Weekly Shop in a Testing Time

He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”

Exodus 17:7; from Exodus 17:1-7, lectionary text for Sunday March 15, 2020

I have never seen the grocery so busy on a Friday morning. I take the last of the small carts and wipe it with the last of the sanitizing wipes from the dispenser. Workers are restocking, yet there are gaps in the displays. ‘No carrots?’ I say aloud, surprised. The man who manages produce thinks there may be a case in the back. (There is.) A woman nearby tells me ‘They’re out of toilet paper. It was the first thing I checked.’ Her daughter in California told her that toilet paper is not to be found; she herself is stocked up from Costco; she may send some rolls to her daughter. The store is not lacking in vivid green St. Patricks Day cheer: cardboard shamrocks sign displays of Kelly-frosted cupcakes, green-sugared cookies, and Irish soda bread (which is normal soda-bread color).

The sense of something looming seems palpable in the presence and intensity of so many shoppers. None of us here is obviously sick. We don’t know when or if we will be. Yet whatever anxiety each of us feels is shown — at least on this morning, in this place — in gestures of fellowship. Confidences about the procurement of toilet paper; wry grins and comments in the checkout line. (A line in which none of us maintain the recommended six foot distance.) There is a camaraderie in the shared circumstance of unknowing. Maybe because as yet the crisis is coming, but not fully here. Is there something of this waiting time not just to savor but to save? Something that we need to remember, to carry us through whatever it is that may come?

Israel in the wilderness. Out from Egypt and not yet to Sinai. Just saved from slavery, and on the way to covenant, and already this is the third instance of ‘grumbling.’ The people grumble for sweet water, instead of bitter (Exodus 15:24), and for food to eat (16:2-3), and now again for water to drink in this place where there is none (17:1). The conflict has intensified. The people ‘quarrel’ as well as ‘grumble’ (in the NRSV: ‘complain’). Their hostility has increased with their desperation. They are unified in their demand: ‘Give us water’ — all of us, as one, require drink.

In the Hebrew, the demand then takes an interesting turn: ‘Why did you bring us up from Egypt to kill me and my son …?’ See what happened there? The collective has become fragmented. Suddenly what matters is not our need but my own, not our children, but my child. It’s awkward in the Hebrew — the sudden singular ‘me/my’ — and entirely elided in the English translations, which maintain the plural ‘us/our’ throughout, as if that middle shift in number was a grammatical hiccup to be corrected instead of a signal of the people’s fear. The need is real. Water is necessary but there is no water for the people to drink. The panic has set in — what’s at stake, each realizes, is my life, my child’s life. Where there had been an all the people now there is each one of them. For the moment of that phrase, the desperate urgency of their need revealed in the insistence on individuality.

The text ends with the place name explained — Massah-Meribah, Trial-Quarrel. The people quarreled with Moses and tried or tested the LORD. The final line, the accusation the people are accused of making, is what their quarrel sums to: ‘Is the LORD among us or not?’ There is either the LORD in their midst or there is nothing. This demand for water is a demand to know that the LORD is among them. God’s response to Moses takes seriously the need. Water will be provided; the people will drink. God will be present. More than that: God is present.

‘See — me!’ the LORD tells Moses (‘hinneni’), or in the old form of the King James ‘Behold! — me — standing there in front of you.’ God’s speech can be translated and read as if its point is proper attribution of the miracle that will occur: God will stand there, before Moses, and therefore Moses’ gesture will result in the life-giving flow of water. But what if God’s speech is not just about divine power? What if God’s speech is about divine presence? After all, this is what the people’s demand for water sums to: Is the LORD among us or not? ‘See me,’ the LORD tells Moses. It’s not just about the water. It’s about God. See: God is standing there.

I walk home with a bag of groceries hanging from each shoulder. The first yellows of spring — forsythia and daffodils and crocus — are being joined by soft pinks and creams of blossoming trees — magnolia, pear, cherry. The wind is blowing and the branches sway and the air is billowing warm. It is a beautiful day. It is a strange season, unnerving with virus as well as flowers blooming. We are all out of our ordinary. Wandering this period of patterns disrupted and no idea when new ones will be set, or can be set, or even what they might be.

At least one particular morning, in one particular grocery store, the result of each of us shaken out of our pattern seems to be that more of us were seeing each other. Recognizing each other’s presence with comments and smiles and an unusually patient waiting in line. Maybe that’s what we need to save and carry on into this unknown future, near term and far. When the crisis comes full, when the fear becomes acute, when desperation overtakes — resist the urge to regard and cry out only for me, for my own. Even when we keep our ‘social distance,’ spend days apart from others, move work and teaching and worship online, we must keep seeing each other — not only looking out for ourselves. See especially those who are not online but restocking grocery shelves, caring for children, nursing the sick. See each other. Regard the ‘us’ of community.

Is the LORD in our midst or is nothing? That’s the question that the LORD answered, in providing the water and in speaking to Moses: ‘See — me, standing before you….’

Maybe the start of seeing the LORD standing, the LORD present in our midst, is by looking to see each other, the ‘us’ among whom the LORD is present.

Wandering Home*

Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were two hundred five years; and Terah died in Haran.

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the LORD had told him.

Gen 11:31-12:4a; expansion of lectionary text for Sunday March 8, 2020.

My name is Abram.

You will know me as Abraham Father of many. You will know me as the rock from which you were hewn, your father of old, whose trust was reckoned as righteousness, who did not withhold even his own son. You will know me as one who was called to go and who went.

But I am not Abraham yet. My name is Abram. And here, at the start of it all, I am not stepping surefooted into any future. I am standing stunned in the remainder of what was. I am seeing it as if for the first time clear-sighted. I am realizing that what I’d taken for shelter turns out to be open to the sky. I wonder if the ruin I now realize is something new or if I have only just noticed what always has been. The shelter seemed sufficient; I never felt the rain. But maybe it had not really rained before. The ground around me is strewn with stones, as if the remains of a fallen building. Not a home. Maybe the foundation for one.

We left our homeland years ago, my father Terah and my wife Sarai and my nephew Lot and myself. My brother already had died. Our father determined to go. We left our homeland, and we set out for Canaan, but we settled elsewhere on our way. It was a place. Good enough for its while. It could not be home — always we were come-theres, not from-theres — but it was a place. We spoke our language and we ate our food and we worshipped our gods and we were together. And I was Abram.

Still I am Abram, but I am no longer sure who Abram is. Was I more Abram when I lived in Ur, with my circle of kindred surrounding? What happened, then, when my brother died? When we left the land of my birth? When we journeyed to another land? The words and food and gods were different. How was I Abram then? And now? My brother is died; my father now too. I have only just realized that I am adrift. Not anchored in any place. This no-place is is not in the land of my birth nor the land we had traveled toward. We had settled here, and I had thought we had built here a stable shelter. But now I look up and see broken walls unroofed, open to the sky. Now I look around and see the ground strewn with stones. Maybe events have tumbled the building; or maybe we never had built the edifice we had imagined, the shelter we had thought we lived in.

Gather myself. Clear the rubble into some sort of order. Set the larger stones here; the smaller pieces there. Maybe a new foundation can be laid.

Gather myself. Or feel myself gathered. Comes a voice. A call. The beginning of a new wondering. Maybe the stones are not for building a home with walls and a roof. Maybe the stones are for laying a road.

I am Abram. Called by God to get up and go. I am Abram, responding to God’s promise that through the process of wondering, and of wandering, I will arrive at the place that is called home.

* Genesis recounts Terah’s death immediately before the LORD’s calling of Abram, as if the two events occur in this order. Elsewhere, Genesis lists the ages of Terah and Abram from which information it can be calculated that Terah did not die until well after Abram had left Haran. But the text on its face suggests a chronological narrative: ‘Terah died in Haran. Now the LORD said to Abram ….’ So that is how I read it this week. See ‘Abraham and Sarah: Genesis 11-22,’ in Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford Bible Series) Oxford University Press; (1993) by David M. Gunn and Danna Nolan Fewell.

Choosing to Choose

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live…

Deuteronomy 30:19; from Deut 30:15-20, lectionary text for Sunday Feb. 16, 2020

Choose. That is the imperative I respond to tonight. Choose.

The full phrase is actually ‘choose life.’ It is embedded in a longer passage. Moses has been talking for 30 chapters, all the way from Deuteronomy 1, reminding God’s people of all God has been and done for them, of all they are called to do and to be in relation to God. Here, in his culminating peroration, Moses sets out the dual possibilities (prosperity and adversity; blessings and curses; life and death; Deut 30:15, 19), and crowns it all with this exhortation to choose life.

Choose, Moses says. The imperative resonates. Choosing is required of me. But I am tired. Bone-tired. Too tired to look again at the text, too tired to ponder it more, too tired to write what I wonder. The exhaustion is real, drags at my body, dulls my understanding. I need some undemanding activity. Reading words is too hard. Wording thoughts feels impossible.

Choose, Moses says. As if choosing is possible for me. As if I have agency. For all that I feel bound in my tiredness, burdened by To-Do’s yet undone, constrained by choices already made and carried out that have led to me here and, yes, tired.

Choose, Moses says. There is no better time than now — there’s no other time than now. You were tired yesterday and, honestly, you’ll be tired tomorrow too. Yes, you are living the sum of so many other choices already made — but so is everybody. Every single one of us has it so. We live now with the choices made yesterday and a year ago and a decade before that; we live the result of the choices that we made in those years past and the choices others made as well. It is a complicated web that connects and ties us all. And it is a web still being woven, threads untied and re-tied and new-spun into wider weaving.

Choose, Moses says. Choosing is required. Choosing is possible. The past has happened, yes, and I am here, and I am tired. Yet I am not ended, the web is not closed, the future is not determined. There is the next choice to be made and walked on into and through, and then the next after that. My agency is limited. The ultimate sum is beyond my control. But I can choose some of the addends. I can choose to resist exhaustion that comes so close to hopelessness. I can choose to persist in intentional effort. I can choose to read and to ponder and to write my wondering.

Choose, Moses says, granting me choice as both duty and as gift.

And, choosing the text, I find that my exhaustion recedes that bit. There’s energy gained as well as spent (none wasted) in the work of wording my wondering, energy come from imagining — hoping — that my words truly are resonating at the same frequency as the words of the text.

The energy ebbs. The tiredness is true, after all. But the effect of the resonance lingers even as I save the document, close my computer, ready for bed. I am allowed and able to choose.

Choose the work. Realize the life.

Transfiguration

for Sunday March 3, 2019

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

Exodus 34:29-32

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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