up over the years, gave way to peals of laughter. And Sarah didn’t stop laughing and telling until she was done laughing and telling, in free, unbridled joy. And that’s how it’s supposed to be.

[1] Genesis 12:1

[2] Genesis 15:3-5

[3] Genesis 17:15-21

[4] Song-Mi Suzie Park, Connections, Year A, Vol. 3, 70.

[5] https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

[6] See Genesis 21:1-6

Mercy calls and responds

Today’s gospel passage presents five scenes for our attention. The first scene is brief, a single verse, and astonishing in its brevity. There’s Jesus walking along, he sees Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, he says, “Follow me,” and Matthew gets up and follows him. The second scene is a dinner at a house, where Jesus and his followers are being questioned for his sharing a meal with tax collectors and other notorious sinners. We sense there’s tension. Then there’s the scene of a parent pleading for his dead child, interrupted by yet another scene of a woman suffering from severe illness who touches Jesus. He tells her to be courageous, calls her “daughter,” and she is made well. Then the third scene continues in the fifth, at the leader’s house, where Jesus interrupts a funeral, makes people laugh, and raises the dead girl. The arc of this five-scene-narrative universe is short, but astonishing, and it’s bent toward fullness of life.

Jesus calls Matthew to follow him, just like he called Peter and Andrew, James and John at the beginning of his ministry in and around Capernaum.[1] Those first disciples were fishermen, an honorable, respected profession. Jesus finds Matthew sitting in a booth by the road, and it’s safe to assume he’s at his job as a toll or tax collector – far from honorable, not respected, his profession is habitually mentioned in a single breath with prostitutes or the broadest possible term of exclusion, sinners. In the gospels, tax collectors and sinners go together like mac ‘n cheese, except that nobody likes them. And Jesus calls at least one of them. And not just that, he eats with them, and not accidentally, more than once, and with many of them. And with whom one chooses to eat was a matter taken very seriously in first-century Jewish and Roman culture.

So the opening scene of Jesus calling Matthew the tax collector, and Matthew responding without any noticeable hesitation, that scene opens the door to the house where we get to see what that means: it’s a dinner party, and clearly Jesus enjoys hanging out with the kind of people who don’t get many, if any, dinner invitations.

The door is open, we can see the whole dining room, and suddenly we realize that we now need to take a good look at where we see ourselves in the scene: at the table, in the company of Jesus, or at the door, with the baffled ones, or mildly angry ones, who ask, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” It’s a good question, you know, we don’t want our kids to hang out with the wrong crowd, because bad habits rub off, bad choices might become harder to avoid, strong principles might be watered down, and if we don’t want that for our kids, why would we expose ourselves to that kind of company, to folks with questionable ethics, you know, folks who’ve lied and cheated and laughed at racist jokes or even told them? Aren’t those kind of boundaries important, and shouldn’t we do our part to draw and maintain them?

Jesus knows what we’re worried about, he’s overheard us talking at the door, he knows what and how we’re thinking, and he says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” It’s a saying everybody knows, and it’s a reminder that curing people has been part of Jesus’ ministry from day one. “Jesus went throughout all Galilee,” we read in chapter 4, “teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”[2] Jesus didn’t just talk salvation, according to the Gospels, he lived it. In him, God’s saving power became present among us, feet on the ground, heels and toes in the dirt, hands on blinded eyes, fingers in deafened ears, kind embrace of hardened hearts, compassion touching the untouchable, rescue for the parched and the drowning, deliverance for people victimized by powers from which we cannot save ourselves, rescue from sin and despair.

“I have not come to call the righteous but sinners,” he says to us. I have not come, I hear him say, to call the righteous into gated castles of perfection. I have come to call sinners, to touch and be touched by what is broken and make it whole. I have come to call sinners and walk them into righteousness. I have come to remind you who you are – all of you, forgetful bearers of the divine image!

Do we see ourselves standing at the door, looking at the room, or are we sitting at the table where Jesus calls sinners to gather and find new life? He quotes the prophet Hosea and says, “Go and learn what this means, ‘Mercy is what I want, not sacrifice.’”[3] Kindness between people is what I want, loyal love, deep respect for every bearer of the divine image – generous sacrifices are terrific, but in the absence of kindness toward neighbors, they are meaningless gestures. Go and learn what this means, mercy is what I want.

Go and learn implies movement, it implies study and discovery, growth and transformation, it implies watching how Jesus embodies God’s mercy and learning from him, learning with him, how to be as he is, and do as he does. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets,” Jesus declares in the sermon on the mount; “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”[4] Go and learn what this means, mercy is what I want. Go and learn what fulfillment looks like. Go and learn what divine mercy infusing every dimension of human interaction looks like. “Blessed are the merciful,” he says, “for they will receive mercy.”[5] Blessed are the merciful, for they will discover that all of life is a river of mercy, and not a cosmic tit for tat.

While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” This is the third scene, a sudden interruption of dinner conversations and shared reflections on the wideness of God’s mercy. This is Matthew’s version of the scene. In Mark’s version, the child is near death, and the father is desperate for Jesus to come quickly and heal her.[6] The urgency is palpable; any delay unbearable. In Mark’s story, news of her death arrives while they’re on the way to the leader’s house. In Matthew’s story, the girl is dead, and the father kneels before Jesus and tells him to come and lay his hand on her – and Jesus gets up and follows him.

Those words stunned me earlier this week. “And Jesus got up and followed him.” This moment of rising and following is the mirror image of the call scene at the tax booth, only here it is Jesus who follows. This man’s need, this father’s faith carries just as much authority as Jesus’ call to discipleship. Jesus calls, and a person follows – and here we see the reverse of the dynamic of persistent mercy, a person calls, and Jesus follows. And he follows this parent to the darkest place imaginable. What was it he said? Go and learn what this means, mercy is what I want. We’re watching mercy move, we’re watching mercy flow and infuse the darkest place imaginable. We’re watching mercy disrupt the young woman’s funeral.

There is laughter when he says she’s not dead, only sleeping. This is the only moment anyone laughs, explicitly, in the Gospels.[7] Some are laughing at Jesus, deriding him. But others are laughing because of Jesus. “When the Lord restored Zion, we were like those who dream,” it says in the Psalm; “our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy.”[8] Some are laughing at the fool who can’t tell the difference between sleep and death, but we are laughing with the Lord of life, to whom death is mere sleep.

When the parent knelt before Jesus, telling him, “Come and lay your hand on her, and she will live!” Jesus didn’t simply get up, he rose up. The language of resurrection is beautifully ambiguous and suggestive. One rises in the morning to take a shower, and it simply means to wake up and get up. Only Jesus didn’t simply get up, he rose. And the next one in Matthew’s story to get up like that, is the girl whom Jesus took by her hand, and she rose.[9]

We are laughing because the arc of this five-scene-narrative universe is short, but astonishing, and it’s bent toward resurrection and fullness of life. “Call to us now, and we shall awaken,” we sometimes sing in the company of sinners gathering at the table of the Lord, “we shall arise at the sound of our name.”[10] In response to mercy’s call, we shall awaken, arise, and arrive.

[1] Matthew 4:20-22

[2] Matthew 4:23

[3] Hosea 6:6; quoted in Matthew 9:13 and again in 12:7

[4] Matthew 5:17

[5] Matthew 5:7

[6] See Mark 5:21ff.

[7] Here and in the parallels in Mark 5:40 and Luke 8:53; laughter is implied in Luke 6:21, 25

[8] Psalm 126:1-2

[9] See also the scene in Matthew 8:24-26 in which Jesus was asleep (!) while the boat was being swamped by waves, and he got up to rebuke the winds and the sea; and, of course, Matthew 28:6, where no translation suggests “he was awakened.”

[10] Gather Us In, Marty Haugen

To notice and to praise

I still remember that early summer evening years ago when I was driving home through the rain. We were still living on Wortham then. I made the final right turn and parked the car at the end of the driveway just after it had stopped raining. Then I sat there for a moment, listening to the rest of a story on the radio.

Eventually, I pulled the key from the ignition and opened the door. It was late in the evening, the sun was low, light pouring through the trees, drops of water sparkling in the grass. I was about to open the back door of the car to grab my bag from behind the seat, when there was this hint of sweet fragrance rising from the freshly-bathed world. Suddenly nothing else mattered. I just stood there. Then I slowly turned toward the tall magnolia tree in our neighbor’s yard, quietly breathing in so as not to startle its graceful blooms, I guess, hoping the breeze would carry one more wave of scented air to me – and there it was. Such goodness. Such generosity. I still didn’t move, and for that moment, I was completely at home in the world; my whole being was a thank you to the giver of life and delight.

Didn’t cost me a penny. All I had to do was be there. All I had to pay was a little attention. Our days are full of these wonders. Honeysuckle. Watermelon. Peaches. Such goodness. The porch swing. The hammock. The beautiful noise of children playing at the pool. Such goodness. The joy of noticing all the places where the Wrens love to stop before they fly to the nest to feed their young. The wonder of a Great Blue Heron gliding across the river with such grace and nary a sound. Such beauty.

This morning, we listened to the entire first chapter of Genesis and then some. Some of you may have thought, “Really, the whole chapter, all seven days? How about one day at a time? He could have done a seven-week sermon series, complete with a couple of Wednesday nights on Faith & Science and a couple more on climate change and sustainability. Why waste it by pouring it all out at once?”

Why pour it all out in one reading? Because it’s the story of life in one chapter, from first light to God’s rest. Because it’s poetry that wasn’t written to be chopped up into lectionary sections, but to be spoken, read and heard with at least a small measure of the Creator’s extravagance in creating. And we listen to the whole poem because God takes time creating. God doesn’t just snap the divine fingers and immediately bring creation into being. God speaks. God makes. God orders. God invites the earth to bring forth. God names. God observes and delights. “And God saw that it was good,” is one of the refrains of this grand poem.

The first day. The second day. The third day. God is not in a hurry. Like an artist who steps back from the detail, again and again, to behold the whole as it is taking shape, 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 Sparrow, the Mocking Bird, the Barn Swallow. The fifth day. God speaks. God makes. God observes and delights.

“Why so many forms?” Annie Dillard asks in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

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.[1]

Humans have a special place in creation, but we’re not that special. We don’t even have our own separate day set aside for us, you know, for the “crown of creation.” We are latecomers to the miracle of life, creatures of the sixth day who arrive in the afternoon, as it were. The waters were already swarming with living creatures of every kind, and birds of every kind were flying across the vast expanse of the sky and nesting in the trees along the banks of the rivers, and the land was filled with animals of all shapes and sizes—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.

Yes, we are latecomers to the miracle of life, but the only creatures made in the image of God, the ones entrusted, honored with the sacred responsibility of representing God’s dominion in how we live with each other and with all of God’s works. We are the first creatures who not only participate in the miracle of life, but who have been given the capacity to see the commonality of all life; the first ones to see how fearfully and wonderfully made all creatures are and how each is connected with the others in a single web. We are the first creatures who don’t just float along with the current in the river of life, but delight in naming every creature swimming with us. We are the ones who observe the motion of the planets and in endless wonder explore the depths of the universe and the grammar of the genome. We are the ones gifted with the capacity to see everything that God has made and how very good it all is, and to say so.

When Carl Sagan came up with his now famous model for the age of the universe, he didn’t count days, but he arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the late arrival of humankind. He first popularized the idea of squeezing all the time of the universe into not seven days, but a single year, beginning with the Big Bang on January 1. On March 15, the Milky Way galaxy was formed. Our solar system 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 down our stories and songs 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?” one of us asked in awesome wonder many centuries ago, and the question still resonates. All creatures praise God by simply being what they were created to be. We were created in the image and likeness of God to represent God’s dominion, to participate in the unfolding of God’s creation, and there was great joy in heaven when the first human beings looked around with awe and delight and said, “Thank you.” Frederick Buechner wrote,

Using the same old materials of earth, air, fire, and water, every twenty-four hours God creates something new out of them. If you think you’re seeing the same show all over again seven times a week, you’re crazy. Every morning you wake up to something that in all eternity never was before and never will be again. And the you that wakes up was never the same before and will never be the same again, either.[2]

Morning by morning, new mercies we see. All we have to do is be there. All we have to pay is a little attention.

We listen to the entire opening chapter of Genesis on a Sunday morning in June, because it invites us to step out of our little boxed-in worlds and to live amid the unfathomable splendor of a gazillion creatures great and small, each vibrating with the love of God, and giving that love a shape that changes from moment to moment and yet remains one for as long as God speaks. We listen to beautiful scripture to better remember who we were made to be; to remember that dominion has nothing to do with feeling “superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.”[3] We were made to be, not autocratic despots, but representatives of God’s dominion – seeing, hearing, tasting, delighting, making, naming, caring, resting, and praising the One whose love is expressed in all of it.

Summer, of course, is the perfect season for us to fully immerse ourselves in God’s delight in life’s unfolding. So have a full, slow, free, and wild summer, filled with wonder and praise.

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

[2] Cited by Debie Thomas https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20140609JJ.shtml

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Dominion of Love,” Journal for Preachers 2008, 26.

A body like a forest

I like to think of the church as a planting of the Lord, to display God’s glory – but it’s not thousands of acres of soybeans, all the way from your toes to the horizon. Nor is it the backyard version with a row of tomatoes here, and two neat rows of corn there, and a gardener armed with Miracle Gro in one hand and Round Up in the other. I like to think of the church as a forest – with layers and layers of life, intricately woven in the depths of the earth, a wild and wonderful web, unruly, displaying God’s glory.

Inspired by Scripture, we think of the church as a creation of the Spirit, and we associate the Spirit with the breath of God, a dove descending from above, a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and tongues, as of fire, inspiring speech and understanding. Joel speaks of the Spirit being poured out, and Paul adds to the richness of imagery by suggesting that we drink the Spirit. Drinking, pouring, blazing, burning, hovering, blowing – all the ancient cosmic elements are hinted at, water, wind, and fire, except one: earth. Earth is in view, in all instances, as that which is transformed, revived, and renewed by the heavenly Spirit’s active presence.

Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit loves variety, so the wide range of imagery seems more than appropriate. I like to think of the church as a planting of the Lord, a wild and wonderful web, unruly, and yet displaying the glory of God. Trouble is, not all kinds of unruly are glorious. 

The trouble facing Paul in Corinth became manifest in divisions and quarrels between groups in the church, in rude and thoughtless behavior at the table, and in the false, pious pride of some who thought of themselves as more advanced in spiritual things than the rest of the church. One author calls it “a confused mayhem of competition” “We’re the true Christians,” it appears some assured one another, “compared to us – the few, the proud, the spiritual – the rest are mere amateurs.” They loved to talk about the flashy, spiritual experiences they themselves had or were able to inspire in others – proof, to them, that they possessed the Holy Spirit. The others? Eh, not so much.

Paul told them to cut it out. “What do you have,” he writes in chapter 4, “that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” We’re recipients of divine grace, so what’s there to boast about? And then Paul gave the church one of the first lessons in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.
And there are varieties of services, but the same Lord.
And there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.

There’s a rich variety of gifts, services, and activities in the church, all of which share a common source and purpose. Healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues, teaching, singing, visiting shut-ins, making dinner for homeless guests, tweaking numbers on a spreadsheet to balance the budget, mailing bulletins, praying at the table – all these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. Everyone who confesses that Jesus is Lord is gifted by the Holy Spirit, not just the few who like to be recognized as the spiritual major league players. The Holy Spirit is not a special gift to a select few in the church, but the Giver of all gifts to the church. All who confess Jesus as Lord, all, without exception, are recipients of the Spirit’s gifts.

There’s nothing to boast about. All there is to talk about is the proper use of the Spirit’s gifts. And what is proper according to Paul?

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

The gifts aren’t for individual self-aggrandizement but for the community.  Each gift, however unique and spectacular it may appear, is meant to be used for the common good. And each gift, however common and unspectacular it may appear, is essential for the well-being and usefulness of the whole. Spiritual gifts are not religious status symbols; they are means to serve the community in a variety of ways, as part of the mission of the church in the world. Now, I don’t think that Paul wants us to spend our time gazing into the mirror or into the depths of the internet, wondering what our personal gift profile might be. I’m certain he would prefer that we simply be about the business of using our gifts in service to the community. Most of your gifts you’ll discover as you go, and a good number of them others will see in you before you yourself have a clue.

Paul tells the church that differences aren’t something we must grudgingly accept. Diversity, including diversity of gifts, is a necessary dimension of being church we must embrace and cultivate. To make his point, Paul uses the common metaphor of the body.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of the one Spirit.

In Paul’s world, the world of the Roman empire, the metaphor of the body was used to maintain the status quo by admonishing the lower classes to stay in their place. Here’s a great example by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, from his History of Rome.

A commonwealth resembles in some measure a human body. For each of them … consists of many parts; and no one of their parts either has the same function or performs the same service as the others. If, now, these parts of the human body should be endowed, each for itself, with perception and a voice of its own and a sedition should then arise among them, all of them uniting against the belly alone, and the feet should say that the whole body rests on them; the hands, that they ply the crafts, secure provisions, fight with enemies, and contribute many other advantages toward the common good; the shoulders, that they bear all the burdens… [and so on]; and then all these should say to the belly, “And you, good creature, which of these things do you do? What return do you make and of what use are you to us? Indeed, you are so far from doing anything for us or assisting us in accomplishing anything useful for the common good that you are actually a hindrance and a trouble to us and … compel us to serve you and to bring things to you from everywhere for the gratification of your desires. Come now, why do we not assert our liberty and free ourselves from the many troubles we undergo for the sake of this creature?”

What would be the outcome? Starvation. “No one can deny it,” the speaker declares.

Now consider the same condition existing in a commonwealth … composed of many classes of people not at all resembling one another, every one of which contributes some particular service to the common good… For some cultivate the fields, some fight against the enemy in defense of those fields, others carry on much useful trade by sea, and still others ply the necessary crafts. If, then, all these different classes of people should rise against the senate, which is composed of the best men, and say, “As for you, senate, what good do you do us, and for what reason do you presume to rule over others? Not a thing can you name. Well then, shall we not now at last free ourselves from this tyranny of yours and live without a leader?” If … they should take this resolution and quit their usual employments, what will hinder this miserable commonwealth from perishing miserably by famine, war and every other evil? Learn, therefore, plebeians, that just as the belly … nourishes the body even while it is itself nourished, and preserves it while it is preserved itself, and is a kind of feast, as it were, provided by joint contributions, which as a result of the exchange duly distributes that which is beneficial to each and all, so in commonwealths the senate … provides what is expedient for everyone, preserves, guards, and corrects all things.

Paul has no interest in admonishing plebeians to stay in their place and to trust the wisdom and benevolence of a senate composed of the best of men. Paul uses the body metaphor to speak of this new community where men and women, rich and poor, free citizens and enslaved people, Jews and Gentiles come together, recognizing each other as indispensable members of the body of Christ in the world, and, perhaps even more challenging, as equally beloved siblings in the household of God.

The gospel is inherently cross-cultural and inevitably at odds with every cultural enclave – including our own. The gospel is neither Orthodox nor Protestant, neither traditional nor contemporary, neither liberal nor conservative. The gospel is bound to no particular culture, gender, nation, ethnic group, or class. It is a challenge to any culture that isn’t a culture of love.

I like to think of the church as a forest – with layers and layers of life, intricately woven in the depths of the earth, a wild and wonderful web, unruly, yet displaying God’s glory. No, not all kinds of unruly are glorious. The Holy Spirit is at work in the world, creating a community where love reigns, and in that work we are both recipients and agents of the Spirit’s transforming power. Thanks be to God.

See pdf (including references, which aren’t in this post)

Far above

Luke tells us a very funny story. I think it’s one of the funniest in all of scripture. The disciples were having a conversation with Jesus when suddenly he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.

How do you visualize the scene? Do you see Jesus slowly floating up like a balloon or is he zipping skyward like Iron Man?

Then the disciples are just standing there, gazing up to where they last saw him. Two men in white robes appear and ask them, “Galileans, why are you staring up toward heaven?” Why? What else would they be doing? And yet, it’s funny to imagine them standing there with their heads back, staring up for who knows how long.

You have probably all seen depictions of the Ascension— paintings, stained glass windows, art projects in Vacation Bible School. The old masters show Jesus floating upward in flowing robes, soft clouds around his feet, while the disciples look up, their faces expressing a range of emotions from fear to wide-eyed wonder and devotion. In one painting, the body of Jesus has all but disappeared, and at the upper edge, you can only see the hem of his robe and his feet sticking out from under the frame.[1] It looks like his toes would disappear any moment now, and then the disciples would be on their own again.

For some of us the scene is just a little too fantastic for our sober minds; for others, though, it’s not nearly fantastic enough, spoiled as we are by Hollywood power myths paired with spectacular visual effects. Is Luke giving you too much or too little with this curious story?

Our perspective changes when, rather than watch the scene from a distance, we enter it. Now we find ourselves in the company of men and women who have been going through a season of profound change. For forty days— in biblical lingo that means a good long time— Jesus presented himself alive to them, appearing to them and speaking with them about the kingdom of God. His painful absence after his death on the cross had turned into a startling and confusing sense of presence— with fear, joy, disbelief. and wonder washing over them in waves. He was with them. He was opening their minds to hear the ancient scriptures in new ways. They were learning, growing. And just when they thought they knew him again in a whole new way, just when they thought that now the world was ready for God’s kingdom to come in fullness, just then the one who was supposed to claim the throne slipped away, again.

Luke turned that sense of Jesus slipping away into a very funny story; but there’s nothing funny about that moment. One moment you have a sense of God’s presence, perhaps even a sense of new familiarity, and then it goes from clear to cloudy and blank. And where do you turn when the familiar becomes foreign, the tangible, intangible, the presence, an absence? Luke suggests our attention is glued to that moment, that spot where presence turned into absence. Why are we staring? Because our hearts are tied to that loss. Because our souls are incapable of movement without him.

What Luke wants us to hear and understand is that Jesus didn’t go away, but that he ascended to heaven. God exalted Jesus— the same Jesus who ate and drank with sinners, who suffered and died in shame— God exalted Jesus as Lord.

According to the witness of Paul, God has seated Jesus at the right hand of God, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.[2] Far above— that’s not meant as information about Jesus’ whereabouts— ‘far above’ is a declaration of his status and position. The friend of sinners sits on the throne of heaven.

We know about rule, authority, power, and dominion. Fear wants to rule us. Ignorance may sit in authority over us. Selfishness may present itself as the ultimate power in the world. Callousness may dream out loud of its cold dominion. But Jesus and his reign expose them as impostors: the throne is his, and heaven’s reign is revealed in his friendship with sinners and his radical hospitality for neighbors of all sorts. Before him, idols shake on their foundations, they crumble and fall, and what will abide is his reign of peace.

“Jesus departs from his followers so that he might exercise his authority and influence over all things, places, and powers,” writes Matt Skinner. 

The ascension does not mean the cessation of his ministry. It does not mean Jesus’ absence. It does not mean the suspension of God’s activity to reclaim the world. Quite the opposite.[3]

Jesus said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses.” Absence would again become powerful presence, and ordinary people, fishermen and tax collectors, freshmen and professors, young, old, queer, straight, trans, left, right— ordinary people would be witnesses to the love that has found us. We would be messengers of reconciliation. We would be truth tellers and ambassadors of the Lord’s reign to the ends of the earth.

When our gaze is stuck on that spot behind the cloud where we last perceived God’s presence in the world, angels gently redirect our attention. It’s no use looking up if we want to see Jesus. We will see him. He will come to us. Our attention needs to be where his attention was when he walked on the earth: On people craving connection, people starving from lack of compassion, people desperate for a taste of hope, places and situations where life is far from flourishing. Our attention needs to be directed by his, and when we’re not certain what it is he wants us to notice, we wait. He will come to us. We will be clothed with power from on high.[4]

Or so he told them, we might say; so he told the few who would become his apostles. But those were different times, simpler times, we imagine. They didn’t have polls relentlessly reporting the declining numbers of believers; for them, in those days, it was just natural to believe in the promises of God and they, of course, weren’t nearly as busy as we are—or so we like to think. Annie Dillard wrote beautifully about this odd assumption:

We are busy. So, I see now, were they. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead—as if innocence had ever been—and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day.[5]

No need, then, to paint the past in a rosy glow, whether it’s the days of the apostles or the years of innocence when tall steeples went up like grass after a spring shower. There is no one but us. There never has been. Us and the promise of God. Us and the promise that we are not on our own, but that God is at work in the world. Us and the promise that we will be clothed with power from on high and be just right—just right, you and me, just right to participate in Christ’s continuing mission to the ends of the earth.

Paul tells us that God raised Jesus from the dead and seated him at the right hand of God in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion. Far above doesn’t mean far away. The movement of God is not away from the world, but deeper into its brokenness in order to heal it. The movement of God is not away from us, but always to us and through us to the world.

Christ reigns far above all rule and authority and power and dominion. Christ reigns, and we have the privilege of letting our lives witness to his sovereign rule.

[1] https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/110001279

[2] Ephesians 1:20-21

[3] Matt Skinner

https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/seventh-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-acts-16-14

[4] Luke 24:49

[5] Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 56-57..

Making love real

It was the night when they were having their last meal together. Judas had already left the table and gone out; the rest of them didn’t know where he’d gone or why. Jesus knew, and he knew it was time. “Little children, I am with you only a little longer,” he said.[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? Why can’t we come with you? What are we supposed to do without 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 orphaned,” he promised, but the loop playing in their minds, I imagine, was, “He’s leaving us.”

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,” she writes.

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. She played games with them. She read them books. She 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 the wonderful things they would 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? And when we worry about what will become of us and of the world—how are we supposed to exude confidence and create it in the ones who look to us?

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

In the Fourth Gospel, the disciples are anxious because their relationship with Jesus was to come to an end. It was the most important relationship in their lives, one that had redefined everything for them: how they saw themselves, how they looked at each other, how they viewed God and the world. And soon, they were afraid, this relationship would be reduced to the past tense of their fading memories of Jesus. How would they know him, follow him, 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.” Jesus promised the coming of another Advocate, another Comforter, Counselor, or Companion as other translations have rendered the term; the Spirit of truth who would continue to make available the truth Jesus embodied and revealed. Jesus’ return to the Father wouldn’t mean he’d abandoned them, but that they would encounter him differently—in and through the Spirit, in and through each other. They and generations after them would encounter the truth of Jesus through a community where the love of God becomes tangible and real, a community shaped by the Spirit of truth.

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 met 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. There’s so much to do in this love-starved mess of a world. And we already have so many things to do. And how much more can we do, over-scheduled as we are? And do we really have all it takes to do all that?  We barely know where we are anymore—how can we do what needs doing?

We worry, because we let 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. Jesus is the truth, and who we are—who we become and come to see ourselves to be in the company of Jesus: beloved children of God. Any good we do, any good we can do, will flow, not from anxious busyness, but from knowing that we’re not orphans, from letting ourselves be rooted, held, and transformed in the love of God becoming tangible in the community of believers.

On Thursday evening mourners gathered at New Song Church outside of Dallas to honor Kyu Song Cho, 37, Cindy Cho, 35, and their 3-year-old son, James. They had been killed last weekend in a mass shooting at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, where a gunman, armed with an “AR-15 style assault weapon” and a handgun, had killed eight people and injured a half-dozen more. Among the survivors of the shooting—the second deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. this year and the second in Texas in a little over a week—among the survivors was the Chos’ six-year-old son, William.

At the funeral, the boy’s grandfather said, “I request a prayer from all of you that he live a healthy life, to be bright, to love everyone, and to be loved.”[5] This is the Spirit of truth addressing us in the words of an old man whose heart was broken in ways I’m too afraid to fully imagine. We have been asked to pray that this young child may love everyone and be loved. We have been asked to give ourselves to making love real for this young child and every child. The Spirit of truth, the Comforter, the Advocate, the One called to our side is a living presence among us. A living presence. “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.”[6] 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 give themselves to making love real in this love-starved mess of a world. 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.

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/grandfather-child-orphaned-texas-shooting-asks-prayers-emotional-funer-rcna84150

[6] John 14:23

Chosen strangers

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!

This is the first line in Peter’s letter. The letter is addressed to God’s chosen strangers in the world of the diaspora, who live in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia—provinces in what is today Turkey. He calls them chosen strangers, because they no longer quite belong where they live, because God has chosen them.

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.

New birth into a living hope—Peter refers to his readers as newborn infants, and urges them, urges us, like newborn infants to long for the pure, spiritual milk, the pure milk of the word.[1] In First Corinthians and Hebrews, milk also is mentioned; there it is baby food for baby Christians who haven’t matured enough in their faith to digest the solid food of weightier teachings.[2] Peter, though, is playing a different theme. Peter is not talking about milk for newborn infants who’ll eventually become meat-and-potatoes Christians.

Peter is writing to believers who struggle with how to live as people chosen by God, how to live the life that erupted with Christ’s resurrection from the dead, and he points to babies. Look at them, he says, they are new to the miracle of life, and yet they know instinctively what they need to thrive. You pick them up, you cradle them in your arm, with their head nestled in your elbow, 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 joy. “Since you have tasted that the Lord is good,” Peter writes, since you have tasted the sweet forgiveness, the rich mercy and abundant grace of God, desire that new-life milk and drink it. Nourished by it you will grow into salvation. Be done with pretense, be done with deceit and prejudice, be done with envy and ugly gossip, and whatever else they serve at the bar of your former life; that stuff has zero nutritional value. Not only does it not nourish you, it consumes you and those around you. Look at a baby: that’s you in the arms of Christ. Drink the love that will not let you go, drink the life given for the life of the world, drink until you want no more, drink until you drowse in sunlit bliss.[3]

At this point, the apostle makes a rather abrupt turn. Peter steps away from the beautiful intimacy between mother and child, and now he writes about stones and buildings. Stones are hard and rigid. Stones are lifeless. Dead as a stone, we say. But Peter wants us to ponder the image of a living stone. Christ is the stone that the builders rejected.

When we build something, we make a plan, and we choose and reject expertly according to our plan. We have trained our eyes to judge what is useful for our purposes and what is not. We build lots of things: Houses, towers, walls and bridges. We build homes, careers, families, lives. And we build egos. We look at others, and we are quick to assess them according to our needs, calculating whether they might be useful for our purposes. When we find them wanting, we toss them to the side—not suited for the project we’re working on, disposable people. Sin encourages us to build our lives according to our own plans and purposes and to choose or reject those around us accordingly. Sin encourages us to make ourselves the measure and judge of all things.

Christ is the stone that the builders rejected. Christ is the stone which human builders toss aside. We have our own designs and ideas, our own vision of life, our own carefully planned projects—and he doesn’t fit in. But in God’s eyes, this misfit, this reject is chosen and precious. God is building a house in the world, and Christ is critical to the design and realization of the project.

Come to him, a living stone … and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.

Peter’s first audience were diaspora churches, scattered all over the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. The fledgling Christian communities were without legal or social status, and their members often were subject to harassment and persecution. Their faith in Jesus, the Crucified One whom God had raised from the dead, often made them strangers in their own towns and neighborhoods. They knew the sting of mockery, the pain of rejection and exclusion. They lived like resident aliens who didn’t know where they belonged and who they were or would be.

Come to him, a living stone … and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.[4]

The word “house” has rich meanings in the Scriptures. It signifies not just shelter, but belonging, identity, community. God called Abraham to go from his father’s house, from his country and culture, to form a new house, a house founded on his trust in God and God’s promise. This new house, this new people of God found themselves in exile in “the house of bondage” in Egypt. Yet God brought them out in a mighty act of liberation, and at Sinai God made a covenant with the former enslaved people and they became “the house of Israel.” In Jerusalem, the temple was built and rebuilt as a dwelling place for God’s name, a house of prayer for God’s people marking the center of their world. We read in the gospels that one of the disciples said to Jesus as they were coming out of the temple, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Jesus told him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”[5] It was as though in those days all things were being swallowed up by the house of Caesar. Yet it was in those days that God began to build a new house in the world, and in that house, Jesus, rejected by human builders, is God’s chosen cornerstone.

Cornerstones are laid as part of the foundation upon which all else rests. They are selected for their size and strength, and the entire structure is only as strong and reliable as those stones. We don’t think of cornerstones as essential structural elements anymore. We consider them ceremonial add-ons to commemorate the year a building was begun. But Jesus is not merely a commemorative ornament in the corner of the building, not in the house God is building. So perhaps we should consider an alternate translation like keystone instead of cornerstone.

The keystone sits at the high point of an arch and it is essential for its structural integrity: remove it, and the arch will collapse. In the house God is building, Jesus, the stone that human builders rejected and continue to reject, is the keystone that holds everything together. Empire builders have no use for Jesus, but God is building a house in the world, a living structure of living stones, with Christ as the foundational cornerstone upon whom the whole projects rests, with Christ as the keystone that provides structural strength and integrity. And all who come to him likewise are living stones forming an integral part of the house, sharing a common life and offering their lives in praise and service to God.

With Christ, all who come to him are a chosen race: as living stones they become the one humanity made in the image of God. With Christ, all who come to him are a royal priesthood: they make their lives an offering of praise and gratitude in response to the unceasing flow of God’s grace and mercy. With Christ, all who come to him are a holy nation: nationalism with all its excluding attitudes gives place to a community that is consecrated to God and God’s purpose to unite all nations in their diversity into one house. With Christ, all who come to him are God’s own people: chosen and precious, a living sign that God desires one human family sharing life in justice and peace. With Christ, all who come to him proclaim with their very lives the mighty acts of him who called them out of darkness into his marvelous light.[6]

Peter does tell his readers what to do, what to desire, what to be done with, but the emphasis is on who we are and who and what we are becoming in the house God is building. We may be living in the house of Caesar, we may be living in the house that colonialism built, but we don’t belong here. We may be living in the house where every brick, every floor board and rafter speaks of ingenuity and skill, but also of injustice, domination, and exploitation. We may be living here, but we’re not at home here, we’re far from home here. We don’t belong here. We’re chosen strangers.

God is building a house in the world. This house is not built with the stones we are tempted to throw at others when we forget that none of us is without sin.  This house is not built with the life-less stones of our hardened hearts. This house is not built on the dead stone that closed the tomb. The house God is building in the world is a house of living stones, a living, breathing, growing house, a dwelling place for God and a house of prayer for all peoples. In this house 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.

Peter’s picture includes no glimpse of a completed house, only of a house under construction. The Apostle wants to encourage us to trust the master builder. When it is finished, the house of humanity will reflect Christ in every detail.

In a similar way, the image of individual believers never arrives at any stage later than that of infants who have just left the womb, nuzzling the breasts of a maternal Lord.[7] We trust this one who is the source of all life and goodness and joy. We trust and drink and let ourselves be built into the house that love builds.

[1] See 1 Peter 1:14, 23; 2:2

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

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

[4] 1 Peter 2:4

[5] Mark 13:1-2 parr.

[6] See Philip A. Potter, “Christ is God’s delegated and precious living stone,” International Review Of Mission 72, no. 288 (October 1983), 540-541.

[7] Paul Sevier Minear, “The house of living stones: a study of 1 Peter 2:4-12,” The Ecumenical Review 34, no. 3 (July 1982), 246.

Spirit-induced community

On Friday, I devoted myself to the baking of bread. I had started a pound of pre-ferment on Thursday, and in the morning I weighed and added the other ingredients to the mixing bowl — flour, water, and salt. I devoted myself to measuring, blending, kneading, and waiting. With a good, active pre-ferment it usually takes about three hours for the community of microorganisms to turn the whole batch from a sticky mess into smooth, bubbly, and bouncy dough. They were doing all the work while I was catching up on a couple of podcasts.

Ezra Klein was talking with Sheila Liming, who teaches at a college in Vermont. He told her about his surprise when reading

this recent study by Cigna that found that about almost twice as many adults aged 18 to 24 reported feeling lonely versus seniors aged 66 and older. So 79 percent of young adults and 41 percent of seniors. And by the way, 79 percent of young adults feeling lonely — I mean, that’s really bad. And you can attribute some of this to the pandemic. But this structure of young adults feeling lonelier than the elderly was consistent in pre-pandemic research, too.

So you teach college students, as you mentioned. I’m curious what you observe about how people in that age group, which I think are canonically and stereotypically understood as the most social, what kind of trouble they’re having socializing, not socializing — how you understand the particular loneliness epidemic among young adults.

She quickly responded, “Oh, they’re having a ton of trouble,” and she talked about some of her observations. Then she described a typical scene:

I think about what an average college classroom is like these days when I walk into the room before the start of class. And generally, when I walk into the room at the start of class, and there’s a lot of young people, and they’re getting ready to start class, it’s dead silent. And everybody’s staring at their phones. And I don’t blame them. And what they’re doing is they’re talking to people most of the time. They’re talking to someone who is somewhere else who is going to have a conversation with them, who’s going to talk with them about their day, who’s going to help them process whatever’s going on in their life. And I don’t think it’s a lack of a realization that they could have the same conversation with the person sitting next to them. I think it’s more about a fear of the risk that comes from doing that — that there’s this kind of public exposure that’s going to happen, or you’re going to be judged in the act of trying to start a conversation with somebody you don’t already know yet.[1]

The two continued to share other observations and findings about trends in our culture that drive fragmentation, isolation, and loneliness. The third voice that was present for me, was Luke. He writes about the community of believers that emerges on Pentecost.

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

Another way to translate this is

They were constant in their attention to the teachings of the apostles, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers.[2]

They were constant in their attention to four things. I can listen to a podcast while I’m kneading the dough, but if I do it while I’m measuring the ingredients, it’s highly likely I will either follow the conversation and mess up the dough, or attend to the dough and miss parts of the conversation. They were constant in their attention to four things, Luke insists.

Who were they? Luke is writing about Pentecost, about the Spirit that inspired, empowered, and directed the mission of Jesus, that same Spirit being poured out on the disciples. Luke is writing about one of the apostles, Peter, proclaiming salvation in Jesus, the crucified Messiah whom God raised from the dead, and the Spirit was moving, breathing, nudging, weaving—and those who welcomed Peter’s message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. Three thousand in a day—Awe came upon everyone because many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles! Wonders and signs indeed. But think about that for a moment: three thousand Jews from all over the known world, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, speaking different dialects, eating different foods, with different interpretations of Torah, all with their own personalities, preferences, attitudes, fears, prejudices—three thousand in a day!

Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread in their homes and ate their food with glad and generous hearts.

Think about those doing the cooking day by day, or those coordinating which believers would meet in which house, or who would bring what to the potluck. And just when all of them were beginning to learn the names of those sharing dinner with glad and generous hearts, newcomers would show up at the table—because daily, Luke writes, the Lord added to their number.

And all who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.

“No doubt there’s a touch of idealization in Luke’s presentation,” comments one scholar.[3] For hundreds of years, interpreters have proposed that Luke offers his readers “a symbolically idealized portrait of communal life,” writes another. And “idealized”always implied exaggerated, hyperbolic, in reality short-lived, limited in scope if ever actually attempted, a state of affairs that looks extremely attractive, yet utterly unrealistic or beyond our reach. “So much tempts us to dismiss these verses as quaint,” comments Matt Skinner, “even as we claim to yearn for such conditions as a sign of God’s reign among us.[4]

But not all have given in to that temptation, not all are giving in to it. Luke’s utopian vision of what the church might be in its finest realization has inspired monastic movements, liberation theologies, experiments in communal living, and countless other, everyday moments of daring to live out with others—difficult others, complicated others, lovely others—God’s vision and promise of life.

Luke paints for us a quick image of fulfillment at the dawn of the church’s mission. He doesn’t write a set of rules or design the one, true structure for Christian living—he paints possibility. This is what the Spirit of Christ can do; this is what our witness to the reign of God can be—the reign of God that Jesus lived and proclaimed in his earthly mission and confirmed with his death and resurrection. The reign of God can be reflected in our life, in our proclamation, in our service, in our mission and witness because the Spirit who inspired, empowered, and directed Jesus, now inspires, empowers, and directs his disciples.

We are easily frustrated in our attempts to build community that represents an authentic embodiment of the gospel, a community where love becomes real because Christ is known. We are easily frustrated because we see what we’re up against in our culture, in our relationships, in our own hearts. What Luke wants us to know and remember is that we’re not left to our own devices in building true community or in pursuing justice or in seeking fullness of life. The Spirit of the risen Christ is present and at work in any situation we may only be able to look at with frustration or fear.

I keep thinking about the sad reality of 79 percent of young adults feeling lonely. And the professor walking into her classroom, and instead of the happy hum of chatter and laughter, there’s everybody staring at their phones in dead silence. Remember what she said?

I don’t blame them. … They’re talking to someone who is somewhere else who is going to have a conversation with them, … who’s going to help them process whatever’s going on in their life. And I don’t think it’s a lack of a realization that they could have the same conversation with the person sitting next to them. I think it’s more about a fear of the risk that comes from doing that.

We’re afraid. We’re afraid of being judged. We’re afraid of being rejected. We’re afraid to drop our kids off at school. We’re afraid to accidentally knock on the wrong door or go up the wrong driveway and get shot. And we’re afraid to ask our neighbor to be considerate and not shoot his gun in the yard, so the baby can sleep. We’re afraid he might say, “I’ll do what I want to in my front yard,” and show us what he means – or worse, show our babies.[5] We’re afraid. We’re also sad; and furious; and exhausted; and numb.

What are we to do? I do my best to listen to Luke, who writes,

They were constant in their attention to the teachings of the apostles, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers.

The words are breathing, I can hear the Spirit whisper. They were constant in their attention not to four or more things, but to one thing, and it changed everything. They were constant in their attention to remaining open to the Spirit of Jesus; open to the love that drives out fear; love that is patient and kind; love that doesn’t insist on its own way; love that rejoices in the truth. They were constant in their attention to the Spirit who opened the Scriptures and their minds, and who continually drew them into newness of life with strangers, inspiring them to be generous and fearless in what they did with their time, their food, and their possessions. I hear them inviting us to join them.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-sheila-liming.html

[2] Luke Timothy Johnson, Acts (Sacra Pagina), 56.

[3] James Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, 196.

[4] Matt Skinner https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-acts-242-47-2

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/29/us/cleveland-texas-shooting/index.html

Walking together

I come from a family of walkers. My grandparents never drove anywhere. Oma walked to the village to do her shopping, and if she had to go to the city, she walked to the bus stop. Opa walked to work at the leather factory, he walked to choir practice, and on Sundays he walked to church. He walked to his apple orchard on the other side of the valley, and he walked in the forest, be it to get firewood, or just for the pleasure of walking. He never drove a vehicle, and the only thing with wheels he ever operated on the street was a rattly handcart he used to haul sacks of apples for cider or chicken feed.

My dad drove to work in the city every day, and my mom got her driver’s license in her thirties. One day she backed into another car in a parking lot, nothing big, just a broken tail light, but that was the end of it. She never drove anywhere again. She walked to do her shopping, she walked to church, and when she needed to go to the city, she walked to the tram stop. She’s 89, and while she walks much less than she used to, she feels most like herself when she does.

I come from a family of walkers. My siblings and I walked to school every day until fourth grade, and then we walked to the tram stop to get to school in the city. We walked to church, to youth group, to the pool in summer, or to visit friends. One of my friends lived one valley over, on the other side of the hill, about six or seven miles away, and I loved the short hike through the woods I took when I went to spend time with him. I rode my bike a lot as well, but I had discovered that there’s nothing better than walking to think about stuff; something about the rhythm of simply putting one foot in front of the other and letting your thoughts wander.

When I heard about veterans hiking the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Cress Trail, or the entire U.S. from coast to coast, I wasn’t surprised. They seek healing for their souls, hiking by themselves or in groups, processing the stuff they couldn’t just leave behind or forget when they returned from the battle field. “We are eternally perplexed by how to move toward forgiveness or healing or truth,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the journey.”[1]

Jesus walked everywhere he went, except for that short ride into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey. And for his followers, walking with Jesus was not just a matter of getting from Capernaum to Bethsaida, or from Jericho up to Jerusalem. It’s how they learned that following was about more than their minds absorbing his teachings; following him was something they they did with their feet, with their whole bodies. It was a way of being in the world. It was a particular walk defined by his pace, his direction, his attention, his goals. They followed him all the way to Jerusalem, full of expectation, and then things just fell apart: the temple leadership, the Romans, the crowds, betrayal and arrest, fear and denial, and the horror of the cross.

And then, on the third day, early in the morning, rumors of resurrection. Some of the women returned from the tomb with words they had received in a vision of angels, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen.” Well, if he was risen, why didn’t he show himself? Why didn’t he enter the city in triumph? Why didn’t he restore the kingdom to Israel? They waited, remembering his words about rising on the third day, but then they set out on the long walk back.

We don’t know where exactly to look for Emmaus on the map, but we know the road. It’s where we walk when we can’t tell if we’re sad, furious, or tired; when our hope has shrunk from cosmic dimensions to a mere glimmer. “Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go,” Frederick Buechner wrote, “to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that [human beings] have had – ideas about love and freedom and justice – have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish [people] for selfish ends.”[2] The road to Emmaus is where you walk when faith is little more than a memory. When you have no idea who you might become now or what might become of the world. Walking gives you something to do; it helps you sort things out; it gives rhythm to the waves of thoughts and feelings washing over you. “I walk a lonely road, my shadow’s the only one that walks beside me” Green Day sing in Boulevard of Broken Dreams. “Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me. Till then I walk alone.” Sometimes you walk alone. Sometimes you wish you had somebody to walk with you.

Cleopas and the other disciple were on the road together. They were talking: the joy of Jesus’ arrival in the city, the shock of his arrest, the guilt they had to bear for abandoning him, the trauma of his execution, and then, earlier that day, the astounding story the women had shared with them. It was all too much, too confusing, and so they walked. A stranger came near and was going with them. It was Jesus, Luke tells us, but they didn’t know it. All they knew were the brutal facts of Friday and the numbness of Saturday and the story the women had told them. Friday had weight. Friday was verifiable. Betrayal, fear, torture, death, hope shattered and silenced – there was a record of Friday, engraved on their hearts. Resurrection was a rumor. Some said, an idle tale.

“What are you talking about?” the stranger asked. They told him about Jesus and how they had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. And the stranger walked them through the Scriptures, beginning with Moses and all the prophets. He taught them to see how what had taken place in Jerusalem was at the heart of God’s story with the world, and how it revealed the full depth of Israel’s witness to the faithfulness of God. In the stranger’s words, the promises of scripture opened up like blossoms, and the two companions opened up along with them. “Stay with us,” they urged him when they reached the village and he was walking ahead as if he were going on. “Stay with us; it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. And at the table, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. That’s when they recognized him. That’s when the resurrection was no longer a rumor, but their life, their world renewed.

“The sacred moments,” wrote Fred Buechner, “the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only… the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal. But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all of our … imagination … what we may see is Jesus himself.”[3] The risen Christ subverts our ways of knowing, making an ordinary moment shine and opening to us a horizon of hope we cannot perceive with our minds alone. At first, we struggle to squeeze what we are told happened on the third day into our frame of understanding of how the world works. But then, suddenly or gradually, we begin to see how the world with all its wonders and its horrors is not only being reframed, but remade, in the new creation where the Crucified One is risen. Resurrection is no longer the odd event we can’t quite square with our knowledge of the world, but rather the horizon that allows us to see all things surrounded and held by God’s mercy.

On Friday, the Tennessee General Assembly adjourned from its 2023 session. Voices for a Safer Tennessee, the group that organized the human chain in support of common-sense gun laws, in a statement commended Governor Bill Lee “for his leadership and courage in urging our lawmakers to ‘set aside politics and personal pride [and] to do the right thing,’ and for proposing new gun safety bill language for the legislature to consider. This was an important first step.” Yes, indeed, an important first step. The statement continued with an echo of today’s Gospel reading where the two disciples are able to speak of hope only in the past perfect sense, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” The statement says,

While we had hoped the General Assembly would act more quickly and discuss the proposed legislation during its regularly scheduled session, we respect that many of our legislators need and want more time to educate themselves on how other states have conservatively, but successfully, protected Second Amendment rights while also protecting citizens.

We had hoped, but because something has noticeably shifted in Tennessee, we continue to hope that the first step was indeed the beginning of a new walk. Governor Lee has already called a special session to discuss firearm safety legislation.[4] A date hasn’t been set yet, but there’s movement, and there’s more time for our elected officials “to hear from their constituents - including the majority of Tennessee Republicans who polled as supporting extreme risk laws (71%), closing background check loopholes (73%), and safe storage laws (68%).”[5]

Imagine some of our elected officials hearing the Gospel reading in their home churches this morning. Imagine some of them calling a colleague, “Let’s go for a walk.” Imagine them walking together, listening to each other. And imagine them listening to the stranger who walks with them, the stranger who holds the power to let them see the world in a whole new light.

[1] Wanderlust, 50.

[2] Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat, 85-86.

[3] Ibid., 87-88.

[4] https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2023/04/21/tennessee-gov-bill-lee-calls-a-special-session-on-gun-reform/70140521007/

[5] https://www.instagram.com/p/CrUiRL6suab/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D