This Unexpected City

These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. […] Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; lectionary text for Sunday October 13, 2019

I am not the addressee of this letter. Jeremiah is writing to the remaining elders and priests and prophets, all who had been taken captive by the king of Babylon and carried off into exile. They had seen their city besieged, their temple plundered. Jeremiah is writing to people who had been taken to a far-off land. Who sat beside a foreign river and its strange trees and endured the taunts of captors who bid them sing (Psa 137). Jeremiah is writing to people who defiantly had hung their harps on the willows and rejected the possibility of mirth, who resolutely set their hearts upon their loss as if to forget the city they loved would be to lose their hands, their tongues, their very selves.

To these people, Jeremiah writes the word of the LORD: ‘Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you….’ And in myriad pulpits in many cities, this text will be preached as a call to social justice in urban settings. Seek the welfare of the city. Support early literacy and food pantries and more. In the city’s well-being, we will find our own.

The LORD does require of us justice and mercy (Micah 6:8) and the rolling down of righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:24). But I’m not sure urban renewal is the sum of this particular Jeremiah text. It seems to me less about place and more about time.

Build houses, the LORD says. Live and plant and eat and marry and multiply.

Your old city is lost to you. Your old life is over. Leave it behind. Leave behind, also, the future you had looked forward to. Leave behind the expectation of living and working and growing old in the familiar place, in the shape that had held stable for so long you presumed it would hold longer still. That particular future is as over as the past that had seemed to promise it. Grieve as you need, but don’t get stuck there. There is living yet to come, a future yet unfolding.

Seek the welfare of the city where you are, for in its welfare you will find your own.

Wander the streets of this unexpected city. Look closely at its waterways, its trees, the way its houses are built. Taste its foods. Try its words upon your tongue. Realize that your old life is over, yes, but that you do not, after all, leave your past behind. You bring it with you as you live forward, as you connect the old experiences and expectations with the new possibilities. Grieve and bury that lost future, but refuse to lose yourself in the same grave. Pivot into life.

The prophet did not address his letter to me. But the LORD did. I have not suffered the violent trauma of Jeremiah’s original audience, but I have grieved the loss of a foreseen future and I have found myself living in an unexpected present. Hope — however reasonably and enthusiastically sown — has not flowered as I had anticipated. So leave go not only of those sown seeds but of the expected color and scent of the flower. Till the actual ground on which I stand. Do this work. Plumb these depths. Savor this beauty, this purpose — however furtive or partial, it is here. Give thanks for the grace that does come.

Find my new future unfolding by living deeply in the particular here and now where I am found.

Seek the welfare of the city where I am. In its welfare I will find — or be found by — my own.

Demanding Hope

And I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel, and weighed out the money to him, seventeen shekels of silver. I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses, and weighed the money on scales. [And] In their presence I charged Baruch, saying, Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.

Jer 32:9-10, 13-15, excerpt from Jer 32:1-2, 6-15, lectionary text for Sept 29, 2019

I felt hopeful the other day. Literally filled with hope. An unexpected opportunity was offered; brief consideration revealed no apparent obstacles; I emailed my acceptance. Hope then rose in me so swiftly and strongly that I had to push back from my desk, go for a walk outside. The hope I felt was not primarily a mental attitude but a palpable force, a purposeful energy that had a physical effect. Hope not as some vague possibility but as a power flowing through me, filling my body from spine to fingertips. I could not contain its force. I had to stand up and stride out, as if to dissipate some of the energy, so I could channel the rest to the challenge of the work.

And part of the effect of this experience was its revelation of how low my spirit and energy have been. That I have been sitting slumped and did not even realize. That I have lacked hope and did not know it missing.

Walk across the academic quad to the chapel. Kneel in a pew and try to arrange my hope-jumbled thoughts into some sort of ordered line. Look up at the blue of the rose window and try to pray and what comes to my lips is none of the set forms, psalmic or otherwise, but the line, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers — ’ Emily Dickinson’s poem is as good a prayer as any, I decide, so I look at the blue and move my lips and murmur the rest of Emily’s words as offering.

I wonder, though, when I get to the poem’s end. The poem ends as if with a breathed recognition that ‘never — in extremity — [hope] asked a crumb — of me.’ Jeremiah’s text — and my own experience — suggest another view. Maybe hope does ask; maybe hope demands; maybe hope tugs you out to meet it coming.

Jeremiah is imprisoned, after all, at a time when the city is under siege (Jer 32:1-2). But the hope — the promise, the expectation — that there will be a time after this, a time when ‘houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land’ — demands of Jeremiah a literal investment: he buys his cousin’s field notwithstanding the imminent destruction he has already proclaimed in the name of the LORD. Because neither ‘now’ nor ‘next’ is the end. There will come a time after this. And that time to come cannot be just waited for, it must be prepared for. Money must be paid. A deed must be signed and sealed, it and its copy placed in a jar for safekeeping. The writing does not anticipate the future; it secures the anticipation. It will come. It has been written — the energy of that promise has been fixed in recoverable form. Jeremiah’s expectation will be realized; the promised, hoped-for, future will arrive.

Let my hope be that hope, I pray. I ask of the LORD a hope that asks of me. An expectation that expects of me, that engages me and energizes me and equips me to meet it coming. That by setting out to meet hope, I may secure its realization, may recognize it when it comes even if it does not look as I expected.

I stand to go. Stare boldly at the blue. Make a last demand before I go back out into the day.

Let me write hope — putting all the vague, inchoate, desires and expectations into explicit words, physical form. Let me write hope that demands so that demanding hope may demand of me. Let me write hope that I may live hope.

A Song in Parts

My joy is gone, grief is upon me,
my heart is sick.
Hark, the cry of my poor people
from far and wide in the land:
“Is the LORD not in Zion?
Is her King not in her?”
(“Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?”)
“The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
and we are not saved.”
For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people
not been restored?
O that my head were a spring of water,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people!
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1

There’s not a lot of hope explicit in this text. More accurately, there is none.

There is grief and heartsickness and hurt and mourning and dismay. The pitiful cry for expectations unfulfilled: ‘harvest is past, summer is ended, and we are not saved.’ A longing to be turned to a fountain so that constant weeping would be possible, that tears would be the speaker’s entire being. All of that is stated, clear on the surface, no close-read parsing needed. But of hope, there is none plain.

That said, there’s less plain about this text than the translation allows. The very first phrase — that stark statement, ‘my joy is gone’ — varies between translations (JPS makes it a dependent clause, ‘When in grief I would seek comfort…’ ; NIV offers, ‘You who are my Comforter in sorrow…’). The Hebrew is obscure. Is it a a single word referring to lost joy — the flash of a smile now dimmed in grief? Is it better read as two words, referring to healing foregone? Is it actually a loan-word from Akkadian, a form of ritual lament known as a ‘balag’ sung over cities abandoned by their god/s? (Really, the article on balag-laments was more interesting that you might suppose.)

And — speaking of God — where is the LORD, anyway? That question is explicitly posed. But by whom? The NRSV provides punctuation, periods and quotation marks and parentheses, but that punctuation is interpretation of the original, unpunctuated, text. Defensible but not determinative.

Is it the query the cry of ‘my poor people’ (literally, ‘daughter of my people’)? If so, is it a plaintive seeking after God — we’ve waited all summer, we’ve brought in the harvest, and still we are not saved? Is it, instead, a smug certainty that God is present notwithstanding the multitude of offenses cataloged elsewhere, as if God’s presence is license to sin with impunity.

Is it the query of the LORD God-self — a rhetorical question as if to stress that God is in Zion, the king is in his city — thus intensifying the anguish and anger of the line that follows: ‘Why have they provoked me to anger’ — as if the LORD stands in the midst of the city, palpably present, yet ignored by the people who throng after other images, desires, promises, and the LORD cries aloud, ‘Am I not here, among you, my people? Why do you not see me? Why do you pass by and not even look?’

And who is the ‘I’ of the passage, the one whose speech is not set off with quotation punctuation? The one whose joy is gone, whose heart is sick, who mourns the ill and slain of ‘my poor people’ and would turn himself entirely to tears? Is it the prophet? Is it the LORD? (The possessive ‘my’ could apply to either.)

These questions cannot be answered. Any answer is partial, shifting. As soon as parts in the dialogue are definitely defined — this speaker is the people, that speaker is the LORD — a shift in focus results in a different point of view, a different understanding. Maybe that speaker is the people; this speaker is the LORD. And that other one the prophet?

Maybe that’s the point. That the passage is less prose discourse and more choral performance. That the imprecise definition of parts and speakers is because the speakers shift and share the parts. That both the people and God ask after the LORD’s presence. That both the prophet and God are offended at the sin, heartsick for the suffering. That each speaker interleaves with all the others; that all bear the burden of the lament.

Have you sung in a choir before? Extended passages when voices cycle out and back again, as singers pause to breathe and resume singing, but the song as a whole continues to sound.

Have you sung in a boat? Singing to lift your spirits, to straighten your back and strengthen your arm so to steady your stroke? Singing with others not only to raise a smile but to synchronize the rhythm as you paddle on longer than you knew you’d have to, longer than you knew you could?

What if the LORD is in the boat with you? What if the LORD is in the choir? What if the LORD is singing alongside the whole ‘daughter of my people’ — strengthening the sound, supporting the note, not only building up the capacity of all the other singers but sustaining and expanding the very song itself.

Hope is not expressed in the text. But hope may yet be standing at its center, wanting to be seen and turned to and joined. Invert the question and sing the song: the LORD is here.

The Contingency of Clay

The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. Then the word of the LORD came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the LORD. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

Jer 18:1-6, excerpt from lectionary text for Sunday Sept 8, 2019, Jeremiah 18:1-11

‘Just like clay in the potter’s hand…’.

Usually I read this passage through the oracle that follows, concerning Judah and its evil, as if the visit to the potter’s house is entirely or only contained in the litany of ‘pluck up and break down’ that came first when Jeremiah first encountered the word of the LORD (Jer 1:10; see ‘Uprooting Anew,’ Aug 25, 2019). I read and picture smashed crockery strewn about the workshop. An image of destruction.

But it’s not.

Read the potter’s house as a parable. Don’t reduce it to a simple proposition nor a single image. Read the potter’s house closely and hear what is actually going on.

There is no smashing. There is not even any crockery — nothing has been fired yet, nothing is firm. The vessel is yet becoming, yet being formed, re-formed. The potter is working at his wheel. The potter is reworking the vessel. Rather, the potter is reworking the clay. The clay is not yet a vessel, if to be a vessel is to be a firm, fixed, final shape, greenware or bisque. The potter’s work is not yet final. The state of the clay remains contingent. And in that lies the hope. The clay is yet pliable; the potter yet working.

What is the clay of me, of us, of the community? What is intrinsic to my being? How to know? How to continually discover?

What of me is vessel, contingent, a shape that holds only for a time — that is meant to hold only for a time?

And how to give myself over to the potter’s hands and not to the vicissitudes of life. Of course, experiences will form and trials may deform. But the form mustn’t be fixed prematurely. Even a form that was right for a time may not be meant for all time. Yes, its reformation may feel like destruction — I liked my life that shape, loved it even — its revision a loss to be mourned. The grief is real. But that grief, too, must pass, along with the former, remembered shape. If the potter is reshaping the clay, as seems good, then there will be a new form for a new time, a new shape for a new stage.

Learn the qualities of the clay. Learn the potter’s hallmarks — shown through the word, handed on in lives through time and today, signed in love and upwelling joy. Study. Learn.

The LORD is a persistent potter, reworking the clay as seems good.

I am clay; my form still becoming. That contingency, and God’s patient persistence, is my hope and my prayer for us all.

Imaging Water

Hear the word of the LORD, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel. Thus says the LORD: What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves? […]

But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the LORD, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.

Jer 2:4-5, 11b-13; excerpt from lectionary text for Sunday Sept 1, 2019: Jeremiah 2:4-13.

When first I looked at this text, I could not see myself in it. It was about other people. People who ‘defiled the land,’ who made it ‘an abomination.’ People who gave no thought for the morrow, for eternity, for true and lasting values, but sought to lose themselves in shallow pursuits, selfish pleasures. (Obviously, I am apt excuse my own shallow pre-occupations and quick to notice others’. And this text was about them.)

God’s people ‘went after worthless things and became worthless themselves’ (2:5). They went after vanity and became vain, as the old King James puts it. They went after delusion and were deluded, says the translation of the Jewish Publication Society. The Hebrew ‘hebel’ means vanity, futility, something transient as a morning fog, emptiness. God’s people went after emptiness and became empty. They became what they pursued.

Surely this is not I, Lord. I seek. I strive. I want to drink deep from you.

The I read the last verse. And was transfixed at the image of God’s people digging cisterns. Not garden spades turning over soft loamy earth. Axes and chisels taken to stone. Hard stone, non-porous, carved out to collect the precious water as it falls from heaven, and to store it for current and future need. This is no light task but an arduous labor. The hewing of pools. Reservoirs cut into bedrock. Back-breaking. Necessary.

I read, and I saw. The people are not lazy or hedonistic or inattentive to their true need — they know they need water, they know there’s a lack, and they are working so very hard to fix it. Desperately striving, pushing themselves to exhaustion, and past … We hew out our cisterns. And still we are parched — because the cracked cisterns won’t hold water.

The trouble is not that God’s people mistook their need but that they thought to fill it by themselves, from themselves, within themselves. As if they could hew out their cisterns, pour themselves in, drink themselves up, and be quenched. I read that last verse, then went back and re-read the whole. Stone emptinesses the people pursued, and they became as stone — hollowed out and empty and unable to hold water, broken and cracked as the cisterns they made. As some mornings, some days, some weeks am I …

Yet God had promised them — before ever they had even entered the land — God had promised the gift of cisterns they did not have to hew (Deut 6:10-12). What caused them to forget the promise, or to fear its failure? Why did they try so diligently, so desperately to lean upon themselves instead of the LORD?

There’s a question repeated twice in this passage. A question that was not asked. The people did not ask, ‘Where is the LORD?’ (2:6). The priests did not say ‘Where is the LORD?’ (2:8). What if they had asked — and, asking, found? What if instead of going after emptinesses, they had gone after the living water? What if they had drunk deep of the LORD God? What would they have been then? What image would they have borne?

I’m aware of walking into a new season. Of explicit transition. Of ongoing discernment. And in a context that seems to be shifting all around me. So many needs; so many unknowns.

Now, as ever, I must remember to ask the question. Where is the LORD who brought me up out of Egypt? Where is the LORD who led me in the wilderness? Where is the LORD who planted me here, at this place and in this time, with these gifts and these needs? Where is the LORD, the fount of living water?

Look for the spring welling up in my life … rivulets rippling, sun-pennies glinting on the surface as it flows … waves growing greater.

The cistern I hew myself will always be inadequate, too small or cracked or otherwise insufficient. But the LORD is an overflowing stream, living water poured into my cup, into me, brimful and running over, so to flow out from my particular life.

Look for the LORD, present and gracious, playful and powerful as living water.

And worship. Wade into the water. Drink deep from the LORD God. Be continually filled and ultimately re-created in the image of living water. Playful. Powerful. Transforming all it touches.

Uprooting Anew

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 1:9-10; part of lectionary text Jeremiah 1:4-10 for Aug 25, 2019

It is both a discipline and a gift to take what the lectionary offers each week and see what the text says in my context as well as its own. I’ve set for myself the work of attending to the prophetic texts while they are given: not reading all the lectionary selections and deciding between but defaulting to the word of the prophet, whichever prophet. This week, though, the lectionary gives me — again — Jeremiah 1:4-10. But I had that one already this cycle!, I want to protest. Let me choose another!

Except I’ve set myself this task not to choose but to accept. And I really do love this passage. So accept the invitation to ponder it again as a gift. Maybe there’s a narrowness to so (relatively) prompt a return to the same words. Or maybe there’s a wideness in clinging to the discipline’s constraint.

So. Jeremiah 1:4-10.

Why do I love this passage? Start there. I love the interplay of the words, the relationship exchange: the LORD gives ‘the boy’ as a prophet (1:5); the LORD gives God’s words to the prophet’s mouth (1:9).

I love it for the intimacy: ‘the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth’ (1:9). The contact is physical: hand meets mouth. The words, even, seem palpable: transferred via touch, taken between the lips, onto the tongue. God’s word eaten (Jer 15:16). Was it sweet as honey (Ezek 3:3)? Did it flame as coal (Isa 6:7; Jer 20:9)? ‘How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!’ sings the psalmist (Psa 119:103).

Suddenly, my lip cringes. Honey is too sweet. My tongue craves chocolate so dark that the depth of its taste rounds my mouth for hours.

Read on. The words that follow the given-word are not sweet. Jeremiah is appointed ‘to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant’ (1:10). Four infinitives of destruction; only two of hope. The bitterness of the first four verbs are only barely tempered by the concluding two. The words tell that Jeremiah’s work will be gut-wrenching, pain-filled (20:8-9). Not sweet.

I know something of the context of Jeremiah’s time: violent destruction, deportation, and death, a traumatic end to the nation. I know something of the context of Jeremiah’s scroll: oracles scribed and re-inscribed, edited and redacted and put into varying orders. I know that the balance of four to two may reflect the trauma of Jeremiah’s context or even a later spirit softening the first bitter draft with the final phrase of possibility.

As I spend the week (again) with the text, it’s these last words — not at all sweet — that stay longest in my mouth, on my mind. There’s a truth to them wider than the particulars of Jeremiah’s time. A truth narrower, too, than the breadth of a nation’s existence, or end. A truth that fits my life.

Think of gardens or forests. Or bookshelves or closets. Or calendars. Think of anything overgrown with weeds that choke the wanted plants, anything crammed too full of old things to leave space for possible new. The ground must be cleared. Of trash. Of debris. Of structures that oppress; patterns of practice or attitude that repress. Even of tangible items and rhythms of living that were good and dear but whose presence crowds out any alternative. (The curly-leafed ivy from my wedding bouquet which has overtaken the entire planter.)

I don’t mean to de-emphasize the violence of the prophet’s words, nor minimize the pain their proclamation portends. To pluck up and to pull down. To destroy and to overthrow.

But more and more I realize their necessity, notwithstanding the pain. At some point, the garment can no longer be patched. At some point, the pattern of life can no longer be tweaked and trimmed around the edges (whether ‘trim’ is read as addition or subtraction). At some point, the only possible way forward requires first an action of relinquishment, an experience of death.

It is exhausting work just to persist. Continuing on as ever we have because forever we have is so wearying that we can miss the way we are meant to take. Or even seeing it, feel ourselves too exhausted to make the turn. After all, we know how to walk this road. One foot in front of the other. There may be no great joy in it, but at least it feels familiar underfoot, it can be trodden without extra effort.

To push and push and push against a wall does not necessarily re-create it as a door. Leave off the fruitless effort. Step back. Study again the way and all the weights you are bearing. Hear the call to pluck up and pull down as invitation and as obligation, as discipline and as gift.

What in my life must I carry on? What in my life must I lay down? What in my life must I let die? What in my life must I uproot? What cost of loss and grief must I risk, allow, even try to welcome?

What in my life may then be planted and built? What of me may bloom new?

God’s Planting

Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard:

My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.

He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines;

he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it;

he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.

Isa 5:1-2; full passage, Isa 5:1-7, for Aug. 18, 2019 linked at https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+5%3A1-7&version=NRSV

It feels a bit awkward trying to appropriate for my own life texts so obviously addressed to a community. The prophet speaks of and to ‘the house of Israel’ and ‘the people of Judah’ (5:7) — the nation planted for justice and righteousness (Isa 5:7), yet yielding only ‘wild grapes’ (Isa 5:2), ‘bloodshed’ and ‘a cry’ (Isa 5:7). I can read the text and recall the sound-play that in Hebrew joins and opposes ‘justice’ and ‘bloodshed,’ ‘righteousness’ and ‘a cry.’ I can review the context of eighth century Judah, the inequity of its affluence, the iniquity of its structures, and I can posit convicting connections to my own context. But that reading alone does not carry me through. I do not need to read the text to see my own world. I know it already as broken and ill. Reading the text as a lens on my context — find the parallels, connect the dots — is important and necessary work. Yet doing just this week after week feels reductionist, redundant. It becomes a short cut that takes me quickly to a blank wall, a dead end. I stand there staring at graffitied bricks. There’s no way forward.

But what if I turn the lens the other way? Instead of treating the text as God’s revelation meant to show me my world and myself, receive the text as a revelation of God’s self. Read the text and look for God. What then do I see? Who is the LORD revealed in this given word?

God as lover. The singer, the LORD, and the vineyard are conjoined in this title, not just ‘beloved’ but ‘my beloved’ — relationship claimed.

God as gardener. There’s love in that image as well, and a suggestion of physical exertion and intimate contact. God breaks up and turns over the soil — heavy, sweaty, dirty work. God hauls out the stones, sets them aside for the watchtower to be built. God plants choice vines: soaks the roots, digs holes and sets the tender plants in, bends to press the dirt around, stakes the tiny vines. Does God’s back ache? Are God’s fingers filthy? Does God pause to wipe sweat from the divine forehead with a forearm? Does God gaze with pardonable pride at the work, seeing already and gloating with joy over the sure growth coming? God builds a watchtower and hews out a wine vat and looks forward to the harvest, the processing, the wine given to ‘gladden the heart’ (Psa 104:15), mixed and poured and set on a table for all to partake (Prov 9:1-6).

God as generous, as ultimately invested. Having given all that could possibly be given: ‘What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?’ (Isa 5:4). God as hurt and puzzled: ‘Why did it yield wild grapes?’ (Isa 5:4). God allowing that emotion, acknowledging the cost of the investment in naming the disappointment of its failure.

God as inviting the vineyard to be invested as well. The inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah are called to judge between the LORD and the vineyard (Isa 5:3). Such judgment is only possible when both sides are fully seen. To ‘judge between’ means to see the vineyard truly, which the text defines as seeing the vineyard in relation to God. So, and again: read the text to see God. The glance turning back and forth between, from one to the other; looking deliberately, carefully; widening the gaze; acknowledging the identity-with as well as the vast distance between.

The LORD planted a vineyard. I — we — are the LORD’s ‘pleasant planting’ (Isa 5:7).

Harvest will come. The LORD makes that plain. God’s plan may be resisted but will not be gainsaid. God commands creation itself to further God’s aim (Isa 5:6). Harvest will come. Yet God wants all of this — planting and nurture and growth and harvest — not done to us but with us. God calls the vineyard itself to ‘judge between,’ and so that we can see enough to judge, God lights the way with words that shine to reveal God’s self.

The writing is no graffitied dead-end but an open door. Through it I glimpse the gardener — if only from behind — bent over and working to till and plant and nurture the growth. Persistently willing a tableful of joy.

Please, LORD: Let me see the world with your sight, by your light. Give me enough heart and courage to walk out into it bearing your image. Lover, gardener, risking the gift, persistently working to bring the harvest to full and joyful fruit. As I myself am brought.

‘Come now’

When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

Isa 1:15-20 (from lectionary text for Aug 11, 2019; full cite Isa 1:1, 10-20)

It is somewhat unnerving to come to this week’s text in a week after news of new shootings, new raids. Bodies torn open. Families torn apart. (I find myself almost, perversely, relieved that the last shooting of the series — the last as of this writing, and based on the information now known — seems to be ‘merely’ wanton criminality rather than flowing from our nation’s divisions.)

It is difficult to read the text’s reference to ‘hands full of blood’ as anything other than literal in such circumstances. Yet the blood-full hands are not only those dripping from intimately physical violence, the oppression of brethren (whether distanced as ‘other’ or acknowledged as kin). The blood-full hands are also those which have offered the right sacrifice — ‘the blood of bulls or of lambs or of goats’ (Isa 1:11) — yet who live in complicit accommodation of the systemic iniquity. The reference to ‘blood’ implicates not only that wickedly shed but also that properly required and accounted for. Even that reddens the hands. Open your palms; spread your fingers wide; flare your nostrils at the iron smell; see the red so bright before it darkens, grows thick and sticky. You’ve touched pitch; did you think you could escape the stain? Rub your hands together; the spot remains.

The blood-full hands are literal and metaphorical. The bloodshed is individual and communal. And even that widened gaze is not enough. Not this week. Because this week has felt a fresh storm of violence, physical and emotional. I need not just a word to the community (notwithstanding all my teaching, my inmost and utmost conviction that this text was given to and through and for community) but a word to me. A word to bring me through to next week. That’s all I ask. Not a forever word but one for-now, a sustaining sufficient to bring me through these days and back again to the text for next week’s word.

Maybe it’s because last week’s text already evoked the motif of the LORD as parent: ’When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son’ (Hos 11:1). Maybe it’s because the motif appears as well in verses just prior to those assigned for this week: ’I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me’ (Isa 1:2b). Maybe it’s because of how I myself feel after this storm of emotion, of anger, of weeping. I am left wrung out, not just limp but lined and turned askew with the marks of its twisting. I read and re-read, and a line catches me. It catches my eye, first, and then, as my lips shape to sound the words, my ear. ‘Come, let us argue it out, says the LORD’ (1:18). And though the ‘Come’ is plural in Hebrew, in English I can hear and imagine it as addressed to me, even me. ‘Come,’ the LORD invites, ‘Come now. Let us argue it out.’ Let us dispute it; let us reason it out. ‘Let us reach an understanding,’ reads the translation of the Jewish Publication Society. The summoning is implacable but not harsh. Is there not a warmth in it? The LORD wants the argument, the reasoning, the understanding. The LORD wants the conversation. The mouth of the LORD speaks as a mother does to a child wrung limp, turned askew by a temper tantrum, the throes of violence having passed, leaving a damp exhaustion behind … and the corresponding inability to figure out any way out of the impasse, any way to resist the paralysis, any way through to newness.

The mouth of the LORD has spoken. The storm need not be a full-stop end of sentence. There is another word. There will be another after that. And it is through the word, the speech, the argument, the reasoning, that the cleansing shall come. It is through relationship that the scarlet stain will be lifted and the white of snow or wool given instead.

Newness shall come. I don’t know how. I don’t need to know fully — I did not ask a forever word, after all, but a word sufficient for this day, for the next. And this is the answer. Come now, the LORD invites. Let us talk together. Through this day, and on into the days coming.

Twisted System

When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.” So he went and took Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. And the LORD said to him, “Name him Jezreel*; for in a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.” She conceived again and bore a daughter. Then the LORD said to him, “Name her Lo-ruhamah**, for I will no longer have pity on the house of Israel or forgive them. But I will have pity on the house of Judah, and I will save them by the LORD their God; I will not save them by bow, or by sword, or by war, or by horses, or by horsemen.” When she had weaned Lo-ruhamah, she conceived and bore a son. Then the LORD said, “Name him Lo-ammi***, for you are not my people and I am not your God.” Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” it shall be said to them, “Children of the living God.”

Hosea 1:2-10; lectionary text for Sunday July 28, 2019

The text and I are in the kitchen together. One of us is at the sink, washing dishes. The other stands looking at the dishwasher’s back. For a moment neither of us speaks. I can no longer stay silent.

‘‘Wife of whoredom’ — really? — my God! do you hear how alienating that sounds? Who wants to spend a week with those words ringing? They’re coarse and unwelcoming. Hostile, even.’

‘’Wife of whoredom’ — of course it’s alienating. Don’t you hear what’s going on?

‘What I hear is ‘whoredom.’’

‘So then you stop listening? Because it’s offensive? Because it’s uncomfortable? No! Don’t shut your ears and refuse to hear more. And don’t assume you know what I mean and start talking over me, responding to the point you assume I’m making. It’s not about the sex. It’s not about fertility cults or harvest orgies or temple prostitution. Don’t turn away! Listen to me!’

The voice of the text had risen strident. Now it drops without losing any of its fervor, its force somehow stronger in its quietness.

‘It’s about fidelity. It’s about identity. And it’s about how brokenness is bigger than just one person, just one couple. Brokenness spreads like cancer throughout the land. We beat each other with it, blame each other for it. We forget and lose who we are meant to be.

‘Yes, the words are alienating. How else to name alienation? How else to make it plain?’

The text and I are facing each other now. Her face is worn; her voice hardly more than a whisper.

‘Read me through. Try. Hear the pain behind the anger. Think how it feels to have to name your daughter ‘not-pitied,’ your son ‘not-my-people.’ These your children whom you called as your own: ‘I will take you as my people, and I will be your God’ (Exod 6:7). These your children whom still you love. These your children who have turned away, who seek security and power and purpose elsewhere. Whose claimed identity is no longer God’s-own but …

‘… but their own.’ Now I am speaking back to the text. ‘Who live as if they have made themselves and called themselves. Who cry in the dark, nor can figure out why or what is wrong. Who do not realize how far from that way they have strayed. Because still they make the ‘right’ decisions, celebrate the ‘right’ festivals. Who respond to the promptings of the larger society — whether walking lock-step or rigidly resisting — so that its imperatives govern their way, define their lives. The system is sick, and it’s twisting us all. And worst of the sickness is that it’s unacknowledged or mis-diagnosed.’ My own voice is now a whisper, echoing that of the speaking text. ‘So it’s not about the sex. It’s about the children.

The text replies, ‘Yes. It’s about the children.’

‘Is it plea, then, rather than judgment? To name them ‘Not-pitied’ and ‘Not-my-people?’

‘Oh, child. It is both. A plea for turning and a warning of consequences. The sowing of Jezreel (‘God sows’) is judgment. The sickness must be named and the sickness must be treated.’ Her voice is warmer, now, but still firm. Her face is set — she will not relent — there’s ache and understanding in her gaze. There is love. My own eyes drop. The text presses.

‘Where do you find your worth? How do you define your worth? What is the name you’re truly living now?’ the text asks. ‘What is the true name you were meant to bear?’

Still gazing down, I feel for a moment a hand resting blessing on my head. The text speaks on, ’In place of the name ‘Not-my-people’ it shall be said, ‘Children of the living God.’’

* Jezreel means ‘God sows.’ ** Lo-ruhamah means ‘Not-pitied.’ *** Lo-Ammi means ‘Not my people.’

Text in Context

Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words. For thus Amos has said, ‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile away from his land.’” And Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”

Amos 7:10-13

The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.

Amos 8:11-12

[Amos 7:10-13 part of lectionary text for July 14; Amos 8:1-12 lectionary text for July 21, 2019] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Amos+8%3A1-12&version=NRSV

I try to read the coming-Sunday’s texts on Monday, to live with them through the week, to see how text and context read each other. Sometimes the connecting line is subtle, so personal that I am not entirely sure whether I am connecting dots or marking them in myself. All I can do in such a case is to re-commit myself, every week, to read the word and read my world, each in light of the other. All I can do in such a case is pray that through practice and repetition and return, the discipline of reading and re-reading, I am not just reading the text but finding myself read, writing and re-writing my life over and over on the way limned by the Word.

That’s why I do this.

Then there are the weeks when I open my Bible to the text prescribed by the lectionary, and find the connecting line from word to world writ stark and bold. When the vision is not just personal nor even particularly subtle, but writ in letters so large and ‘plain … that a runner may read it’ (Hab 2:2). And because the lectionary is a contrivance — useful but not the word itself — sometimes the connection crosses the lines between lectionary divisions — just as the news is not over when we put our paper in the recycling but continues across days and weeks.

There is a nation, the text says. A nation enjoying the security of its ‘restored’ borders (2 Kings 14:25) and a season of prosperity. A nation of ‘great houses’ and ‘houses of ivory,’ a ‘winter house’ and a ‘summer house’ (Amos 2:15). A nation whose residents have ‘built houses of hewn stone’ and ‘planted pleasant vineyards’ (5:11), whose fortunate ‘lounge on their couches’ and eat and drink like gourmands (6:4-6). Who amass the latest in luxury items and experiences, who enjoy a rising real estate and stock portfolio. A nation whose leaders claim fidelity to the ideal’s claim on their identity, with ‘festivals’ and ‘solemn assemblies’ (5:21), with concerts (5:23), and parades and fireworks. There is a nation urged to rejoice in its own strength (6:13)

Yet a nation which will not hear the one who ‘reproves in the gate’ (5:10). A leader who calls judgment conspiracy (7:10) and seeks to eject the one who sees affluence and power — ‘something good’ — and insists on writing them ‘bad.’

‘The land cannot bear all his words,’ the leader says (7:10). Conspiracy, the leader charges (7:10). ‘Go, flee away’ (7:12), the leader commands, go back to where you came from. The leader does not engage with the substance of the proclamation (perhaps Amos’s charges are irrefutable — the poor are trampled (5:11), brought to ruin (8:4), sold for silver (8:6); righteous are afflicted, bribery is rife, the needy are pushed aside (5:12); religious festivals are mere pauses in practices of deceit (8:5)). Instead, the leader asserts that the land, the city, the sanctuary are the king’s (7:13), as if possession entails exclusive right to speech. As if any countervailing voice is an act of infidelity, even treason, to the nation’s ideals, rather than the plaint of the LORD God-self who charges the nation with having betrayed its own founding covenant, the writing by which it was formed (2:4).

There is a nation which ‘commanded the prophets saying ‘You shall not prophesy’’ (2:12).

I do not know whether I would have recognized Amos as the LORD’s messenger. Living as I do in a house (singular), able to lounge in bed or on the couch, aware that my fridge and cupboards are filled with food, my closet with clothes, my shelves with books, Amos’s word would have made me uncomfortable. (Because it does.) I might have disagreed with Amos’s assessment — he finds only falsehood, from sanctuary to market to the court in the gate, in a tone so strident that I suspect he exaggerates, ignores the small mercies that must also have existed. (Amos prophesies imminent and ultimate disaster, yet the nation is stable for decades after his own.) Even if I entirely agreed with Amos’s social diagnosis, I likely would have critiqued his prescribed remedy. The rolling down of justice with an accompanying flood of righteousness (5:24) sounds not just threateningly transformative but so vague as to inhibit legislative implementation. (It’s as impracticably vast as ‘Love God and love your neighbor.’) (Oh.)

Yet I hope I would have listened. I pray I would have tried to hear.

Not just for the sake of remedying those particular injustices, averting that prophesied catastrophe (the land trembling and sinking under the waters, the earth darkened in broad daylight, the grief and mourning as ‘for an only son’ (8:8-10)), but for the sake of hearing itself.

For comes a time when nation will know famine (8:11-12). Not a famine of food or drink but a famine of the word, a dearth of truth. Comes a time when we realize not just our lack but our desperate need. Comes a time when we will know ourselves starving and parched. We run to and fro; we search and we seek. Yet if we have refused to hear, we will not even know if we find. If we have grown unwilling to listen to truth, unaccustomed to listening for truth, we grow unable to hear truth. God may even speak, and we will not know.

I pray for the humility to listen. I pray for the courage to speak.

That seeking with and through each other, we together find and hear the word of the LORD.