lenten journal: antonyms

One of the joys of teaching English is vocabulary study. Every week or two, I turn the page to a new list of words for my students – expunge, bequeath, cogent, supercilious – and then put them through the paces of the exercises that come in their books hoping that a few of the words take hold somehow. I’m caught between knowing that a random list of words apropos of hardly anything is not much of a way to learn new words and knowing that the structure, however arbitrary, does help. And so we soldier on through the definitions, the completion of sentences, the synonyms, and the antonyms. When we start talking about what a word means, we learn from what we consider its opposite. If I say the opposite of high is low, I offer one meaning. If I say the opposite of high is sober, well, I mean something quite different.

We talked about opposites on Sunday morning in our Bible class. I am helping to lead a class that is using Walter Brueggemann’s great book, The Bible Makes Sense, to help us get a better handle on our scripture. Many in our class are not familiar with much of the Bible and the class has been interesting and inspiring. We talked about opposites as we looked at the stories of the manna falling to feed the Israelites and Jesus using the little boy’s lunch of loaves and fishes to feed a whole hillside of folks. Somehow in the discussion we got to opposites. I don’t remember how exactly, but I do remember saying the opposite of love was not hate. Hate is similar to love in that it takes a lot of energy. When you hate someone, they matter to you. The true opposite of love is apathy. You just don’t care, or even more you don’t even notice. In the judgment scene in Matthew 25, Jesus admonishes those gathered by saying, “I was hungry and you didn’t feed me. I was in prison and you didn’t come to visit . . . “ and the people responded, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or in prison?”

And Jesus replied, “Exactly.”

Another mistaken antonym shows up when we come to faith. I think the popular answer is often doubt, but I think Frederick Buechner had the right idea when he said doubt was “the ants in the pants of faith.” Then again, faith is a hard word in English because we’ve made a noun out of something that is really a verb. Faith is about trust – wholehearted, chips-all-in-before-we-get-to-the-casino (thanks for that one, Jules) trust. When the stakes are that high, doubt rides sidesaddle. The opposite of faith – of trust is fear because it propels us to run and hide rather than to leap and know that love will catch us.

The two Bible stories centered around bread and brought us to a discussion of Communion, which we share on the first Sunday of every month. We talked about what the Bread meant and what metaphors moved us at the Table. As our discussion continued, I remembered one more pair of antonyms that I have carried for a long time -- thanks to an old friend, Kenny – and mentioned in this blog on more than one occasion, I’m sure. Jesus’ command as he passed the bread was to eat and remember. Who knows how many times I have heard the call to take the meal seriously so that I might not forget what God has done in Christ. And that’s a good word. But, perhaps, the opposite of remember is not forget.

Jesus said, “This is my body,” and then Paul said we, the people of God, are the Body of Christ, the incarnation of love in the world. When we remember Jesus, we put the Body back together again. Re-member, as in the opposite of dismember. The centrifugal force of life pulls us apart day by day and flings us to the edges. When we take and eat together, when we gather in close and trust that nothing can separate us from the love of God no matter how painful life is we re-member Jesus: we put the Body of Christ back together again in love so true that it casts out fear.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: telling stories

I spent the morning and early afternoon at the Third Annual Jack Crum Conference on Prophetic Ministry at Avent Ferry United Methodist Church in Raleigh. My primary connection to the event was through my friendship with Ryan Rowe, who is a member of the church and the organizer of this year’s conference. He asked me to help with the food.

The conference is named for a former pastor of the church who was responsible for helping the church to galvanize its identity in the midst of the civil rights struggle. In 1958, they were meeting in a dairy barn that belonged to a rich benefactor. The church was an all white congregation. Crum invited James Lawson, an African-American and fellow Methodist, to come a preach. The man who owned the barn, and who was also going to donate land to let them build a church, said if Lawson came he would evict them and take back his land.

Ryan read part of the sermon Crum preached the following Sunday, prior to Lawson taking the pulpit. “Money cannot buy our witness,” he said. And then he repeated himself. Then Crum went on to say the second galvanizing principle was to stand against those who were wrong but “to love them in the midst of their wrongness.” “Speaking the truth without love,” said Crum, “is not Christian.”

And then, fifty-three years later, James Lawson himself stepped once again into the pulpit of Avent Ferry UMC. This man who went on from that Sunday in 1958 to pastor in India, to study with followers of Gandhi, to help found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to train civil rights activists in nonviolent actions, to ride in the last stages of the Freedom Rides when the early riders had been beaten down, to pastor in Memphis and work with Martin Luther King to organize the sanitation workers stood up today to stand with those working to keep a well integrated and successful school system in Raleigh from being taken apart by forces reminiscent of those who opposed him fifty years ago. He spoke with a gentle and calm authority, not as one who had something to prove nor as a hero in the fading light, but as one who knew how to speak the truth in love and still had some truth to speak.

He talked about how hard it is to read the gospel stories of Jesus because we find it hard to let him be human, to really see him in the stories. “If you want to understand the stories of Jesus,” he said, “read a biography of Gandhi or Martin Luther King.” The fact that we were sitting in a room with no stained glass windows seemed perfect to me in that moment: he was calling us to see in new and clear images.

His words reminded me of something I read in Nathan Brown’s book, Letters to a One-Armed Poet, which chronicles his grief in the loss of one of his best friends. In a piece called “Nip and Tuck,” he writes,

I’ve buffed out so many scratches and dings in the paint of our stories, I now worry about their cosmetic integrity.

At the same time, “the truth” has always felt like salty taffy in my mouth – the way it yanks on loose teeth and takes forever to digest. And “the facts” of any matter seldom make people lean forward in their customary seats . . . seats on the front rows of lives that are filled enough already with the hassle and boredom of “what actually happened.”

Right now I’m reading The Great Gatsby with my American Literature class at school – me for about the tenth time, they for the first. Though I’ve read it with students several times, I’ve also reread it four or five times on my own because I am captured by the writing and the way the story unfolds. No matter now many times I read it, there is always something new to find there.

I love to tell the story
for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting
to hear it like the rest

So sings one of my favorite hymns. Thinking about what Lawson had to say this morning, what Gatsby thinks about looking across the water at Daisy’s green light, what Nathan meant by “buffing and shining,” I wonder what are the stories of Jesus – the ones with the scratches and dents of humanity and hope?

We’ve often done a pretty good buffing job on the gospels over the years to make them fit nicely into our anthology of culture and faith. We can talk, for instance, about the gruesomeness of the Crucifixion and focus on Jesus’ suffering because he died for us and also, perhaps, because we don’t have to feel it firsthand. When the call of the story is for compassion and voluntarily taking on the pain of the poor and marginalized, we’ve move more quickly to metaphor. When it’s something we can’t fit comfortably into our categories, we explain it away as being added by church tradition or later inserts. When it comes to our weekly lectionary readings, we just skip over the hard parts. The prospect of a “taffy” truth that leaves us toothless and disquieted is more than we want to face on most days.

I was reading Marcus Borg’s blog tonight, looking for information on his new book, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power - And How They Can Be Restored, and found these words:

But he was not a secular social revolutionary. He was God’s revolutionary. And God’s passion – what God is passionate about, according to Jesus – is for an earth in which swords are beaten into plowshares, in which nations do not make war against nations anymore, in which every family shall live under their own vine and fig tree (not just subsistence, but more than subsistence), and no one shall make the afraid (Micah 4.1-4, with close parallel in Isaiah 2.1-4). This was the passion of Jesus, and for Christians, Jesus is the revelation of God’s passion.

Violent revolution? No. Non-violent revolution? Yes.

Of course, Jesus and the Bible are also personal as well as political. Of course. But we have not often seen the political meaning of Jesus and the Bible. It is there – and once one sees it, it is so obvious. Not to see it is the product of habituated patterns of thought, or of willful blindness.

Jesus was (and is) not about endorsing the rule of domination systems that privilege the wealthy and powerful. Jesus was (and is) about God’s passion for a very different kind of world.

Yes, and we have church buildings and jobs and families and debts and obligations and other stuff we want to do. In the jukebox that is my mind, I cue the Beatles:

you say you want a revolution
well you know we don’t want to change the world

My friend Burt called tonight while I was cooking dinner. We’ve been close friends since college – a long time ago, now. It had been awhile since we talked, so we both had stories to tell along with new scratches and dents to share. When we were younger, we thought we would change the world.

I think there’s still time.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: part of the story

Here’s more of Stephen Dunn, once again, from my reading today. These are the opening words to a chapter titled, “The Hand Reaching Into the Crowd.”

We live in a graceless age. Accordingly the word grace (in its various parts of speech) has lost power and significance, though it is frequently used. We have our saving graces, we are graced by one’s presence, we seek to be in someone’s good graces, and sometimes we need grace periods, which instructively, are given these days more by banks than by other higher powers. A recent headline read, Still Cheaper Chicken May Grace Our Menus Soon. The word is nearly unhearable, nearly dead, in that context in which it is familiarly used rarely compel us to engage its meaning. It might be said that all much-used, debased words are looking for restoration, for revivifying contexts.

In its Latin and Old French roots the verb means either to favor or to give thanks. In Modern French it means “to pardon.” . . . The noun’s theological definition refers to God’s free and undeserved favor, at once suggestive of beneficence and selectivity. We cannot earn it; we can only hope for mercy.

When I finished writing last night, I sat down next to Ginger in the adjacent room just to be together for a few minutes before we fell asleep. Between blogging and watching basketball, I had missed who had been voted off of American Idol. She picked up the remote to find the recording. “You can just tell me,” I said.

“Oh, no,” she replied, “you have to see it.”

What followed was the surprise that Casey, one of the more talented of this year’s crop, came in last in the voting. He was then given the chance to “sing for his life,” as Ryan Seacrest called it, though he was hardly through the first verse when the judges stopped him to say they were intervening to save him from elimination. They have one “save” per season and they were ready to use it. The young man was overcome. In the flood of emotion that followed, I heard him say to the judges, “You only have one save. Why would you use it on me?”

After that, all he could say was, “Thank you.”

Tonight, I sat down to dinner with three of our godchildren (and their parents). Jasmine, who is seven, was asked to say grace. She began a series of sentences, each one beginning with “Thank you, God,” that told the story of her day: what she had done, whom she had seen, what she had eaten, all the way down to our sitting around the table and the empanadas that were waiting to be consumed. By the time she was done, all I could say was, “Thank you.”

Dunn’s discussion of grace was a lead-in to a story and a poem about the aftermath of the 1993 World Series where Mitch Williams, a pitcher for the Phillies, gave up a series ending home run. Reporters descended on him in the locker room to ask the akward and agonizing questions reporters ask in the loser’s locker rooms because it was their job. “If the were better men with better jobs,” Dunn wrote, “they would have put their arms around him, asked how they might be of help.” Then, another Phillies pitcher, Terry Mulholland, reached through the mob of mic holders, took Williams’ hand, and led him away from the assault without saying anything to anyone. “Oh,” Dunn writes in the poem, “the luxury of failing in private.” Then in the next paragraph he writes,

Christianity has given us great stories of pardon and forgiveness, in other words of moral grace, but very few stories about the symmetries and felicities of art. We are our stories, which is why it is useful to know many. The scariest people I know are the ones who avidly subscribe to one story, one version of the world.

Perhaps one sign of our graceless age is fail has come into its own. We use it as almost its own part of speech. Epic Fail. Noun, verb, adjective, adverb all rolled into one. We are all each other’s band of reporters, pushing microphones into one another’s faces demanding to know how it feels to be such a screw up. Private is an anachronism. Context is of little consequence. We are being conditioned to think of life as a sequence of YouTube videos or news segments edited to show our failures from every angle without telling the story.

Jesus met the woman at the well and they talked. She had failure written all over her. She was alone at the well because that was the least painful way for her to get through her day. Jesus listened to her story and told her some of his. When she went back into the village, she invited the people who held the microphones in her face to come back with her to the well to meet the one who had offered her grace. Her statement has always been puzzling to me. She said, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done,” as if that were somehow a comforting statement. I’ve often thought perhaps the gospel writers left out part of her invitation. I want it to read, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done and still loves me.” Dunn’s description of Terry Mulholland leading Mitch Williams out of the ring of reporters gives me knew eyes. Mulholland knew what Williams had done and knew the way to forgiveness, to grace and gratitude. Not only did he know, but he took him there by telling his own story of failure through his actions.

The point of life is not to measure up, or even to get it right. I don’t really know if life has a point anymore than a great story has A Lesson To Be Learned. Every story that moves us, that makes us more human is one of failure and forgiveness, of loss and redemption. Sometimes we are the ones who blew the game standing in the spotlight of the inquisitors. Then there are the stories where we get to take someone by the hand like Mulholland, or awaken hearts with our gratitude like Jasmine, or speak words of healing like Jesus. To be a part of those stories, we have to be paying attention.

Peace,
Milton

a poet's bible

As I was reading this morning, I reached for David Rosenberg’s A Poet’s Bible: Rediscovering the Voices of the Original Text and his translation of parts of Job and Ecclesiastes took me on a wonderful little journey.

A Poet's Bible

I found it used, on the shelf
in the basement of the Harvard
Bookstore, one blurb proclaiming,

“The best translation of this century,”
yet relegated to life among the
remnants and returned, years ago.

And this morning, after coffee and
my own reflection on my daily
work, I found it again and pulled

it from my own shelf and a place
it had sat unread far too many
days for a best translation.

I opened to Ecclesiastes
(turn, turn, turn)
to see how the poet heard what

I know by heart because he knew
the words behind the words,
all unrecognizable consonants

to me, running right to left,
as if we were playing the record
backwards to see what was being

secretly said; but there’s no secret
when I can sit and listen to
my life, to his words:

the grace to be still
in the flow of all creation
for a moment

I read it repeatedly in silence
and the chill of this rainy morning
glistening with the grace that has

traversed millennia, transcended
language, and is aged with the
understanding of fallen leaves and

broken branches, life and death,
failure and hope: used books,
used lives found in translation.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: jesus goes postal

I’ve been struggling with a story today.

“Jesus cleansing the Temple” is the way it usually gets titled for those of us who know the story. It shows up in all four gospels and I’ve heard it over and over; it’s not new to me. Jesus was going into the Temple in Jerusalem during Passover and saw the mall-like atmosphere that had grown up in the outer court where people could exchange money for Temple currency (to the profit of the money changers) and buy animals for sacrifice (also at a serious markup, I’m sure). He made a whip out of some cords and sent the money changers and merchants running for their collective lives, leaving tables turned and everyone wondering what the hell happened.

We read John’s version this morning, being good lectionary followers, which comes early in his gospel – Chapter Two, to be exact. The first chapter is full of the poetry I dearly love – the Word became flesh and dwelt among us – and the second begins with Jesus at the wedding at Cana, which is a story I love because of the interaction between Jesus and his mother.

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come." 5His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."

First, who gets away with calling his mother, “Woman”? Second and speaking of performance criticism, wouldn’t you love to be able to hear the tone in the voices of both Jesus and Mary? Third, we get a picture of a pretty cool Messiah in this opening miracle. Drinks are on him.

A sentence later – that’s right one sentence, however much time actually passed --he’s in the Temple going off on the moneychangers like Chuck Norris on a drug dealer. Two sentences after that, before the dust can even clear or anyone straighten the tables, Jesus is quietly talking to Nicodemus about being born again.

One of the ways I was taught to look at Bible passages was to begin by noticing what came before and after the story of interest. How do I make sense of stories that show Jesus going from wedding to warrior to welcomer? More than that, and regardless of what comes before and after, what do I do with a story where Jesus responds with violence? He made a whip out of cords, which I’m assuming was intended to be more than symbolic, and he stormed the Temple, turning over tables and chasing everyone from the sellers to the sheep out of the room. Whatever his motivation, whatever prophecy he fulfilled, he was violent and he did damage. The blessed-are-the-peacemakers-turn-the-other-cheek guy was whipping people to get his point across.

As I said, I’ve been struggling with the story.

I went back to the beginning of John and looked at the order of things once again:

• the Prologue
• John the Baptist points him out
• Jesus chooses his disciples
• the wedding at Cana
• Jesus clears the Temple
• Nicodemus comes to see Jesus
• some more John the Baptist stuff

Chapter Four opens with Jesus’ encounter with a Samaritan woman, which is one of my favorite stories. At the end of their conversation, he told her he was the Messiah. Could it be John was giving us an account of how Jesus grew into his identity? Could he be showing us how Jesus got started and found his way to a true sense of his calling?

(By the way, these questions are not rhetorical. And, yes, I understand the are problematic since the other gospels place the story late in Jesus’ ministry because they only record one Passover where John records three. And I’m not trying to get into a theological debate here; I’m trying to figure out what to do with a violent Messiah. This blows my mind.)

To say Jesus lost his temper doesn’t satisfy me because I don’t think he is out of control in his actions. We don’t need to retitle the section, “Jesus Goes Postal.” The recent church shooting is too fresh in my mind to think that Jesus was just freaking out. He knew what he was doing. He seemed full of righteous indignation, as Ginger says. The main victims of the merchants and moneychangers would have been the poor because of the price gouging. Jesus came to liberate the poor, to turn the world upside down; we see that over and over. Yet, only this once does his defense of the poor come in the shape of a fist.

Years ago, I heard Tony Campolo speak and he said, “Everyday, over and over, we have to make a choice of how we are going to respond to the world around us, and we are always choosing between whether we will respond with love or with power.” Here is a story of the One who incarnated Love responding to a situation with power, not love. Jesus took the strong hand and slapped me silly.

Part of my struggle is with myself. I have heard this story my whole life in church and never let myself see what troubles me about it until today. I allowed myself to be blinded by familiarity; I wasn’t looking for anything new. Jesus chased the bad guys out of the Temple, which is what good guys do. But he did it violently. This can’t be one of the go-and-do-likewise kind of stories. Had Jesus made it a pattern, he never would have gone through the Cross to the Resurrection.

I suppose this would be the paragraph where I tie it all together and tell you have I’ve come to terms with the story in some new and insightful way. It’s not. And I think that’s OK. My struggle is not a crisis of faith, as though I somehow think Jesus is not who he said he was. My struggle is to have the wherewithal to think and feel through my new understanding of the story (new to me, anyway) and see what it has to say about my faith and my growth as a human being.

As we say in the UCC, there is more light yet to break forth.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: show me a story

I guess because I grew up hearing sermons in church, I spent a large part of my life thinking of a sermon as primarily an oral presentation, rather than a written document first. When I began to preach with some regularity that perspective changed. I found I was a better preacher once I learned a sermon was a written document first – I needed to have worked out what I was going to say – and then an oral presentation.

When I was teaching high school in Boston to classes with seventy percent or more nonnative English speakers, I was daunted by the fact that Shakespeare was part of the curriculum. Most of the kids had trouble with modern English; how were they going to understand what Will wrote? I went to a workshop on teaching Shakespeare and was reminded that, though we were handing the play to the kids in book form, a play is intended to be performed, not read. Over the years, I taught the kids how to choreograph a swordfight on stage, how to figure out what was happening in a scene. From the opening line, we acted the play out in class and the language came alive. They got it. I did, too.

This morning, Ginger and I drove to Greensboro for a meeting of Baptist professors of religion who were gathering prior to a larger convention. Dalen Jackson, president of the group, had invited Ginger to do the devotion for the group at the beginning of their session. I went along for the ride. After the devotion, we hung around to hear Dalen’s paper, “’Clumsy Mark’ Again? Mark’s Gospel as the Transcription of Peter’s Public Performance of the Gospel Story.” It has been awhile since I got to be in on an academic discussion, and I learned something.

At the heart of Dalen’s paper was a discussion of performance criticism, which was new to me. He used a quote to describe the idea:

A performance was an integral part of every early Christian experience of the compositions that now comprise the writings of the New Testament. The New Testament writings were either written “transcriptions” of oral narratives composed in performance or they were composed in writing (perhaps orally by dictation) for use in oral performance.

I’ve always thought of the Bible as a book (more of an anthology, I guess). My experience with it is primarily in print. What Dalen taught me today was the gospels, along with most of the rest of it, were just the opposite of my sermons: oral before they were written. They were more like Shakespeare’s plays: intended to be performed, because that is how they were created.

Reading the gospels, for me, is sometimes like reading email messages in that tone is often hard to convey. Here’s one of the passages from Mark that I wonder about, for instance, Mark 3:31-35:

Then Jesus' mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you."

"Who are my mother and my brothers?" he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."

How did Jesus ask who his family was? It’s not an easy answer – by that I mean this doesn’t feel much like a Hallmark card moment to me. The tone we infuse into the words makes a difference in how they can be interpreted. If the words stay in the two dimensional world of the page, tone stays out of reach, because it needs the three dimensional world of performance to have room to move. In a time before books, that’s how the stories got told. If we want to get to the heart of the stories, then we have to let them live off of the page; we have to incarnate them, if you will – perform them.

My favorite liturgist at church is a person named Suzanne. When she reads scripture she does It from memory. She tells us the story. She is a part of the Network of Biblical Storytellers who already know what Dalen is talking about, though they get to it down a different path. Rather than connecting back with long ago, they are looking at present trends. They describe themselves by saying, “We bring God’s stories to life for a post-literate, digital age.” Whatever the age, they are on to something: the gospel story is a living, breathing thing, not something static trapped between book covers. These are stories to be read (aloud) and wrestled with, to be talked about and talked through, to be performed and remembered.

My friend Beth is an actor in California. She wrote me the other day about a character she is going to play in an upcoming performance because there were some theological issues in her character’s background that were more akin to mine as a Christian than to Beth’s, who is Jewish. Our discussion was both fun and meaningful to me, in part, because I got to learn something about how Beth, as an actor, goes through the process of becoming a character, learning about her and then climbing inside her skin for the two hours she is on stage. It reminds me of one of the earliest and still most meaningful explanations of the Incarnation given to me along the way: Jesus was God with skin on. Jesus stepped into the human story as one of us.

Dalen’s invitation, as I heard it today, was for us to step into Jesus’ story by climbing inside its skin, if you will. The dictionary says the word perform comes from old words that mean to alter and to accomplish. When we tell the story – when we perform it – we alter it by breathing life into it again and we accomplish the task of letting it come alive in us.

I had fun learning today.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: how do I get there from here?

Genesis 12:1-4; John 3:1-17
A Sermon for Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Durham

It’s written matter of factly in our scripture passage this morning:

“Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you,”

as though God and Abram were having a conversation. If they were, we aren’t privy to it. The chapter starts with God talking and gives us no background or context. If we back up into Chapter 11, we learn about Abram’s family tree, that he was originally from Ur (which is modern day Iraq), and that Terah, his father, had actually set out from there for Canaan, but only made it as far as Haran before he settled down to live out his two hundred years. We don’t know why.

Abram had been in Haran a hundred and twenty-five years or so when God spoke to him about moving on. He was settled and secure. God offered him promises and unsettledness – pack up everything, leave your family and friends and the land you know as home – for a reason: “and I will make you a blessing.”

Nicodemus was a settled man as well. He was a religious leader, which meant he both power and money. He heard Jesus speaking and came to find him to ask more questions, I think, but began with a statement instead:

“Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

Jesus’ response – also in a matter of fact tone -- seems to indicate that he wasn’t interested in some sort of esoteric theological discussion. He wanted to make it personal:

"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God."

Nicodemus got to hear the phrase “born again” before it was road weary and politically laden. He took it at face value, wondering how he could climb back into his mother’s womb and come back once more as a bouncing baby boy. The image is not a sentimental one, but a painful, messy, even bloody image. How could something as visceral as childbirth be repeated? And why would you want to do that?

After listening to Ginger’s sermon last week on the temptations of Jesus, I told her I thought they could all be summed up in one phrase: I matter most. The Tempter was trying to get Jesus to live as though he mattered most. From that perspective, these two stories could be summed up in an opposite way: God matters most. God is where things start and finish, God is the Alpha and Omega, the First and Last Word.

The other thing that struck me was something I remembered from a New Testament class many years ago. The temptations were not a one time thing for Jesus. Deciding whether to feed people to gain allegiance, or to use the miracles as a way to gain popularity, or to see the world as belonging to him were things Jesus had to stare down everyday. Our stories today are no different.

Abram left Haran and made it all the way to Canaan. He even built an altar at Bethel. Then a famine came and he and Sarai were forced to go to Egypt to find food. The man who had trusted God on the first part of the journey lost his nerve. As they got close, Abram told his wife he was afraid, when the Egyptians saw how beautiful she was, that they would kill him and take her to be with the Pharoah. His plan was to say they were brother and sister. Abram made himself safer, but he didn’t prove himself more faithful in what he did to himself and his wife.

I don’t mean to be too hard on the guy. Maybe he thought the journey to Canaan would be a one time thing: he would unpack at Bethel and then he would get to live two hundred years in the same place. He had hardly taken the saddlebags off the camels when it was time to go again.

Nicodemus shows up two more times in the gospels. In one scene, he asks a rather innocuous question as the other Pharisees are plotting to kill Jesus. Then he shows up at the tomb with oil and spices to pour on Jesus’ body. Perhaps the thought of outing himself as a “born again believer” was too much.

The sentence closest to the heart of our denomination over the last few years I, “God is still speaking.” Those are dangerous words. If God is still speaking – and saying the kind of things Abram and Nicodemus heard -- then the Bible is not an expanded version of Life’s Little Instruction Book or Robert Fulghum’s Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. God’s words to us are incendiary, and intentionally so. If we listen, ours are also. When the children lead us in prayer each week, here’s what we say:

Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The trip from Iraq to Israel was less complicated in Abram’s day and Nicodemus didn’t have to contend with globalization and climate change and a world as large as the one we know. So will we ever get to settle in the Promised Land or be born once and for all?

The short answer is no.

If birth is our working metaphor, then it is God’s womb we climb into over and over, and with each birth we see another way we are called to be the people of God, whether it’s figuring out how to respond to Darfur or Kenya, or how to meet the needs of the poor and homeless in our city and our nation, or how to hold our government accountable when they torture and abuse people, or how to handle our finances as a church so that we are faithful and generous stewards of what we have been given, or how to deal ethically in our business practices, or how to live with honesty and integrity as a church community. We are called to be born again and again and again, each time a fuller incarnation of the God who gives birth to us over and over and over.

John 3:16 is the first verse I memorized as a child. It begins, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son . . .” Not only is God still speaking, but God is still so loving the world that God continues to live in a constant state of labor, giving birth to us, the children of God, again and again, that we might be a blessing so the world may know how deeply that love runs. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: answering invitations

In getting to preach this Sunday, since Ginger is away on our church’s women’s retreat, I’ve been thinking about Abram and Nicodemus, the two stars of the lectionary readings this week, and tonight that’s led me to thinking about invitations.

As one who grew up Southern Baptist, invitation is a loaded word, tied to the altar call at the end of every service, calling people to conversion, church membership, or (as we often said) to “redecorate” their lives. As we sang the final hymn, the pastor stood at the front of the church and waited for people to step out into the aisle and come forward. On many occasions, the pastor would signal to the organist to pause and he (they were all men in those days) would implore us to not let the song end without responding to God’s call. For the most part, we all stood still and sang.

The hymns we sang were ones that spoke to our desire to be changed by our encounter with God.

All to Jesus I surrender, all to him I freely give
I will ever love and trust him, in his presence daily live

I surrender all, I surrender all
All to thee, my blessed savior, I surrender all

The songs were filled with imagery of transformation:

Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way
Thou art the potter, I am the clay
Mold me and make me after thy will
While I am waiting yielded and still

The one I remember as the pinnacle of invitation hymns was

Just as I am without one plea
But that thy blood was shed for me
And that thou bidst me come to thee
O, Lamb of God, I come

Thanks to YouTube, I’ve spent the better part of my evening alone flipping through gospel videos, listening to songs full of invitations to follow and calls to come home. I think about Abram, who hailed from what we know as Iraq, hearing God tell him to pack up and head west. The story is told in only a few verses because Abram didn’t do much talking; he packed up and left.

Nicodemus’ question to Jesus - and Jesus’ answer – unwittingly created one of the great dividing lines in Christianity, as some cling to the idea of being born again as label more than metaphor. Both were trying to come to terms with how we are changed when we encounter God. Neither had any idea how their words and actions would alter the landscape for those who came after them.

The story of our faith is a collection of short stories of individuals and communities of faithful followers who have answered God’s call to move and grow, or to be born anew into a world that needs a fresh incarnation of God’s love. Some of the stories are rich and full; some are tragic and some are laced with laughter.

In my musical journey this evening, I came across Mark Heard’s song, “Heart of Hearts”:

Tears in the city
But nobody's really surprised, you know
My heart's taking a beating
Existence is bleeding me dry, you know

But way down in my heart of hearts
Way down in my soul of souls
Way down I know that I am a fortunate man
To have known divine love

The world is in shambles
I'm just a young man but it's been getting a little bit old to me
I'm already aching
The years have been taking a little bit of a toll on me

But way down in my heart of hearts
Way down in my soul of souls
Way down I know that I am a fortunate man
To have known Divine love

Two in the morning
The siren is a warning that everything is not quite alright
The city is sleeping
I'm down on my knees in the night tonight

But way down in my heart of hearts
Way down in my soul of souls
Way down I know that I am a fortunate man
To have known Divine love

I still don’t know exactly where the sermon is going, any more than Abram knew how to get to Canaan. What I do know is I can sing a few more verses and prepare myself to be changed, converted, even born again once more.

Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind;
sight, riches, healing of the mind,
yea, all I need in thee to find,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

Just as I am, thou wilt receive,
wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;
because thy promise I believe,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

Just as I am, thy love unknown
hath broken every barrier down;
now, to be thine, yea thine alone,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

As the old preachers used to say, close your eyes and make it a prayer.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: joseph

After Annunciation

This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There’d have been no room for the child.

(Weather of the Heart, Madeleine L’Engle)

Madeleine L’Engle played a big part in my understanding of both Advent and the Liturgical Year through her book, The Irrational Season, which draws its title from her poem. She wrote essays working her way around the calendar in church time – Advent, Christmas, Holy Innocents, Epiphany, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, Transfiguration, Advent – challenging me to learn to tell time differently. (I wrote more fully about this here.) Advent both began (“the night is far gone”) and ended (“the day is at hand”) her timekeeping because the Birth was the reason we have a calendar at all. Our year, our faith, our hope, begins here and calls us to expect a new year and to find new things in the Old, Old Story.

When I try to grasp the nature of the universe with my conscious mind, my humanly limited intellectual powers, I grope blindly. I come closer to understanding with the language of the heart, sipping hot bouillon and relaxing, standing by the dining-room window where I can no longer sit on the window sill because of our accumulation of plants – coleus and Swedish Ivy and ferns and alligator pears and philodendron and anything else we can coax to grow in the polluted air of the city – than when I think with mind alone. (4)

I’m sitting at my laptop in the makeshift dining room of our rent house sipping red wine instead of bouillon (not much of a bouillon sipper myself) next to the crush of crèches that adorn our mantle. Year after year, in quiet moments like these, the one in the story who pulls at me most is Joseph. While Luke’s telling provides the script for most of the pageants to be acted out in the next few days, with angels dropping in on Zachariah and Mary, Matthew writes about Joseph: Mary came up pregnant and they both knew he wasn’t the father, Joseph was trying to figure out how they could both step out of the marriage with the least amount of shame and scorn –

But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins." (Matthew 1:20-21)

After the dream, I imagine Joseph laying there wide-eyed (as if anyone could go back to sleep) and thinking, “Emmanuel – God with us. What am I supposed to do with that?” and then getting up to go find Mary. None of the gospel writers records any of Joseph’s words or feelings; all we are given are his actions: he stays with Mary, he takes her to Bethlehem, they flee into Egypt, and, as the boy grows up, he was his father. I did find one old ballad, “The Cherry Tree Carol,” that tells of Mary and Joseph being in a cherry orchard. She asks him to pick cherries for her and he tells her, rather snidely, to let the father of her child do it. It starts to rain cherries and he gets the point. (Fit that into your Lessons and Carols service!)

I don’t see him that way. As a carpenter, he was a guy who built things, who fixed things, who knew how to measure twice and cut once, who thrived on the kind of beauty that comes from precision as much as polish. When he found out Mary was pregnant, he wasn’t impulsive. He was thinking it through when the angel swooped into his dream. He moved from there to build a life for his family, such as it was, but all the measuring and planning the world could not have prepared him for what happened. The boy was born in a barn. People from shepherds to kings came to see him. They fled like refugees overnight because Herod wanted the baby killed. And that was just the first few months.

Like Mary, Joseph had to be filled with something other than reason – and fear. They had to swap angel stories at some point. He was the one given the name, which meant he would name the child as any father would do in those days. He grew into a role he never imagined he would be called to play and they lived out their days with a heartfelt understanding of the paradox of blessing: a life of meaningful pain and joy.

Down all the days, he still gets marginalized in most tellings of the story. He doesn’t do much more than lead the donkey and find a room, or at least a stable. I’m not pulling for equal billing, I just wanted to say when my heart hears the Story, I find deep resonance in this carpenter who chose to stay and stand with mother and child.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. – Two things: the artwork is from Bee Still Studio (thanks to Karyn who has a copy hanging at her parents' house). Second, the Beatles had long since broken up before I realized Mother Mary’s words to the boys from Liverpool were straight out of Luke. Though it’s no carol, I hear it differently this time of year, both in light of the Season and as I often find December a dark month.

the rest of the story

There’s always something new to learn.

As many times as I’ve either heard or read the parable of The Good Samaritan and the story of Jesus’ visit with Mary and Martha, I’d never thought about the two being connected until Ginger mentioned it in her sermon last Sunday. Both are stories about people stopping along the way and, I suppose, about people who don’t stop.

The parable has always been the easier story for me to take because I can more easily put myself in the role of the guy who stops. I’ve always been attracted to the people at the edges, the ones who feel left out; they are the ones I gravitated to as a youth minister, as a teacher, and in just about any other situation. But Jesus’ visit to the sisters is more problematic. When our house fills up with company, I’m the one in the kitchen while most folks are on the couch talking. I’m not necessarily alone in the kitchen, but I’m working hard to make sure everyone is fed. And I love it. I like swirling around making sure bowls stay filled, food is served hot, and people don’t go away hungry. When I do stop to talk, I always have one ear listening for the timer so I don’t burn whatever is coming out next.

I’m also not much of a meditator. (Is that a word?) If I sit quiet and still for twenty minutes, I fall asleep. I’m thoughtful and reflective, intentional and focused, but I’m not particularly quiet. I think if Jesus stopped by here, I’d be most likely to say, “Come talk to me in the kitchen while I finish the crab dip.” (That’s Ginger’s favorite; I figure he’d like it, too.) So the way I read Jesus’ admonition to Martha is less about her doing and more about her complaining that Mary was just sitting around. Martha doesn’t sound particularly joyful in her hospitality, I must say, in the same way that the religious leaders in the parable were so consumed with duty or privilege that they couldn’t afford to be compassionate. It wasn’t on the schedule.

Garrison Keillor is hitting home runs over at The Writer’s Almanac this week. Today’s poem was by one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye, whom I’ve quoted before. It sounds like something Jesus might have quoted right alongside of his words in Luke 10.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

I looked back at the two stories in Luke and noticed that both are somewhat unfinished. We never hear from the lawyer after Jesus says, “Go and do likewise”; we never hear what Martha says or does after Jesus tells her, “Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

At Vacation Bible Camp, Ginger was taking prayer requests from the kids one day when one girl asked that we pray for homeless children. Ginger agreed and talked about how some children live on the streets or in cars. Another little girl said, “People live in their cars?” She was incredulous, so Ginger talked about it some more with the hope that the seed planted in our prayer time would grow kindness in her heart. Certainly, the lawyer original question was intended to be more quiz than conversation. What I hope is he realized he was the guy in the ditch who needed a neighbor as much as anyone. Naomi is right: kindness grows out of sorrow.

My image of how the day was going for Martha when Jesus arrived is she had to improvise. I don’t think they were expecting him, since I don’t imagine he was on a specific itinerary. Based on the tone of her comment about her sister, I also imagine whatever she was preparing to feed Jesus wasn’t going well. Maybe she burned the pita bread or the hummus was runny. Maybe she cut her finger or burned her arm pulling something out of the oven. Maybe she was pissed because she was the only one who knew she was having a hard day. Maybe Jesus was saying, “Why are you taking your stuff out on your sister?” Martha had not yet been able to see, as Naomi says, “the size of the cloth” of kindness.

Jesus counted Mary, Martha, and Lazarus as friends, so I have to believe the conversation didn’t end at the height of the tension where Luke stopped his story. Jesus touched a raw sibling nerve with his words; there was more to be said.

I tried writing a couple of endings and everything I came up with felt forced or trite. What I see as I write is I have a lot at stake in Martha finding some redemption. I know her well; I need for her to come off better than she does. No, it’s not so much about how she appears as needing her to find some healing in the story because I think Jesus’ words must have hurt. She was trying hard and came up short. Somehow, I think that feeling was not unfamiliar to her. Whatever happened, I know Jesus was kind and found a way to say she was the one he was looking for and he needed her to stop just long enough to understand.

Peace,
Milton

no enemies, only neighbors

I took my trip on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho today, as did many of you who are in churches that follow the lectionary, and listened again to the parable we have come to call The Good Samaritan. Many of Jesus’ parables have gotten misnamed over the years -- the three in Luke 15 for example: The Lost Sheep should be The Good Shepherd, The Lost Coin should be The Persistent Housewife, and The Prodigal Son should be The Loving Father. I think, however, that we labeled this one pretty well because the Samaritan is the one who drives the point home.

When the lawyer quoted The Law back to Jesus – love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself – and then asked who his neighbor was, he was expecting a theological discussion, not a call to incarnational living. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus called us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us. In this parable, he changes his vocabulary from enemies to neighbors: love your neighbors as you love yourself – oh, and by neighbor he meant anyone that’s not us.

That’s a tougher road to take than the Jericho Road ever was.

One of the best sermons I remember on this parable focused on the guy who was beaten up, though I can’t remember who preached it. The preacher said, “Everyone thinks the Samaritan is the Christ figure in the story. I think they’re wrong. Jesus is in the ditch.” Everyone is my neighbor because Christ is in all of them. Ginger made the point this morning by recalling the closing scene of the trial in A Time to Kill. Jake Brigance is a lawyer defending a black man who is on trial for murdering the white man who raped his nine-year-old girl. The jury is all white. Jake struggled the whole trial with how to get people to see something other than race. He has a breakthrough in his closing argument:

I want to tell you a story. I'm going to ask you all to close your eyes while I tell you the story. I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to yourselves. Go ahead. Close your eyes, please. This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon. I want you to picture this little girl. Suddenly a truck races up. Two men jump out and grab her. They drag her into a nearby field and they tie her up and they rip her clothes from her body. Now they climb on. First one, then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure with a vicious thrust in a fog of drunken breath and sweat. And when they're done, after they've killed her tiny womb, murdered any chance for her to have children, to have life beyond her own, they decide to use her for target practice. They start throwing full beer cans at her. They throw them so hard that it tears the flesh all the way to her bones. Then they urinate on her. Now comes the hanging. They have a rope. They tie a noose. Imagine the noose going tight around her neck and with a sudden blinding jerk she's pulled into the air and her feet and legs go kicking. They don't find the ground. The hanging branch isn't strong enough. It snaps and she falls back to the earth. So they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck and drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge. Pitch her over the edge. And she drops some thirty feet down to the creek bottom below. Can you see her? Her raped, beaten, broken body soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood, left to die. Can you see her? I want you to picture that little girl. Now imagine she's white.

Several of the jurors visibly flinched. They saw a little girl they knew and loved and that changed them. Love and pain are the common denominators of our humanity. Such is the profound power of the Incarnation. No enemies, only neighbors.

The parable is even more difficult to live because it pulls us to both compassion and justice. When we see the images of the victims of the genocide in Darfur, or any one of the civil wars going on around the globe, the call to do whatever we need to do to save them is crystal clear, even if our resolve to figure out how to live that calling is still muddled. But the racial tension between the Jews and the Samaritans adds another layer. What if it were Osama in the ditch? Is it still Jesus, too? How can we be at war with our neighbors in Iraq and Afghanistan? How can I stop to help someone when I know they want to kill or hurt me because they think I represent my government? Am I really supposed to stop to help heal someone who stands for things I’m against?

This neighbor business is messy, difficult stuff. I have a hard enough time with my actual neighbor who sits and his porch and yells at the driver of the ice cream truck to turn off the music. If only Jesus had met him, I’m sure the parable would have had at least another paragraph of exceptions.

Our foster daughter drove out from Boston with her girlfriend to have dinner with my in-laws before they go back to Alabama tomorrow. When she got in my car to go to dinner, she said, “I’ve got a CD you’ve got to hear” and put in James Morrison’s Undiscovered. He’s a young British singer who has both soul and substance. Here are the lyrics to the title tune:

I look at you, you bite your tongue
I don’t know why or where I’m coming from
And in my head I'm close to you
We're in the rain still searching for the sun

You think that I wanna run and hide
I'll keep it all locked up inside
I just want you to find me
I'm not lost, I'm not lost, Just undiscovered
We're never alone we're all the same as each other
You see the look that’s on my face
You might think I’m out of place
I’m not lost, no, no, just undiscovered

Well the time it takes to know someone
It all can change before you know its gone
So close your eyes and feel the way
I'm with you now believe there’s nothing wrong

You think that I wanna run and hide
I'll keep it all locked up inside
I just want you to find me
I'm not lost, I’m not lost, Just undiscovered
We're never alone we're all the same as each other
You see the look that’s on my face you might think I’m out of place
I'm not lost, no, no, just undiscovered

I love that: I’m not lost; I’m undiscovered. Though they seem worlds apart, my own need to be discovered in the ditch is not really so far from my seeing Jesus in the ditch whether I’m looking at a transient or a terrorist. We are called to discover one another, or perhaps to discover the Jesus in one another.

No enemies, only neighbors.



Peace,
Milton

a boy named sous

I got the gig!

It’s no Holy Grail, but there was much rejoicing. Yay!

In between the opening and closing sessions of our Avalanche Ranch VBS, I drove down to Plymouth to talk to the Chef and came back with a job as his sous chef. I’m pumped. I call back tomorrow to find out my schedule. It is a salaried, full time position: five days a week, dinners only, and Wednesdays and Thursdays off. Along with Chef, my coworkers are from Greece, Pakistan, Italy, France, and Brazil. My place on the line will be the fish station to start and then I will rotate through to learn all the stations so I can run the kitchen when the Chef takes his days off.

Here are some of the things I will learn how to prepare:

Prince Edward Island mussels steamed with pinot grigio and Rayes lemon pepper mustard, slivered shallots, flat leaf parsley, and giant garlic crostini

Carpaccio duo of yellowfin tuna and Atlantic salmon with marinated artichoke hearts, saffron aioli, capers, red onion, extra virgin olive oil, and crostini

Pan roasted Atlantic salmon with baby gnocchi, Portobello mushrooms, spinach, and sweet vermouth Dijon cream

Jumbo shrimp and local sea scallops with snow peas, bell peppers, cilantro, and slivered scallions in a coconut curry broth, wasabi whipped potatoes

Pan seared Atlantic halibut with sweet corn, green bean and roasted mushroom succotash, wilted Swiss chard, and lemon chive butter sauce

Cilantro pesto encrusted yellowfin tuna with veggie sweet pepper, cucumber, and red onion salad, sticky rice, and citrus mirin dipping sauce

And that’s just the fish station. I think this is really going to be a good thing. To top it off, I got home to find a message from one of the other restaurants where I left a resume asking me to call. Now I get to call and say I’m already employed. I’m thrilled and grateful.

Thanks for your prayers and encouragement.

When I got back to Vacation Bible Camp (our kids don’t like to call it “school”), I was just in time to do my thing as song leader. I’ve got this goofy cowboy hat and I get up in front of the kids and we sing and dance together, if by dancing you mean thrash around in joyous abandon. One year, a kid went home and was practicing the song he had learned when his dad asked him what he was doing.

“I’m dancing,” he said.
“That’s not dancing,” his dad answered.
“It’s how Milty does it,” the kid replied with confidence.

This year’s theme, Avalanche Ranch: A Wild Ride Through God’s Word, chooses different stories to focus on different aspects of God’s nature. Today’s was “God is with us all the time” and the story was Joshua telling the Israelites to stack up the stones for an altar after they had crossed the river, my touchstone from a couple of nights ago. We whooped and hollered and sang:

you better hold on tight
‘cause it’s a wild ride

Then, of course, we danced – my way. I love that we are teaching our children that we belong to an untamed God who is full of as many surprises as promises. In one of my other favorite theological movies, Three Amigos, they jump on their horses after thinking they saved the town, and Steve Martin says, “We ride,” and they tear off across the desert. In the next scene they are in the middle of nowhere and Martin Short asks:

“How far do you think we rode before we stopped and asked for directions?”
“Oh, just three or four miles,” Martin replies.

“Faith,” says Frederick Buechner, “is a journey without maps.” One day the Israelites are one side of the river and the next they have crossed over without getting their feet wet. One day I the function chef and the next I get fired by a crazy owner only to find get hired, not too many days later, by a good guy I don’t even know because I saw his restaurant across the parking lot from the Unemployment Office.

As long as I’m referencing movies, we went to see Evan Almighty the other night. It’s a variation on the Noah story. At one point, God is talking to Evan’s wife who doesn’t understand why her husband is doing what he’s doing. God says, “When someone prays for courage, do I give them courage, or do I offer them the opportunity to be courageous?” For all my uncertainty and even insecurity, I’ve been given an opportunity to do what I most want to do in what appears to be a healthy restaurant environment. About all that’s left for me to do is walk in on my first day and say,

“My name is Sous*. How do you do?”

Peace,
Milton

*with apologies to Johnny Cash.

what god sounds like

I know what the voice of God sounds like.

I heard it at church this morning when our pre-kindergarten and kindergarten age children led us in our prayer of confession as a part of our worship service celebrating our children. Five or six little munchkins stood at the front of the church and said together, “Let’s pray” with more energy than I’ve ever heard in such an invitation. Then, in unison, we all said:

God, we’re sorry for the things we did that were wrong. Help us love one another better. Help us love you better. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

Then God spoke in the children’s voices:

God’s love is so big! We are forgiven! We get to try again! Thanks be to God!

And everyone said, “Amen.”

When I was a kid, Samuel was one of my favorite biblical characters. I loved the story of him going to wake up Eli because he thought the old man was calling him. When I pictured the priest, I saw him like my father who woke up in the night whenever my brother or I made a noise and then, as long as he was awake, would wander down the hall to the bathroom from which one of us was exiting because that was why we had made noise to begin with. In my mind, Eli was standing in the middle of the hall in his boxer shorts, his hair standing up in all directions, squinting and saying, “What are you doing up?”

“You called me,” Samuel said.

“You’re dreaming,” said the old man. “Go back to bed.”

When it happened a second time, I imagined Eli was a bit more perturbed and a little less sleepy. When Samuel came down the hall the third time, Eli was awake enough to realize what was happening.

“Samuel, you’re hearing a voice that’s not mine. The next time you hear it, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.’” (I learned the story from the King James.)

When I animated the story in my mind, I never had a clear idea how God sounded. I never really bought into the booming bass voice that blows out the woofers. And, I guess, I never spent a lot of time trying to imagine how God sounded at all. But this morning when the children proclaimed, “We are forgiven,” I knew that’s what God sounded like. I really felt forgiven.

When I caught up on my reading tonight, I found this wonderful poem at Anchors and Masts:

God Says Yes To Me
Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

About three lines into this wonderful poem, I could hear the kids reading the words. “Yes, yes, yes,” is best said by energetic kindergarteners, don’t you think? Alongside of how it sounds, the voice of God reads like a Mary Oliver poem, for one. One of my favorites is her work simply titled, “Poem”:

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body's world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is --

so it enters us --
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

The watchword of the United Church of Christ is “God is Still Speaking.” What else would God be saying but, “Yes, yes, yes.”

Peace,
Milton

call me noah

For the past few weeks, the children’s message at church has involved the retelling of the story of Noah in different ways in preparation for our Church School switching to the Rotation Model curriculum next fall. The first week the story was told with a short drama, the second week we sang the “Arky Arky” song, and today the kids got a rainbow craft project. The woman leading the children’s time explained that when God said, “I will put my bow in the clouds,” God was taking the bow as a symbol of war (as in bow and arrow) and turning it into a promise.” My mind jumped to an alternative ending to her sentence: turning a symbol of war into a symbol of gay pride.

The idea of the Rotation Model is to speak to our multiple intelligences so we hear the story in new ways and, hopefully, in the way we can best hear it. As the ark has floated around in my head the last month, I’ve heard several things. I went back in my mind to a philosophy of religion class in seminary where the professor talked about all the flood myths in various ancient religions. “Does it bother anyone that Genesis says only Noah and his family were in the ark and yet any number of flood stories that don’t involve Noah have survived?”

It was the fact that he asked the question that bothered several of the folks in the class. To me, the variety seemed to speak to some sort of cataclysmic diluvian tragedy they all were trying to explain. That bothered some folks, too.

Noah’s Ark is one of those stories that can cause people to throw lightning bolts at one another. When I searched for web pages, I found articles and exhibits across the continuum of feasibility and belief. I found a page that lists the various flood stories, a Christian site that takes the story quite literally, an explanation at JewishEnclyclopedia.com, and a BBC story about a guy who has built a replica as a way of calling people to faith. In a book I have here at home, I found this interesting comparison:

Christian and Jewish historians and theologians give slightly different interpretations to the Noah story. For Christians, Noah represents an ideal faith in God – marked by trust and obedience and for which Noah and his family were saved. For Jewish interpreters, Noah represents a reluctant faith marked by Noah being one of the last to enter the ark as a sign of reluctance. This suggests his faith may not have been so strong. (The Intellectual Devotional 14)

And I found these words from Karen Armstrong:

Religious truth does not stand or fall by the historicity of its scriptural narratives. It will survive only if it enables people to find meaning and value when they are overwhelmed by the despair that is an inescapable part of the human condition. When we are discussing the meaning of life and the death of meaning, the historicity of the flood becomes an irrelevant distraction from the main issue. We are dealing not with history or science but with myth.

Today in popular parlance, a myth is something that did not happen, so to claim that a biblical story is mythical is to deny its truth. But before the advent of our scientific modernity, myth recounted an event that had - in some sense - happened once, but which also happened all the time. It was never possible to interpret a myth in terms of objective reason.

There were two ways of arriving at truth, which Plato called mythos and logos (reason). They complemented each other and were of equal stature; both were essential. Unlike myth, logos had to relate accurately to the external world: from the very earliest days, we used it to create effective weapons and to run our societies efficiently.

But humans are also meaning-seeking creatures, who fall very easily into despair. When faced with tragedy, reason is silent and has nothing to say. It was mythology and its accompanying rituals that showed people how to acquire the strength to go on.

Ever since the children stood at the front of the church this morning waving their rainbows and reminding us that God keeps promises, I’ve been thinking about Noah in a different way: as a study in depression. Whether Noah was determined or clueless or both as he began to build the ark, his task was an isolating one from the first cubit. Genesis chronicles the ridicule and the questions he endured. But Noah didn’t live in isolation. As the boat came to completion and the storm clouds began to gather, Noah had to come to terms with leaving friends – all his friends – behind to drown. His daughters-in-law couldn’t bring their families. Sometimes it sucks to be the standard-bearer.

I’ve always wondered what the sanitation system was like on the ark. The rain lasted for forty days, but when you add up all the time it took for the water to dissipate, they were in the ark for nigh on half a year. Our Schnauzers can only last about ten hours inside before sanitation becomes an issue. Six months?

The last thing that crossed my mind I had never thought of until today: the ark had no means of propulsion. All it did was float. Granted, in a flood, floating is important, but it was going nowhere. Put it all together – isolated in a boat that’s not going anywhere and is filling up with crap – and you have a pretty good picture of depression. “It was mythology and its accompanying rituals that showed people how to acquire the strength to go on,” Armstrong says. So it is. I’m acquainted with both floods and rainbows in my life and to find traces of that which most haunts my existence in the stories my faith uses to make meaning of life as a whole is strangely comforting. I know of days that feel as though I’m sinking in excrement, or endless days tossing about on an endless, restless sea, and days when the clouds break, the rainbow forms, and my feet find solid ground.

I know this story; I’m living it.

Peace,
Milton