Tag: Rejoice

Read it and weep.

(c) Katherine E. Brown

“And all the people gathered as one man in the square before the water gate. And they said to Ezra the scribe to bring out the scroll of the teaching of Moses which the LORD commanded to Israel. And Ezra the priest brought the teaching before the assembly, man and woman and all with understanding to hear…. “

Nehemiah 8:1-2 [Neh 8:1-12 NRSVUE]

Another round of Sunday morning balcony prayers. Sitting in my perch of a pew, looking at the stained glass colors shifting on the stone floor, while the sound of the choir’s rehearsal washes over me. The news of the new administration has come in a barrage of rapid-fire reports. Day 1 executive orders. A bishop’s plea for mercy. Late-night ‘truth’ tweets and morning updates and executive orders round 2 and 3 and more. (Reminder to self: read the print paper; avoid the online comments.). Now I am here, at church, in the balcony praying, if only, to settle and center myself for worship. Mentally rehearsing the week’s news is not the right litany for my need. Settle. Center. Listen to the choir, even its pauses, its repeats, a particular phrase rehearsed again and again to make it right. ‘Slow it down,’ our music minister exhorts, ‘hear the words. They’re beautiful.’

Slow it down. Hear the words. Nehemiah 8. I’ve been in it a week, and I may linger a week longer. Nehemiah 8: the chapter depicts the people as one. That’s the literal Hebrew: that the people were ‘as one man’ [8:1]. The text lists men and women and all with understanding to hear, and knits this variety together as one whole. United they are in asking of Ezra that the scroll of the teaching be brought to be read. United the people ask to hear God’s instruction; united they lift their hands; united they bow their heads and worship God [8:6].

Ezra reads. The ears of all the people are tuned to the scroll of teaching [8:3], and the words heard penetrate past ears to hearts. Ezra reads, and the people weep at the voice of this writing restored to them after long while. Reading Nehemiah, I remember Amos’s warning: refusal to heed God’s word leads to inability to hear, to famine of truth. Had God’s people starved? (Have we? How else to interpret a people that hears the call to mercy as ‘nasty,’ conflates politics with partisanship rather than community governance, grabs after ‘mine’ for me rather than seeking ‘ours’ for all, interprets diversity as opposition to unity rather than its intended expression?)

Ezra reads, and weeping follows. It’s as if the people — through giving hands and heads and ears to worshipful attention — themselves have been given new vision. Through this lens of God’s teaching, they glimpse God’s holiness, and they glimpse themselves through God’s eyes. (I see this second sight also in Amos.) Weeping expresses their intense yearning; weeping is their prayer that God, too, yearns for reunion, that God, too, longs to rejoice with us, in us.

The weeping people’s wordless prayer is answered. Do not weep, the leaders exhort, do not mourn. Do not grieve, they say — and the Hebrew used, etsev, takes me back to the beginning: etsev is the word for human toil and pain [Gen. 3:16-17], for the intense grief of the LORD God-self at the spoliation of God’s good creation [Gen. 6:6]. Do not etsev, the weeping people are told, for ‘this day is holy’ and ‘the joy of the LORD is your strength’ [Neh. 8:10].

Live holy. Live in the strength of God’s joy. Eat and drink and share portions with those who have not [8:10, 12].

The blur of tears gives way to clearer sight. I do not settle or center myself. I am settled through being present to God’s presence, lifting hands to praise, bowing body to worship, tuning ears to hear. I am centered through eating and drinking and generous living. Phrases and practices rehearsed over and over till I — till we — are made right in the repetition.

Time to go down again to worship, to word proclaimed and table opened. And from there out into the fray of the world to ‘resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.’*

Do God’s joy. Be God’s joy.

*This phrase comes from the Baptismal Covenant of the United Methodist Church.

Wisdom Calling

Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? 

“To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. …

The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. …

When he established the heavens, I was there,

when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, …

then I was beside him, like a master worker;

and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, 

rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”

Prov 8:1, 4, 22, 27, 30-31; from the text for Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019;

for full text see: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Prov+8%3A1-4%2C+22-31&version=NRSV

Wisdom calling.  Wisdom standing at the crossroads and raising her voice. 

I have a crush on this woman.  I don’t aspire to be her — such attainment is ‘too high for me’ (as the psalmist might say).  I want to be near her, to spend time with her.  Sit at an outdoor cafe and chat as we watch the passers-by.  Then find ourselves occupied by our own conversation — leaning in, bodies turned towards each other, intent on our communion.  Laughing aloud together for the very humor of being alive.  

I want to be friends with her.

I imagine Wisdom so strongly.  She calls to all, here and now. She stands at the crossing — that one, just there, where they’ve shifted the lane-lines over to make room for the new transit line coming in, and the buses lumber crowded in the construction-narrowed road (picture the bus with its shoulders hunched in, like the passengers that stand crammed in its aisle).  Wisdom talks in high flights of poetry and with a well-grounded gumption.  Wisdom talks to me.

I am driving that very road, held by the red light, a bus just beside me.  The weather is drab and damp, not even poetically so, yet I am aware of delight rising with me.  I turn the feeling over and realize Oh, it is because I get to spend the week with Wisdom.  It is because I am headed to the library, where I will pull commentaries and lexicons off the shelves, and look up words and learn from others’ insights.  Pay attention to that joy.  It’s telling something.

Wisdom calls.  Heard or unheard — the very mention of crossroads suggests all the traffic that passes by without even pausing; now the light turns green, and I turn left — Wisdom cries out to all who live.  And for all the seeming playfulness of her proclamation, Wisdom’s delight is not ignorance or avoidance or petty weakness.  Wisdom knows creation.  She was there before its beginning and through every step of its coming to be.  Wisdom’s hymn trumpets deep awareness and full engagement and potent strength. 

Wisdom sings her birth from the LORD — not just created but gotten, in the old English sense, begotten; the verb in v.22 the same as in Gen 4:1, in Eve’s exultant joy at the birth of her first son.  The birth image echoes again in v.25:  ‘brought forth’ is a verb suggestive of the writhing and travail of childbirth.  The LORD in labor, bearing and bringing forth Wisdom, keeping her near, delighting in her daily delight.  Wisdom hymns her identity as joy; joy before the LORD, joy in the world, delight in humanity.  She is entirely herself, and the self that she so freely rejoices in is not solitary but relational.  

I come home from my library delving and pick up the ‘Outlook’ section from Sunday’s Washington Post (a day late) and see the cover article, ‘Changing Channels,’ about women after 50, stories from eight women who’ve reinvented their lives, themselves.  The article opens with the line, ‘When women turn 50, the world starts to tune them out ….’  Woman Wisdom! I think, standing on that street corner, calling to the passers by.  As the article continues, the women describe an ‘energy shift,’ a new sense of freedom to be themselves, to discover anew who those selves are.  This is me, I realize as I read.  Second calling (or third, depending on how you count).  Wandering and wondering and recognizing again and again that I myself (and at my age too!) am in-process.  And the freedom to claim that becoming, is that not also Wisdom?

I am in-process, still being created, still being born.  As Wisdom — way back before the beginning of it all — once was.  And as Wisdom even now delights in the joy of that eternal and daily newness, so might I.

Wisdom stands on the corner, and she looks me full in the face and smiles warmly and stretches out a hand and says, ‘Come and see…’ (John 1:39).  She shows me wonders vast and tiny.  She shows me how to see and how to hear.  How to laugh.  And — please God — how to tell.

I am being born into friendship with Woman Wisdom.  A laughing thought, indeed!  Yet that is the promise.  ‘I love those who love me; those who seek diligently will find me’ (Prov 8:17).  The promise is plural — not just to me, but for each of us, all of us. Be attuned to the delight that signs the encounter.

Birth involves writhing and travail.  But — oh! — then comes the light, and the shuddering gasp and intake of breath, and the life.  

And ‘the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy’ (Job 38:7).