The thing with feathers …*

Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.

Luke 13:10-13, excerpt from Luke 13:10-17, NRSVUE, lectionary gospel for Aug. 21, 2022

‘Bound for eighteen long years,’ he said (Luke 13:16). She heard, and she paused in her praise. Had really been so long. From when would she count it? From when her body’s bearing had become fixed contortion? Or had the binding begun farther back, when the first spider-thread of unease ensnared her? She had dismissed the twinge, whenever it was. Told herself the day’s load had been too heavy, she’d twisted something trying to keep up. But she kept twisting herself trying to accommodate each next sure-to-pass-soon circumstance. Not denying the ache, exactly, but ignoring it. And each day she kept going, that day’s thread twisted together with its fellow until she’d found herself bound by a sticky, wrist-thick rope that kept her hunched in the world, bent over by the spirit’s weight.

When had she last stood straight before this day? The crowd rejoiced at the wonder they had seen. And she in the midst of their sounding joy, was suddenly cast back in her memory.

A goldfinch had caught her eye, and she’d turned her head to follow its flight into the thicket. She’d lost sight of it then. Stood herself still and peered closely until she glimpsed its lemon yellow deep within the tangled branches. A smile had spread wide across her face. She’d had to share the wonder. ‘See!’ she pointed out to passersby. ‘See! A finch, right there!’ Two had paused their own progress and followed her pointing finger with their own eyes. They did not see. She watched their expressions turn from expectancy to puzzlement, then a slight withdrawal towards doubt. ‘See! There!’ she repeated, as if words alone could make it visible. Her insistence kept them there a beat longer, but neither her words nor her pointing finger made them see. The bird was too well hidden to be noticed if you hadn’t already known where it was. Then the goldfinch moved, and its motion made it visible. ‘Oh!’ they all exclaimed together as it flew up from the bush. Another finch flew too, two small brightnesses flitting around each other, darting through the air. ‘Look!’ they exclaimed, “See!’ The sound of their delight drew another from the doorway to see its reason, and so it spread.

How long since she had seen a flying brightness that made her smile? She had walked hunched in the world, bent over by the spirit’s weight, her gaze on her own feet moving along the dusty road. She hadn’t thought of birds. But maybe a tiny thing with feathers had been set within her own soul, too hidden to be noticed unless you knew it there, yet in its own subtle way resisting the rope that had bound her so firmly, working to unwind even one cobweb thread. For she had come here this Sabbath, as she had before, treading the path worn by others’ feet before ever her own had started their journey of persistence.

She had not come asking or expecting birds. She had come in fidelity to the unsuspected feathered thing hidden in the thicket of her own self. The insistence of habit had drawn her there without her knowing why. Then hope had flown and shown itself. Had seen and called her over, pronounced her free and laid hands on her. It had felt as if one hand pulled on her shoulder and one hand pressed the small of her back and together the hands reshaped and stood her straight who had not stood straight for eighteen long years.

She stood now in the midst of the crowd’s sounding joy. Wonder was among them — a bird darting up from the constriction of cares quotidian and extraordinary, delighting with its brightness and its airy flight, delighting even she herself who was its sign, re-awakening her to its presence and its power. A smile spread wide across her face. She had been waked again to demand. ‘See!’ she said, ‘See!’ She had been waked again to the promise that there is something to demand.

Demand the vision. Demand the movement that makes visible hope and joy and life — on the Lord’s day and every day.

* First line from Emily Dickinson

Life asked back

Someone in the crowd said to [Jesus], “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

Luke 12:13-21 [NRSVUE]

‘Life is short,’ the worship leader reminds us. Her benediction is a summons to lovingkindness and a statement of blessing. ‘Amen,’ we say, and stand as the family recesses with the urn that bears their mother’s remains.

Life is short. It turns in a moment. I study the gospel text. Inheritance and division. Abundance laid up for future years. The expectation of ease. It’s almost too apt. This morning’s funeral. Others before it. Death come after illness; death come in an accident. I’m turning the age my mother died. Our house is filled with things brought here from our parents’ households and things we accumulated ourselves.

I read Jesus’ parable carefully. The rich man sees the abundant harvest and imagines his future settled. Now he will enjoy the fruit of his husbanding, the bounty his fields have produced. (Notice the phrasing. The fields have produced this plenty, not the man, however diligent his efforts.) The man speaks to himself, tasting already the delights of further speech with himself, ‘I will say to my soul, Soul… Psuchē … Life …’

Then God interrupts his intimate anticipation: ‘Fool! This very night your psuchē they ask back from you.’ That’s the literal translation of the Greek. ‘They demand’ the man’s psuchē, his soul [12:19], his life [12:20]. ‘They…’ — third-person plural — ‘… demand’ — present tense.

Who are the demanding ‘they’? Perhaps the undefined pronoun is a substitute for the passive: ‘Your life is demanded of you,’ a circumlocution for divine action, for God recalling the life-breath given but for a time on this earth. God is, after all, the speaker. God’s next word may suggest that ‘this night’ marks a transition from present tense to eternity: ‘And what you have prepared, to whom will it be?’ All the possessives the man had gloated over — my crops, my barns, my grain, my goods, my soul — suddenly untethered from identity in relationship to him. Whose will they be?

Or reconsider the question. Who belongs to whom? Is the man the one who possesses or the one who is possessed? The Greek allows the possibility that the things prepared are the insistent ‘they’ which ‘this night’ demand? The man preoccupies himself with projecting prodigious barns as if abundant harvest and gathered goods demand this planning, as if it is not undertaken for himself alone but is exacted of the possessor of such abundance.

I try to hear the tone in God’s interrupting ‘Fool!’ Does God thunder judgment, the man’s overnight demise, or does God’s mouth twist wryly as he recalls the man’s attention (our attention) to the present that very moment unfolding? Listen to the rich man’s gloating over abundance and recognize its skimpiness. The man speaks to and of himself and construes his self as possession (‘my psuchē’). God’s interjection recalls the man to relationship — the relationship that actually is (the rich man and his riches), the relationship being constructed (the possessor possessed) by the attention absorbed.

Life is short. It turns in a moment, and it comprises all those moments’ turnings. The preoccupations of our days. The plans we turn over in our minds and those put to action with our hands. Each of these moments demands of me my life. God’s interjection recalls me to this. Not just eternity in-breaking overnight, with the shrill of a telephone bell, but eternity unfolding in all those incremental turnings. My life is demanded of me. This very night, and tomorrow, and the night and the morning after. Resist the preoccupations that increasingly diminish the self of me. (Building bigger barns for my own soul only.) Turn towards those that risk the possibility of self opened and enlarged, enriched towards God.

Life is short. Life’s brevity is vast. Let me be increased as experience and expectation interleave to ground myself in this very now. Ask what it demands of me. Attend to its answer. Listen for the word that tugs me forward to meet it, then go to meet and be met by the presence in the summoning present.

A New Year

For thus says the LORD: 
 Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, 
 and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; 
 proclaim, give praise, and say, 
 “Save, O LORD, your people, 
 the remnant of Israel.” 
 See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, 
 and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, 
 among them the blind and the lame, 
 those with child and those in labor, together; 
 a great company, they shall return here.  
 With weeping they shall come, 
 and with consolations I will lead them back, 
 I will let them walk by brooks of water, 
 in a straight path in which they shall not stumble; 
 for I have become a father to Israel, 
 and Ephraim is my firstborn.

Jeremiah 31:7-9, excerpt from 31:7-14; lectionary for Sunday January 3, 2021

When does the new year start? When the clock counts down to midnight — voices joining the last ten seconds before the ‘ball drops’? When the explosions of neighborhood fireworks (illegal), have ended, another 15 or 20 minutes past that? Or does the new year not really begin until after sleep has set its bound around the old year, newness coming not with the clock but with the dawn — however late and low the light appears. Although even then…. Is morning itself sufficient, or is the first cup of coffee a necessary measure for eyes to open and see the day?

We’re in January, now. The ‘new year.’ Yay.

When does the newness begin? And how? And when and how do we know it?

‘Sing aloud with gladness,’ says the LORD. Really? The exhortation to song seems tone-deaf to the mood of the year, a command difficult to fulfill. It seems an odd fit for Jeremiah, as well, prophesying as he did so horrifically of judgment and of end.

‘For thus says the LORD: Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise, and say ‘Save, O LORD, your people, the remnant of Israel.’

Glad songs and shouts of praise and demands for salvation.

Commentaries and translations note the difficulty in verse 7. It would make more sense if the songs of gladness were of salvation already realized rather than salvation for which the singers still cry. Why sing when it’s incomplete? When the hurt has not been healed, the wounded continue lame, the blind still need leading. How is it possible to sing gladness and — in the same phrase — demand saving? How is it possible to sing aloud while weeping, to walk and to plead and to not stumble on the way? How resolve the contradiction of the proclamation that the LORD will gather Jacob home, that the people will be radiant over God’s goodness, and that the LORD already has ransomed and redeemed, and that we — hearing the words of Jeremiah to whom the word of the LORD came — are called here and now to ‘Sing aloud with gladness … and say ‘Save, O LORD, your people.’

‘Save, O LORD, your people.’

When does the newness begin?

I’m not immune to the idea of New Year’s Eve. I watch the crowds on TV: the lights and the energy and the thrum of anticipation that rises as the hour grows near. I know the falseness of the thought that a critical tick of a clock will suddenly transform the world (Cinderella and her pumpkin coach at midnight notwithstanding) — but even if the the basis is a fictional construct (this particular measurement of time rather than that one), there is something real behind it. Time does turn. Night’s dark does give way to day. Now that we’re past the winter solstice, each day’s light lasts a tiny bit longer than the one that came before. There is truth in the claim that time turns on into new. The mistake is not claiming that newness is, nor longing for that newness in our lives. The mistake is misunderstanding what it is, or imagining it as something we can grasp rather than something we are given, even something that grasps us.

Maybe this is why this passage is set as a text for Christmas.

Birth comes through the world broken open.

‘Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow. I will give the priests their fill … And my people shall be satisfied with my bounty,’ says the LORD.’ As if newness begins with recognition of what’s been shattered. As if newness begins with the awareness of mourning and sorrow, of insufficiency and lack. With the acknowledgement of what we’ve suffered and of what suffering we’ve caused. With the admission that we cannot save ourselves.

This text does not deny the reality of a broken world, a suffering people, creation groaning. It’s not all shining delight. The way is walked by blind and the lame and the laboring. Supplications shall be raised along with the song. ‘With weeping they shall come,’ the LORD promises. Last week I read news stories of those who received the first doses of COVID vaccine and found themselves weeping. Their tears came as surprise, a belated reaction to all the tears that had been swallowed of necessity, pressed down until it was hard as rock within, there being no space nor energy to spare in the midst of so much suffering.

Weeping signs the pain that could not be allowed until the promise had broken in. Hope cracks the stone, new-seen as seed. The seed shows its seam; a hint of green unfurls.

‘Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise, and say, ‘Save, O LORD, your people, the remnant of Israel.’

Newness begins as we cry out for it. Even while our eyes are still confused by exhaustion and by gloom. Even before the coffee. Even before the dawn.

Newness begins now. In gladness sung to the one who can save, demanding the salvation that only that one can give.