“Unto us is born …”

“The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago….”

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14 [1:1-18 NRSVUE]

“The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told them.”

Luke 2:20 [2:1-20 NRSVUE]

I did not know I was dreaming until I had waked. It was one of those settings that you recognize even though none of the dream-details match the reality. I was at Christmas Eve worship for the “pop-up” Christmas pageant: a staging where some parts are planned and practiced and others are improvised on the night. Children milled about. Helpers handed out costumes, reminded the scripted of their parts, readied to aim the walk-ons down the correct aisles at the correct cues.

The children’s minister stepped forward with a short speech of welcome, then nodded to the helpers in back, and the pageant began. Mary was demure in her blue scarf; Joseph held a crook (obviously judged mature enough to wield it safely). The two trod forward to Bethlehem, said their parts, and took their seats by the straw-filled manger. Shepherds came up the aisle next. One, a round-faced blond, was a born performer: she sniffed loudly with disgust at her own sheep stink and exclaimed with comic verve, ‘I smell because I’m a shepherd!’ A responsive chuckle rippled through the congregation.

The shepherds arrived at the stable and it was they — not Mary nor Joseph, nor any of the tinsel-haloed cherubs — who announced the birth to the congregation. The sheep-smelly-smelling shepherd picked up the swaddled bundle from the manger, unwrapped it slightly, and with two hands held high to the assembled faithful the large altar Bible.

‘Unto us is born a book!’ she proclaimed.

What was the dream-congregation’s reaction to the appearance of a hefty tome instead of the expected baby? Dream-me for a moment worried lest the congregation focus more on the missing baby doll than the meaning of the lifted book. Dream-me then was glad — and waked-me glad still — for the pageant’s point that the written word is not some static printing-press artifact but a life that breathes and grows and transforms those who receive and welcome and breathe and grow in response.

Is the Bible a ‘what’ or a ‘who’? And if the latter, then who is the Bible? Or, maybe, how is the Bible a ‘who,’ and how many ‘who’s are the Bible?

How much of this text is the material remains of generations who lived and told and wrote and retold and rewrote and handed on for the next generation’s living, and the generations’ after that? How much of this text is the still-bright spark of something beyond any human creation? The newborn babe who bears the genetic legacy of so many forebears yet comes forth from the womb, mouth mewling and limbs flailing at the first gulp of air, life sparked by a pair of copulating bodies but not created, nor ultimately contained, by either of them.

What if the baby born unto us was the Bible? The bound book, covers open, pages flapping, bawling for our attention and response. Let that imagining change our experience of the whole! The infant demanding engaged attention and active nurture; to whom we bend near, listening closely to its cries and attending to its wrappings and ensuring that it is fed and held and sung to and spoken of and lived with. Through whose presence we are ourselves enlivened into new identities, recognizing our own infancy and need and hope of growth.

Conceive the Bible as the baby begotten and born in our midst. The Bible not a ‘thing’ that exists static and inert, apart from the beating life of human community, but a ‘who’ that delights and frightens and argues and enriches and teaches and transforms and raises a new and whole ‘who,’ bodies of print and people together, hearts beating with life and enlarged in love.

Unto us is born … the Word. May we be devoted to its raising that we may be raised through its being.

Turn our return!

“When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.”

Psalm 126:1 [KJV; see Psalm 126]

Psalm 126 lives in my mouth in its King James cadences, whether spoken aloud or in my mind’s ear only. The “t’s” in “turned” and “captivity” are clipped in soft staccato while the “e” of “dream” stretches longer than its single syllable. Its sound ebbs as I am drawn into the vision it pronounces. Remember that dreaming? Remember what it was to live a dream?

Pause at the thought of dream, then let the recitation of it tumble from my lips. My mouth pronouncing the phrases is again brimful of brightness. Remember what it was when others saw our joy, named it for us, even before we ourselves recognized that our shoulders were lifting, our steps become lighter? “The LORD has done great things for them.” O! Savor it!

My singing tongue slows, then continues, resolutely: “The LORD has done great things for us, whereof we are glad.” The glow of remembrance fades even as I recollect it. My voice catches, my tone shifts from reverie to plea: “Turn again our captivity, O LORD!…” Memory of God’s prior graces moved into urgent demand of God-self: remember us, do again great things for us.

Psalm 126 is a psalm from a middle place. Prayed by a people who know God has done great things for them. Prayed by a people who know, also, that the great thing is yet unfinished, who pray that God is not done with them.

I pray this psalm as I walk in the day. I pray this psalm as I lie down at night. I pray this psalm as I read the news. I pray this psalm as I move into Holy Week. I will pray this psalm on past this Easter Sunday, as I am praying it now, past all the prior Easters that have been.

“Christ is risen!” we will proclaim on Sunday. The sanctuary will be filled with flowers and the Hallelujah Chorus and jubilation. Our mouths will be filled with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy.

And then we will leave the sanctuary and go into the world. And then we will find, again, or still, that resurrection has changed everything and that the world remains broken.

The LORD has done great things for us! Turn again our captivity!

The Hebrew is something like ‘Turn, O LORD, our returning ….’ The verb echoed in its object; the dream memory of v.1 revised in v.4 to imperative demand. ‘Turn our return.’ The unfamiliar syllables feel awkward in my mouth. They resonate differently than “turn again our captivity.” The latter might be read as a turning-back, a restoration to what was before. I’ve pictured it so: freed exiles streaming back to a rebuilt city. Perhaps this psalm was rooted in a real memory of return, yet in that history, the city’s rebuilding was but an incomplete fulfillment. God called God’s people to further walking. God’s people called God to further rescue.

Read Psalm 126 not as returning back to some prior way of being but as turning on to what yet will be. The final verses tell it so: they do not rest in the storehouses of some prior season’s harvest but call for sowing anew and promise that the resulting harvest will be abundant, occasion for new shouts of joy. Easter does not turn back the clock nor deny death. Easter overcomes it: Thomas knows the risen Jesus not by his unblemished skin but by his wounds.

The world remains broken. Sow the seed anyway. Because resurrection has changed everything. Because we can practice it. Must practice it. Sing joy — even in tears, even while weeping — that in singing we experience already the harvest anticipated as God turns our return on towards God’s intended end.

Prophet in Motley

Hoy! All thirsty ones, come to the waters!
And whoever is without silver, come, buy, and eat!
Come buy — without silver and without price — wine and milk!
Why do you spend silver for not-bread? And labor for not-satisfaction?
Hear! Hear me, and eat what is good, and let yourselves delight in rich food!
Stretch out your ear and come to me. Hear, and your very self shall live!

Isaiah 55:1-3a (see Isaiah 55:1-5 NRSVUE]

The prophet’s opening ‘Hoy!’ catches me. A loud call, a sudden summons. It echoes in my ears; I slew my head around as if I might see on the street the speaker I see in my mind’s eye: clad in bright motley, wearing some sort of jingly jester’s cap, clothes and stance and call all setting him separate from the streams of passersby, who step to avoid him and continue on their way.

Hoy! The prophet calls. Speaking inestimable abundance — buy without silver, eat and drink wine and milk and goodness itself. Invitation and question together challenge the world’s prices, turns them topsy-turvey. Why spend, why work, for that which is the opposite of life? (He would not mistake public service with ‘lower productivity,’ as if worth is denominated only in dollars.)

The prophet summons the thirsty — meaning everyone — to a table that seems entirely separate from the one at which the oligarchs sit and squabble, jostling for proximity measured in piles of silver. The prophet describes a different circle. Listen! he cries. Look! he enjoins. Hoy! The summons is urgent; the verbs all imperatives, and plural. Go, all of you, from the table at which sawdust not-bread is sold in exchange for silver. Come, all of you, and sit instead at the table on which bread and wine and milk and good things are set.

Oh, it’s not so easy. The table being fought over is not the table that ultimately matters, but in the here and now the bombast spills over and has consequences. (USDA cancels contracts; the hungry are harmed.) Response is required. The prophet reminds that faithful response is not partisan reenactment of scarcity but empowered by the perception of abundance.

Hoy! Prophet in motley. Now I’m picturing the street performer who juggles at the local farmer’s market. His audience comprises a gaggle of open-mouthed children, whose parents are more attuned to the glad awe on their offspring’s faces than the arcs of balls or clubs whirling through the air. But they’re paused. They are tuned to more than their own busy-ness.

That pause may be itself a beginning.

After all, how many heard the prophet when first he spoke? He was no central figure, around whom the world turned. He cried out a word in earshot only of some. (Seal the teaching among my taught-ones, earlier Isaiah had said [Isa 8:16], suggesting both the dearth of immediate response and the conviction that the proclamation’s power persisted.) Some heard and were taught, some spoke and taught others in turn. The prophet’s call, the people’s march: these have purpose. The large public acts are testimony and sign. Resistance to what is wrong and commitment to work towards right. Yet for all that rallies matter, they tend more confirming than transforming. Change I might effect comes in smaller, more connectional increments.

The farmers market juggler catches all the balls, makes a sweeping bow. The children find their voices, tug parents towards whatever’s next. Grown-ups strange to each other read each other’s faces, catch each other’s eyes — smile awareness of the spell, appreciation of the shared experience. A seed for further word to be spoken; from which relationship may be built; through which transformation be born.

Come. Your presence is the only price. Come and hear. Eat and drink and live.

Resistance Springing

You shall answer, and you shall say, ‘… Now, see: I bring in the first fruit of the ground which you gave to me, LORD.’ You will put it before the LORD your God, and you will bow low before the LORD your God, and you will rejoice in all the good which the LORD your God gave to you and to your house, you and the Levite and the alien who is among you.

Deuteronomy 26:5a, 10-11; see Deut 26:1-11 NRSVUE

I am extra aware of the light the first week after the clocks spring ahead. It’s not just that my alarm rings earlier, as measured by the sky; it is the strangeness of the afternoon light: clear at an hour when I am expecting its tone to have warmed with the sun’s lowering. The sun keeps its own time still, yet its rhythm, too, is shifting, each day longer by minutes. By the end of January, we can walk in daylight as late as 5:30; as late as 6 by February’s end. Changing the clock does not itself add to the day, but it does make plainer what has been taking place already, making the incremental seem sudden, and more entire. Everything seems to have come on at once. Red buds are visible on the maple tree. Snowdrops’ slender white flowers are now joined by yellow aconite and purple crocus and hellebore in muted colors of cream and mauve. The withies of winter jasmine have grown green and put out yellow flowers. I look out the back window and see daffodils madly daffodil-ing — cups and petals unfolded and shining golden in the sun.

These buds and blooms are the first fruits of spring, somehow made more noticeable by the admittedly artificial, and frankly sometimes-irritating, practice of changing our clocks. Shifting my rhythm this way shifts something in my sight. Spring’s good is sprung. Daffodils dance yellow in the March wind, and their apparent joy insists upon being rejoiced-over.

Deuteronomy’s first-fruits are not the bright blooms of the neighborhood but the first of the season’s harvest on which the people will depend for the rest of that year and until the next year’s harvest is ripe. These first fruits are not to be hoarded nor privately gloated over. These first fruits are to be given back, that the whole harvest may be received as gift.

I appreciate the precision of the liturgy in this text: directions for posture and gesture and scripted speech. The first-person recitation places each one who recites it in continuity with the vulnerable father, the oppressed stranger, the one heard and seen and saved and brought in to a land from which first fruits would grow — these very fruits, brought here in this basket. To practice this liturgy is to be reminded that the ‘exceptionalism’ of God’s people is not inherent in themselves but in God, the giver of all the good.

Read on. The liturgy is larger than the scripted gestures and declarations in front of the altar. The next step in the practice is to ‘rejoice in all the good the LORD your God has given you’ — the very good which the one-who-trusts-flesh cannot even see? Rejoice in all the good along with the portionless priests, with the alien who is among you. Not sharing ‘yours’ with ‘them’ but receiving with them the LORD’s giving to all.

Rejoice! This injunction brackets and punctuates the core of Deuteronomy [see 12:7, 12, 18; 16:11, 14, 15; 26:11]. God’s people are commanded to bring offerings at set times, to eat and to be glad in the presence of the LORD and the company of the vulnerable. Gladness as scheduled practice. Make the feast not for being already glad; become glad in the making of the feast.

Joy may seem an unrealistic demand, even unkind in the context of these days. (How can joy be expected in the face of so many summons to fear?). Then I remember the text context of these commands to joy: the people are yet in the wilderness, that time of turmoil and fear and traumatic becoming. Even so, even then, even here, God’s people are given the command to rejoice. The practice of joy as the distinctive characteristic of God’s people. Joy multiplied in the making of it. Wilderness resisted in delight dancing and insisting on being rejoiced-with.

Parable

In July, 2023, I found Jesus on my kitchen floor. Literally. I’d just unpacked the groceries into fridge and cupboards and basement pantry, then bent to gather and stow the reusable bags strewn about the kitchen, and saw him lying there on the green and white tiles. Tiny Jesus. I picked him up. He was made of some sort of laminated cardboard. Posed with arms outstretched, feet in first position, hands and feet inked with red stigmata. Haloed head tilted slightly to the side, dark hair lank on his shoulders, great wide eyes of an Orthodox icon. I looked at Jesus lying there in the palm of my hand and wondered where he’d come from. Fallen out of one of the grocery bags? (Unexpected literature has landed in my grocery bags before.). From a recent wedding attended? (I hadn’t remembered adding any prayer cards to my purse.)

I know exactly when I found Jesus because I was so struck by the unexpected encounter that I texted a photo to husband and daughters, and to my seminary sisters, and wrote about it in my journal. It had been a hectic season, with multiple moving parts meshing imperfectly, and I felt more aware of busyness than blessing. I was a bit weirded out to find Jesus on my kitchen floor — those eyes! those bleeding hands and feet! At the same time, I was a bit delighted to think that I went out for groceries and ended up encountering Jesus in my own kitchen. Little laminated Jesus lying on the floor. But Jesus. I tucked him into the pocket at the back of my journal and every so often took him out to hold and look at. Jesus and I gazing at each other. When that blank book was filled, I moved him to the pocket of the next, and then the next after, until I bought some books without pockets, and then left Jesus on my desk, for his own safety.

Sometime last academic year, I saw that the middle image had dropped out of my key-charm. The cross-shaped charm had been a gift from a colleague. The cross was bigger than any individual key on the ring, and the whole was a difficult fit in the small bag I carry. (The key-ring-and-cross fit more easily before I also carried a cell phone, which gives some indication of how long I’d had the key ring and charm.). That said, I liked the heft of the cross in my hand (if not its fit in my purse), and when I saw its center was missing, I was dismayed. I went back out to the car, looking around the driver’s seat, reaching my hand into the creases, bending low to look on the floor. I checked the other car too, just in case. I did not see the center anywhere. For a few weeks, I left the cross charm on my key ring, then decided that it was silly to spend purse space when its center blank seemed to gape absence whenever I glanced at it. I removed the cross from the ring. It was, I admit, a lot easier to snug the keys into my bag. I appreciated the convenience.

This morning, I again came across the key-charm with its missing center. Why am I keeping this? I wondered. Then I thought Wouldn’t it be funny if the little laminated Jesus could fit in the empty center? Maybe I could trim and fit him in. I looked through my desk and found the Jesus, placed him in the center of the metal cross, and realized Oh … oh … This empty space is the place he’d come from. I set him in the outline, pressed slightly, then ran my thumb over the whole. The surface felt smooth. The fit was precise, even to its depth.

A parable cannot be reduced to any single meaning. Nor can this two year sequence of finding and losing and finding again. I might dwell on the shock of that initial encounter in the midst of everyday, an unexpected, weird, delighting, welcome right there on my kitchen floor. I might be stuck instead in the rueful realization that I hadn’t recognized the kitchen-found Jesus as one I’d carried for years — he looked so unfamiliar there on the floor — nor that I had carried the key-charm for months after without seeing that its center was missing. I might pause on the added thought that without that center, the key-charm didn’t seem worth carrying anymore.

For now I’ll rest in the reunion of the two pieces into a single whole. Find some glue to restore the charm securely, then attach it again to the ring. Yes, the whole will take up more space in my small bag. I’ll have to arrange things carefully each time, if they’re to fit. Do it, that the inconvenience of the matter may become its own parable. Re-enacted every time I take out my keys remembering, now, to look for the center image present.

Testimony in the Wilderness

“Moses descended Mount Sinai, and the two tablets of the testimony were in Moses’ hand in his descent from the mountain. Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone from his speech with [the LORD].”

Exodus 34:29; See Exodus 34:27-35 NRSVUE

The wind is wild tonight. I sit at my desk upstairs and hear it roar through the trees. Do I hear the creaking of the trees themselves? Does the house shudder slightly as another gust hits it? Something outside crashes loudly down. It’s too dark to see what.

The wind unsettles me. To be fair, I am already unsettled. Too much these weeks do I lurch from news report to news report, calming myself each time with recourse to countering commentary. (Also dark chocolate.) But these means keep me bracketed to meaning as defined by this world. Even opposing empire, I am allowing empire to define the terms of engagement.

With difficulty I wrest my mind from the wind’s violence to Exodus 34: Moses transfigured. I have sat with this text before, focused on the transformative intimacy of Moses and the LORD. Now I feel its larger context of wilderness, of people terrified and mourning and longing to be led into new life, of trauma.

Exodus 34 is a reprise of Moses’ earlier ascent to receive from the LORD stone tablets with the teachings and the commandments (Exodus 24:12-18). Then also Moses had been up there forty days and forty nights. Meanwhile, at the base of the mountain, the people had seen ‘that Moses delayed to come back down’ (Exod 32:1) and responded with the desperate anxiety of an abandoned child. They demanded a god to go before them. Aaron made the Golden Calf, and the people made an unholy festival (Exod 32:2-6), and the LORD made Moses go back down the mountain with the two tablets of testimony, God-carved and God-inscribed. God’s anger had blazed forth, ready to consume, but for Moses standing in the breach (Exod 32:7-14), identifying himself as one of God’s own, not God’s only own. At the end of a dance of judgment and mourning (32:15-33:11), request and response (33:12-23), the LORD said to Moses, ‘Now, carve two tablets of stone like the first, and I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you shattered’ (34:1). A second summons. A second ascent. A second span of forty days, after which Moses descends, shining.

In Exodus 32, the people’s sight of Moses’ absence so consumed them that they rushed to fill it. In Exodus 34, the people see in Moses’ radiance the presence of God.

The text tells that Moses did not know before it tells what Moses did not know. Moses doesn’t need to know his face shines. The people do. They have been oppressed by empire; terrified by wilderness. Maybe they’d imagined, leaving Egypt, that the road to the place God had promised would be straight, that any ascent would be so carefully graded that progress would be steady — that they could walk it without losing pace nor heart. Exodus tells a different story: a series of complaints and protests, of turning and returning. Wilderness life is precarious. God’s people know it so. They need to know it so. We need to know it so. So that they — we — can learn the only presence that will sustain life. Can leave space for it to shine, to speak.

This feels a wilderness time. My surprise at this feeling — or at its pain — is to me convicting. It reveals my mistake in imagining that the journey to kingdom living would be steady. That progress would be stable. Incremental. Within my control. As if control was ever meant to be mine. As if stability, rather than righteousness, is God’s priority. Have I (have we?) imagined myself ‘good people’ and forgotten the call to be ‘God’s people’? Goodness is a shallow cup. God is an inexhaustible well. Terrifyingly deep; ultimately sustaining.

Pray presence at the center. Not the small flickering that speaks of itself, but the great radiance that — even unknowing — tells God. Attend to the light; heed the speech; drink of the source. The stance on any particular issue may be the same; the strength will be greater.

Pray to see, pray to be, God’s testimony even, or especially, in this wilderness.

Creek’s Gleaming

Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, and the LORD will be his trust.
He will be as a tree transplanted upon water, and upon a stream he will stretch out his roots. He will not fear [see] when heat comes in; his leaf will be green. And in the year of drought, he will not be anxious, and he will not leave off making his fruit.

Jeremiah 17:7-8. See 17:5-10 NRSVUE

Light stays later these days but even so is fading when Paul and I set out for our walk. We go down to Sligo, needing the solace of water. We have the path nearly to ourselves this weekday evening. Walking. Some talking. More looking. The ground beside the path is soft; the grass is winter-bleached and strewn with last season’s leaves. Trees grow near the creek, some fallen across it. We stand a while on the bridge, watching the water slip between banks tangled with brush and vines.

I look at the water and listen to Jeremiah in my head. Jeremiah 17 pairs, and contrasts, the one who is cursed and the one who is blessed. The term used for each is the same, “champion” or “strong man.” They are not distinguished in innate vigor or prowess but in where they place their trust: whether in flesh or in the LORD. The one whose trust is the LORD will not cease making his fruit, Jeremiah says. Despite the drought, the heat, the salt of news in print or online or email inbox, there is fruit to be borne. Fruit specific to that one’s making, as there is fruit specific to mine.

This text has been to me as a drink of clear water when I have felt parched these last weeks. Lift it to my lips and tip the bowl of it. Sip its promise; let it fill my mouth, soothe the dry tissues. Swallow the words and feel the refreshment of them running down my throat. Then, revived by that first effect, drink of the text more deeply still. Plod my way through the Hebrew, word by word. Let the awkwardness of my translation catch my attention, focus my thought, in the same way that uneven ground makes me more aware of my step as I walk.

The one who trusts in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD, that one does not “fear” when heat comes in. That is what is written in the Hebrew: “he will not fear.” But in the margin is an ancient alternative: “he will not see.”** The NRSVUE reads the word as “fear”; the JPS reads it as “see” (JPS “sense”). Surely “fear” is the right translation, I think. It is the better choice for not denying the reality of drought, the risk of desiccation. It does not ignore the trouble but states the LORD is water regardless: roots stretch out; leaves green, fruit is made.

Then, thinking on, I see the symmetry in the alternate translation, the balance in its opposition: the one whose trust is flesh will not “see” when good comes” (17:6); the one whose trust is God will not “see” the heat (17:8).

Read the double-possibilities as deliberate wordplay: expressing the inversion of attitudes and outcomes as well as the relationship between vision and fear. Translating “see” reminds that the bases of trust — flesh vs. the LORD — oppose each other, reverse outcomes: as the one will not see good; so the other will not see heat. Yet translating “fear” keeps also in view that the difference in their vision is the right trust, including the right fear. Because the blessed one trusts in the LORD — has the LORD as trust — because that one does not fear the heat, he will see the good that comes in, he is able to see the good that comes in. Fear narrows vision, limits and misleads sight. Trust restores it. The scorching heat, desert drought, trouble looming over, these are real and terrible, but these are not entire. Good comes in its own and awesome glory. The one whose trust is the LORD will see it. And in the meanwhile makes the fruit that is peculiar to that one’s making.

Paul and I are walking by Sligo Creek. Sky fades to softness and even so, the creek gleams. Flowing water reflects the darkening tangle of trees and brush, yes, and also the faint pink cast of the setting sun, and the pale-water blue of the sky. Dusk draws in, and still the creek shows light, flows liquid silver, even amid the darkening.

Drink deep of the LORD, the living water. Stretch out roots to see the good, green your leaves, make the fruit that is yours to make.

**The two words are close in the Hebrew. The “Ketiv/Qere” notes reflect ancient reading tradition.

A Hope of Woe

And I said, ‘Woe to me! I am lost! For a man of unclean lips am I, and in the midst of a people of unclean lips I dwell, yet the King, the LORD of Hosts, my eyes have seen!’

Isaiah 6:5 [see Isaiah 6:1-13, NRSVUE]

In this season of headlines blaring crises and woe, I am avoiding Isaiah 6. It is unnerving to read of cities laid waste and houses uninhabited and the ground (‘adamah’) itself desolate, burned-over, bereft of its God-banished humans (‘adam’). It is unnerving to read of this expected destruction when the headlines seem to report so much of the same: not thoughtful husbandry of resources, careful culling of dead trees or pruning of unhealthy growth, but the slash and burn of an entire forest, heedless of where trees and branches fall, uncaring that the damage ripples beyond the immediate crash. Is there no good to nurture? In our time? In Isaiah’s? Where is the end? What is the goal?

To my ear, God’s tone is implacable. The LORD does not bluster but aims straight towards God’s end. Calls for someone to go, to proclaim, and thereby to accomplish, the hardening of people’s hearts and eyes and ears, lest they should see and hear and understand and turn again to the LORD (Isa 6:9-10), the LORD who is source of healing (Exod 15:26).

How is it that God should want to prevent this? Should call for one willing to be the agent of this hardening? Does the prophet know what he is volunteering for? He cried ‘Woe!’ in seeing his sin — starkly visible in the light of God’s holiness — and, reading, I realize the prophet’s cry is not undone by the touch of that hot coal, seraph-carried to his lips. The coal comes with the word that his sin is covered over, his iniquity turned away, but not that there is no more “woe!’ For when the prophet, purified and emboldened to speak in divine counsel, hears the task for which he has just offered himself, he cries out again: ‘Until when?’ (Isa 6:10). And learns that the work is longer than his lifetime, is a work that he himself will not accomplish, nor see accomplished. It is a work larger than human possibility.

Is this why the LORD reserves it to God-self, forecloses the possibility of premature return? Lest the people, turning, imagine that they have cleansed themselves, healed themselves, can be trusted with total control? Those who join house to house and field to field (Isa 5:8), who “acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of his right” (Isa 5:23) — these may share a portion of what they call their own, may make edits around the edges and imagine it is their righteousness working. As if individual acts of compassion are sufficient substitute for just society. Not them. We, us. For this, too, is part of the passage: the prophet does not cry his first woe in repudiation of others’ sin but in recognition of his own, and in kinship with his people. Isaiah’s glimpse of God gave him truer sight of himself: not one set apart from his nation’s sinfulness but one who has a part in it. Isaiah is convicted to speak of himself and people as one, and seemingly stricken with equal parts horror and awe, Isaiah cries Woe! That recognition — not ‘them’ but ‘we ourselves’ — begins the process of cleansing, allows Isaiah to speak to God, and after that, to speak for God. Even as hard word spoken judged Isaiah as much as the earth’s kings to whom he was subject.

We cannot save ourselves. God knows this. Isaiah learns this. In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw The King, the LORD of hosts. Isaiah has seen and spoken with The King, yet Isaiah cannot prevent Uzziah’s grandson Ahaz from right-sizing his foreign policy, piously refusing to rely on God (Isa 7), sending to the foreign empire Assyria for aid. Isaiah cannot keep Judah’s king, who should have been as ‘son’ to God (Psalm 2), submitting to be ‘son and servant’ to Assyria’s king (2 Kings 16:7), setting a foreign altar in God’s own sanctuary (2 Kings 16:10-16).

Isaiah cannot prevent any of this. Isaiah’s work, it turns out, is not to prevent it (lest Isaiah imagine that his work was effective to save?) but to prophesy nonetheless. To proclaim what fidelity looks like, to decry injustice and evil and oppression — even to write a record of the protest, of the call, of the need for God, and to seal that writing as a sign to the future (Isa 8). That seal signs both that the people did not, could not, save themselves, and the seal signs that there will be salvation.

Our burning-over is destruction. God’s burning-over leads to new seeds opening. The proclamation meanwhile is part of the work. I am not expected accomplish it; I am not excused from proclaiming it. It is my work to acknowledge my sinful part in the larger human ‘we’ (not us/them, but only us, all of us ‘like God,’ but not ourselves God). Recognize that kinship, cry out the Woe!, then attest to the possibilities that God intends.

Isaiah sees the LORD’s presence filling the house, the LORD’s glory filling the earth, and writes the vision so that others too can be filled. Filled with awareness of God’s holiness, awareness of our lack, and awareness that there is work to which we are summoned beyond that first Woe! Work which may fill us with, and for, God.

Read it and weep.

“And all the people gathered as one man in the square before the water gate. And they said to Ezra the scribe to bring out the scroll of the teaching of Moses which the LORD commanded to Israel. And Ezra the priest brought the teaching before the assembly, man and woman and all with understanding to hear…. “

Nehemiah 8:1-2 [Neh 8:1-12 NRSVUE]

Another round of Sunday morning balcony prayers. Sitting in my perch of a pew, looking at the stained glass colors shifting on the stone floor, while the sound of the choir’s rehearsal washes over me. The news of the new administration has come in a barrage of rapid-fire reports. Day 1 executive orders. A bishop’s plea for mercy. Late-night ‘truth’ tweets and morning updates and executive orders round 2 and 3 and more. (Reminder to self: read the print paper; avoid the online comments.). Now I am here, at church, in the balcony praying, if only, to settle and center myself for worship. Mentally rehearsing the week’s news is not the right litany for my need. Settle. Center. Listen to the choir, even its pauses, its repeats, a particular phrase rehearsed again and again to make it right. ‘Slow it down,’ our music minister exhorts, ‘hear the words. They’re beautiful.’

Slow it down. Hear the words. Nehemiah 8. I’ve been in it a week, and I may linger a week longer. Nehemiah 8: the chapter depicts the people as one. That’s the literal Hebrew: that the people were ‘as one man’ [8:1]. The text lists men and women and all with understanding to hear, and knits this variety together as one whole. United they are in asking of Ezra that the scroll of the teaching be brought to be read. United the people ask to hear God’s instruction; united they lift their hands; united they bow their heads and worship God [8:6].

Ezra reads. The ears of all the people are tuned to the scroll of teaching [8:3], and the words heard penetrate past ears to hearts. Ezra reads, and the people weep at the voice of this writing restored to them after long while. Reading Nehemiah, I remember Amos’s warning: refusal to heed God’s word leads to inability to hear, to famine of truth. Had God’s people starved? (Have we? How else to interpret a people that hears the call to mercy as ‘nasty,’ conflates politics with partisanship rather than community governance, grabs after ‘mine’ for me rather than seeking ‘ours’ for all, interprets diversity as opposition to unity rather than its intended expression?)

Ezra reads, and weeping follows. It’s as if the people — through giving hands and heads and ears to worshipful attention — themselves have been given new vision. Through this lens of God’s teaching, they glimpse God’s holiness, and they glimpse themselves through God’s eyes. (I see this second sight also in Amos.) Weeping expresses their intense yearning; weeping is their prayer that God, too, yearns for reunion, that God, too, longs to rejoice with us, in us.

The weeping people’s wordless prayer is answered. Do not weep, the leaders exhort, do not mourn. Do not grieve, they say — and the Hebrew used, etsev, takes me back to the beginning: etsev is the word for human toil and pain [Gen. 3:16-17], for the intense grief of the LORD God-self at the spoliation of God’s good creation [Gen. 6:6]. Do not etsev, the weeping people are told, for ‘this day is holy’ and ‘the joy of the LORD is your strength’ [Neh. 8:10].

Live holy. Live in the strength of God’s joy. Eat and drink and share portions with those who have not [8:10, 12].

The blur of tears gives way to clearer sight. I do not settle or center myself. I am settled through being present to God’s presence, lifting hands to praise, bowing body to worship, tuning ears to hear. I am centered through eating and drinking and generous living. Phrases and practices rehearsed over and over till I — till we — are made right in the repetition.

Time to go down again to worship, to word proclaimed and table opened. And from there out into the fray of the world to ‘resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.’*

Do God’s joy. Be God’s joy.

*This phrase comes from the Baptismal Covenant of the United Methodist Church.

Speaking Delight

On account of Zion, I will not be silent.
On account of Jerusalem, I will not be still —
Until as brightness her righteousness goes out,
And her salvation burns as flame.

Isaiah 62:1 (my transl.); see Isaiah 62:1-5 NRSVUE

The lectionary repeats every three years, so I am again looking at this Isaiah text. Again pondering silence and speech, naming and re-naming, brightness and sight. Again wondering if and how there might be any news in this text so old. I’ve written on it already. Why write on it again? Why keep speaking the need to speak? Is anyone even listening, or are we all tired of the same old summons to righteousness, said as if we’ve made no forward motion in the last 70 years?

The lectionary repeats every three years, and sometimes the ancient text and the current calendar seem so in sync that that synchronicity itself speaks. This section from the prophet Isaiah is assigned for Sunday, the eve of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, this year also the eve of the presidential inauguration. The concurrence of these two observances has its own awkward synchronicity. One looks back at the man who called the nation to ‘Stride Towards Freedom’ — urging us forward towards making real the ideals we ostensibly espouse. The other inducts into office the man who calls for greatness ‘again,’ said with a backward glance, towards some imagined former, now-lost, luster. Each attitude in its way acknowledges that where we are as a people is not where we are meant to be; they hold this conviction in common with each other. So too Isaiah, the prophet who looks back to look forward, modeling the insight that reiteration may be, after all, part of the point.

The oracle that begins in 62:1 is not beginning from scratch, after all. The last section of the prophetic book, Isaiah 56-66, is replete with call-backs to what had come before, renewing and extending God’s promises to God’s people. Not because life had been static since the promises first were proclaimed but because the proclamation had not yet been fully realized: life had lurched forward, and twisted sideways, and shifted again, and still there was more road ahead.

Time it was that God had declared that the time for silence was past — that time had come to to cry out like a warrior, like a woman in labor — that God was birthing something new in and for God’s people, turning ‘darkness into light’ (Isa 42:10-16). The context for those promises was war, exile, inestimable loss. God’s people had cried out their conviction of forsakenness — and God had reassured that the LORD had not forsaken, that God was returning to embrace, that Daughter Zion should again be a rejoicing bride (Isa 49:14-18; 54:6-8).

Fifty or 100 years on, some of those promises had been realized: official exile had ended; deportees had returned to the land of their origin; Jerusalem had been rebuilt. Yet not all returned. The rebuilt city was less than the remembered old. The rough places had not been made all plain nor the crooked straight; God’s glory had not yet shone so universally bright that all flesh rejoiced in seeing it together (Isa 40:3-5).

Creation’s joy may have burst forth at the anticipation of return, but some 70 years on, its song seemed too soon over (Isa 55:12-13). God’s people were divided. They quarreled. They had to be reminded yet again, to keep justice and do righteousness, that God’s salvation was drawing near, that God’s righteousness being revealed (Isa 56:1). The time for silence was long, long past (Isa 42:13-14). The time to cry out is not yet over (Isa 62:1). Words are required again, and still, until righteousness shines bright and salvation flames. God does not cut short God’s bringing-forth any more than a laboring woman stops her labor short of birth. The only way to go is forward. Not because progress has not been made but because it has not yet been fully realized.

Life lurches forward, and twists sideways, and slouches ahead again, and still there is more road ahead. We look back to get our bearings, align ourselves with the marks, and adjust our way. Until God’s promise is realized fully and completely: salvation aflame and righteousness shining bright and all flesh — all — rejoicing in present glory and bridal delight.