Standing before the king

photograph (c) Katherine Brown

In the third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. The Lord gave King Jehoiakim of Judah into his power, as well as some of the vessels of the house of God. These he brought to the land of Shinar, and he placed the vessels in the treasury of his gods. Then the king commanded his palace master Ashpenaz to bring some of the Israelites of the royal family and of the nobility …. The king assigned them a daily portion of the royal rations of food and wine. They were to be educated for three years, so that at the end of that time they could be stationed in the king’s court. Among them were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, from the tribe of Judah.

Daniel 1:1-3, 5-6, from 1:1-21 [NRSVUE]

Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Four youths from Judah (the Hebrew calls them ‘children’), ‘of the royal family and of the nobility … without physical defect and handsome, versed in every branch of wisdom, endowed with knowledge and insight, and competent to serve in the king’s palace’ (Dan. 1:3-4). The description of their good looks and amazing insight sounds swoon-worthy until you realize it’s a procurement order. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, has requested a bevy of these carried-off boys to be corralled, trained, and fed from the king’s own table so that they might in time ‘stand before the king’ (1:4, 5, 18).

To ‘stand’ is the idiom for service, a catch-phrase that can connect this text with last week’s, Elijah’s affirmation that he ‘stands before’ the LORD (1 Kings 17:1). The connection hints at what’s at stake for Daniel and his compatriots. They’ve survived the war. As they endure the captivity, they need to consider. Before whom do they stand? Israel’s God or Babylon’s king?

Babylon’s king is the overt actor. He laid siege to Jerusalem, carried off its treasures, ordered the boys be brought and trained and fed. Yet the chapter is bracketed with references to other kings: the king of Judah, which Babylon conquered (1:1), the king of Persia, which will conquer Babylon (1:21). The frame suggests the transience of earthly powers. Meanwhile, God’s power ‘gives’ Jerusalem into Nebuchadnezzar’s hand (1:2), ‘gives’ Daniel the favor and compassion of the palace master (1:9), ‘gives’ the four youths knowledge and skill in wisdom (1:17). God’s giving is stitched through the chapter, though God is not the actor strutting on the stage.

I wonder what of God’s presence was palpable to Daniel and Hananiah and Mishael and Azariah. Were they aware that God — who had given their homeland to an invader — would give them the favor and knowledge and skill to survive, to thrive in this strange place? What was it that sustained their commitment to stand before the God of Israel even while standing before Babylon’s king? What did they know, or hope? And when?

The chapter pivots at verses 7 and 8. The palace master ‘sets’ Babylonian names on these boys from Judah (1:7), and Daniel ‘sets’ his heart on not ‘defiling himself’ with the royal food and wine (1:8). It reads almost as if he’s shaken himself awake, becomes a speaking actor in the play rather than a prop shunted about the stage. Description gives way to dialogue, the negotiation of the ‘test’: ten days of vegetables (or maybe ‘seeds’) and water, after which Daniel and friends appeared so much haler than the other candidates that they were allowed to continue on their restricted diet. They are allowed to refuse to defile themselves.

The text never defines how the royal rations would defile. Suppositions are multiple. Perhaps the foreign food violated kashrut. Perhaps the king’s portion is imperial indoctrination. Perhaps the preferred rations echo the ‘seeds’ and ‘growing things’ of Genesis 1:29, as if Daniel and friends, carted off to the king’s gardens in Babylon, will to live as if in God’s garden of Eden.* Or the text is meant to evoke the water and manna of the wilderness: a daily sustaining and a test that leads to knowledge.** Or the text is determinedly indeterminate — staking itself on the explicit claim that this refusal is necessary to avoid defilement, and the demonstration of God’s giving, subtle but sure — while requiring continual wrestling with its possibilities. As Daniel and his friends had to live in the tension of their time, so do we have to live in the tension of the text, allowing it to resist any tidy resolution so that it can speak to our own untidy lives.

How do you know who you are in a setting where everything is not what it was? How do you maintain identity when all around you is strange, even hostile? How do you allow yourself to change without becoming strange to yourself? How do you commit to God’s reign while subject to the powers of the world? This text invites us into the questions not by offering an answer so much as a process. It refuses to conflate God’s kingship and any other but recognizes, even magnifies, the tensions between. (The palace master may change the boys’ names from -of God to -of Babylon; the text itself refuses, uses the names that include God’s name.)

Shake yourself awake. See what’s at stake. Set your heart to stand before the LORD. Hope in God’s giving. Commit to the tension — that’s how the lines sing.

Faith feeds on commitment.

* Anne E. Gardner, ‘The Eating of ‘Seeds’ and Drinking of Water by Daniel and Friends: An Intimation of Holiness.’ ABR 59 (2011) 53-63.

** Michael Seufert, ‘Refusing the king’s portion: A reexamination of Daniel’s dietary reaction in Daniel I.’ JSOT 43(4) (2019) 644-660.

A widow of Zarephath

photograph (c) Katherine Brown

Now Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” … Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there, for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.”

1 Kings 17:1, 8-9, from 1 Kings 17 [NRSVUE]

Elijah springs into the narrative fully formed, as if we’re expected to know who he is without ever having been formally introduced. Ahab we know. Ahab was introduced by lineage and title: he’s son of Omri and now king over Israel (1 Kings 16:29). Ahab’s reign is ‘evil’ (16:30), not least for his having married a foreign princess and for worshiping foreign gods (16:31-33).

Elijah is unknown. He appears suddenly, challenges the king with the LORD’s judgment of drought (17:1), then hides himself away, according to the LORD’s word (17:2-4). The text follows Elijah as a camera might — first to the wadi, where he will be sustained by ravens; then to Zarephath, where he will be sustained by a widow — yet that close focus is both framed by the larger faithlessness and adds a different light to it. Elijah’s sojourn in Zarephath is not a pause in the action but an action that recasts the story as a whole, resisting rigid definitions of fidelity by showing openness to encounter.

Drought has ultimate consequences. Its effect stretches beyond Israel’s borders. An intermittent wadi and the kindness of ravens sustain Elijah at the start of the drought, but soon the wadi is dry (17:6) and the LORD sends Elijah out of Israel, to a town in Sidon, the kingdom from which Ahab’s wife had come. ‘I have commanded a widow to feed you,’ says the LORD, an echo of the earlier word ‘I have commanded ravens to feed you’ (17:9, 5).

Elijah rises and walks and goes in to the gate of the city. And — see! — a widow is there. She is gathering sticks to make a small fire to bake cakes of the last of her meal to eat with her son before the both of them die (17:12). Like the Israelites in the wilderness, this woman expects death. Her plan is not to avoid the doom but to measure its arrival. Instead, a different destiny arrives and calls to her; this fate asks for a drink of water, asks for a morsel of bread (17:10-11).

Who is the guest here, and who is the host?

Elijah is the supplicant; he comes from away, is recognized as foreign. The widow is of the place. She is mistress (‘ba’alah’) of a household (17:15, 17), a house with an upper room in which is a bed for Elijah’s use (17:17-19). She is of the place while Elijah knows himself but a sojourner, reminds the LORD he is ‘dwelling as alien and dependent,’ as the lexicon defines the verb Elijah uses in his prayer (17:20).

Yet ‘the word of the LORD in [Elijah’s] mouth is truth’ (17:24). The word to the LORD from Elijah’s mouth brings life (17:22). The presence of Elijah in that particular house leads to its sustaining: the jug and the jar are not exhausted, and the household eats many days (17:15). Elijah is there by the widow’s sufferance; she is sustained by his sojourning. Elijah receives life through the widow’s hand (17:11); he returns life through his own body and voice, calling on the LORD to make full Elijah’s initial word and return life to the boy (17:19-22).

Who receives, here, and who gives? Who, in giving, receives. And who, receiving, realizes that a gift has been given?

The story resists the binaries, the false opposition of either/or, in favor of a shifting perspective that sees in each a guest, in each a host, in both of them an exchange of receiving that gives life. The story stretches the categories, allowing each participant to stand separate even as each bends towards the other. ‘As the LORD your God lives’ the woman says to Elijah, an oath that connects to Elijah’s commitment without claiming it as her own. Even at the end of the story, when Elijah returns to her her again-living son, she does not say that the LORD is her God. She says that Elijah is a man of God (17:23-24). Maybe this, too, is her gift to Elijah, a reminder of God’s power and Elijah’s authority, before Elijah is called to show himself to the king (18:1).

We live in a season of division. Categories are rigid. Compromise is anathema. Consensus is the impossible dream of a naive idealist. Conversation, even, is suspect as potentially undermining conflicting claims of purity. Battle lines are drawn, opposing ground is trenched, each side is dug in.

But the LORD sent Elijah across a boundary. To be a stranger seeking sustenance; to be a stranger giving grace. To talk together and to eat together and for three years abide in the same household, sharing the domestic particulars in which the ideal is enfleshed. To stand sure in who and whose you are (Elijah’s name means ‘my God is the LORD’) while bending towards the other enough to learn of them, and of them to learn yourself, and something more of God.

That God’s power stretches across borders. That God’s good is not constrained by creeds. That God wills and works life in ways that confound our categories.

May we be drawn into encounter that shifts our perspective, shows us God, shares God’s love.

Bread from heaven

photograph (c) Katherine Brown

Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not.” … When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.”

Exodus 16:4, 14-15; from Exodus 16 [NRSVUE]

Friday morning, I open my pocket prayer book and read praise to God ‘who is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine’ (Eph. 3:20). Sunday morning, the preacher recites the same line from the pulpit. I start at the unexpected repetition, sit thinking the paucity of our asking, the skimpiness of our imagination. I have this on my mind as I come to read — again, and hoping for the first time — Exodus 16.

Exodus 16. The story of bread from heaven [Exod. 16:4]. Flaky stuff, fine as frost [16:14], like coriander seed, and honey sweet [16:31]. Each of you gather what you need, Moses tells God’s people [16:16]. Some gather more, some gather less, but each finds they have gathered not too much nor too little, but for each tent-hold enough [16:17-18]. Manna rains down as an unexpected and precisely calibrated grace. Bread for the day.

Bread is given for the people’s hunger, and bread is given as a test, whether the people will follow God’s teaching or not [16:4]. I resist the word ‘test,’ at first, as if its purpose is our failure. But teachers do not test students to fail them but so that they learn, and show they know. What if God’s test, too, is invitation rather than stumbling block? What if its purpose is the possibility of practice?

The practice of dailiness: each morning gathering. The practice of sufficiency: each household having enough. The practice of consumption: heavenly bread hoarded breeds maggots and stinks [16:20]. The practice of pause: on the sixth day, double portions are gathered and kept for the seventh, for no bread falls on the Sabbath [16:22-27]. The practice of trust that underlies all of these.

I picture it covering the ground, a flaky frost of honey-sweet seeds. I imagine God’s people getting up early, going out in the morning’s first freshness to gather and prepare it. I wonder how it can be boiled or baked [16:23] yet melt in the heat of the sun [16:21], how kept over, it grows foul, except on the sixth day, when it stays good for the next day’s eating [16:24-26]. The logic of my questions is preoccupied with natural processes; the logic of the text is that these realities do not constrain God’s power, nor God’s will to work life beyond our asking, beyond our imagining.

I notice, then, that God’s people do not ask in this text. Not at first. They assume a dread outcome. They (implicitly) accuse Moses and God of — at best — culpable neglect. They do not ask.

God has brought them out of slavery in Egypt. They had groaned under the burden of their oppression [Exod 2:23], then praised God at their salvation [15:1-21]. Now, six weeks after singing, they seem to claim Egypt as a halcyon place: they were proximate to fleshpots, ate their fill of bread [16:1-3]. Better for God to have struck them down with full bellies there, they protest [16:4]. They know they will die from hunger. They do not ask for bread. Can they not imagine the possibility? Do they not trust its realization? Are their spirits still so broken by their cruel slavery [Exod 6:9] that they cannot hear that they were redeemed not for a different form of death but for life?

God hears their complaint. Heavenly bread is God’s response to the people’s need — an implicit refutation of the implicit accusation. Heavenly bread is God’s answer to the question the people have not asked, and heavenly bread draws from the people a question they could not have asked before. The people see this unexpected, unexpectable, coriander-seed-honey-sweet-fallen frost-flake — and they say to each other, ‘Man hu?’ ‘What is it?’ [Exod 16:15]. Their encounter with this miracle bread jolts them out of their anxiety into a present wonder, an explicit asking. What is it?

‘This is the bread the LORD has given you to eat’ [16:15]. Moses tells them to gather, and how much, and that it is to be eaten, not kept over [16:16-19], except on the sixth day, for the Sabbath [16:22-26]. Moses’ answer defines the ‘what’ not by its substance but by its source and its purpose. Here’s what to do with it, Moses says, here’s how to be in relationship with it. Daily. Sufficiently. Consuming. Trusting it will be provided because the provider of it can be trusted.

The question the people are surprised into asking becomes the name of the substance that surprised them: manna. The word an abiding reminder of gift beyond expectation or imagination. An invitation to persistent practice. A test not meant for failure but for formation, for coming to know [16:6, 12].

Manna. Summons to risk the asking that expands the trust, enlarges the imagination, extends the knowing. Gather and eat and taste the sweetness.

Here, in the wilderness, turn and see the glory of the LORD [16:9-10].

Labyrinth Progress

photograph (c) Katherine Brown

And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go up to me on the mountain and be there. And I will give to you the tablets of stone and the instruction and the commandment which I wrote for their teaching.’

Exodus 24:12 [my translation], from Exodus 24:1-18 [NRSVUE] *

There’s a labyrinth in the woods where we walk. It doesn’t seem to be an official installation; no park signs herald its presence. We noticed it a few years ago, probably in winter or early spring, some time when the brush nearest the trail had died back enough that it could be seen. Stones are set in an irregular circle, within which a way is marked. The path starts at the edge, seems aimed directly at the center, then loops back and out, then in again. It’s a little labyrinth, really. Two or three wide strides would carry me entirely across it. Instead, I make my steps small enough to fit in its bounds. I follow the path toward the center, am carried back to the outer edge, then curve around in again. I walk a weaving back and forth, in and out. I hear the breeze rustle last season’s leaves and the creek run over rocks nearby.

Labyrinth progress, walking and reading: in towards the heart, then curving away. Overwhelming theophany, divine summons — all of this has happened before. Already the LORD invited and the people committed to do all which the LORD had spoken (19:1-8). Already the LORD came in cloud thick as kiln-smoke, in thunder and lightning and a trumpet that set flesh to trembling, and Moses, called, went up the mountain and talked with God (19:16-20). Exodus 24 reprises the antiphony of divine speech and human assent: the people promise ‘to do’ and ‘to hear’ (24:7); they are blood-bound in covenant (24:8); and the elders go up and eat and drink in the presence of a shining blue, smooth as pavement and clear as light (24:9-11). They have left Egypt; they are at the mountain. The act of encounter seems complete.

How, then, to understand the LORD’s further invitation to ‘Go up to me … and be,’ the promise of more to be given, instruction written on stone, purposed for teaching (24:12).

Chronological logic may suggest that this invitation is told out of order, came back before ‘all these words’ were declared by the LORD.** Yet maybe chronology is not the primary logic in the narrative. The looping back of the story may be a reminder that seeming completeness is not the same as complete. That Moses is — we are — summoned to further encounter, and encounter again.

The LORD says to Moses, ‘Go up to me on the mountain and be there. And I will give … ’ — promising Moses further gift. Summoning Moses to be in ongoing expectation.

To be in expectation is to recognize that what already is is partial. It is to resist the mistake of conflating our kingdoms with God’s, of claiming our constructions of power and identity as ultimate. To be in expectation is to know that all our going has not yet brought us to the completeness of it all. We suffer still the travails of empire and of wilderness, and we impose them on others and on creation itself. Crises continue, and none of them are new, and all our going has but led us back to the same ground, even the same trenches, newly named but familiar underfoot. It is not that we have never seen God flaming atop a mountain; it is that we mistook that flame for fulfillment. As if our own experience has already encompassed all that God has promised to work. The LORD’s invitation to go up, to be, to be given more reminds us that what is is not what is to be.

There’s also this: the LORD says to Moses, ‘Go up to me on the mountain and be there.’ God is not calling Moses to some divine waiting room (Moses flipping the pages of an outdated periodical till he is seen and handed the scrip for wholeness) but even in a state of expectation, to be in the presence of the glory of the LORD tenting on the mountain in fire and in cloud (24:15-18).

We’re not just waiting for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We’re called to present ourselves to God’s presence even in this state of aching expectation of God’s further gift.

I walk the path towards the heart of the labyrinth, am carried back around the outer edge, then in again, and out until, having walked to the center, I pause, then step in faithfulness to the path’s guiding back out again. To resume walking on the woods trail, beneath the trees and beside the creek. Reminded to be in expectation, reminded — even in ache of brokenness — to persistently listen for the invitation to go up to God and be.

Labyrinth progress, walking and reading: in towards the heart, then curving out for further return.

* The lectionary lists this text for Transfiguration Sunday, the transition into Lent. I’ve been circling towards a center and away again, and continue weaving a way into the Easter season.

** Robert Alter translates Exod 24:1: ‘And to Moses, He had said — ’ using a pluperfect to suggest the slipping of the sequence. [Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: Translation and Commentary (W.W. Norton: 2004) p.455].

Concert Season*

Candle procession. photograph (c) Katherine Brown

‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel.’ … ‘which means, “God is with us.”’

Isaiah 7:14, excerpt from Isa 7:10-16 [NRSVUE] and Matt 1:23, excerpt from Matt 1:18-25 [NRSVUE]

The middle school does not have its own auditorium, so concerts are held at the high school. Tonight’s concert is chorus and orchestra. The auditorium is a cacophony of noise; talking, laughing. Students cavort; parents visit. Odd squeaks sound as one instrument is bowed, then another – individuals rehearsing the awkward bits, each of them alone, not yet in concert. Punctuating the chaos comes the tinkle of piano keys as the accompanist runs through the songs, adding a spritely rhythm to the random-patterned, rising-falling noise.

The chorus director gathers her brood onto the risers. There is some awkward stomping and giggling but no crashes. She sketches a movement with her hands, and the chorus begins to sing a scale – soft voices, vulnerable. On the other half of the stage, the orchestra director sets the beginning strings to tune; they scratch and squeak. The advanced orchestra waits, clustered in little groups, some kneeling backwards in their seats, chatting and laughing.

The concert begins with the chorus, continues with beginning strings. Then the advanced orchestra moves onto the stage.

The performers take their seats. They settle sheet music on the stands; they ready instruments. After a pause, a dark-haired girl — the first violinist – stands, tucks her violin under her chin, and draws her bow across its strings. A single note sings solitary. Is then joined by others, as bows are drawn across violins and cellos and a bass. The notes come in slightly different times and keys until the wavering dissonances are resolved and merge. The director enters, bows, lifts his baton, motions the music to begin.

I love that initiating note … the others that join…. The potential of all the music to come is held in that long-drawn not-quite-chorded note. There will be carols and dances and a concerto by Liszt. But first there is this note, offered up, fragile and tenuous and pregnant with possibility. As small and frail and potent as a baby born God-With-Us. A note begun sweet and solitary. A note rehearsed year after year, across seasons and generations, in different keys and rhythms, until all the instruments are added, and the dissonances drawn together, and the music swells in full power and one song.

Presence signed: God-with-us.

*originally written 2010

The Limits of Sense

photograph (c) Katherine Brown

His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge for the poor and decide with equity for the oppressed of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

Isaiah 11:3-4, from 11:1-10 [NRSVUE] (Lectionary text for Dec. 4, 2022)

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

Isaiah 35:5-6a, from 35:1-10 [NRSVUE] (Lectionary text for Dec. 11, 2022)

It is the seeming rejection of sense perception that catches me when I read Isa 11. Not the ‘wolf living with the lamb’ or any of the peaceable kingdom images. Not the ‘shoot’ coming from the ‘stump of Jesse,’ the ‘little child’ leading; the promised ’root’ Paul claims as Christ [Rom. 15:12]. It’s the fact that this coming one shall not judge by his eyes nor decide by his ears [Isa 11:3].

That forswearing of senses strikes at odds with the prophet’s earlier proclamation to ‘Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes’ [Isa 6:10]. If sensory deprivation is prophesied as the LORD’s judgment, and restoration of vision and audition is prophesied as the LORD’s coming grace [Isa 35:5-6], then how am I to understand the mission of this promised shoot? The one who ‘shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear’ but will judge with righteousness and decide with equity [Isa 11:3-4]? Isaiah 11 sets sight and sound in opposition to righteousness and equity, complicating the idea of a simple progression from blindness to sight. This text describes vision and audition as senses whose usefulness is suspect.

I compare translations; consult lexicons; search scholarly articles. The shoot from the stump of Jesse shall ‘delight in the fear of the LORD,’ or perhaps shall ‘sense’ in the fear of the LORD (as the JPS translation suggests). ‘Fear of the LORD’ is the sixth of the spirit-gifts which shall rest upon him: wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge and fear of the LORD [Isa 11:2]. A variety of values (near-synonyms?) for that which should undergird right judgment. Not the seeing of eyes nor the hearing of ears but fear of the LORD, the ‘beginning of wisdom’ [Prov. 9:10].

Does it seem backwards to describe knowledge as a spirit-gift, rooted in reverence? Do we trust what is taught or do we conceive of learned interpretation as less reliable than direct perception? Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Our senses are how we apprehend the world around. Our senses are the basis of our witness of and in the world. We know what we saw, we declare, we know what we heard.

Except we don’t. Not really. Sight is interpretation. When we look at light and dark, lines set on a page or shapes shifting in the world around, we don’t just see but interpret the form and the movement. More than that, until we learn it, we may not even see it.

This is what I learned from learning Syriac. Syriac script is consonantal. Vowels are written as tiny marks added around the consonants like some sort of decorative surround. Syriac vowel shapes are varied, and when first I encountered them they seemed to me random squiggles. They were to me literally indecipherable. I consistently floundered in my guesses as to which vowel was which until finally the professor said, Can you not see the letters? She enlarged the pages double-sized so that the squiggles stood out clear to my sight. Only then could I see: each was distinct, had a different shape, stood for a different sound. I had to learn the details writ large before I was able to see them writ small.

I couldn’t see them until I knew them.

We don’t know what we see; we see what we know.

We cannot judge by our own sight until we are taught how to see.

The prophet does not reject sense perception so much as require its right re-ordering, calling us to learn righteousness and equity. Instruction is promised; the Word will flow from Zion [Isa 2:1-5]; calling people to walk God’s holy highway and to sing joy [Isa 35:8-10].

The sprig sprung from Jesse’s line is like the ‘child who has been born for us’ [Isa 9:6] or the ‘servant’ whose tongue is taught [Isa 50:4]. The church reads these as Jesus, who told those who asked to ‘Go and tell what you hear and see’: blind eyes seeing, deaf ears hearing [Matt 11:4-6]. (Jesus’ juxtaposition of sense terms suddenly makes me wonder if he thought by his answer to open the ears and eyes of those who had asked!)

The sprig sprung from Jesse’s line may be read as Jesus. Yet reading Jesus in this text does not exhaust its possibilities. It promises not only ultimate judgment and ultimate restoration, but also proposes a way to wait in the meanwhile. I cannot see and hear and study to save myself. But I can be reminded that my sight and hearing are limited by what I know and re-called to look and listen and study to be in relationship with the world. Copy righteousness and equity over and over until their shapes are fixed in my hand and my eye. Recite fear of the LORD with my lips and mouth. Walk God’s instruction with my feet. Practice sight and hearing and pray sense enlarged with ‘the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea’ [Isa 11:9].

Building New

To the leader. A Psalm of David, 
when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. 
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions. 
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me. 
Against you, you alone, have I sinned,
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment. 
Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me.  
You desire truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. 
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 
Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones that you have crushed rejoice. 
Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.  
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me. 
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me. 
Restore to me the joy of your salvation, 
and sustain in me a willing spirit.

Psalm 51:1-12, lectionary psalter for March 21, 2021; from Psalm 51

This is how spring comes in the neighborhood. Birdsong backed by notes of yard work and home improvement projects. The rustle of a rake pulling last season’s leaves from the garden, then scraping across a paving stone. A new fence going in: the buzz of saws cutting wood, and the sw’thuk of the power hammer fixing pickets to the rail. We walk past a house being renovated. For weeks this winter, that house had trash set for bulk pick-up (old furniture, luggage, board games, stuffed animals that looked at the sky from atop the pile). I’d mourned the dismantling of a family home and prayed at the passing of people I did not know. Now the for-sale signs have been replaced with a home design board. A dumpster sits by the curb. The battered metal awnings are gone; windows replaced; bricks fresh painted. A new porch is being put on. The smell of sawdust hangs in the air. We wonder if the interior is being totally gutted. We wonder when it will be done.

I’ve been in Psalm 51 since Ash Wednesday. I wonder when it will be done.

‘Have mercy on me, O God … blot out my transgressions.’ Wash, cleanse, blot, purge. A litany of demands, starting from that first: ‘Grace me, as is your faithfulness, as is your compassion,’ your rechem, or womb-love. The psalmist’s ‘I’ pleads with the ‘you’ of God. As if these two (we two?) are the only two in the world. ‘Against you, you alone, have I sinned,’ the psalmist proclaims, yet the proclamation of exclusivity rings false to me because the ancient superscription connects this psalm with a context. The psalmist’s sin against the LORD was suffered in the bodies of a woman taken and her husband killed. The superscription opens up the psalm, resists sin’s spiritualization. Sin, transgression, iniquity: these are more than imperfect ideation. The suffering we cause our neighbors is the suffering we cause our LORD, the offense from which we need to be cleansed, the brokenness which needs restoration. However ardent the plea, it is a sham unless the reconciliation between self and God is broadened to include reconciliation with the other.

The litany proceeds from wiping away the old iniquity to creating a clean heart. It’s not a steady progress. The first series pertains to erasing what was: wash, cleanse, purge. Verse 8, then, is Janus-faced: bones already crushed naming the hope for joy bone-deep. But not joy yet: ‘Hide your face from my sins.’ Are God’s eyes covered? Maybe God’s gaze is not averted so much as intensified: looking past and through all the evil that has been, back to the goodness of creation’s original intent and future hope. Rebuilding the psalmist in that sight.

‘A clean heart create in me, God, and a firm spirit renew within me.’ William Ross** argues that the psalm’s verbs evoke damaged structures reconstructed by God: ‘do not scrap me … refurbish the joy of your salvation for me, reinforce me with a willing spirit.…’ Crushed bones as broken walls, self as built city. ‘In sin I was birthed’ [v.5] describes the sin of the broken world into which I was born, in which I live, the structures from which I suffer and the structures from which I benefit. The bones that need to be broken, the spirit re-founded and firmed and renewed, are not just mine alone but those of the community. Yet the psalm makes plain that I am not absolved from my responsibility. Suddenly its ardent individuality seems not fraud but summons: I am involved in the world. I myself need to repent. I myself need to ask for — and to work for — holy joy, renewed and firm and amid — leavening? — the whole.

I’ve been in Psalm 51 for weeks. I’ve read it, resisted it, returned to it. I wonder when it will be done. So much needs to be ripped out. Some was good for a time but not good for all time. That too must be given over. Torn out, broken, crushed. The metaphors are so violent! Dust clouds over the dumpster as pieces of an old life are hauled out and thrown away. It hurts. Who wants to have part of your heart torn away? Maybe the only way it can be borne is in community. All of us needing to repent. Each of us saying to God, ‘Against you, you only, have I sinned.’ I can speak only in the midst of others also confessing in the voice of the psalm’s ‘I’; all of us together trusting that the tearing out of the old will result in a newer-firmer, wider whole.

I can’t make myself new in this same-old life. The psalm reminds me that I’m not expected to. The newness is God’s work. Mine is study and prayer and proclamation in community.

This is how spring comes. The first green of the daffodils spears through the ground. We look daily to see the spires grown higher. One morning the green is topped with yellow. It is as if the daffs had waited for us to look away so to surprise us with the flowers’ arrival. Oh. Spring.

‘A clean heart create in me, God, and a firm spirit renew within me.’

** William Ross, ‘David’s spiritual walls and conceptual blending in Psalm 51.’ JSOT 43(4) p. 607-29, 622-223 (2019).

Psalm Upside Down

You who fear the LORD, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him;
stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! 
For he did not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him.  
From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will pay before those who fear him. 
The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the LORD.
May your hearts live forever!
All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the LORD;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him. 
For dominion belongs to the LORD,
and he rules over the nations.  
To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
and I shall live for him. 
Posterity will serve him;
future generations will be told about the Lord, 
and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
saying that he has done it.

Psalm 22:23-31, lectionary psalter for Feb. 28, 2021

The light has had a peculiar intensity these past days. It’s not brightness, exactly, at least not the sort that gilds the tree trunks or glows on the house bricks. It is clarity. In the afternoon the sun shines strong through the back windows and fills the kitchen. It’s not just that light shows more clearly the kitchen contents — cupboards and countertops, cups and crumbs — but that the kitchen has become a container for this other thing, for light itself.

We’ve had so many grey days, so many days of snow and rain. I have grown accustomed to the dull light, welcomed it as restful. It does not occur to me that I need not just rest but reviving until the ‘rains are over and gone,’ and a gusty wind has blown the sky clear. This happens every spring. I do not look for the turn of the year. I settle into a holding pattern of wool sweaters and shawls and mugs of hot tea and do not feel how deeply the long dark has settled into me with its own holding weight. Then comes this light so clear and strong, and I realize I have missed it. I put on rubber boots and walk the neighborhood. Yards that were snow dusted are now purple-carpeted with blooming crocus. Birdsong is piercing sweet. In the muck and gravel beside the road, there is a shape of shining light, a puddle showing sky and treetops upside down.

I had read this psalm one of the grey mornings. Snow fell and smoothed the untidy ground into a certain unity of shape and shade. I sat at my desk, and milk-pale light lay across the page, and cold radiated from the window glass, and I wondered that we should read just the ending praise from this psalm that starts with a cry of God-forsakeness. How can the exultant proclamation that ‘future generations will be told’ of God’s salvation make sense without the recitation of the abyss from which the tellers were delivered?

But maybe — sometimes — that pit itself is not known until one is plucked out of it. The fall is not always so precipitous as to call attention to itself. It may be a creeping dullness, a subtle descent, its nadir not recognized until a outstretched hand has brought you out to a broad place.

Notice the parallel in the lines of verse 26: ‘They shall eat, the afflicted, and they will be sated; they shall praise the LORD, those who seek him.’ Satiation is the answer to affliction. Praise is the result of seeking. Hunger — for food, for the LORD — is implied but not stated, nor is finding listed as the necessary precondition of praise. Seeking is.

And, as seeking leads to praise, so praise may be the start of seeking. Glimpse the sky in the puddle and let yourself be tipped with delight to lift your eyes and look at the sky. There’s not a leaf nor a cloud hiding its brilliance. Realize together both the light and your hunger.

Dine on praise. Pray your seeking be sated by God.

Sifting Shifting Witness

photo (c) Katherine Brown (color enhanced)

The mighty one, God the LORD,
 speaks and summons the earth
 from the rising of the sun to its setting. 
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,
 God shines forth.  
Our God comes and does not keep silence,
 before him is a devouring fire,
 and a mighty tempest all around him. 
He calls to the heavens above
 and to the earth, that he may judge his people: 
“Gather to me my faithful ones,
 who made a covenant with me by sacrifice!” 
The heavens declare his righteousness,
 for God himself is judge. Selah  
Psalm 50:1-6, from Psalm 50, psalter for Transfiguration Sunday

Have mercy on me, O God,
 according to your steadfast love;
 according to your abundant mercy
 blot out my transgressions. 
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
 and cleanse me from my sin. … 
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
 and put a new and right spirit within me. 
Do not cast me away from your presence,
 and do not take your holy spirit from me. 
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
 and sustain in me a willing spirit.
Psalm 51:1-2, 10-12; from Psalm 51 for Ash Wednesday

‘The LORD speaks and summons the earth.’ The LORD calls the earth, cries out the earth, from the sun’s rise till its going in. I read the line, and the LORD calls the earth to be, summons it to unfold itself, as if creation does not exist but for God’s daily re-call. In my mind God’s speech unfurls rainbow banners across the heavens. I look out the window and see pink glowing from sky to snow-ground.

This summons, though, is not to being but to judgment. The LORD who flames from perfect-beauty Zion in fire and storm consuming, whose righteousness the heavens declare, calls a gathering ‘that he may judge his people.’ ‘For God himself is judge.’

This is where the lectionary selection for Transfiguration ends. As if it is safe to summon the shining-bright LORD as judge and not recount the judgment. As if it is honest or true to not read on to God’s arraignment of God’s own people. As if the mountaintop was itself the end and not the transition (literarily, liturgically) into a next phase of relationship. Lent.

Where am I in this psalm? Who is God speaking to? Who is the LORD speaking of?

Having called the earth as if to be, the LORD calls to heavens above and earth below to witness the charges. I am not called as witness, however. As I count myself among God’s own, numbered among God’s ‘faithful,’ I must count myself among those arraigned, against whom God testifies. We are not invited to overhear God’s speech to others but to be addressed by God. We are summoned to ‘Hear!’

What we hear is both censure and assurance. God’s people — we, I — are arraigned not for our failures of worship but for something else. Sacrifice as we practice it is not an inherent offense. Nor is it needed by God. All is already the LORD’s. Who are we to set aside some portion only? As if it all — as if we — are not already God’s own. As if God has a hunger that can be slaked only by our burnt offerings. The LORD rejects our offerings as necessary for God’s sake, yet the psalm continues on into exhortation: sacrifice thanks; pay your promises; ‘call on me in the day of trouble.’ The LORD does not reject us or our offerings. If there is rejection, it is of our ordering. We are the ones who need this discipline taken on, that distraction given up. The LORD, of grace, accepts our need as offering, and God promises to deliver.

But the psalm does not end there any more than it ended after that initial summons to judgment. The LORD castigates the wicked. How comforting it would be to think this address, at least, is against ‘others,’ and this is the part I can overhear. These harsh words against those who ‘hate discipline’ and ‘cast my words behind you,’ who befriend thieves and adulterers, who speak evil and deceit and slander against their own kin — I would rather witness these words than take them to myself.

Except that these words, too, are addressed to those who carry God’s covenant on their lips. These words, too, are addressed to those counted as kin, which is why their falsity is such an offense. If I draw that line between, am I not risking the same slander? It is the LORD who is not like us, not we who are not like each other. I must see that if I am to see at all.

I need re-creation as much as anyone else. To be ‘washed of my iniquity, cleansed from my sin,’ ‘restored to joy and sustained in willing spirit.’

I need not just to listen but to hear to bear God’s promise truly on my lips and know God’s word present in my heart, so that I may bear God’s name in the world.

Let me not forget you, LORD.

Let me learn to see myself with your eyes that I may see you with my own.

Psalm as Snow Day

‘

‘Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them….

‘The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy.’

Psalm 111:2, 7, from Psalm 111, lectionary psalm for Jan. 31, 2021

Every week, I read the text — whichever text it is — a first time. I will read it again and I will do research and I will read it yet again, seeking the spark that arcs across from the ancient word to my own world. Sometimes flame flares so swift and strong and bright that words flow without much effort. Sometimes the spark catches but smolders; there is something there, but I struggle to know it. Sometimes there seems no spark at all, and I think I’ve chosen the wrong text of the lectionary four. I worry at the words like a dog worrying at a bone, working that a spark might fly, worrying that this time none will.

Every week — or two — I read the text a first time. Looking to see a light to see by.

The week I read Psalm 111, I immediately knew v.7 was the intended spark: ‘The works of his hands are faithful and just.’ The works of God’s hand. This is a phrase I’ve studied much and know well. Humans are God’s handiwork. This is where I would spend the week: pondering my identity as a made-creature, my calling to be faithful and just. With a sigh of satisfaction, I read the rest of the psalm, turned out the light, and settled to sleep, secure that verse 7 would spark. I would gather the tinder — translations and lexicons and what commentaries I have — strike the text, watch it flare, tend the flame, and write the fire.

The tinder didn’t catch. Because the text did not spark. Because in the Hebrew, the predicate in v.7 is a pair of nouns: ’The works of his hands truth and justice.’ The meaning shifted in my mind. Not that God’s handiwork — otherwise unnamed — has the quality of being faithful or just but that God makes truth, God makes justice. Truth. Justice. These themselves are the works of the LORD. The lexical study surprised. I checked multiple translations hoping one would give me back the adjectives of the NRSV. None did. I felt bereft. I had thought myself spoken of, or to, reminded of being God-made; reminded to be faithful and just. ‘The works of his hands truth and justice.’ I felt as if a door had closed and shut me out of the psalm entirely. I circled the psalm again. Noting the way ‘works’ ties it together: ‘works’ are great, are studied and delighted in; ‘works’ have power, are shown; ‘works’ are truth and justice; God’s instructions are ‘worked’ in truth; those who ‘work’ them gain understanding. ‘Works’ are a definite thread; but do they connect to me?

Sunday snow came. Monday snow came. The ground was covered over. The air moved with the falling of the flakes. The world was transformed. I had a snow day — entirely unexpected. Entirely unexpected as well was the way the snow drew me out and into it. Crunching across the ice-glazed, snow-covered grass. Wanting to see and hold in my mind’s eye a picture of just snow and sky and trees. Shades of gray, white to near-black. Wanting to go deeply in. Apart. No houses, no cars, no wires, none of the messy interconnectedness that is human life in this close-in suburb. Wanting to see the world that is not-us — deep green holly, dark cool evergreen, bare tree branches stretched out and up — all overlaid by this grace of snow — its shape and shading at once stark and soft, striking and subtle. Other.

Snow day as Sabbath unexpectedly imposed, unexpectedly allowed. Snow shifting the quality of the light. I’d been reading for a spark to summon me to examination of self and world, to whatever next-work is needed (and so much next-work is needed). I’d been following the thread in search of a knot to keep it from pulling loose. Snow shifted my sight to show psalm and snow day were the same gift. Stop tugging at the thread, stop worrying for a word of exhortation. Stop. Experience a word of wonder. This psalm is about the LORD. It is a summons to sit and study honor and majesty and greatness and power and mercy and grace and truth and justice. Stand. Snow cold underfoot. Snow coming down. Listen. Snowfall has a sound of its own even as it makes all the other sounds different. Look with open eyes, soft gaze. Snow light changes sight.

Look to see the LORD whose work I am. Only then can I see the work I am made to be.

This is wisdom; this is delight: wonder in the LORD.