Step by Step

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God.  So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying […] ‘I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’  If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”  Acts 11:1-4, 16-18

full Acts text for Sunday, May 19, 2019, Acts 11:1-18

At the beginning of the week, I came to this text knowing that it is about a key transition in the life of the early Jesus-followers:  the gospel going out to a community (a ‘house’) of non-Jews.  Now at week’s end, I take from the text the realization that it is as much about the process of life unfolding as it is about this particular pleat in God’s plan.

‘Step by step.’  

The text begins with a critical query on a practical aspect of being community — you ate with them? — and ends with all present recalled to the ideal that all peoples shall see the glory of the LORD (Isa 40:4), that ‘God shows no partiality’ (Acts 10:34), that ‘even’ the nations shall receive God’s gift of life (Acts 11:18).  The ending praise sounds as a crescendo after a silence of realization and reflection — Oh, this is what was promised then … seen in our-very now ….   The voices rise, rejoicing for God’s radically inclusive gift.  

Notice the mis-match?  They still haven’t figured out how that gift is to be lived.  Do we eat together?  Whose table do we sit at?  Whose recipes do we use?  That’s going to take longer to figure out.  (See Acts 15, Acts 21, 1 Cor. 8, Gal 2, and so on.).  Yet somehow that’s okay.  For now.  They’ve been recalled not just to praise of God’s plan but to renewed sight of it.

‘Step by step.’ 

This phrase applies not to each of Peter’s movements through the story but to Peter’s explanation of his movements.  ‘Step by step’ is how Peter reviews and reflects upon what had happened.  The prayer.  The vision.  The summons.  The Spirit.  Jesus’ words not just recalled but re-heard.  Peter hadn’t understood them because he hadn’t yet lived them.  Now he did, because he had.  And still there was more to live, and still more to learn.  Peter never saw the path in full — could his imagination have stretched so far?  (Could my own?) 

You ate with them?  Isn’t that the way of it?  We may recite the ideal almost unthinking, but pragmatic aspects of living sharpen the focus — and in revealing the stress points, invite us to look farther on.  Where are we headed?  Where is God guiding us?  And if the answers to these questions do not match, what then?  How can we be re-minded not just of but to the ideal.

’Step by step.’  A call to continually recalibrate our way and reform our imagination.  Maybe it’s walking that makes the way, but it’s telling that lets us see the way we’ve made and the way God calls us to and if or how the ways connect.   Step by step.  Look back to see where we’ve been; look here to see where our feet are planted now; look ahead to see as far as the next turn.  And then, once that stretch is walked, review and reflect and re-tell.  In order to rejoice and walk on ahead, so far as the next turn.

New Life, Again New

Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity.   At that time she became ill and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in a room upstairs.  Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the request, “Please come to us without delay.”  So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them.  Peter put all of them outside, and then he knelt down and prayed. He turned to the body and said, “Tabitha, get up.” Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up.  He gave her his hand and helped her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive.  This became known throughout Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.  Meanwhile he stayed in Joppa for some time with a certain Simon, a tanner.

Acts 9:36-43; text for Sunday, May 12, 2019

Tabitha is a disciple, the only woman in the New Testament so called.  Other women are described in ways that connect them with discipleship, but only Tabitha is explicitly titled.  She is introduced as ‘disciple’ before she is even introduced by name.  ‘Disciple’ identifies her as one who belongs to the Way (Acts 9:2), who ‘calls upon’ the name of Christ (Acts 9:14).  Before we know anything else about Tabitha, we know the most important thing:  Tabitha is one who lives the claim of resurrection, of new life in Christ.  And Tabitha dies.

Tabitha is dead.  She ‘became ill and died.’  She was washed and laid out.  Her fellow-disciples know she is dead, and they send for Peter.  Maybe they send as if in urgent query — how could death have taken one who claimed life?  Maybe they send in hope of comfort.  Maybe they send for witness — see, this disciple, this life given to good works, is ended.  ‘Attention must be paid.’  And, yes, maybe they send for Peter as if to collect on his proclamation that in Christ death is not the end of life.

By the close of the passage, Tabitha’s life is returned to her.  Peter prays and speaks her to rise, he helps her from her deathbed to her feet.  Peter shows Tabitha alive, and the report of her living spreads beyond the saints and widows to whom first she is shown until many in Joppa believe in the Lord.  

I read the story for Tabitha, as Tabitha.  How do I show myself alive?  How do we, who already claim identity as disciples, show new life?  After all, the story ends in the report that transforms.  If the report of Tabitha’s raising does not transform, perhaps it is because we who tell it need, first, to be waked by it ourselves.  To hear its voice saying, ‘Get up,’ and to open our eyes to its truth in our lives, to take its hand and be lifted to our feet, to realize that our own new life must be repeatedly renewed, so that our own renewed-newness can be the report that is told.

All Tabitha has to do to prove new life is show up alive.  Maybe that’s all that would have been visible:  Tabitha still a disciple and devoted to good works and charity.  But surely even the most ardent disciple would have been transformed by this bodily experience of God’s reviving power.  I imagine wonder leaping morning by morning at the sight of day, and even in the night joy deepening in the realization that nothing, nothing, is beyond God’s reach nor God’s desire to hold.  Tabitha’s new life must have embodied that shock in ways beyond the daily renewal of faithful discipleship, but in expectation of further and otherwise unimaginable transformation.  It may not have looked much different, but it cannot have felt the same, and surely, even subtly, that showed.

How do I live resurrection?  How do I embody not just the daily renewal of faithful discipleship but the conviction of further transformation in ways beyond my imagining?

Partly, perhaps, continuing to practice discipleship as ever:  feed the hungry, comfort the grieving, visit the prisoner, care for the sick.  Bear the name of Christ as if cupping in my hand a precious gift.  But somehow at the same time, expect to be borne by that name into relationship that may discomfit as well as delight, into newness I cannot yet know but only discover.  Or be discovered by.

Bearing the Word

Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” He answered, “Here I am, Lord.” The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.” But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.” But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Acts 9:10-17; Text for Sunday, May 5, 2019

Saul will ‘bring my name’ to many, the Lord tells Ananias, who is reluctant to go to this man who has persecuted many who ‘invoke’ the name of the Lord.  Called upon in vision by that Lord, Ananias is taken aback, wonders if perhaps the Lord needs reminding of who Saul is, based on who Saul has been. 

‘Go,’ the Lord repeats.  ‘For he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people Israel.’  And in faithful duty, Ananias goes.  

Bringing the name.  Usually I read this and think of the work as verbal.  Something Saul is to say.  It is not only that I have in mind Saul’s later career — as he declares and proclaims and instructs and writes letter after letter — it is that speech seems implicated even in this particular passage.  The saints are those who (literally) ‘call upon’ the name of the Lord.  Ananias goes and speaks to Saul of the Lord Jesus, the one who had appeared to each of them.  To bring the name then is to say it, to utter words, or write them on flimsy slips of paper, or even cast them into the ether online.

But Saul is not literally to ‘bring’ Christ’s name. Saul has been chosen to ‘carry’ — bastazw — the name.  As one may ‘carry’ a pair of sandals (Matt 3:11), a jar of water (Mark 14:13), a purse or bag (Luke 10:4), or a cross (Luke 14:27).  

As a womb may carry a child (Luke 11:27).

Saul is not just to tell but to bear the name of the Lord. 

Now I hear the work differently.  It is more than the gusting of windy words — spirit-filled as they may be.  It is a tangible substance, with a palpable weight.  

Sometimes bearing it is a burden.  Shoulders sag; knees bend; back and mind and heart grow weary with the load.  Acknowledge this.  That a call to bear the name is a call to suffering:  the suffering of one who must encounter as brother an erstwhile enemy; the suffering of one who must go among strangers and love them as kin while counting his kin as strangers, leaving them to the care of the Lord.

And then comes the feeling that the weight may not be a chore but a foundation, a sturdy structure on which to stand, even a rod that stiffens the spine and lifts the chin and steadies the gaze.  That to bear the name is not to heft a heavy load but — to borrow the old rabbinic image — to be lifted by a pair of wings.

To bear the name of the Lord is to bear the life of the word within your own body, to give your own and only life to its nurture in the womb and in the world.  To know that life and body together are marked by the encounter with the name.  There was a before when I bore only myself, or so I imagined.  Now I bear the name … and reshaping my life around its substance, I find myself borne.

‘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.

A Taught Tongue

The Lord GOD has given to me a tongue of those-taught to know to sustain the weary with a word.  He wakes in the morning, in the morning he wakes my ear to hear as those-taught. Isaiah 50:4 [my translation]

Text for Sunday, April 14: Isa 50:4-9; linked here https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isa+50%3A4-9&version=NRSV

My translation is clunky.  This is deliberate.  I want to have to think about every word.  I don’t want my eyes to glide across the line merely reminding myself of the text and what I know.

I want to hear it.  I want to know something new.

Which is risky, and frightens me a little.

I’ve bought a book by an author I’ve never read before.  I am excited to hold it in my hands, to anticipate hearing a voice and stories which are to me entirely new.  I open the book, tugging at its still-stiff binding, and suddenly I am aware of a frisson of fear.  What if it is not what I expect?  What if I find I don’t care for the author’s voice, or her story?  Or — perhaps worse — what if I do?  What if I am taken with it all, and am taken thereby to someplace I do not want to go?   My worry is not that I shall have wasted money or time in reading.  It is that I shall have wasted part of my heart in caring.  I am already so tired; I do not have the energy for another’s book-bound pain.

My study Bible helpfully captions Isaiah 50:4-11, ‘The Servant’s Humiliation and Vindication’ just in case I can’t follow the progression from smiting and spitting (50:6) to flint-faced confidence (50:7-8).  Some of my students immediately ‘know’ that this passage is about Jesus; the connection between Jesus and Isaiah’s servant is an early Christian tradition (Acts 8:32-35).  But I assign my students articles that identify the servant as the prophet who wrote, or the prophet Jeremiah, the king Zedekiah, the holy city Zion, or the nation of Israel, sometimes called Jacob (e.g. Isaiah 41:8).  I have in my files as many articles again.  The reams of studies can make it seem as if as if the text was written to be a riddle — ‘Who is the servant?’ — a test of our ability to answer correctly.  

But what if the text does not pose that question?

The Lord GOD has given to me a tongue of those-taught.

The NRSV describes God’s gift as ‘the tongue of a teacher,’ but the Hebrew is ‘taught-ones,’ or ‘disciples.’  The same term recurs at the end of the verse, applied to the speaker’s ear waked to hear.  The organs of hearing and of speech linked by this descriptor of each as taught, each as open to receive the LORD’s gift, the LORD’s waking.

What is the LORD waking me to hear?  Is it even a question?  And if the LORD wakes me, instead, with an answer, then what is the question I am meant to have asked?

What if the point of these verses is not the identity of the servant but of the ‘me’ gifted by the Lord GOD?  The one wakened to hear, wakened to be taught, wakened to speak as one who has heard and learned.  The one who knows that the waking and the teaching are not only for my own, personal, sake, but for the sustaining of the weary.  Even if the ‘weary’ and the taught are the exact same ‘one.’  Or ‘ones.’  It’s plural, after all.

It’s easier, I realize — and, I admit, fun — to follow the threads of text-connection — to pretend that the point is the question ‘Who is the servant?’  Because once we answer that, right or wrong, we can be done with it.  Because ‘the servant’ is Jesus or Jeremiah or Jacob or Zion, but in any case not-me, not us.  

But what if the text is not a riddle but an invitation.  Morning by morning to be waked to listen,  so to speak the story I — we — have heard.  Which means morning by morning to be waked not just by the noise of birds singing the sun up or school buses rumbling past but by others’ voices, others’ stories.  In print, in person, even in ancient texts read anew.  To risk not just my time and energy but my heart.  To identify with and as, even at risk of being pulled unwilling to places I did not want to have to go.  To be able to set my story, there, so, with all the rest, to see it in its proper shape and size and to see the way it fits as part of the larger whole.  To sustain with my speech, and, speaking and hearing, to be sustained.

We are on the verge of Holy Week.  From Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, through his suffering and death, and past death into life.  If it’s only about Jesus, we can tick the boxes, turn in our test papers, and promptly forget the whole.  

But what if it’s about us?  What are our ears waked to hear?

Smelling Memory

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

John 12:1-8; Text for Sunday April 7, 2019

Memories are tagged by senses as well as words.  The sight of a particular blue, the sound of a musical note, the feel of a knitted blanket, the taste of a familiar dish.  Of all of these sense-triggers, smell goes deepest, evokes the most.  The smell of bread baking, of beef stew simmering.  The library smell of old books, wood and wax. The milky smell of a baby.   The fall tang of wood smoke.  The sharp green of fresh-cut grass.  Hyacinths honey-sweet and lavender astringent and blue.

What did Mary remember when she uncorked that perfume?  What did she remember as she anointed Jesus’ feet, wiped them clean with her unbound hair?  Did Mary think of Lazarus her brother, so lately dead and buried?  Did Mary think of Martha, her sister, who had called Jesus Messiah and Lord?  Did Mary think of Jesus ordering the stone to be rolled back in spite of Martha’s warning of the foul smell of four-days-past death?  Did Mary remember that what had emerged from the tomb was her living, walking grave-cloth-bound brother, coming out in response to Jesus’ call? Did Mary remember what those grave-clothes smelled like, when Lazarus emerged? Had she clung to her brother through the musky-sweet scent of decay? Or had he smelled instead like new-born life?

The whole house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

What did Mary remember at the end of it all, whenever after she smelled the fragrance of the nard?  Did she remember Lazarus sitting host again to the one who had hosted his return to life.  Did she remember Martha paused in the doorway, bringing in the bread and wine, smile of joy turning into an O of surprise?  Did she remember Judas’s question?  Did she remember the rest of them gathered there?

Or did she only remember him?  Did she only remember the hem of his robe and the shape of his feet as she washed them in perfume and wiped them with her hair?  Did she only remember somehow knowing that this would be one of the last times he would be with them.  Did she only remember that this was her last time to make her thank-offering for one life returned, her gift-offering for another death coming?  

Six days before the Passover.  The third day after that.  Whenever after Mary smelled the perfume, what did she remember of the love-offering she had given? What did she experience of the love-offering she had received?

revised from 2010

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.

Bearing Figs

Then [Jesus] told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

Luke 13:6-9

text for Sunday March 24, 2019

What was wrong with the tree?  Why did it not bear fruit?

Was it that the tree had been planted in the wrong place?  Was there was too little sunshine, or too much?  Was the soil was too acidic, or not enough?

Surely the tree longed to bear fruit.  

Maybe the tree looked at the other trees in the orchard, saw all of them bent with the happy, heavy weight of fruit.  Some trees bore fruit that was round and red; others longer and green; some trees were hung with fuzzed-globes of warm yellow while others bore smaller globes, with a purple-blue haze to the skin.  But no fruit hung from her branches.  The tree wept for her own barrenness, for the wrongness of her planting in this place, for the fruit she had been meant to bear but had not.

The master came to look at her, “Three years I have looked for figs,” he said, grieved to find the branches empty.

Figs?

‘Sir, let it alone for one more year,” said the gardener.  “I will dig around it and put manure on it.”

Figs?  The tree heard and wondered.

The gardener came to the tree. “Figs,” he murmured, soft as a breeze.  “You are meant to bear figs,” he told the tree, “You have always been meant to bear figs.  Be fruitful.  Bear figs.”

The tree listened and began to hope.  Her barrenness was not the master’s design; it was a grief to him as well as her.   The gardener dug around the tree, and put manure in the soil.  The gardener put new heart in the tree. “Figs,” the gardener whispered blessing to the tree.  To her neighbor, he whispered “apples” and to another “pears” or “peaches” and “plums.” The tree listened and began to understand.  She was meant to bear figs – not the fruit that every other tree bore, but figs, green-skinned, purple-fleshed, seeded and sweet.  The tree had blamed the planting, blamed the garden, blamed her own inability to be something she was never even asked to be.  Now she realized her true purpose.

“Bear figs,” the gardener promised.  The tree heard and believed.  The tree put away her tears and began to bud.  The tree bore figs for the master’s joy, and her own.

*originally written 2010

Drone Tones

The LORD is my light and my salvation;

whom shall I fear?

The LORD is the stronghold of my life;

of whom shall I be afraid?

Psalm 27:1

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

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

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

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

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

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

One thing only.  One thing enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Meaning of Beloved

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

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

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

Sunday March 10, 2019, Lent 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*The Greek can be read either way.