Tag: resist

Resistance Springing

(c) Katherine E. Brown

You shall answer, and you shall say, ‘… Now, see: I bring in the first fruit of the ground which you gave to me, LORD.’ You will put it before the LORD your God, and you will bow low before the LORD your God, and you will rejoice in all the good which the LORD your God gave to you and to your house, you and the Levite and the alien who is among you.

Deuteronomy 26:5a, 10-11; see Deut 26:1-11 NRSVUE

I am extra aware of the light the first week after the clocks spring ahead. It’s not just that my alarm rings earlier, as measured by the sky; it is the strangeness of the afternoon light: clear at an hour when I am expecting its tone to have warmed with the sun’s lowering. The sun keeps its own time still, yet its rhythm, too, is shifting, each day longer by minutes. By the end of January, we can walk in daylight as late as 5:30; as late as 6 by February’s end. Changing the clock does not itself add to the day, but it does make plainer what has been taking place already, making the incremental seem sudden, and more entire. Everything seems to have come on at once. Red buds are visible on the maple tree. Snowdrops’ slender white flowers are now joined by yellow aconite and purple crocus and hellebore in muted colors of cream and mauve. The withies of winter jasmine have grown green and put out yellow flowers. I look out the back window and see daffodils madly daffodil-ing — cups and petals unfolded and shining golden in the sun.

These buds and blooms are the first fruits of spring, somehow made more noticeable by the admittedly artificial, and frankly sometimes-irritating, practice of changing our clocks. Shifting my rhythm this way shifts something in my sight. Spring’s good is sprung. Daffodils dance yellow in the March wind, and their apparent joy insists upon being rejoiced-over.

Deuteronomy’s first-fruits are not the bright blooms of the neighborhood but the first of the season’s harvest on which the people will depend for the rest of that year and until the next year’s harvest is ripe. These first fruits are not to be hoarded nor privately gloated over. These first fruits are to be given back, that the whole harvest may be received as gift.

I appreciate the precision of the liturgy in this text: directions for posture and gesture and scripted speech. The first-person recitation places each one who recites it in continuity with the vulnerable father, the oppressed stranger, the one heard and seen and saved and brought in to a land from which first fruits would grow — these very fruits, brought here in this basket. To practice this liturgy is to be reminded that the ‘exceptionalism’ of God’s people is not inherent in themselves but in God, the giver of all the good.

Read on. The liturgy is larger than the scripted gestures and declarations in front of the altar. The next step in the practice is to ‘rejoice in all the good the LORD your God has given you’ — the very good which the one-who-trusts-flesh cannot even see? Rejoice in all the good along with the portionless priests, with the alien who is among you. Not sharing ‘yours’ with ‘them’ but receiving with them the LORD’s giving to all.

Rejoice! This injunction brackets and punctuates the core of Deuteronomy [see 12:7, 12, 18; 16:11, 14, 15; 26:11]. God’s people are commanded to bring offerings at set times, to eat and to be glad in the presence of the LORD and the company of the vulnerable. Gladness as scheduled practice. Make the feast not for being already glad; become glad in the making of the feast.

Joy may seem an unrealistic demand, even unkind in the context of these days. (How can joy be expected in the face of so many summons to fear?). Then I remember the text context of these commands to joy: the people are yet in the wilderness, that time of turmoil and fear and traumatic becoming. Even so, even then, even here, God’s people are given the command to rejoice. The practice of joy as the distinctive characteristic of God’s people. Joy multiplied in the making of it. Wilderness resisted in delight dancing and insisting on being rejoiced-with.

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.