Made in the likeness

‘The tongue is a fire…’
James 3:6; excerpt from James 3:1-12, lectionary for 9.12.21

When we woke up, fog obscured the lake. Somehow that’s part of this telling: that when we woke that morning, all we saw was thick grey-white.

Now the fog is gone. We’ve paddled onto the wide water, pointed out a kingfisher darting, a great blue heron laboring into flight. Paul casts for fish, and I sit and look at the world as we drift. The sky is bright, light blue. The clouds are dense white mounds, gently flattened on the bottom. The blue and the white show not only in the sky but in the lake. The water is so glassy as to hold the image of the heavens. Made in the likeness, I think, is this what James meant…?

Connections with James continue uncanny. ‘Not many of you should become teachers,’ James writes, and I, starting a new semester, wince and laugh. ‘The tongue is a fire,’ James writes, and I hear voices rising strident, angry and afraid, speech consuming communion. I marvel again that in telling his world, James is reading me my own.

Have I found a key to reading in likeness? James has been using family references throughout: calling God ‘Father’ (1:17, 27; 3:9), addressing ‘my brothers’ and sisters (1:2; 2:1; 3:1; 3:10), stressing relationship in community. Reference to ‘those who are made in the likeness of God’ shifts the stress. ‘Likeness’ is also relational, but the primary relation is to the original, to God who created us in God’s own ‘image,’ according to God’s ‘likeness’ (Gen. 1:26-27). The relation of image to original comes first and is universal. The relation between images, all made in the same likeness, follows. And if the first relation of ‘likeness’ is universal, then the secondary between images is not limited by the corporate bounds of the community but defined in God.
I am sitting in the canoe, floating on water that bears the likeness of the sky. The sky speaks blue, with clouds. The water echoes. There are no words but a sort of speech is heard (Psalm 19:1-4). The water has to hear the light to tell it back.

‘Hear!’ God proclaims; the command to hear is the necessary preface to the command to love (Deut 6:4-5). God who commands hearing is also God who hears (Exod 2:24; 3:7; Psalm 18:6), God who holds us all in mind.

Should we not also strive to hear and hold each other?

James-the-letter is all-tongue, shaping words for others to hear. James-the-letter-writer also has ears. James hears a community facing trials (1:2), angry (1:19-21), divided in itself (2:1-13), mirroring the world instead of the Lord (1:24). James hears, also, the word that is full, perfect, complete, and James wants this breaking body to hear the likeness it was made to bear. James writes so that the body will be reminded to listen, tuning ears to the perfect law, told by his imperfect tongue, through his imperfect pen.

‘The tongue is a fire.’ I cannot control the ‘whole body’ (3:1-2) whether it is my own or the body corporate. I can bend my part of it towards the goal of perfect love. Neither shout nor be silenced. Listen without deferring to the fog of fear or hate. Tune ears to hear amid the cacophony the finest thread of love, the shared yearning for wholeness. Turn tongue and pen to persistently make plain the vision.

Bless Lord and Father and those made in God’s likeness.

The Law of Liberty

A boat in need of being made whole. Photo (c) Katherine Brown

‘So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty.’

James 2:12; excerpt from James 2:1-17, lectionary epistle for Sunday Sept. 5, 2021.

James 2:12 catches me in particular this week and only partly because some lectionaries omit vv. 11-13 from the formal reading. Whenever verses are cut like this, I wonder whether they’re trimmed to avoid too long a reading or too difficult a point. I’ve enough of a contrarian streak to resist the lectionary’s limit. More than that, though, verse 12 catches me because of its phrasing: ‘So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty.’

‘The law of liberty’ sounds an oxymoron when compared to the way in which ‘liberty’ is usually construed these days. News reports and social media quote or proclaim ‘liberty’ as the nation’s primary value, seeming to define it as freedom to do or to refrain from doing as each individual chooses. Yet if ‘liberty’ is the freedom to do what you will without constraint, then how can it be a ‘law’? Even if ‘law’ is interpreted as making ‘liberty’ the absolute value, that by which all of us are bound, there remains a tension in the idea of being bound to unrestraint. Besides that, James explains that the ‘law of liberty’ is that by which we are ‘judged.’ If liberty is the freedom to do what you will, without constraint, then how can it be a ‘law’ whose keeping (or lack) is judged? Judged by whom? Who has the right?

The rhetoric around masks and vaccination grows only more vituperative. The fervor is surely a measure of the stress weighing on us all. Both sides cry ‘liberty’ but neither defines it the same way. For one group, liberty means not being required to act; any imposition of responsibility is resisted: each should ‘do the good in his own eyes’ (the context of Judges 21:25 shows the lack of approbation of this view). Others point out that doing nothing in the context of disease (viral or otherwise) is not a neutral action, and argue that liberty means not being required to bear the negative consequences of others’ choices.

James seems to understand ‘liberty’ differently. It’s not ‘individual,’ not ‘personal’ (the adjectives which modify, if implicitly, ‘liberty’ in current rhetoric). James knows ‘liberty’ in the context of ‘law.’ The ‘law of liberty’ is ‘the perfect law,’ the mirror that tells us who and whose we are — if only we look into it (James 1:25)! It is the royal summons (James 2:8) to love our neighbor as ourselves (Lev. 19:18), so that they and we together are caught up in the connected web which is kingdom living.

‘For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it,’ James writes (2:10), and having already called partiality a violation (2:9), goes on to talk of murder and of adultery (2:11) as if to make excruciatingly plain that the law is not a list from which we pick and choose. It is a whole, with its own integrity.

The royal law of liberty is perfect, complete, full, indivisible. Because we are partial, we come to know it partially, in bits and pieces and numbered lists, and we each keep the part of it that we touch. I’m not meant to hold the whole world in my hands but I am meant to keep the whole law for that part of the world which I do hold, and to learn thereby that my touch is not the limit of my reach. My speech and my silence, my actions and my inactions, all affect others. Theirs affect me. Whether we seek to live in a ‘more perfect union’ or the kingdom of God’s will done ‘on earth as in heaven’ (Matt 6:10), we are bound to one another. The perfect law is the liberty to work out life together, not to freedom to think [prefer?] death (James 2:17).

‘So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty.’

Summer’s End

‘Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.’

James 1:17-18; excerpt from James 1:17-27, lectionary text for Aug. 29, 2021

This is not where I thought I’d be at summer’s end. I remember April and May. The relief of being vaccinated. The satisfaction of submitting spring semester grades, wrapping up the entire, grueling, academic year, with only two summer courses to teach. The pleasing surprise of coming awake one morning before my alarm, sunrise summoning me up and out to walk, to recover that daily rhythm of summers past.

Now it is the end of August. Sunrise is an hour later. We’ve gone from azaleas to crepe myrtle, from ‘Brood Z’ cicadas (95 dB) to ‘oak leaf itch mites’ (don’t ask!). I planned a family funeral repast, taught my two classes, graded papers, preached, anticipated re-opening, walked in the mornings, read the news, was increasingly undone. COVID is coming back around, more virulent than before. Division persists, expands, embitters; the disharmony is its own distinct pain. Smoke from western wildfires hazes the eastern sky. Haiti endures assassination and earthquake. Hurricanes Fred, Grace, Henri, and Ida sweep through in swift succession. Afghanistan suffers violent collapse. I am swamped, over-aware of my inability to make a difference, paralyzed by my own puniness. Also I broke my toe, so morning walks are paused. ‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved’ (Jer. 8:20).

I’ve journaled all summer but not written to post. A half-dozen false starts, each easily deleted as it existed only electronically. I revert to pen and page, write on a leaf bound into a book, something I cannot easily delete nor discard. I push to write on through, pray the unfurling line of ink is a line to haul myself out into, again, a broader place. I open my book, take pen in hand, and hitch my line to the letter of James.

The lectionary text begins mid-way through chapter 1. The references to ‘giving’ and ‘gift’ seem a non-sequitur after verses discussing temptation and testing and desire and sin. There’s an echo, though, of earlier verses, where James wrote of God’s own generous, ungrudging ‘giving’ (James 1:5), and of the ‘full work’ of endurance: that we (‘you’) are full, perfect, complete (James 1:4).

Full, perfect, complete. None of these do I feel now. I am more aware of incapacity and lack. James writes of looking into a mirror and promptly forgetting the self you’ve seen. What I read is an injunction to catalogue flaws as if self-recrimination had not already overwhelmed me in the face of the world’s needs. I turn away. Seek distraction. I’d open a browser if I wasn’t tethered to a pen. Turn back. Reread what I’ve written. Reread what James has written to me, and realize why: not to shame but to sustain (James 1:3-4, 12). Look where James is telling me to look: into the text, ‘the perfect law, the law of liberty’ (James 1:25).

The law, the gift, the work of endurance: each is described as ‘perfect,’ meaning ‘complete,’ ‘lacking nothing.’ ‘Look into the perfect law,’ James urges. Be reminded of who we are. Beloved (1:16; 1:19). God-birthed. First-fruits — we described as God’s own choice offering (Deut 18:4; Jer 2:3). Given by God, given to God.

I am small. My hand cannot hold the world. I cannot put out the fires, hold back the storm surge, cure the pandemic, end the rancor, stop the war. This is true. But it is not completely, fully, perfectly true. If I allow myself to be consumed by that incomplete, partial, imperfect realization, I become even smaller, more less-than than before, not self-emptied so to be filled with God (Eph 3:19), but too scant and scattered a soil to bear the implanted word (James 1:21).

I am small. So. My hand can hold the word. And a page, and a pen. I can write a line. I can plan a syllabus and teach a course. I can pray for my students, for family and church and world and self. I can look into the perfect law, and I can look at the world, and I can remember that I am God-birthed and God-beloved and God-given to bear the word on. May that be enough for now, to carry me through the next step, and the step that comes after that.

The Same Kinds of Suffering

face-masks by Paul Brown; photo (c) Katherine Brown

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen.

1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11; lectionary epistle for Sunday May 24, 2020

It was years ago, now, that I was riding home on the Metro one winter evening, lost and alone in my own bad news, trapped behind a glass wall of grief. The train driver told a joke, and the mouth of the man opposite twitched in appreciation, and the movement caught my eye, and my gaze his, but I did not smile, only looked through him for a minute till we both turned away. If I had smiled, I think he would have smiled back. He would have been a sort of brother. I would have felt glad of the connection. Instead I sat there in my own unhappiness, in the Metro car with strangers. I had the wit to recognize the tension but not the will to break through the wall.

1 Peter’s word hits hard against that glass wall, reminds us that while our griefs may be profoundly unique, there is a unity in suffering. We confuse the two, I realize, grief and suffering. As, perhaps, we confuse gladness in all its wildly various forms with its common wellspring of joy. Grief does constrain and imprison us … unless, until, we are drawn to see past our own particulars to the underlying unity.

‘Your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering,’ Peter reminds us. ‘All the world’? The phrase hits close in this time of pandemic. The losses mount. Too often they are set against each other. Save lives but kill the economy. Individual liberty opposes community welfare. I learn of a death, ‘non-COVID caused,’ and I wonder at the need to distinguish it for those of us without epidemiological responsibilities. Is this death somehow separate from the others? Is there therefore less pain? or more?

Peter writes not only ‘all the world’ but also ‘the same kinds of suffering.’ As if all these pains should not be treated as distinct and opposing. As if to distinguish my distress from yours is to miss the gospel promise. ‘Do not be surprised,’ Peter admonishes, ‘as though something strange were happening.’ Yes, the particular suffering Peter describes comes of calling on the name of Christ within an empire that acclaims Caesar. But the ground of Peter’s claim of Christ is that Christ participated fully in humanity, ‘suffered in the flesh’ (1 Peter 4:1). This is the sameness that underlies our suffering. Tap into this wellspring that connects our suffering with God’s own, and the suffering we experience in our flesh becomes what Peter describes: suffering with and for Christ — so that we ‘may also be glad and shout for joy’ in Christ (1 Peter 4:13).

It feels premature even to imagine being glad and shouting for joy. This pandemic continues to unfold, and the shape of its process remains murky. So many losses already — lives, jobs, plans. We cannot even know how many more losses we will suffer. But the very universality of this virus invites a recognition that suffering is not a matter of various kinds but of ‘the same kind.’ It can connect us or, more accurately, reveals what has always been true: we are all connected. Maybe reading 1 Peter can rewrite our experience of pandemic; or perhaps the current context of global convulsion may allow us to read 1 Peter anew and suddenly, shockingly, plain.

I imagine myself again on the Metro. Looking across at the stranger whose mouth had just twitched. He, too, must know grief and uncertainty and loss and pain. Each one of us might have true cause to feel ourselves kept separate by the glass walls of our individual experience, rightly divided by the unique peculiarities of our distinct distresses. Yet together we are — all of us — on the same side of the wall, the side to which Christ in flesh came, on which Christ in flesh suffered.

I am not alone behind a wall but together with brothers and sisters in all the world. Nor are we — together, in our same kinds of suffering — alone behind a wall. God has reached across the wall to ‘himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish’ us. Let us, then, work to restore, support, strengthen and establish each other.

Beloved, do not be surprised. Be sustained in unity with Christ.

Stone Soup

Image by Katherine Brown — photo (c) Katherine Brown

Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation— if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 2:2-4; excerpt from 1 Peter 2:2-10, lectionary epistle for Sunday May 10, 2020

I was wrong: we do not have baked beans in the pantry. Black beans, kidney beans, Chick Peas, a couple cans of green beans (bought specifically as pandemic pantry stock). No baked beans. They would have been good with our sausages. No matter. We have fresh salad stuff and some flatbreads besides. (Put them on the grill for a couple minutes when the sausages are done, till they are warm and soft and smoky). We have plenty of food, overall. It’s just that the limited visits to the store and the persistent gaps on the grocery shelves have required both greater discipline and a certain improvisation. Rationing as jazz? I buy what is available and compose from what I buy, and the meals that result are enough to keep us humming. And sometimes, those unexpected compositions sing.

I read this passage from 1 Peter and realize it is composed from a similarly disciplined store — the pantry being the Hebrew Bible. After all, this imperishable and enduring word is the ‘pure milk’ on which we — new born ‘into a living hope’ — grow into salvation. Trusting that already we have tasted that the Lord is ‘good’ (in the Greek ‘chrestus’ — a near-pun with ‘Christ,’ clearly Dad-worthy), Peter sets a table for our further eating, composing a meal rich with quotes and allusions in order to nourish us in faith. You are a ‘priestly kingdom and holy nation,’ he quotes. Once no-people but now ‘God’s own people,’ newborn through a stumbling-stone that became ‘a precious cornerstone,’ ‘the chief cornerstone,’ Christ, a living stone.

Be living stones, Peter exhorts, ‘built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood.’ Not like those who follow after idols of wood or stone, which do not ‘hear nor see nor eat nor smell,’ which cannot move or answer or save. Not like those who have walked after these dead stones and become dead as stone themselves. Come to the Lord, a living stone. Be living stones.

‘Living stone’ — Peter repeats the phrase without defining it. It’s stone for some sort of building, although not necessarily architectural. If it was just a tower at issue, then the order of assembly matters, stones of certain size or shape must be laid as a foundation before any others can be raised above. But the metaphor shifts as the verse proceeds, from house-as-building to house-as-household, as people, as priesthood. Living stones building lives. So — taking a cue from that beginning, commanded longing for ‘pure, spiritual milk’ — imagine the built spiritual house as soup, with living stones as ingredients added in whatever order they (we) come to hand, stirred and simmered together, changing the flavor of the whole — and being themselves infused with new flavors imparted by all the other ingredients, transformed by being part of the whole.

Build more playfully yet! Think of the old folk tale: the proffering of one single stone is what led the rest of the townsfolk to bring out of their own stores foodstuffs that were not stones at all. So is the living stone in this metaphorical stone soup Christ alone calling all of us into the pot? Or are we, too, called to be — transformed into — those living stones so that the offering of ourselves invites others to offer their own, themselves? Maybe don’t choose. Maybe claim both. Be like Christ, the living stone, who sees and hears and answers and saves, the living stone who eats and who feeds!

Be living-stone-soup.

Held in Mind

For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly.

1Peter 2:19; excerpt from 1 Peter 2:19-25, lectionary epistle for May 3, 2020

I have come again to the text seeking a word that will feed. My first thought on seeing this week’s reading is, ‘Well, crap.’ I feel let down by the lectionary commendation of ‘unjust’ suffering, the suffering the righteous endure but do not deserve, distinct from any proper punishment for wrongdoing. ‘If you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval,’ the text reads. This text has been used abusively in the past — it comes just after an instruction for slaves to obey their masters — and when I read it I recoil, as if the words have struck an unhealed bruise. I could spend this week in another reading. This discipline I’ve chosen is as artificial as the lectionary itself. It feels like a cheat, though, to just throw this text aside. Set myself to it. Maybe there is in it a word for this time, a word for me. Certainly, there’s suffering enough in this time. Read it again, weighing every phrase.

‘Being aware of God.’ The hook catches my heart, tightens the cord between me and the words until the line is taut and tugs the text just slightly slant. Read at this angle, the word does not recommend but assumes suffering. The point of the passage is not to seek and embrace suffering but — through it all — to seek and embrace God, to reframe the experience of suffering not as a barrier to God but as a possible means of connection. The passage is an exhortation of how to bear suffering: ‘being aware of God,’ who suffered in Christ, whose example and experience of suffering as redemptive and freeing means that we needn’t suffer in isolation (no matter how physically distant) but ‘being aware of God.’

I read the text again before bed, go to sleep pondering this possibility. I dream in cycles, rise towards wakefulness, to the phrase ‘being aware of God’ then sink again into dreaming sleep, surfacing again to the words ‘being aware of God,’ as if that phrase was the tether that kept drawing me up. Was I aware of God? I was aware of the idea of being aware. Is that itself the point? Even so, a lingering unease. The text speaks of ‘credit’ — as if right suffering accrues points on a heavenly ledger, earns God’s ‘approval.’ But what when one cannot be aware even of being aware? What when one cannot even recite the phrase? What credit then? How can the account be balanced, but by grace?

Grace is present in the passage — literally: ‘grace’ — charis — is the third word in the Greek. I’ve pulled out my Greek testament, and that word, at least, I know at sight. My wondering quickens. Grace, charis, is the bracketing concept: ‘for this is grace,’ 2:19 begins — not ‘credit,’ not divine regard earned but ‘grace’ experienced; and 2:20 ends: ‘if doing good and suffering, you endure, this is grace with God.’ At this point, I’m reading the testament with the lexicon, checking every word; my mind alert, my heart urgent. ‘For this is grace’ the text reads, ‘if through the consciousness of God endures …’ The Greek behind the NRSV’s ‘being aware of God’ is this: the consciousness or mindfulness of God.

So: what is the ‘consciousness of God’? Is it my consciousness of God or God’s consciousness of me? I don’t see any grammatical cue that dictates a reading. I check several translations and they all suggest that it’s my (or ‘your’) awareness of God at issue in the phrase, not the other way round, that my mindfulness (‘being aware’) colors my experience. That fits with the overall flow, the fact that Peter is addressing a plural ‘you’ that is suffering, a ‘you’ that needs to be reminded to endure in the hope — the expectation — of Christ. I know my Greek is poor; I should defer to the translations which represent the considered judgment of committees of experts. But this other possibility will not let me go. I am caught by the reading’s promise that grace is not primarily our consciousness of God but God’s consciousness of us; that God holds us in God’s loving thought even when we are caught and carapaced, trapped in the amber of our own suffering; that when we cannot be conscious of God, still God remains conscious of us. Grace raises us again and again towards waking. We come up from the deep of sleep towards the surface of awareness, re-minded and re-minding ourselves towards consciousness of God.

‘Being aware of God.’ It is through the consciousness of God that I have consciousness of God. Mind calls to mind. Love summons love. Reaching to hold, I realize I am already held.

Telling Time In Tree Leaves

If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God. Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.

1 Peter 1:17-23; lectionary epistle for April 26, 2020

Telling time in a pandemic. Our sense of its passage — along with so much else — is skewed by circumstances beyond our control. Days lead one into the next with not much to distinguish them. ‘Dear Professor,’ a student emailed me Friday morning, having missed Thursday’s Zoom lecture, ‘I am sorry but I really, really thought today was Thursday …’. The present pattern of our lives is not bounded by the bright lines of leaving the house, driving to campus, entering other spaces. The morning alarm is set later, and its buzz has lost some of its imperative force. I have waked to full daylight these past weeks. How do we mark the rhythm when the old marks no longer apply? Is waking-to-waking even the right boundary to count? Because I wake before daylight as well. I wake in the night having dreamed vividly, oddly. I get up in the dark, my steps small and slow. I come back to bed, squinch my eyes shut against the neighbor’s bright-as-day security light, settle myself again prone, if not to sleep, lay and listen for the chime of the dining room clock, not even sure whether I hope that it is nearly morning or that I still have hours to sleep.

Telling time when the world’s turned upside down. Maybe clock-tolled hours are not the right measure. I sit at my bedroom desk, look out the front window at the trees. Six weeks ago the topmost branches were knobby with leaf-buds and yellow-tan against the deep blue of the sky. Three weeks ago, the trees were hazed with green, as if some verdant mist hung about the branches. Now I look and see that the vague haze of earlier weeks has shifted from peridot to emerald and distilled itself into definite leaf shapes. The leaves are still small enough to be each one distinct, not yet merged into the glossy dark green tree-shape of summer. Yet. There are leaves where there had not been. That’s how long we have been in this state of waiting for we know not what. No: that’s not so. We know what we are waiting for. We just don’t know the when. We are waiting for the ‘curve to flatten,’ for testing to be more widespread, for clearer insight into this virus — its rates of contagion, of morbidity, of mortality, for a vaccine. We know what we are waiting for. We just don’t know the when.

Telling time. Count it by the calendar: secular, academic, liturgical. No tally has the answer. We’ve been home since spring break. We’ve been home since early in Lent. We were home through Holy Week. We’ll be home through semester’s end. Shall we be home this whole Easter season? Will that mark the completion of the term of this time?

Time is the preoccupation of First Peter as well. The recipients are living a ‘time of your exile’. The patterns of their lives have shifted; their former ways no longer apply. When did they learn their former ways were ‘futile’? What overset their ignorance? What caused the realization that those everyday inequities entirely unrecognized or otherwise accommodated were in fact the proof of this world’s futility? What called them from that barrenness to ‘new birth into a living hope’?

Telling time. The paradox of a single point calibrated along multiple whens. First Peter’s hope, Christ, was ‘destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages.’ Beginning and end. First and last. Still this last time is not yet ended, else Peter’s audience would not be in their ‘time of exile,’ neither in the world nor out of it. Needing to be reminded — by the writing and sending and reading of a letter — of trust, of faith, of hope. Of how to wait for the what (or the who) when you don’t know the when. Needing to be reminded that living in the meanwhile is a process with its own peculiar grace. And every so often an unexpected sign that time is being told not only by we who are waiting but by God who is drawing time on and drawing us in.

Again I come awake from a dream in the night. Again I shuffle down the hall and back. Again, I reach for the bed, close my eyes against the piercing light, and settle myself prone to wait for the clock. Then I realize that one of those ‘agains’ wasn’t. I open my eyes. The bedroom is dark. I lift up on an elbow, look to the window, and realize that the neighbor’s light is not shining through the bedroom window because the leaves on the maple now are full enough to block the brightness. All those weeks of days of growing leaves, from bare branch through bud to new green, and suddenly When has become Now. This is not the end. More growth will come. But this ‘now’ for tonight is enough to tell me that time is being told not only by I who am waiting for God but by God who waits for me. This ‘now’ for tonight is enough to recall me to hope and to love through the ‘living and enduring word of God.’

‘Proclaim the Lord’s Death’

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

1 Corinthians 11:23-26; text for Holy Thursday, April 18, 2019

What does it mean to ‘proclaim the Lord’s death’? The phrase catches at me as I read these verses. Three verses.

Three verses set in the middle of a longer argument Paul is making to tell the church in Corinth what they are doing wrong in worship, how they should be doing right. Three verses that aren’t particular to the situation in Corinth at all, of teaching that didn’t originate with Paul, as if this is merely the hook on which Paul hangs the argument that matters.

Or is this hook itself the point?

‘I received from the Lord’ — Paul is not the source of this teaching but its conduit — ‘what also I handed on to you’ — Paul is not the end of the teaching, nor meant to be its end. Paul received it in order to hand it on; handing it on was the reason for his receipt of it. The word was not given to be swallowed into silence but to be spoken on. It is a word held in trust, a word not given for Paul’s sake only but for the sake of those to whom he would speak it.

What have I received in trust? What have I been charged to speak on to others? What did not begin with me nor is meant to end with me? With you? With us?

Body-bread. Covenant-cup. ‘Do this,’ the Lord’s repeated instruction. ‘Do this.’

Is ‘this’ the taking and breaking? The drinking? The thanksgiving?

Paul repeats the teaching he received, then shifts from first-person quotation (what Jesus said) to second-person exhortation: ‘Eat this bread; drink this cup.’ For in doing this, Paul says, ’you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.’

It is not only that body-bread and covenant-cup proclaim the Lord’s death but that ‘doing this’ is a proclamation ‘until he comes.’ The cross is central, but it is not the whole. Paul’s words make plain that it is not the end: there is yet more to look forward to, more to live towards.

‘Do this,’ Paul instructs. His words do not only characterize the action as proclamation, they frame the time of proclaiming, the Corinthians’ ‘now,’ living between Jesus’ death and Jesus’ return. Which is our ‘now’ too; we live still poised between death and return; in this time of proclamation. Declaration. Statement. Witness.

‘This’ is not memorial but testimony. ‘This’ is not over, ‘this’ is not past. ‘This’ lives.

We live in the time between death and return. Whether we feel ourselves resurrected or waiting in the tomb for the voice that calls us out, still, we live in the time of resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection, the promise and foretaste of our own, the power that lets us live even while we wait.

Body-bread. Covenant-cup. Resurrection-proclamation.

The word did not come to be swallowed into silence but to be told aloud with our mouths and with our lives.

Until he comes. Again. And we live beyond all our imagining.

Becoming New

‘So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!’ 2 Cor 5:17

Sunday March 31, 2019; Epistle (2 Cor 5:16-21)

Have you seen a new-born morning? Walked out into air all pearl after night’s rain and with rising sun. Felt the ground slightly soft underfoot and seen the grass green as emerald. Smelled spring, a subtle, earthy freshness. Sensed life not just revived but rejoicing, quivering in the held poise of the perfect present, at the same time as it perceptibly gathers itself into forward motion, into the fullness of a fresh-washed, beautifully-born day.

This is not such a morning; not such a day. Overcast. The light low. The sky holding rain.

I let too much of the day get away from me. As I have let too much of the week get away from me. Not that the time rushes unusually quickly, only that I see it step and do not set my own stride to keep pace with its passing. I should be able to. But I don’t. I am tired, I say. I haven’t slept well. Which is true. Yet insufficient explanation for my sluggish step.

I have thought on this text during the week. Certain phrases caught me: ‘the ministry of reconciliation,’ ‘the message of reconciliation.’ We are ‘reconciled to God’ to ‘become the righteousness of God.’ Reconciliation the ground of righteousness, not its result. Righteousness the growth of reconciliation, not the other way around.

Reconciliation a necessary word in this divided world. A necessary work.

I feel too worn to undertake it.

Maybe I’ve started at the wrong end of the text. Our becoming the righteousness of God is the culmination of Paul’s argument, not its beginning. Righteousness is the ultimate end, and reconciliation the penultimate step towards that end. And before that?

New creation. Everything become new.

I can’t see it; I can’t feel it. Can I know it anyway?

Push away from the desk. Leave the text. Go for a walk. Step out of the house into the gray, surprisingly warm day. Before I’ve reached the end of the front walk, I see vinca, pale purple, and pachysandra’s tiny white blooms. Daffodils — the sight of them always puts new heart into me. Forsythia flowers rich yellow. On down the road, around the neighborhood. More daffs; more forsythia; their yellow a glad color under the dull sky. Magnolia trees have moved from bud to bloom — oyster-shades of muted purple and pink. Some sort of bush with tiny white flowers, distinct against even tinier green leaves. I spy a few hyacinths blooming.

The world perceptibly turning towards new. Yet the old persists. The flowers grow up through last fall’s brown leaves. The tree-branches are still mostly bare and the grass still winter-faded. The world is not yet new-born. At least not today. And yet, and yet: the persistence of the grays and browns are lovely background for the pinks and mauves. The tiny white blooms seem distinct in their purity. The yellow shines steadily in the dull light. The newness does not have to be entire to be complete: the new shows plainly against the old, and the old is renewed by the juxtaposition. All is seen new even as it is being renewed. There is reconciliation in the recognition.

May that seeing be the seed of further renewal, of reconciliation — of old and new; ‘us’ and ‘them’; weariness and bright hope; even me and myself. And all with the Lord God.

Two Texts At a Gathering

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

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

texts for Sunday Feb. 3, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Love bears all things,’ Paul murmurs.

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

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

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

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