Drone Tones

The LORD is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The LORD is the stronghold of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?
Psalm 27:1

Sunday March 17, 2019; Psalm 27 full text linked below:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+27&version=NRSV

I am reading Iris Origo’s Italian War Diary** this week. On July 11, 1943, she woke to the sound of booming. Her diary records the noise of naval bombardment, the reports of allied landings in Sicily, and the ‘little festa’ celebrating her newborn daughter’s christening. ‘A day of strange contrasts,’ Origo wrote, adding, ’The introit [for the Mass] is appropriate: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? … Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident…’ I read Origo’s journal and wonder how people are able to live, when dailiness itself is warped by being woven with the weft of war.

I do not suffer the shudder of bombardment punctuating the introit to Mass, nor — as Origo heard through the waves of her own labor pain — the groaning of an injured airman in the next room. But I read the news. Last week’s Ethiopian airplane crash. Yesterday’s massacre in the New Zealand mosque. Other events, less traumatic, but closer to home.

There are times I am overwhelmed with it all: the scale of suffering, the number of needs, the amount of things that must be done, that I could and should do. I am pulled askew, taut and thin, stretched as if to breaking. The present pain of the world sounds a drone tone to my life — as the sounds of bombardment were to the sung introit of Origo’s daughter’s Christening Mass. An untimely syncopation, pulling any sense of melody off-key. Such days I cannot even recall hope, much less sense it. If only I could fix myself towards some single point, I think, if only so, then at least I could claim it.

‘One thing I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple’ (Psa 27:4).

One thing only. One thing enough.

The psalmist knew the same trouble as I, as Origo, as any. The psalmist is similarly pulled. The psalm does not strike a single note but many, it is woven through with a whole gamut of emotion, of need, of desire. The psalmist is battered by circumstance, aware of enemies, even, at times, feels forsaken by the LORD.

‘Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud … Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help. Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation!’ (Psa 27:7a, 9).

Yet the drone-tone through the psalm is not, in fact, the world’s pain, nor even the psalmist’s. Those are named, and truly, and held up to God. Attention is paid, as it must be. But the sustaining tone behind the noise is the singleness of the psalmist’s conviction of the LORD’s beauty, of the LORD’s succor: ‘he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will set me high on a rock’ (Psa 27:5). The warp is kept taut and true despite the varied weft by the singleness of the psalmist’s hope in the LORD’s hearing and the LORD’s goodness.

‘Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD’ (Psa 27:14).

Step to that beat. Not because it is easy nor even obvious. But because it is the only way to keep walking through the valley when hope cannot be felt nor recalled but only claimed. One step. The next. Wait for the LORD. Claim the LORD my light and my salvation. Claim the LORD my goodness through all my days. Claim the LORD claiming me.

May the days be woven straight, even when the path runs slantwise to sense, to justice, to grace. May the days be woven true with and into love. May the sum of all the weaving be the pains eased, the hurts healed, and the world returned to wholeness as all shout together with joy.

** quotes from Iris Origo, War in Val D’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1044; London: Pushkin Press (2017), pp. 63, 59.

The Meaning of Beloved

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, …’

Luke 4:1-3; full lectionary gospel linked below:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+4%3A1-13&version=NRSV

Sunday March 10, 2019, Lent 1

If love has the last word, then why is the devil speaking?

Jesus has just been baptized with water from the river and with word from on high (Luke 3:21-22). Jesus is Son. Jesus is Beloved. Jesus pleases well. And Jesus, full of the Spirit, is led by that same Spirit into the wilderness, and there Jesus is tempted by the devil for 40 days. Jesus will be famished by the days’ end. How should this be?

‘If you are the Son of God,’ the devil prods. Is the phrasing a taunt, casting doubt on the prior experience, the wonder of blessing having given way to wilderness stress? Is the phrasing a challenge, ‘since you are …’* — testing the bounds of how that claim will be lived? Does the devil seek to cajole or to provoke?

In any case, why should Jesus be there, in the wilderness, accosted by such active, persistent, personal temptation? Why should the Spirit have led Jesus to this?

Or is this, yet again, what the Spirit does: makes plain what beloved-ness is, what blessing means, what inspiration leads us to see. Encounter with God necessarily requires encounter with neighbor. People are hungry — how shall they be fed? People search for meaning — where shall they find it? People long for community — how will they create it? The people are not pretend nor their needs imaginary. They are flesh and blood and desperately real. They are famished. As Jesus becomes.

Luke presents the test with a fable-like setting and pair. Jesus and devil both are well-versed in the written word of God and well-acquainted with the needs of the world. But the devil disguises the needs as a set of hypothetical tests, as if the claim of beloved-ness is proved in accurate quotation and pure speech. Jesus refuses the hypothetical. Jesus turns to the real. Jesus will not use the world to prove the Word but will live the Word to heal the world. Jesus — still filled with the Spirit (Luke 4:14) — will ‘return to Galilee’ and begin to teach and claim for himself Isaiah’s anointing to ‘bring good news to the poor’ (Luke 4:18). Isaiah the prophet who, seeing God in glory, saw himself and his people with new-opened eyes (Isaiah 6:1-5).

We cannot see God without seeing our neighbor. And maybe, when we truly look to see and hear and love our neighbor, we will find that we have learned to see and hear and love our Lord.

I am not strong enough to pray that the Spirit may lead me into the wilderness. But I can at least pray to see and hear and love more fully, more truly, even knowing that wilderness will occur. And I pray that when I know myself there, the Spirit will remind me — yet again — that this new sight is the meaning of ‘beloved,’ reassure me that the Spirit is leading me through, and revive in me the conviction that the Spirit will fill me and use me toward the healing of the world.

*The Greek can be read either way.

Marking Mercy

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sound the alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for the day of the LORD is coming, it is near—
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and thick darkness!
Like blackness spread upon the mountains
a great and powerful army comes;
their like has never been from of old,
nor will be again after them
in ages to come. …
Yet even now, says the LORD,
return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
rend your hearts and not your clothing.
Return to the LORD, your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
and relents from punishing.

Joel 2:1-2, 12-13; text for Ash Wednesday March 6, 2019

A season of uncertainty. I read the news of the world, of the nation, of the church. Of disarmament, of immigration, of investigation, of exclusion, of dissolution. The lack of shared vision unsettles. The weather itself conspires to contribute to the sense of confusing variation. We’re a week into March by the calendar but a month back towards winter by the weather, experiencing a reprise of unseasonable cold, even snow.

Lent begins this week. Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the days that take us to Easter. My thumb dipped in oil, pressed into ashes, marking the sign of the cross on someone’s forehead. The cross signed on my own forehead. Dust you were and to dust you shall return. The murmured reminder sounded to each. Skin touching skin; grease and ash between. So many foreheads, each unique. All of them smudged with the souvenir of our shared mortality. Incongruous. Unifying.

One year, late home from the evening service, I looked in the mirror and saw above my tired eyes, a question mark smudged on my forehead. The sooty cross had shifted shape. Did it tell the uncertainty of a passing season? Did it signal a deeper mystery?

We know our near-term destination. At the end of Lent, comes Holy Week, the church’s re-living of Jesus’ death and resurrection, undertaken in anticipation of our own. The days can be counted, the steps marked in time as if on a map. But so much we do not know. Who or what will we encounter along our way? What or who will encounter us? Who will we be when we encounter Easter? And who when Easter — God’s Easter, not the church’s — encounters us?

Jesus taught his disciples to pray: ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt 6:10). Yet the prophet Joel makes plain that God’s kingdom does not wait on our will. The day of the LORD comes when God wills, with trumpets and in gloom. The mystery of the prayer, the mystery of the season, is not that God waits for our cue but that we are tuned to God’s design, that we may greet our Lord trembling not with the terror of righteous judgment but with the joy of reconciliation, the grace of reunion, the amazement of love overwhelming

‘Yet even now,’ says the LORD. Even as the trumpet is sounding. Even as gloom looms dark, obscuring the way. Yet even now, there is time, there is direction, there is the promise and presence of LORD who is ‘gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.’

Abounding in steadfast love. For us.

That mystery persists. That mystery abiding has the power to sustain even in this uncertain season.

Cross or question, may the ash-mark upon my forehead be a gateway to the journey.

Transfiguration

for Sunday March 3, 2019

Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them; and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses spoke with them. Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he gave them in commandment all that the LORD had spoken with him on Mount Sinai.

Exodus 34:29-32

Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.

Luke 9:28-29; full lectionary text linked below

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+9%3A28-36&version=NIV

This has been a hard week for the people of God called Methodist, the people among whom I live and work and love, to whom I am committed, with whom I have communion. Some of whom now have been dealt the blow of exclusion. News is still too new to know if, or how irrevocably, communion has broken. But the specter itself aches. I feel uncharacteristically wanting Ash Wednesday, texts and liturgy that match my mood.

But first comes this Sunday, when the church recalls Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain. The lectionary twins the text from Luke with that of Moses’ transfiguration. The writer of the gospel evokes Exodus motifs: dazzling white glory, shining shadow cloud, divinity speaking on the mountain. Jesus is about to accomplish his own (literally) ‘exodus’ at Jerusalem (Luke 9:31). Moses and Jesus. The figures are connected. But I don’t think their comparison is the sum of the gospel’s aim. Such reading is too facile, too swiftly exhausts the significance of the text. If it is about no more than proving Jesus’ identity as ‘Son,’ then we the church could just recite the creed and be done. It would be a much more efficient use of Sunday mornings. But we’re given — yet again — a story.

One story. Doubly told. A story about encounter with the LORD. About how that transforms those who are directly there and those who encounter them.

Moses has been on Mount Sinai 40 days and 40 nights (Exod 34:28). Moses has asked, and been granted, a vision of the LORD’s glory — an encounter so powerful that God himself must shield Moses from its full effects (Exod 33:21-23). The LORD, who knows Moses by name (Exod 33:17), descends in a cloud and proclaims his own name: ‘The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation’ (Exod 34:5-7). Moses has spoken with the LORD; Moses has heard God’s own mouth proclaiming God’s own nature: ‘I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy’ (Exod 33:19). No wonder Moses shines with the reflection of God’s glory! No wonder Aaron and the rest are terrified! Moses mutes his glow, tells what the LORD had told. Ever after, when Moses speaks with the LORD, his face again shines (Exod 34:34-35).

Do Peter and John and James shine when they came down the mountain? Like Moses they had stood in the presence of God, been enveloped by the cloud, heard divine speech (Luke 9:33-35). But unlike Moses, when they came down the mountain, they had nothing to say. Not yet. They kept silent (Luke 9:36). Maybe because they still did not understand the encounter they had had, and until its fullness was revealed after Easter, they were unable to receive it, unable to tell it, unable to glow with the reflection of its glory. In time that would come. In time, maybe, they would glow. In the presence of joy. In the practice of love. In the experience of communion.

I have seen that glow. Not the overwhelming glory that tells me that I am in the direct presence of divinity but the glow that tells me the one whose face is shining has been. And the glow of encounter has shined on my own face. I don’t always know it, think only that I am telling of some newness I have seen, some wonder I have encountered, don’t even realize I am aflame until the person to whom I am talking lights in response and I realize. Oh. This is it.

Here’s the thing: I have seen that glow on those who hold inclusion as dear as I do and on those who do not. I have learned from them; they have learned from me. We have disagreed about how God sees and yet at times — to our mutual surprise — we have recognized a glow of glory and lit a new sight of God for each other. I believe the LORD has been delighted by the spark kindled, the light spread.

Transfiguration Sunday is not only about Jesus but about the church. We live after Easter. We are no longer to remain silent as the disciples did. We are not to turn away from each other’s light nor quench each other’s fire. We are called to encounter God with and through each other, to shine in communion, to glow with the glory of the LORD, the LORD, merciful and gracious.

May God’s mercy and grace heal those hurt, guard the glow, and restore our hope of inclusive communion, that we may all look full and loving at each other whole, ascend the holy mountain, speak with the LORD, and feel our faces shine bright with God’s glory.

Living Water

“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. …
“But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Luke 6:27-28, 35-36

for Sunday February 24, 2019

Wednesday it snowed. Flakes fell fast and the ground was cold so they stuck and they stacked, and soon the sight through the window was of shades and shadows of grey — from white to blue to dove. After the snow came some freezing rain, skimcoating the ground with an icy glaze. By night, the streetlights seemed to show a frozen world. All stiff and still.

Thursday it was warm. The sun and the temperature rose together. In the afternoon I took a walk. The snow was much melted. The white cover persisted in the shade, rapidly sagging, showing more and more of the color beneath. The snow and the earth were softening into each other. I saw the wheaty-green of wintertime grass, the squelchy brown of mud showing through. Snowmelt gurgled in downspouts and ran along the edges of the road, glinting and glimmering as it rushed downhill. Its motion flashed in the sunshine.

How do we have a conversation? How do we have a dialogue, an argument — in the best sense of the word? How do we define the issues, limit the dispute, carefully explore each point of view? How do we come to mutual understanding even if not common agreement?

I am a professor. In class I talk. I review the readings; I add information; I invite discussion. Sometimes there is little answer. The information feels too new or there is too much of it. And I stand there as an expert, which itself can inhibit response. I have learned to ask “What questions do you have?” not “Any questions?” I try to listen and not rush to fill the pauses. I am still working on it. But I try, not just for the sake of my students’ learning, but for my own. Because the possibility for surprise flows both ways. Because it is delight when the talk takes an unexpected turn, latches on to an overlooked detail, makes it new for all of us. Makes us newly alive.

Why conversation? you wonder. Why listening and speaking when Jesus is talking about love? Love your enemies, do good, bless, pray. There’s nothing in that list about listening.

No. But Jesus’ four-fold litany — love, do good, bless, pray — is addressed to “you who are listening.” Listening, it seems, is the prerequisite. Listening is the beginning. Love, it seems, starts in listening. In listening to Jesus’ speech. In listening to each others’ speech. Not just passively allowing the sounds to flow past our ears, but listening with our whole hearts and soul and strength and mind (Luke 10:27). Listening, expecting nothing in return, listening even to our enemies, those who hate us, who curse and abuse us. For our Father is merciful to the ungrateful, even to the wicked. Our Father listens even to us (Luke 11:9-10).

Jesus is talking to us. Not to our enemies. We who are listening are the ones addressed, the ones invited to respond. Whole-hearted listening is the start of our loving; and love continues in whole-hearted speech. We are not meant to stand frozen stiff and still in pristine purity but to turn towards each other, to soften into each other. To listen and love and do good and bless and pray.

May there be space for words and space for silence. May there be openness to the possibility of mutual surprise. May there be the delight of new sight, of unexpected understanding. May we be each transformed by the encounter. May we know communion.

See! We are having a conversation! See how it burbles and glints as it flows!

Living water.

Hearing Healing

for Sunday February 17

[Jesus] came down with [the twelve] and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them. Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
“But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
“Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.
“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

Luke 6:17-26

I wish this text did not have ‘Woes.’ A bit ironic when last week I had been so stricken as to join Isaiah’s own and claim hope in it. It would seem nicer if this text had only blessings. Even if I could not claim myself among those identified as ‘blessed’ — we are not poor nor hungry, although weeping I know — I could at least hang near their fringes. Luke’s Jesus does not seem to permit this sidling near. There are those pronounced ‘blessed’ and those to whom Jesus addresses woes. Luke’s Jesus explicitly addresses the extremes, as if there is no middle. One is blessed, or one is addressed with woe. Those are the only options.

‘Don’t spiritualize Luke,’ the commentaries all agree. When Luke says ‘poor,’ do not helpfully complete the phrase ‘in spirit’ (Matt 5:3), think destitute, even desperate. When Luke says ‘hungry’ do not imagine hungering for righteousness (Matt 5:6), think bellies bloated with emptiness, of daily bread prayed for more often than eaten. Definitely do not let this thought drive you up from the table for another square of dark chocolate. Set yourself back into your seat, staring — glaring — at this text, sorry you cannot count yourself poor and hungry, sorry to know you are rich and full, wishing there was a word in Jesus’ words that you could claim as happy, a happy word you could claim as for you.

‘Happy’ or ‘fortunate’ — these are equally apt translations for the ‘blessed.’ And the ‘woe’ is not itself a curse although it pronounces the pain to be felt when we see as God sees. The words are powerful, blessing no less than woe. Jesus’ speech makes something plain that was not so before; Jesus’ speech makes something be that had not been before. The poor realize their inheritance, the hungry experience fullness, the mourners hiccup past the worst of their tears and begin to feel a peace steal over their spirit. Jesus’ words perform what they describe: blessedness.

And the rich? Those who are full and laugh and have the praise of ‘all’ (an inherently suspect acclamation)? Does Jesus truly speak ‘to’ or only ‘about’ them? Are they rhetorical figures, straw-persons set in opposition to the blessed? Were they there among that crowd of disciples who had come to hear and be healed? If so, what did they hear? How were they healed?

‘Power came out of him,’ Luke writes of Jesus, and the power that came out from him ‘healed all of them.’ And then Jesus looks at his disciples — not only the twelve apostles but the whole ‘crowd’ of disciples there — and speaks.

Healing precedes hearing, one commentator notes. I wonder. Maybe the power that comes out and heals is Jesus’ speech. The sound of his voice, the rise and fall of his tone, the shapes of his words, strung into sentences of blessing and of woe, sentences that make things happen. You listen as if he is talking to you. You listen because he is talking to you: ‘Blessed are you,’ ‘Woe to you.’ And because Jesus is talking to you, you yourself, you hear what you had not before. You’re not inappropriately sidling near, as if hoping blessing might trickle down. You already are there, already trying to hear. Maybe the point is not, or not only, the proclamation of blessing, the pronouncement of woe, but the adjustment of sight, the glimpse for a moment as if through God’s eyes, of God’s judgment, in God’s reign. A flash like lightening on a summer night that shudders across the entire sky, shows the world brighter than day, so that darkness after seems blacker than before. But there was that moment. When you saw. That those consoled in their riches have exhausted all the consolation that they can know. But those — rich and poor alike — who gather on a plain, bringing their illnesses and their troubled spirits to the source of consolation may yet be healed, may yet become a community together, a crowd of disciples, gathering and eating and sharing the kingdom of God.

Reading the News

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Isaiah 6:1

Excerpt from lectionary text: Isa 6:1-13

for Sunday, February 10, 2019

In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah ben Amoz went into the Temple. Maybe he went for duty; maybe he went for solace. Maybe he went for sense of presence that had sustained him in the past. The presence that he felt not in but through the pillars of bronze capped with lily-work, the basins of bronze and carvings of cherubim, the lamp stands of pure gold, the altar … (1 Kings 7:15-50).

In the year of the new Congress, in the month after the government shutdown — the month in which it might happen again — in the week of a multitude of news stories about race and politicians and public figures, of fingers pointed and voices raised and all of it accusation and none of it dialogue, I opened the book of Isaiah. Maybe I went for duty; maybe I went for solace; maybe I went in hopes of a new encounter with the presence that has sustained in the past.

In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah went into the Temple. He stretched out his arm and felt weight of the door shift as he pushed his hand against it. And maybe, when he entered, he heard the priest say, ‘This week, worship will focus on the pomegranates.’ And maybe Isaiah thought ‘The pomegranates? Again?’ It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading this fruit nor appreciate its rich symbolism. But I’ve made a study of it already, recently, have pored over so many scholarly scrolls. I know how the pomegranate links Temple and the high priest’s robes (Exod 28:33-34) and the land itself (Deut 8:7-10). I have studied the way this text links to the rest of the book — the reference to lips and mouth, the motifs of deafness and blindness — all themes which recur, with variations, from Isaiah 6 through Isaiah 29 to Isaiah 42 and on. But this is the year King Uzziah died. But this is the week that every time I open my laptop, there is a new ‘Breaking News’ scroll, and this text is too familiar, and I had hoped that we’d be set to something new, to stretch our study and pondering, to encounter sustaining presence amid this urgent and pervasive instability.

Isaiah set himself to read again the familiar fruit, in the familiar space, in the Temple, set above the capitals. I set myself to read again the familiar text, in the familiar space, between the Song of the Vineyard of Isaiah 5 and the encounter at the Fuller’s Field of Isaiah 7. Isaiah set himself to read again the familiar fruit in the new space of Uzziah’s death.

And Isaiah saw the LORD and heard the singing and smelled the smoke and felt the shaking of his own heart pounding in sync with pivots on the thresholds.

‘How long, O LORD?’ Isaiah heard himself ask, presented as he was with God’s impossible command: to prophesy with the expectation of being ignored, to persist in the face of stubborn rejection, to speak knowing that very speech would — surely, perversely — cause the audience to turn away, to add to the online comment field ‘How long do we have to discuss this? How long are we going to go over this old ground? He is the problem, not us. He is reprehensible. We never harbored those thoughts, participated in those practices, laughed at those photos.’ How long?

Reply comes that persistence is required. Because the rejected word is not the last word. Because the hardening, the closing-off, the people turned to stone is not the point but the path. There will be planting where there was pulling up. There will be new growth where there was only burned-over ground. Because there cannot be new growth until the ground has been cleared. Because the people cannot be healed until they realize they are sick. Until we realize that we are sick unto death.

In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw the LORD in the Temple. In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw himself. Maybe Isaiah saw himself so devastatingly clearly because Isaiah saw the LORD, so high and lofty. Maybe Isaiah saw the LORD high and lofty, because suddenly Isaiah saw himself as he never had done before.

Stretch out your arm; put your hand up to the door; feel its weight shift in response to your push; enter into the text though you have done so countless times before. Read the known text; read the news. Whichever reading occasions the vision, may it come. Overwhelming in its very reality. Bringing into shocking conjunction the image of holiness, the conviction of sin. Leading to the necessary cry: ‘Woe is me, for I am a woman of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.’ Proclaim it. For according to the promise, ‘Woe!’ is not the ending but the hope of its beginning.

Two Texts At a Gathering

Now the word of the LORD came to me saying,
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” …
But the LORD said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’;
for you shall go to all to whom I send you,
and you shall speak whatever I command you,
Do not be afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD.”
Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me,
“Now I have put my words in your mouth.
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.” Jeremiah 1:4-10

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. … [Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. … And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. 1 Cor 13:1-2, 7-10, 13

texts for Sunday Feb. 3, 2019

Which route to take through the thicket this week? The reprise of silence and speech, as from Isaiah 62? The continuation of Paul’s writing the Corinthians about gifts? Which passage speaks more strongly? Or do they speak to each other. I know the text-connection is just a trick of the lectionary, which lists both passages this same week, but I wonder all the same. I imagine the texts as two guests at the same gathering. What do they share beyond acquaintance with the host?

Maybe they engage with the classic, ‘What do you do?’ Or maybe ‘When …?’ After all, the words of each arise out of the particular time and place in which he worked: Jeremiah prophesying at the end of the kingdom of Judah, in the shadow of the crisis of exile; Paul instructing the Corinthians, a church in the crisis of its growing pains. Each spoke in a different world. Which does not mean their words cannot speak to each other.

Imagine overhearing these two texts, standing at that gathering, glasses in hand, surrounded by the buzz and movement of others also there, talking towards their own particular connection.

A dialogue on speech: ‘You shall speak whatever I command you… ’; ’If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels….’ A dialogue on prophecy: ‘I appointed you a prophet …’; ‘And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries….’ Does it seem each overture of Jeremiah’s is undermined by a retort from Paul — ‘I am a noisy gong’; ‘as for prophecies they will come to an end…’? Listen again, and closely.

‘The word of the LORD came to me,’ Jeremiah tells, as the conversation swirls around them both. The LORD said, ‘I appointed you a prophet to the nations.’ Only in Jeremiah’s speech, what the LORD says is ‘I have given* you …’, a giving which recurs towards the end of the encounter, as the LORD stretches out his hand and touches Jeremiah’s mouth and says ‘See, I have given* my words in your mouth.’ Giving. Gifts.

‘Gifts!’ Paul exclaims, in delight at the connection. ‘That’s what I am talking about: the gifts God gives in and through and for the body. And the greatest of these is love.’

‘Of course love,’ Jeremiah replies. Did the command to pluck up and pull down cloud the issue? It is love that connects God and prophet and people so closely that the suffering of one is experienced by the other as grief and heart-sickness, hurt and dismay (Jer 8:18-21).

‘Love bears all things,’ Paul murmurs.

‘Love gives all things,’ Jeremiah says. The LORD gave me myself; the LORD gave me God-self. Paul nods in rueful recognition, recalling a certain encounter of his own (1 Cor 15:8).

Not an easy gift, love. Its force breaks in to life-as-it-was and plants life as-it-might-be, life growing towards complete.

The texts’ conversation continues, overture expanding into symphony; the music of their exchange stretching past their two times and on into my own. Breaking in and giving still.

* [literal Hebrew; the NRSV connects Jer 1:5 and 1:10 by repeating the verb ‘appoint,’ stressing the connection of Jeremiah’s appointment as prophet and the nations/kingdoms he is appointed over; the Hebrew of the MT connects Jer 1:5 and 1:9 by repeating the verb ‘to give,’ stressing the connection of the LORD giving Jeremiah as a prophet and the LORD giving words to Jeremiah’s mouth.]

Thumbs

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 one Spirit.
Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. […]
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

1 Cor. 12:12-20, 27-31

Jan. 27, 2019

Sloths do not have opposable digits. I do not recall how this became a significant bit of family knowledge; probably some PBS nature documentary. The significance of the sloths’ lack of thumbs manifests in a particular practice: when having to stand on the Metro, my husband and daughters hold the grab bars with their thumb and fingers all curved in the same direction rather than grasping the bar firmly within a round formed of thumb, palm, and fingers.

“We don’t want to show off our opposable thumbs,” my husband explained, the first time I noticed this peculiarity. “Sloths might be jealous.” Our girls found this absolutely hilarious. As much in recollection of their mirth as a desire to not incite sloth-envy, I sometimes find myself — even alone — reenacting that peculiar modesty, and holding the grab bar in a way that does not show off my opposable thumbs.

Thumbs matter. I may choose to not use my thumb’s opposability — in deference to sloths’ sensibilities — but it does not cease to be a functional thumb, ideally suited for grasping transit grab bars or holding a pen or whatever. Its function is just not being fully realized. The thumb’s full thumb-ness (is that a word?) comes in its interaction with the rest of the hand: the fingers it reaches across the palm to touch; the palm itself, that fleshy center, from which all five digits splay and wiggle and stretch and hold on to the world.

We are all members of one body, the apostle Paul writes the church in Corinth. Already.

Paul is not instructing them to become something new but reminding them of what they have already become: one body. Paul is urging them to live it. (No thumb modesty enjoined!).

“We were all baptized into one body,” Paul writes. “You are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.” Paul claims identity with all and with each of them, a membership no more nor less than that of Chloe or Stephanos or Crispus or Gaius.

Every part is fully part of the whole; every part is equally significant to the whole; every part matters in the whole. And every part needs to live in the whole to be most fully itself.

A whole that is greater than the sum of all its parts: the community, the body of Christ.

I matter to the body. I matter in the body. Thumb or palm or fingers. Apostle or prophet or teacher. The identity has already been given. I do not need to seek it but only to see it. To see it and to live it in the body, with all those others whose names and shapes and work are different from my own. And without whom my own identity cannot be fully known, without whom God’s gift to me, of me, cannot be entirely experienced. Without whom I cannot splay and wiggle and stretch to touch the world, living into the greater gift, the more excellent way, love.

Silence and Speech

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,
until her vindication shines out like the dawn,
and her salvation like a burning torch. …
Upon your walls, O Jerusalem,
I have posted sentinels;
all day and all night
they shall never be silent.
You who remind the LORD,
take no rest,
and give him no rest
until he establishes Jerusalem
and makes it renowned throughout the earth.

from Isaiah 62:1, 6-7; from Isaiah 62:1-7

Jan. 20, 2019

I’m cheating. Is it cheating? The lectionary text is Isaiah 62:1-5, but I’m reading two more verses. Because what catches me is not the imagery of Zion as a bride (v.4), nor Jerusalem renamed (v.2), nor whether the crown of beauty and royal diadem (v.3) should be understood as reference to the rebuilt walls of the post-exilic city — all of which are important issues, properly the focus of scholarly and devotional attention.

What catches at me is the very first line: ’For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent.’

Silence. Enjoined. Invited. Unbearable. Unsustainable.

Silence and speech. Recurring motifs throughout the book. I’ve spent the past few years focused on them, from the prophesied hardening of Isaiah 6:6-10 (‘… stop their ears and shut their eyes’), through the renewed call to listen and to look (Isa 42:14-18), on to the servant, ‘blind’ and ‘deaf’ (Isa 42:19), yet ‘given the tongue of a taught-one* … to sustain the weary with a word,’ whose ear the LORD wakens (Isa 50:4), and further to the promise that ‘all your children shall be taught-ones* of the LORD’ (Isa 54:14). Silence and speech. I had followed that thread so far and am not sure that I ever had hit upon this particular passage. Or been struck by it.

Silence and speech. I thought that first line caught because of the work I have done. Now I wonder if the work itself caught me first. Because I have felt silent. Because I want to speak. Because my ear has been wakened. Because it’s no good listening if I cannot tell others what I hear. Because I don’t always know what I’ve heard until I say it to someone else. Because the imperative to speak is given so that I know. So that I am known. So that I know I am known.

Yet this passage says even more. Something new to my ears.

‘For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest.’

Zion. Jerusalem. The LORD’s bride; ’My Delight’; ’Married’ (Isa 62:4) This is not about me as an individual nor about a particular other to whom I might speak. This is about the people of the LORD. Whose vindication, whose salvation, will shine out like the torches of dawn … so long as I do not keep silent.

Is it is as conditional as that? Does the vindication of the Zion depend on my voice? Of course not! Yet might it require it? Might the raising of my voice towards that end effect its realization? Might my speech expand not just the expression but the experience of God’s grace? Might I be obliged, even if not responsible?

Words reminding me. Speech reminding Zion. Utterance reminding the LORD. That vindication is promised, salvation is sure, glory is to be seen and a new name given and claimed.

‘For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest.’

I raise my voice to participate in the promise.

*literal translation of the Hebrew