To see the beauty of God's cause

One day, the disciples asked Jesus, “Why do you use parables when you speak to the crowds?” And he replied, “Because they haven’t received the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but you have. Although they see, they don’t really see; and although they hear, they don’t really hear or understand. What Isaiah prophesied has become completely true for them,

You will hear, to be sure, but never understand; and you will certainly see but never recognize what you are seeing. For this people’s senses have become calloused, and they’ve become hard of hearing, and they’ve shut their eyes so that they won’t see with their eyes or hear with their ears or understand with their minds, and change their hearts and lives that I may heal them.”[1]

Jesus tells parables to get through to people whose senses have become calloused. They may be people who have heard too many lies, too many promises that evaporated into thin air, too many speeches that only add heat and little light. They may be people who have seen too much of the heart-breaking stuff, and now their vision is clouded with the cataracts of cynicism and despair, and they can’t see the things that heal.

Jesus tells parables to make us wonder, to make us ponder things that are worthy to receive not only our full attention, but the devotion of our lives. Jesus tells parables to heal our calloused senses so that we too might perceive the secrets of God’s reign.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make their nests in its branches.

Now you can call a mustard plant a shrub or a bush, but you wouldn’t call it a tree. It grows about five feet tall, maybe six in a good year, or even nine, but even at nine feet tall, mustard is still only a scrawny, twiggy thing. If you want a tree, you don’t start with mustard seed.

The prophet Ezekiel compared Assyria, Israel’s powerful neighbor to the north, to

a cedar of Lebanon, with fair branches and forest shade, and of great height, its top among the clouds. The waters nourished it, the deep made it grow tall, making its rivers flow around the place it was planted, sending forth its streams to all the trees of the field. So it towered high above all the trees ... All the birds of the air made their nests in its boughs; under its branches all the animals of the field gave birth to their young; and in its shade all great nations lived.[2]

In Israel’s imagination, big, towering trees represented the great empires of Assyria, Egypt, Babylonia, and Rome, and in Jesus’ day, many hoped that God’s coming kingdom would be the mightiest, most magnificent tree of all: it would be the very tree of life, with the nations of the world finding peace and security in its shade, together with the birds of the air and the animals of the field.

When we hear the story of the mustard seed and the tree with birds nesting in its branches, we may notice at first the contrast of small beginnings and wondrous endings, but it is about more. Perhaps farmers in Jesus’ day actually did grow mustard to eat the greens or use the seeds as medicine. Perhaps they knew about mustard as a rotation crop that helps improve the soil. If so, they also knew they had to get it plowed under before the plants seeded—otherwise their fields would produce very little the following spring except a bumper crop of mustard. Mustard behaves like a weed—it’s invasive, fast-growing, drought-resistant, and impossible to control. It begins with a seed only slightly bigger than a pin head, and before you know it, it’s taken over your field and garden.

Jesus tells a parable with mustard in it. Yes, the mighty tree of God’s reign on earth begins with the tiniest of seeds, but this is about more than small things growing tall. Mustard is a necessary ingredient here, and there’s nothing mighty or majestic about mustard. It grows anywhere, not just on the heights of Lebanon or by the great rivers of Egypt or Babylon. It doesn’t just grow in the places where power tends to be at home, no, it grows like a weed wherever the tiny seeds get dropped. It is invasive, fast-growing, drought-resistant, impossible to control, and common as thistles.

I hear in this kingdom parable a powerful affirmation of ordinary things and people. The planting of the Lord, the oaks of righteousness don’t sprout from acorns, genetically engineered in an agro lab and pampered in beds of privilege in the greenhouses of power. No, the great tree of God’s reign on earth begins with ordinary seed, common as mustard and just as invasive. Ordinary people, inspired and reminded by Jesus to live as citizens of God’s reign, together transform the world until it shines with the glory of God in all things. Common people, committed to small acts of love and compassion, are the ones who continue to sow the tiny seeds. Every unsung moment of forgiveness a seed. Every word of encouragement a seed. Every small step of great courage a seed. God’s reign is like a weed that finds the tiniest crack in the concrete and it grows and nothing can stop it until the birds of the air make nests in its shade.

In the second parable, Jesus takes us from the field to the kitchen. “The kingdom of heaven,” he says, “is like yeast that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

If you’ve never baked with yeast or sourdough, you need to try it. Popping a can of cinnamon rolls makes nice enough rolls in the morning, but it’s only a parable of convenience and sameness. To know leaven, you must smell it, watch it, better yet, touch it and work it. You know what I mean if you’ve got your hands in it, perhaps you’re among the many who have made their own sourdough starter from wild yeast during the pandemic.[3] But if you don’t have starter in your kitchen, yeast will do. All you need is flour, water, yeast, and a little salt. You make the dough and knead it and place it in a bowl. It looks OK, feels a little heavy, and it doesn’t smell much like anything. Now you cover the bowl with a dish towel, and then you go and take a nap or walk the dog. Just give it time.

An hour later you come back to the kitchen, and it smells lovely: fresh and tangy, like somebody squirted a little vinegar in the air. Then you notice the kitchen towel: it doesn’t just hang over the bowl, no, it rests on a perfectly rounded mound of dough that is light and springy, and touching it reminds me every time of touching baby skin.

The parable points to this beautiful process of slow, barely noticeable and powerful transformation, and it doesn’t begin in any of the great centers of power, it begins in a woman’s kitchen. She hides the leaven in three measures of flower — that’s about nine gallons — enough to make bread for the whole neighborhood. The kingdom is like that, says Jesus, and it’s like treasure hidden in a field — again, hidden, not seen with a quick, casual glance.

“There are people who stumble over the reign of God purely by chance,” writes Gerhard Lohfink. “They were preoccupied with something completely different, but then, one day, they are confronted with the treasure. Others, like the rich merchant, have sought and looked everywhere, and finally they find what they have long dreamed of.” Both finders in Jesus’ parables, as different as their paths have been, once they see, immediately jump into action. With great joy, they give what they have in order to acquire the thing found.

How do God’s purposes find fulfillment in the world? “Only through people and their freedom,” writes Lohfink.

It happens only through the fact that people are drawn and moved by that which they can desire with their whole hearts and with their whole might. But apparently it is only possible for them to desire in freedom what God also desires if they see, vividly, the beauty of God’s cause, so that they experience joy and even passionate desire for the thing that God wills to do in the world, and this passion for God and God’s cause is greater than all human self-centeredness.[4]

The most moving thing I heard on the radio this past week, was a recording of John Lewis’s acceptance speech at the National Book Awards in November 2016.[5] He and his two co-authors received the award in Young People’s literature for the third and final installment of the graphic memoir, March.

“This is unreal. This is unbelievable,” he said, and he talked about growing up in a very poor household in rural Alabama. Books were hard to come by.

“I had a wonderful teacher in elementary school who told me: ‘Read, my child, read’, and I tried to read everything. I love books,” said Lewis. “And I remember in 1956, when I was 16 years old, some of my brothers and sisters and cousins going down to the public library, trying to get library cards,” Lewis said, clutching his award. “And we were told that the library was for whites only and not for coloreds.”

“To come here, receive this award, this honor — it’s too much,” he said, his voice trembling.

It was a long and painful road he walked, and he walked it with immense courage and unwavering hope, encouraging countless others along the way. Clearly he had seen, vividly, the beauty God’s cause and, with passionate desire for the thing that God wills to do in the world, he gave his life to the cause that is us, all of us.

He had found the pearl of great price, the one thing worthy of giving his whole life to acquire it. And he’s still marching with us.

[1] Matthew 13:10-15 (CEB) quoting Isaiah 6:9

[2] See Ezekiel 31:2-9; see also Daniel 4:10-12

[3] The woman in Jesus’ story didn’t use rapid rise dry yeast, that wasn’t known until World War II when Fleischmann’s laboratories developed it for the U.S. military. See https://www.bakerybits.co.uk/resources/a-look-at-the-history-of-yeast/

[4] Gerhard Lohfink, Does God Need the Church? Toward a Theology of the People of God, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 47.

[5] https://youtu.be/uqmYNOPVyO4

Deep solidarity

Wearing a mask has been suggested, it has been encouraged and recommended, and it has been mandated, resisted and refused.

From the moment of our birth, we breathe in — and we breathe out. Rarely ever do we pay attention to this basic rhythm and reality of life: we breathe in — and we breathe out. Like the tide on the beach, with every breath an ocean of air flows into our lungs and into every cell in our body — and it flows out. And as all the water on Earth is one — one stream cycling through rivers, oceans, clouds, glaciers, and layers of soil and sand and rock — so is the air we breathe one — one Earth, with just one atmosphere, shared by all living things that breathe.

The global pandemic has reminded us with great urgency that we do indeed breathe the same air. For some of us, the mandate to wear a mask over our mouth and nose in public is blatant government overreach, and not wearing it is a defiant statement of liberty. For others, the mandate reflects well-informed and prudent judgment by public officials, and so they obey and do their part, be it happily or grumpily, sporadically or consistently.

And there are those, few in number, who never needed a mandate, and they wear the mask because it reduces the number of viruses that might return to the air on their breath — to them it is a simple and powerful way to love  their neighbor. It wouldn’t occur to them to think of this simple act as an imposition — on the contrary, they might see it as an expression of their freedom to act in love, unconstrained by proud self-assertion.

He who believes that to be free is to be led by no one but himself, may not understand them. He who believes that being led by another can only amount to bondage and servitude, may shake his head when they tell him that to be free, to them, is to be led by the Spirit of Christ.

“You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters,” Paul wrote to the churches in Galatia. “Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.”[1] Freedom, according to the men and women whose witness we receive in the Scriptures, is not absolute autonomy, but the building of relationships that are free of manipulation, relationships of mutuality and care.

“Because God is a God of life and blessing, God will do redemptive work, should those gifts be endangered,” writes Terence Fretheim. “The objective of God’s work in redemption is to free people to be what they were created to be. It is a deliverance, not from the world, but to true life in the world.”[2] True freedom, true life, for all people, all things, is to be what they were created to be.

We read a passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans this morning, where he declares, “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”[3] It’s not just human beings who long to be who we really are, who we are meant to be as creatures made in the image of God: the whole creation is waiting, because its freedom, its true life, is tied to ours.

I talked about the single ocean of air that envelops Earth and the single stream of water that cycles through air and land and sea, and through every living thing. In Genesis 2, humanity is made from the moistened dust of the ground, and the name we are given in Hebrew is intimately connected with the stuff from which we are formed: we are adam, made from adamah, earthlings made from earth.[4]

In Genesis 3, in a poetic reflection on what happens when humanity fails to live in right relationship with the creator of all things, adam, now differentiated as Adam and Eve, man and woman, experiences life as exile, and the breach in the relationship between humanity and God ripples through all of creation, landing as a curse on adamah, the very ground from which we come and on which we live.[5]

“There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land,” the prophet Hosea laments.

Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.[6]

And Isaiah cries, “The heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth.”[7]

A curse devours the earth because humankind, made for relationship with God, assumed it could achieve a more satisfying relation with the world if it freed itself from its relation with God. We prefer proud self-assertion over trust and interdependence.

Bill McKibben, one of the leaders of the global struggle against catastrophic climate change, wrote earlier this month,

The battle is not just to swap out coal for sun; it’s to swap out a poisoned and unfair world for one that works for everyone, now and in the future. Of course, no matter what we do now, we’ve waited too long to prevent truly massive trauma. Already we see firestorms without precedent, storms stronger than any on record, Arctic melt that’s occurring decades ahead of schedule. We’re losing whole ecosystems like coral reefs; we have heat waves so horrible that in places they take us to the limits of human survival. Given the momentum of climate change, even if we do everything right from this point on those effects will get much worse in the years ahead, and of course their impacts will be concentrated on those who have done the least to cause them, and are most vulnerable. That means there is another area we need to be working hard: building the kind of world that not only limits the rise in temperature, but also cushions the blow from that which is no longer avoidable. … we’re going to need human solidarity on an unparalleled level, and right now that seems a long ways away.[8]

A curse devours the earth because we prefer proud self-assertion over trust and solidarity.

We know, says Paul, we know that the whole creation has been groaning until now. He couldn’t imagine the groans we’re hearing. But he knew in his bones that God is a God of life and blessing, a God who does redemptive work, when those gifts are endangered. Paul knew that God made a way for Israel out of bondage in Egypt: They groaned under the yoke of slavery, and cried out, and God heard their groaning.[9] And Paul knew that God made a way for humankind out of our bondage to sin and death in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

No groan goes unheard. We know, says Paul, that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for … the redemption or our bodies.[10] To him, the two groanings are of a piece. All of creation is caught up in the same process of salvation, the same process of being “set free from the bondage to decay” to share “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”[11] So God’s people are being saved not from creation but with creation: the gift of the Spirit does not distance us from the world but increases our solidarity with creation.[12] And solidarity is just another way of saying loyal love or building relationships that are free of manipulation.

As people of God, we trust the One who abides with us in the profound solidarity of love, who suffers with us,  who groans and endures with us, and who inspires in us a longing for wholeness that gets us through the night. Paul calls the gift of the Spirit to the church “the first fruits,” which sounds like the beginning of the harvest season — the first basket of grain, the first cluster of grapes, first fruits waiting to become loafs of bread and cups of wine for the great banquet of the redeemed.

The gift of the Spirit poured out on all flesh is the first fruits, the first taste, the first glance of the redeemed creation. The gift of God’s Spirit kindles in us a fire of holy restlessness that cannot put up with the world as it is.

First fruits — we know there’s more where that came from, and we lean into that promise. That’s what our hope is, a leaning forward into the promise of resurrection for all of creation. And it is no easy hope. Audrey West writes, “This is hope as a woman in labor hopes: breathing through the pain, holding tight to a companion, looking ahead to what cannot yet be seen, trusting that a time will come when this pain is but a memory.”[13]

Many of us struggle to hope like that when dealing with broken relationships, devastating illness, or simply the daily avalanche of soul-draining news. We often find ourselves closer to groaning than to singing.

Paul tells us, You are not alone. The groans that rise up from the depth of your heavy heart are God’s own as much as they are yours. The Spirit is praying with you and for you, with sighs too deep for words. In the profound solidarity of love, God abides with you, suffering with you, groaning with you, enduring with you, inspiring in you a longing for wholeness, and kindling in you a fire of holy restlessness. God will not put up with what the world has become. And why would you?

[1] Galatians 5:13

[2] Terence Fretheim, “The Reclamation of Creation: Redemption and Law in Exodus,” Interpretation 45, 359; my italics.

[3] Romans 8:18-21

[4] Genesis 2:5-9

[5] Genesis 3:17-19

[6] Hosea 4:1-3

[7] Isaiah 24:4-6

[8] https://350.org/bill-mckibbens-letter/

[9] Exodus 2:23-24; 6:5

[10] Romans 8:22-23

[11] Romans 8:21

[12] See James Dunn in Soderlund, Sven K. and N. T. Wright, eds., Romans and the People of God (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 1999), 87-88.

[13] Audrey West http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1306

Take my yoke

The time was … when we loved the king and the people of Great Britain with an affection truly filial; we felt ourselves interested in their glory; we shared in their joys and sorrows; we cheerfully poured the fruit of all our labours into the lap of our mother country, and without reluctance expended our blood and our treasure in their cause.

So declared the residents of the town of Malden, Massachusetts, unanimously, after having met in town meeting on May 27, 1776. They responded to a request from the Massachusetts House of Representatives that all towns in the province declare their views on independence. “These were our sentiments toward Great Britain while she continued to act the part of a parent state,” their statement continued.

We felt ourselves happy in our connection with her, nor wished it to be dissolved; but our sentiments are altered, it is now the ardent wish of our soul that America may become a free and independent state. … We long entertained hope that the spirit of the British nation would once more induce them to assert their own and our rights, and bring to condign punishment the elevated villains who have trampled upon the sacred rights of men and affronted the majesty of the people. We hoped in vain; they have lost their spirit of just resentment; we therefore renounce with disdain our connexion with a kingdom of slaves; we bid a final adieu to Britain.[1]

A few weeks later, the Declaration of Independence was signed by representatives of the thirteen colonies and publicly proclaimed, and that historic moment became a milestone, not only in the history of this nation, but in the world’s long struggle for freedom, justice, and the rule of law. Those “who trample upon the sacred rights of [humans] and affront the majesty of the people” can no longer sleep comfortably in their penthouses and palaces, dreaming dreams of autocratic rule, because in the summer of 1776 a bell was rung whose sound no tyranny can muffle for long.

This year, the celebration was much quieter, and not just because many fireworks and parades were canceled due to the pandemic. The celebration was quieter, perhaps a little more introspective than usual, because we feel with renewed urgency that the promise of these bold, founding declarations is yet to be fulfilled.

On July 5,1852, Frederick Douglas was invited to address the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, and several minutes into his speech, he asked,

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful.[2]

We celebrate, not because we have arrived, but because we hope. We celebrate because the vision of human rights and democratic governance is always greater than the political realities of any given time. The greater vision is the one that aroused the imagination and courage of the townspeople of Malden, Massachusetts, and their fellow revolutionaries, as well as of Frederick Douglas and the many who are marching with him on the long road to freedom. It is a vision rooted in divine promise, and proclaimed by the prophets in dark times:

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?[3]

Not every yoke, though.

“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be their slaves no more; I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect,” we read in Leviticus 26:13. This yoke God has broken. “With a yoke on our necks we are hard driven; we are weary, we are given no rest,” we read in Lamentations 5:5. That yoke must be broken.

But Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you.” It was common Jewish practice to speak of the “yoke of Torah” or the “yoke of the commandments,” and always with praise.[4] To accept the yoke of Torah meant to serve no master but God alone. To accept the yoke of Torah meant true freedom as servants of God. When Jesus said, “Take my yoke,” he didn’t mean to suggest that he had something less demanding than Torah to offer. He was pushing back hard against religious authorities of his time whose interpretations fell way short when it came to walking erect and rest for the weary:[5]

The scribes and the Pharisees … do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.[6]

Jesus’ own proclamation focused on these weightier matters, and the response he received was divided. “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,” he prayed, “because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.”[7] He was joyfully received by those who were hungry for justice, those thirsting for tangible mercy, those longing to belong. The little ones who knew nothing about the fine points of the law and the details of the rituals, those who were burdened, those who were known sinners – they were the ones who got the message. They welcomed and embraced the friend of sinners as their friend.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”[8] Jesus calls all who are weary and burdened to become his disciples. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.” When he says, “learn from me,” he means it quite literally: he invites you stay very close to him, shoulder to shoulder, to listen to what he says, to observe what he does, to notice the things he pays attention to. Take my yoke, learn from me.

Here’s a way to look at this: Carol Borland is a pastor in Vermont, and she and her husband also run a maple sugaring operation. They use a team of horses to pull a large sled when they harvest the sap from the maples in the last days of winter. The horses are yoked together – not with a yoke, but through harnesses and their hitch to the sap sled. Together the two can pull incredible loads.

One of the horses, Tony, is much stronger than the other – both physically and in his own will, commonly known as stubbornness. The other, Jerry, is calmer, more reliable, and willing to listen to commands. So when the Borlands decided to train a younger team by hitching them one at a time with one of the older horses, they used Jerry because he would listen to the commands and do as he was instructed. The younger horse pulling beside Jerry soon learned the commands. The few times they tried using Tony, the younger horse learned how to be stubborn.

There seems to be a relationship between learning to obey and sharing that yoke. And maybe not only with horses. The yoke Jesus calls us to take upon us is one he already wears. It’s like he’s saying to us, “Become my yoke mate, and learn how to pull the load by working beside me and watching how I do it.”[9] Together we can pull incredible loads.

The burden is light because we’re pulling with him and we’re pulling in the right direction. With him, we’re on the road to the kingdom. Side by side we walk, we pull, watching and doing as Jesus does, like young horses in training. Side by side with him we learn the way of gentle humility, and discover the freedom that comes with aligning our path with his. Side by side with him we become who we’re meant to be, and do work that is real and worth doing.

This is a poem by Marge Piercy, titled, To be of use.[10]

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Take my yoke, says Jesus. The work is real and it is worth doing. Together we can pull incredible loads.

[1] Instructions from the Town of Malden, Massachusetts, for a Declaration of Independence http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=238

[2] “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/

[3] Isaiah 58:6

[4] Aboth 3:5

[5] Lev 26:13 and Lam 5:5

[6] Matthew 23:2, 4, 23

[7] Matthew 11:25f.

[8] Matthew 11:28-30

[9] Hare, Matthew, 129.

[10] Marge Piercy, “To be of use”

 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use

Hospitality of mind and imagination

All of chapter 10 in Matthew is a send-off speech Jesus gave to the twelve disciples. At the end of chapter 9, Matthew shows us Jesus as looking at the crowds, and having compassion for them because they were “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

“The harvest is plentiful,” Jesus said to the disciples, and that they should “ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” And before they could ask, he sent them out — gave them “authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness,” and sent them out. “Proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” He sent the disciples to act as his envoys — servants of the kingdom, traveling light — no money in their belts, no bag, no extra clothing, entirely dependent on the hospitality of others for shelter and food.

He also prepared them for rejection. They would not be welcomed everywhere, and they should be prepared to expect some hostility since he was sending them out “like sheep into the midst of wolves.” They would also have to face the possibility of painful division within their own families; that their closest and most important relationships might be ruptured because of their loyalty to Jesus and the kingdom of God.

Today’s three verses from Matthew are the final paragraph of Jesus’ send-off speech. Something is different in these closing lines. There’s a shift in focus from the trials of those who are sent to the rewards for those who receive them. There’s a shift from high demand to promise. “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” In these closing verses it becomes clear that Jesus is not just addressing the twelve who are about to go on the road. He’s talking to all disciples, the ones who venture out for the sake of the gospel, and the ones who welcome them.

By the time the gospel of Matthew was composed, congregations of Christians already existed in many cities and towns around the Mediterranean. Itinerant Christian apostles, prophets and teachers were not unusual at all; on the contrary, early Christian writings suggest that at times they may have become a burden to the small communities. Not only did they need a place to stay and something to eat, they also sometimes disagreed with each other. Paul wrote in his first letter to the Thessalonians, “We appeal to you, brothers and sisters, to respect those who labor among you, and have charge of you in the Lord and admonish you; esteem them very highly in love because of their work … Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good.”[1] Hear them out. Test everything. Keep the good stuff.

In a Christian teaching document from around the turn to the second century, churches are admonished to

welcome every apostle on arriving, as if he were the Lord. But he must not stay beyond one day. In case of necessity, however, the next day too. If he stays three days, he is a false prophet. On departing, an apostle must not accept anything save sufficient food to carry him till his next lodging. If he asks for money, he is a false prophet … If someone says in the Spirit, “Give me money, or something else,” you must not heed him. However, if he tells you to give for others in need, no one must condemn him.[2]

In his writing, Matthew not merely recalled Jesus’ instructions to the first disciples; he also addressed contemporary communities of disciples to whom he was connected, telling them that there was still need to send out prophets and teachers, and that those sent ones depended on communities of believers to welcome them. “Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.”

Congregational life in Matthew’s day was very different from ours, we know that. But I imagine that life was also very similar. No community is too eager to welcome a prophet, either because things are going just fine or because things are unsettled already; and whether you’re comfortable with the way things are or quite uncomfortable, you don’t necessarily want some outsider coming in and stirring up trouble. I hear Jesus addressing both sides here. To the prophets he says, “Don’t be afraid. Speak without fear the word you have been given. Proclaim the gospel.” And to the settled disciples he says, “Welcome without fear anyone who speaks in my name, whether you agree with them or not. Receive the fullness of the gospel.”

There aren’t a lot of itinerant prophets around anymore, but there’s plenty of settled Christianity in our city and beyond. And there are Christian voices and accents among us that come to us like those of strangers who are passing through. Do we welcome them? “Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.” What’s a prophet’s reward? We won’t know unless we welcome the prophet.

We live far from the the early days of itinerant prophets and house churches, but to be sent and to receive are aspects of being church together that never become a thing of the past. You and I are no less part of Jesus’ mission than Simon, Andrew, James and the rest of the twelve were. In our proclamation and ministry, in our everyday witness to the reign of God, Jesus himself is present, and wherever our witness is received with welcome, the One who sent him is received.

Jesus calls us to be fearless when we venture out with the word we have been given, and equally fearless in receiving the word of life when it comes to us – to listen, to test, and to hold fast to what is good. Our situation as Christian witnesses is vastly different from the initial context for Matthew’s proclamation. What hasn’t changed is that we are sent to proclaim the gospel of Jesus in word and deed, and that we are also called to receive the proclamation of others – regardless of their accents, whether they be accents of speech, culture, or theology.

Both being sent in the name of Jesus and receiving others in the name of Jesus involve a level of vulnerability and fearlessness few of us are simply born with. And our growth in vulnerability and fearlessness is part of our formation as disciples. Few of us may venture out and go far without money or extra clothing or firm plans for lodging, but some of us do venture out far to explore and declare new dimensions of the gospel for our time, and they are as dependent on the hospitality of others as the first apostles were — and the hospitality of mind and imagination may be even more demanding than the hospitality of room and board.

I believe Jesus calls us to such vulnerability and fearlessness in our attempts to live and proclaim the good news of the kingdom. Not even the smallest gesture of welcoming another is too small. “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because they are my disciples—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.” This word of promise points ahead to the final judgment where the heavenly judge says to the righteous, “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.” There is no act of welcome more basic and beautiful than giving somebody a cup of cold water, and in the story of the great judgment, Jesus tells us that he is the thirsty one.

And the reward? There’s the joy of being able to do what the Lord has taught us and to serve him in the stranger, the prophet, the littlest ones. And there’s the joy of being welcomed by Christ in our need, in our hunger and thirst for righteousness,  and in our desire to know the will of God.

Jesus says, “Whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward.” Who are the righteous and what is their reward? Again, the word points ahead to the final judgment when the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”[3] To welcome one another is to receive Jesus himself, and to welcome Jesus is to receive the one who sent him, and to become heirs to all that God has to give — life abundant, true justice, and love without end.

On Wednesday afternoon, I was out by the street, changing the name on the sign to Riah Milton. A man walked up to me, an itinerant you may say, and he didn’t carry any money in his belt, nor did he have a change of clothes, and the ones he was wearing hadn’t been washed in a long time. He didn’t have a second pair of sandals either, and the ones he had on his feet were not made for walking.

I don’t know if he was a prophet; he told me he was a little drunk.

Could I give him some money for food? I told him I couldn’t, that I didn’t have any cash on me and the church was closed.

Could I get him something to eat from the kitchen? I told him I couldn’t, that much of the building was under construction, including the kitchen and all offices.

Could he help, do some work? Not likely, I told him; it wouldn’t be safe.

Could he use the bathroom? They’re all gone, I told him with a big can-you-believe-it sigh, because I didn’t remember the lone toilet left in the entire building, over in the office wing.

“Here’s what I can do. I’ll take this stuff inside and then I meet you at my car and take you to get something to eat.”

He didn’t wear a mask; I doubt he had one, and I didn’t have a spare with me. Anyway, we got in the car and drove to Taco Bell, and after a long, slow trip down the drive-through lane during which he continued to tell me about his life and his demons, he ordered some tacos and a Sprite.

It wasn’t a cup of cold water, and I didn’t invite him to come home with me, take a shower, and spend the night in our guest room. But after I dropped him off at a bench in the shade, I knew that I had heard a true word about life in our community. And I was grateful.

[1] 1Thessalonians 5:12-13, 20-21

[2] Didache 11:4-5, 12

[3] Matthew 25:34

Do not be afraid

In 1998, Nancy, Sarahbeth, Miles and I moved to Hampton, VA, where I had been called to First Christian Church. Soon, everybody but me went to school. Miles went to pre-school in the neighborhood. Nancy started her Master’s program at Hampton University, and Sarahbeth attended Forrest Elementary.

Forrest Elementary — it took me a while to notice that Forrest was spelled with two r’s, and that it wasn’t referring to the wonderful place where all kinds of small things flourish and grow under the canopy of mature trees. Forrest was somebody’s last name. I still remember the moment when driving by the school one day I said to myself, “No, wait… There’s no way they would name a school after a leader of the KKK,” but I wasn’t sure. I looked it up, and was relieved to learn that the school was named after Alfred S. Forrest. Perhaps he was a local leader, who knows, perhaps a teacher—I don’t remember if I found out who Mr. Forrest was. The school board’s governing documents stated, “Elementary and middle schools will be named in honor of persons who have rendered outstanding service to mankind in their community, state, and/or country.”[1]

A couple of years later, Sarahbeth graduated and went to middle school, Jefferson Davis Middle School. In a letter to the principal and the school board I asked what “outstanding service to mankind” Mr. Davis had rendered. I thought it was a curious way to teach young people the meaning of citizenship by having them recite, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands…” in a school named after the former president of the Confederate States. I never got a response. However, when doing a little research this week, I was glad to read that in 2018, in the aftermath of the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, the school was renamed Cesar Tarrant Middle School after a Hampton slave and Revolutionary War hero.[2]

Here in Tennessee, in 2018, the City of Memphis sold two parks to a non-profit, just to be able to remove statues of Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest. In response, the state legislature not only changed the law to explicitly prohibit such sales, but also cut a $250,000 appropriation to the city for its bicentennial celebrations.[3]

I wasn’t born here. I wasn’t raised here. I’m a resident alien still trying  to sort out where I am and how to proclaim the kingdom of God in a state that has more dedicated historical markers linked to Nathan Bedford Forrest—a slave trader, war criminal, and Klan leader—than to all three former U.S. Presidents associated with Tennessee combined: Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson.[4] To honor such a man is not merely unwise or unfortunate, it is idolatrous. To elevate such a man, to literally put him on a pedestal in public places across the state, is to idolize his dehumanizing violence. To do so also declares emphatically that the lives of those so violated, and the lives of their descendants do not matter.

State law currently instructs the governor to issue proclamations for six separate days of special observation, three of which pertain to the Confederacy: Forrest Day on July 13; Robert E. Lee Day on January 19; and Confederate Decoration Day on June 3, otherwise known as Confederate Memorial Day and the birthday of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.[5] Forrest Day is still on the calendar, but the General Assembly voted this year that the Governor no longer has to make the annual proclamation.[6] And that’s as far as Tennessee elected officials are willing to move even now—inches, when we have miles to go.

Some of them are afraid their constituents might torch their vehicles if they voted to remove the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Capitol building.

Tell me, what do you find more distressing: the fact that apparently such terrorist threats are being made, or the fact that some Tennessee legislators bury empathy, reason, and conscience for fear of losing their vehicle or the next election?

On Thursday, a bill was before the legislature that asked for $3,500 to move the bust from the state Capitol to the Tennessee museum. The bill was voted down. That’s when woman wearing a clerical collar stood up and raised her arms and said loudly, “I bring good news! I am Rev. Neelley Hicks and I have good news that we have the $3,500 needed to move the statue.” She didn’t remember what else she said when I talked with her on Friday morning, but she vividly recalled how she and Rev. Ingrid McIntyre and several others began praying, “Our Father, who art in heaven…”

They were gavelled down and asked to be quiet, but they continued to pray. State troopers were ordered to remove them. After Amen, they were faced with armed troopers asking them to leave. Neelley got up, and on her way out she said to the troopers, “This is sinful. This is wrong. God came to earth in a brown body. Forrest killed brown and black men. Your mama taught you better. Shame.”[7] She said it to the troopers, but she said it loud enough for the people on the floor to hear her, the ones who really needed to hear her, “Your mama taught you better. Shame.” Some of them had gotten up during the Lord’s prayer and bowed their heads during the holy interruption, suddenly aware that this was a moment not just for political calculus and fear, but for reverence in the presence of God.

“Prophets … are intent on making us see the truth about ourselves, which can result in our feeling humiliated and shamed,” writes Megan McKenna. Prophets aren’t concerned about coming across as judgy. What God sees, looking at their society, the prophets must tell, and they cannot not tell. Jeremiah said,

Whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.

Reproach and derision all day long, but the prophet cannot not tell. The prophets, writes Megan McKenna,

never let up until we change, or until we make a choice, or until we attack back, or until what they say comes to pass, or until they disappear or die. … They go after everyone indiscriminately, but especially governments, the economy, the military, leaders, other prophets … They turn on us as a people and on us as individuals … They lay our lives bare, down to the bone, marrow, and soul. They break through our well-planned worlds to say that we are the problem.[8]

“Your mama taught you better. Shame,” Neelley declared on her way out of the assembly, trusting that her words would find a way to break through layers of complacency and fear, and touch the soul of one or two.

“You shall go to all to whom I send you,” God said to Jeremiah, “and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.”[9]

Do not be afraid, for I am with you, has got to be one of the most beautiful commandments in all of scripture.

The power of a life drenched in God’s love threatens the powers and principalities of this world, but do not be afraid of them: they will not prevail.

Centuries-old entanglements of dehumanizing brutality and smug justifications may take generations to dismantle, but do not be afraid: the justice of God will prevail.

“It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher” and we all have a long way to go when it comes to that likeness, but do not be afraid to do the next right thing, for the kingdom of God is near.

Jesus didn’t come to bring easy peace, comfortable and convenient, but a sword that cuts through lesser loyalties than those to God and God’s reign. But do not be afraid, for nothing is greater in all of history and eternity than God’s loyalty to you and your neighbor and all creation.

To be a disciple is to be a learner, not a teacher. “It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher” — which doesn’t mean holy and perfect, but growing in holiness and fearlessness. Kingdom work and witness can be dangerous because it messes with demons and idols and powerful interests, but do not be afraid: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account,” says Jesus. “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”[10]

John Lewis wanted to be a preacher when he was a little boy in Troy, Alabama, and he famously practiced preaching by offering words of comfort and challenge to the chickens in the yard. When he was a young man, his mama told him not to get in trouble, and he loved his mama, but she had also taught him to love the Lord. And so he did get in trouble: good trouble, necessary trouble, kingdom trouble. He got in trouble right here in Nashville where he went to college and where he met James Lawson and Diane Nash.

The civil rights leader and U.S. Representative for Georgia’s 5th congressional district for more than thirty years, turned 80 in February. Cynthia Tucker writes,

It’s at once remarkable and tragic that Lewis’ legacy — his lifetime of patient, optimistic and non-violent resistance to systemic racism — remains so relevant. He has given 60 years to the work of trying to build the “beloved community” only to arrive at a moment when that work may seem naive, that community farfetched, the dream a child’s fantasy. … His undying hope for America lies not in any sense of its imminent perfection but rather in his conviction that the “beloved community” will one day come to fruition only if those who are committed to justice and equality keep on keeping on, one step at a time, … no matter how brutal the forces on the other side.[11]

“It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher” — and we all have a long way to go when it comes to that likeness, but do not be afraid to do the next right thing, for the kingdom of God is near.

[1] https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/hampton/Board.nsf/Public#

[2] https://www.dailypress.com/news/education/dp-nws-hampton-school-board-davis-0124-story.html

[3] https://patch.com/tennessee/memphis/tennessee-house-punishes-memphis-confederate-statue-removal

[4] Loewen, James W. , Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 237.

[5] https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2020/01/17/tennessee-nathan-bedford-forrest-day-rep-files-bill-end-observation/4499963002/

[6] https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/10/bill-lee-no-longer-proclaim-nathan-bedford-forrest-day-tennessee/5336437002/

[7] https://www.facebook.com/neelleyhicks/posts/10222196742096398

[8] Megan McKenna, quoted in Feasting, Year A, Vol. 3, 149; my emphasis.

[9] Jeremiah 1:7-8

[10] Matthew 5:11-12

[11] https://bittersoutherner.com/2020/the-way-of-john-lewis-cynthia-tucker-black-lives-matter

Intolerable trouble

“Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time,” was the opening line of “A Talk to Teachers” James Baldwin gave in October, 1963.

That year, Medgar Evers, a leading civil-rights figure and N.A.A.C.P. state field director, was murdered in his driveway by a white supremacist in Jackson, Mississippi. It wasn’t the first time shots had been fired at his house. A few years ago, I stood in the hallway of what used to be his family’s home, looking into the children’s bedroom: the mattresses were on the floor—not because they didn’t have beds, but because white men would drive by the house at night and shoot through the windows, and having the children sleep closer to the floor reduced their risk of getting shot, the docent explained.

That year, 1963, four young girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—were killed when Klansmen bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama.

That year, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in his motorcade through downtown Dallas.

“Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time,” James Baldwin told a group of educators in October 1963.[1]

Black [people] were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that [black people] were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. . . . This is why America has spent such a long time keeping [black people in their] place. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh.  And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.”[2]

Intolerable trouble. That was the year I turned three, and it reads like it could have been written last week.

Five days after President Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a Joint Session of Congress, saying, “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”[3] The bill passed the House in February of ’64, but in the Senate it was debated for two months, including seven Saturdays with several attempts to filibuster the bill. It still is the longest Senate debate in U.S. history. On June 19, the Senate adopted an amended bill and on July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the bill into law.

A month later, on August 4, the FBI found the bodies of three missing civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Earl Chaney had disappeared on June 21 while volunteering for the voter registration drive in Mississippi. They had been shot and buried. During the investigation it emerged that members of the KKK, the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office, and the Philadelphia Police Department were involved in the incident.[4]

That was the year I turned four. Somebody will say with a knowing smile, Well, that was Mississippi, that was Alabama, that was over fifty years ago. George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis on May 25, that was three weeks ago.

I know, I’m not preaching; this is my lament. I look back and weep, and I don’t know whether to give in to the urge to scream or fall silent altogether. “[Lament] takes many forms,” says Brad Braxton.

Guttural groans, copious tears, long stretches of silence, fits of rage, quiet questioning, bittersweet remembering, tension-riddled tossing and turning. We lament because people matter to us, because values such as dignity and the presumption of safety matter to us. We do it because there remains somewhere in us a faint hope that today’s pain will not completely swallow tomorrow’s possibilities.[5]

Sitting with the Gospel reading for today, my hope was fed with the milk and honey of Jesus attention and compassion:

Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Sitting with these words, I was reminded that God is the healer of our every ill. Jesus is teaching in our churches, I trust, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom—and he will not make our trouble a little less intolerable or tolerable enough. The God we worship will not rest until the promise of creation is fulfilled in peace.

Jesus sent the disciples to join him in the work of teaching, proclaiming, and healing. Say, ‘The kingdom of God has come near,’ he told them. Cure the sick. Raise the dead. Cleanse the lepers. Cast out demons.

There’s a whole new world that begins to shine through and take shape in the presence of Jesus, a world where everything that gets in the way of life’s flourishing in fullness is overcome.

Raise the dead, he said, and I assume he meant it.

Are we to go to Birmingham and tell death to return Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley to their families? Are we to go to Jackson and tell death to let go of Medgar Evers? Are we to go to Neshoba County, and Ferguson, and Minneapolis, and Glynn County, Georgia and raise the dead? I don’t suppose Jesus meant to instill in us illusions of divine grandeur, when he told us, “Raise the dead.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his Christmas letter in 1942, sent from a Nazi prison,

We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes and showing real compassion that springs, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. Christians are called to compassion and action, not in the first place by their own sufferings, but by the sufferings of their brothers and sisters for whose sake Christ suffered.[6]

What I hear in Jesus’ commandment, “Raise the dead,” is “Do not let their names sink in dust and ashes along with their bodies.” What I hear is a commandment to speak their names and hear their stories and honor their lives by building the kind of communities where they would be at home.

On May 8, one of our neighbors posted on Facebook,

I am a Black man who jogs.

Given the tragic ending to the life of Ahmaud Arbery, yesterday’s run felt different. As I was preparing for my normal pre-run ritual, I added a new step; I kissed my wife and kids before heading out. . . . As soon as I left our apartment to start the run, I burst into tears. I had a moment of fear in thinking about Ahmaud. I wondered if that would [be] the last time, I saw my family. I almost gave in to that fear and went back inside.

. . .  As I broke the border of campus to set out, I placed my playlist on shuffle and the first song to come on was “How Great is Our God.” That song and the circumstances surrounding Ahmaud’s untimely ending took something that I do almost every day and turned [it] into a therapy run, not just for me, but for our country. I didn’t stop crying until mile 3.

. . . I slowed down when I approached another Black man on a corner selling copies of “The Contributor” . . . I slowed down because as I approached him, he started yelling and cheering. It took me completely by surprise. Because of the distance between us and the music in my ears, initially, I could barely decipher what he was saying.

. . . I have never heard more encouraging words yelled at me as I ran. In that strange moment when our eyes connected, he yells, “do it for Ahmaud” and proceeded to give me the raised Black Power fist with his right hand. That set me off emotionally and physically to a place where I felt like I left my body and this run had become so much bigger than just another run. . . .

I am a Black man who jogs.

However, to others, I’m their deepest fear and can become the object of their hate. . . . The senseless end of Brother Ahmaud’s life is a tragic and triggering reminder to my people that your status, titles, degrees, wealth, etc. can’t shield you from the physical and psychological effects of racism. I’m a 44-year-old, married, Black male with two beautiful kids. My wife is a neonatologist; my daughter Jordan loves to randomly ask me to dance with her; and my son Rosevelt, thinks his dad hung the moon.

I have a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, where I have been a professor for the past 18 years. . . . I love photography, DIY projects, data analytics, and spending time with my family. I’m a very active person. In addition to being a member at Title Boxing Club, Orange Theory Fitness, and the Vanderbilt Rec Center,

I am a Black man who jogs.

Before yesterday, my “bio” was something I never thought about during a run. But yesterday I had to; while I may see myself as all those things, to someone with ill will in their heart, none of those things matter. Just as Brother Ahmaud’s bio didn’t matter. . . .

Today, I will run again in Ahmaud’s memory. And like yesterday, and every day moving forward, before I leave our apartment to start my run, I will kiss my wife and kids because

I am a Black man who jogs.[7]

I didn’t know about that post until Thursday, when we got an email from the man who wrote it:

To Whom It May Concern:

I am a Black man who jogs and I wanted to say thank you for recognizing Ahmaud Arbery on the sign outside your church. Mr. Arbery’s death had a profound impact on me. At the height of my frustration, anger, and confusion about his murder, I wrote the attached post. Because of how he died, I stopped running around the streets of Nashville. Instead I started running on Greenways and Trails, such as Shelby Bottoms or the Harpeth River Trail, because I felt safer in these environments. After a month long hiatus from running on the streets, I decided to return today. My run this morning took me in front of your church. When I looked up and saw, “Ahmaud Arbery” on your sign, I said to myself, “How great is our God.” Thank you for raising awareness about the unjust ending of his life and for restoring my faith in running the streets of Nashville. I pray for God’s continued mercy, favor, and grace for you and your congregation.    

Sincerely,

Rosevelt Noble

Intolerable trouble James Baldwin called it with prophetic clarity of eye and voice. I pray that each of you and all of us together will continue to stand and march with those committed to cast out the demons of slavery and topple every false idol. God raised our brother Jesus from the dead, and therefore we stand firm in the hope that the pain of centuries will not completely swallow tomorrow’s possibilities.

[1] Delivered on October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child – His Self-Image”; published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

[2] https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/baldwin-talk-to-teachers

[3] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25988&st=&st1

[4] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-murder/

[5] Brad Braxton https://www.christiancentury.org/article/reflection/james-baldwin-reminds-us-not-be-surprised

[6] Letters and Papers from Prison, as quoted in Kelly, Geffrey B. and F. Burton Nelson. The Cost of Moral Leadership: the spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publ., 2003, 46.

[7] https://www.facebook.com/rosevelt.noble/posts/10102746323527478

Our crisis and work

We just read the entire first chapter of Genesis, which, to some of you, may have seemed a little over the top, a little extravagant perhaps. Words poured out like precious perfume that could have been put to more careful, measured use, verse by verse, line by line, phrase by phrase. But the pouring out, far from being wasteful, may well be the only appropriate way to take in this grand liturgical poetry that opens our Bible. It’s the whole story of life, from first light to the seventh day when God contentedly rests amid the wondrous whirl of creation. A little extravagance of speech and attention is called for in trying to echo the lavish fullness and awesome orderliness of creation.

The biblical scholars remind us that the chapter, in its entirety, was composed as a “prequel” to Exodus 15, the story of Israel’s salvation at the sea, when God ordered the waters to part so the Hebrew slaves could escape the deadly threat of Pharao’s military and cross over on their journey to the promised land. The chapter was composed in exile, after the kingdom had fallen and the Temple had been destroyed and the ancestral land had been devastated by Babylon’s armies. With bold, assertive speech, the exiles claimed that the God who set them free and led them out of the brick yards of Egypt was the creator of heaven and earth. The orderliness of the composition reflects a deep orderliness of life with words that reassured a people far from home. The rhythms of evening and morning, of weekday and sabbath, pointed those who recited and heard them to cosmic orders that the chaos of foreign captivity could not erase or subdue. Creation had a beginning and a goal, and the story of life from empty nothingness to fulfillment in sabbath peace was spoken by the God of Israel, not the gods of Babylon.

God speaks with sovereign power, and the word accomplishes God’s purpose and succeeds in the thing for which God sent it.[1] God speaks. God makes. God names. God observes and delights. “And God saw that it was good,” is one of the refrains of this poem of life.

The first day. The second day. The third day. God doesn’t snap the divine fingers to bring forth light and land and life; God makes time and takes time. And at the end of each day, God, like an artist, steps back from the detail, to behold the whole as it is taking shape. Good. Good.

God pauses to observe closely how the earth brings forth plants yielding seed of every kind and fruit trees. The fourth day. God notices how the waters swarm. God sees how birds fly across the sky and where they build their nests. God lingers with delighted attention over every movement of every wing. The Carolina Wren, the eastern Goldfinch, the Belted Kingfisher, the Mourning Dove, the Great Blue Heron. The fifth day.

God speaks. God makes. God observes and delights. “Why so many forms?” asks Annie Dillard.

Why not just that one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely and wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.[2]

According to the opening chapter of Genesis, human beings are latecomers to creation. We are creatures of the sixth day.When Carl Sagan came up with his now famous model for the age of the cosmos, he didn’t count days, but he  arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the late arrival of humankind. Sagan first popularized the idea of squeezing all the time of the universe not into seven days, but a single year, beginning with the Big Bang on January 1. On March 15, the Milky Way galaxy was formed. The sun and planets came into existence on August 31. The first multicellular life on earth appeared on December 5, fish on December 18 and birds on December 27. Human beings arrived on the scene about 8 minutes before midnight on December 31. And we started writing only about half a second ago in cosmic time.

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” we ask with the Psalmist. Humans have a special place in creation, but we’re not that special. We don’t even have our own separate day set aside. We are latecomers to the miracle of life, creatures of the sixth day who arrive in the afternoon, as it were, after cattle and creeping things and wild animals of every kind.

Let us make humankind, God said, in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over all this, as far as the eye can see. What kind of a mandate is that, dominion? We have a long history, particularly in the West, of confusing dominion with domination. And that history is not a long-gone past, but our present crisis and work.

We — and by “we” I mean first and foremost men of European descent — have been taught to view ourselves as “superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.”[3] In that profound misunderstanding of dominion as domination, the full humanity of women was questioned, and the question was answered in the negative; people of the first nations of the Americas were labeled innocent or savage, and when they resisted efforts to remake them in the image of their European “masters of civilization,” they were killed or marched off to shrinking reservations; the full humanity of people of African descent was brutally denied in order to keep labor costs down on plantations and the markets for cotton and sugar strong, and article 1, section 2, clause 3 of the Constitution defined a slave as 3/5 of a person. Women and all people of non-European descent were assigned their place “in nature” by European men who viewed themselves as superior to nature, contemptuous of it, and willing to use it for their slightest whim. This, we have been taught, is what dominion looks like — domination with a touch of contempt. The knee of a white man crushing a black man’s throat.

Sometime in 1938 or 1939, Bertolt Brecht, a German writer in exile in Denmark, wrote,

Truly I live in dark times!
A sincere word is folly. A smooth forehead
Indicates insensitivity. If you’re laughing,
You haven’t heard
The bad news yet.

What are these times, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds.[4]

Truly I live in dark times, when my morning psalm of praise for the Osprey and the Belted Kingfisher and the Great Blue Heron, for the flowering Oak Hydrangea and sweet Magnolia blooms, when such a song is almost a crime, because it implies silence about so many horrors of domination.

Peniel Rajkumar writes about the life-giving word of Genesis 1 becoming flesh and assuming an identity as “Jesus, the incarnate word who chooses to pitch his tent among human beings in an act which can be described as radical solidarity,” and he asks, “Where do our words pitch their tent today? In the safety and security of power or in the vulnerability of and solidarity with those disadvantaged by power?”

In Genesis 1, God’s word creates life, God speaks the world into being, and “on the seventh day, when the text states that God chose to refrain from all of God’s work, what seems to be implied is that God was silent on the seventh day. But an important aspect of this ‘silence of God’ is that God could afford to be silent because God saw that ‘everything was very good’.”[5]

On that great sabbath, God will rest amid the wondrous whirl of creation, and we will all sing in the one great symphony of life. Until then, God will continue to speak, and we will choose where our words, inspired and formed in the company of Jesus, will pitch their tent.

Until then, we will sing whenever we catch a glimpse of life’s wholeness; and we will stand and speak in solidarity with those whose full humanity as creatures made in the image of God continues to be denied, and we will work with them in dismantling the structures of domination.

Dominion is not a license to define and oppress and exploit — it is a commission to see as God sees, and care as God cares, and delight as God delights.

We together, humankind in all its diversity, and each of us in our unique expression of our shared humanity, are made in the image of God: entrusted to represent God’s dominion among each other and in our relation to the non-human creation. We have been given the capacity to see in astonishing detail how God’s creatures are all fearfully and wonderfully made, and how each is connected with the others in a single fabric of mutuality.

May our eyes be clear and our speech truthful.

[1] See Isaiah 55:11-12

[2] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1988, 137.

[3] Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” Science vol. 155, no. 3767, 1967, 1203-1207.

[4] “An die Nachgeborenen,” translated by Peter Levine https://peterlevine.ws/?p=18077

[5] Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar https://politicaltheology.com/speech-and-silence-the-politics-of-genesis-1-24-peniel-jesudason-rufus-rajkumar/

Worried kids

It was the night when they were having their last meal together. Judas had already left the table and gone out, and the others didn’t know where he’d gone or why. That’s when Jesus said, “Little children, I am with you only a little longer.”[1]

Sometimes he sounds like a mom or a dad, doesn’t he? Little children he called them, and I imagine that’s how they felt. Not like grown-up friends, not like adults who know that sometimes life can take unpredictable turns and you just deal with it, but like kids. Like worried kids.

That night he also told them, “Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other.” But Peter and the rest of them weren’t quite ready to hear those words. When you feel like a kid, it’s really hard to love like a grown-up. They worried what would become of them. “Lord, where are you going?” they asked.[2] When will you be back? What are we supposed to do without you? Why can’t we come with you?

Little children he called them, and that’s how they felt. Worried kids, not at all excited about the prospect of having the entire house to themselves with no one around to tell them what to do. “I go to prepare a place for you,” he told them, “so that where I am you may be also.”[3] And he went on like this for a very long time, telling them everything they needed to know before he left them.

“I will not leave you as orphans,” he promised, but all they could hear, I imagine, was, “I will leave you.” I will not leave you comfortless, but I’ll be gone, nevertheless.

Barbara was the eldest of three daughters and the designated babysitter in her family.

“From the time I was twelve, I was the one my parents left in charge when they went out at night. First my father would sit me down and remind me how much he and my mother trusted me—not only because I was the oldest but also because I was the most responsible. This always made me dizzy, but I agreed with him. I would not let the house burn down. I would not open the door to strangers. I would not let my little sisters fall down the basement steps. Then my mother would show me where she had left the telephone number, remind me when they would be home, and all together we would walk to the front door where everyone kissed everyone good-bye. Then the lock clicked into place, and a new era began. I was in charge.”

Turning around to face her new responsibilities, what Barbara saw were her sisters’ faces, looking at her with something between hope and fear. They knew she was no substitute for what they had just lost, but since she was all they had they were willing to try. And so was she.

“I played games with them, I read them books, I made them pimento cheese sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off. But as the night wore on they got crankier and crankier. Where are mommy and daddy? Where did they go? When will they be back?”

She told them over and over again. She made up elaborate stories about what they would all do together in the morning. She told them to go to sleep and promised them that she would make sure mommy and daddy kissed them good night when they came in.

“I tried to make everything sound normal, but how did I know? Our parents might have had a terrible accident. They might never come home again and the three of us would be split apart, each of us sent to a different foster home so that we never saw each other again. It was hard, being the babysitter, because I was a potential orphan too. I had as much to lose as my sisters, and as much to fear, but I could not give in to it because I was the one in charge. I was supposed to know better. I was supposed to exude confidence and create the same thing in them.”[4]

When Jesus prepared his disciples for his departure, he called them little children. Having washed and fed them, he sat them down to give them his instructions and left them in charge. So we’re the responsible ones now, the ones he has trusted to carry on in his name.

But what about the times when we feel not quite grown-up enough for the responsibility we were given, when we feel abandoned, desolate, vulnerable, frightened—in a word, orphaned?

What about the moments when our little brothers and sisters look to us for a story to comfort them, for a brave song that will keep the monsters from coming up the basement steps; when they look to us for assurance that all will be well in the morning?

What about the moments when we worry about what will become of us and of the world—aren’t we supposed to exude confidence and create confidence in the ones who look to us?

“I will not leave you orphaned,” he promised. And he kept his promise.

The first disciples were anxious because the most important relationship in their lives, the relationship that redefined from the ground up how they saw themselves and each other, how they saw and knew God and all things, the most important relationship in their lives was to come to an end. They were anxious about the prospect of their relationship with Jesus soon to be reduced to mere memories of him. How would they love him after his return to the Father?

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth.” In other translations, this Spirit of truth, the Spirit who continues to make available the truth Jesus embodied and revealed, is called another comforter, counselor, or companion. Jesus promised them that he would not leave them like orphans. His return to the Father didn’t mean he’d be absent, but rather that they would encounter him differently, in and through the Spirit, in and through each other. They would continue to love him, not by clinging to their cherished memories of him, but by continuing to live in his love.

While Jesus was with them as the Word of God incarnate, his mission was limited to the one place where he was at any given time, and to the people he encountered then and there. With his resurrection a new era began. His friends, the disciples, every generation of disciples, were given the Spirit and became the community of love where the living Christ, the living God is at home.

We’re the responsible ones now, the ones he has trusted to carry on in his name, gifted with all that is needed. We worry, because we think it’s all up to us now, and there’s so much to do, and we already have so many things to do, and how much more can we do, and do we really have all it takes to do all that? And we worry, because we think it’s all up to us now, and there’s so much to do, and we feel like we can’t get anything done, stuck at home, stuck in uncertainty, lonely or wondering how much longer we can stand constantly living on top of each other.

We’re so used to letting ourselves be defined by what we do and how much or how little we accomplish. But doing is not the whole truth, it’s not even half the truth, it’s not who we are. Who we are, who we really are and who we come to see ourselves to be in the company of Jesus, is God’s loved ones. And any good we can do, any good we can possibly do, will flow, not from anxiety, but from knowing that we’re not orphans.

The Spirit of truth, the comforter, the advocate, the counselor, the one called to our side is a living presence among us, not merely the memory of one who once was present a long, long time ago.

“Those who love me,” Jesus said that night, “will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” The divine presence the first disciples encountered in Jesus, the divine presence we seek and so often question, that presence is promised to those who abide in love and keep Jesus’ commandments by loving each other as Jesus has loved them. In this love, God is at home in the world and we are at home in God.

[1] John 13:33

[2] John 13:36

[3] John 14:3

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine, 80-81.

The house that love builds

Today we celebrate and thank the women whose love has surrounded us through the years so we would thrive and flourish, our mothers and grandmothers, and for some of us, it’s our godmothers, aunties, and big sisters we honor on this day. The lectionary for this Sunday includes, quite appropriately, though nobody thought about Mother’s Day when the readings were assigned — the lectionary includes one of the very few passages in the Apostolic writings that speak of infants and milk. In First Corinthians and Hebrews, milk is mentioned as baby food for baby Christians who haven’t matured enough in their faith to digest the solid food of weightier teachings.[1] Here in First Peter, though, we hear a different theme. Here it’s not about the contrast between milk for newborn infants who’ll eventually become meat-and-potatoes Christians.

First Peter is addressed to believers who often struggle with how to live the new life of faith, the new life of hope and love in a world that often gives more reason for fear and despair. The Apostle points to babies as perfect examples because they are new to the miracle of life and they simply know what’s best for them when it comes to eating and thriving: You pick them up and you cradle them in your arm, and if they’re even just a little hungry, they’ll turn their little face toward you, and with their mouths open they begin to feel their way to the source of all goodness and fulfillment.

“Since you have tasted that the Lord is good,” the Apostle writes, since you have tasted sweet mercy and rich wisdom and abundant grace in the community of believers, long for that milk, that new-life milk, that pure, whole-life milk. Get rid of all ill will and all deceit, pretense, envy, and slander and whatever else they serve at the former-life bar; that stuff has zero nutritional value. It doesn’t nourish you, but rather consumes you and those around you. Look at an infant: that’s you in the arms of Christ. Like a newborn baby, desire the pure milk of the word. Drink the love that will not let you go, drink the life given for the life of the world. Nourished by it, you will grow into salvation.

Penelope Duckworth is an Episcopal priest, and she’s also a mother; or perhaps she would say she’s a mother and also an Episcopal priest. She wrote a poem about the sacrament of nursing, titled simply, Milk (For Clare).[2]

Pulled by your cry, it surged out.

Welling from the nipple’s pores, it was thin,

bluish, sprayed in tiny streams,

caused a slow, dull, homesick pain.

We laughed in astonishment as it kept coming

until your shining mouth let go

and you drowsed in sunlit bliss.

You, at seven months, nurse and pedal

rhythmically, your hands explore the air.

I fill to meet your whitest need,

The hind milk now, grown thick and creamy,

will hold you sleeping with its weight.

Dame Julian, in her mystic state,

perceived Lord Jesus as her mother

offering to nurse us all,

milk flowing from his giving breasts.

It is a glory, this feeding from the body:

Take and eat this simple meal.

This is my body given for you.

…

We know there’s a vast difference between a body given and a body taken, between life freely given and life violently taken.

Wanda Cooper-Jones is a mother. Her youngest child was born on Mother’s Day 1994, and she named him Ahmaud. And this week, the men who killed him were finally arrested, 74 days after grabbing their guns and chasing her unarmed 25-year-old son in their pickup truck.

Terri Hord Owens, our General Minister and President, and also a mother, shared her lament:

Enough, America. Enough. We are tired, we are heartbroken, we are angry.

There is an historical record that is hundreds of years old documenting the horrors of violence upon black lives and black bodies. Generational trauma which began from the time of the Middle Passage is yet being inflicted upon black lives today.

My great-great grandfather was borne of the trauma of a white slave master raping a black woman.

My great-grandfather grew up in the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan and knew the trauma of constant terrorization of his community.

My great-grandmothers suffered the indignities of having to enter the back door when they worked as domestics in white homes.

My grandfather faced death threats when he fought for desegregation.

A family member was beaten up when he stopped to help a fellow college student whose car had broken down because he had spoken to a white girl a few days before.

In elementary school, I was called “nigger”, and told that “if it hadn’t been for us white people, you niggers would still be slaves”. I was then slapped in the face and my glasses were shattered, leaving shards of glass on my cheeks.

My son was accused of stealing his own jacket from the school cateferia when he returned to retrieve it. He asked, “did they think that because I am black?”

My husband and son have both been stopped over and over by policemen for no reason, given no tickets, simply because they drove a certain kind of car in predominantly white neighborhoods.

I am grateful that none of these family members died, but all around them, others did. Too many lynched. Too many beaten and killed. Too many shot by police, and by people assuming the right to be judge and executioner. Too many dead as a result of escalated response that was unwarranted. Too few of the killers have been arrested, and too few have been convicted. Too many black and brown people are dying of COVID-19; too many black and brown people are in poverty and are low-income and underemployed. Too much pain and injustice, too much blood spilled, too many bodies battered, too much indignity to bear, too little justice and reparation.

And so, I ask you, America: when will it be time for justice? How can I be sure that you are not raising your children to devalue and kill ours?

There are no words, no emojis for the heaviness of this pain, frustration and anger.

Let me lament for now... I will rise to fight... another day.

I got nothing to say unless and until I have heard her out, so I can even begin to feel the heaviness of her pain, her frustration and anger, and begin to bear it with her.

Michele Norris, also a mother, wrote,

I am so tired of seeing black death on small screens. Exhausted by the constant reminder that black bodies immediately represent a threat. Anguished because when I look at these videos, I see the people I love — my husband, my sons, nephews, my people. I am reminded that, despite their accomplishment and commitment to civic life, they can so easily encounter men who will see none of that, men who will feel justified in extinguishing a perceived threat. … This country will never confront the attitudes, the fear of black bodies, the slow roll of justice for black lives cut short too soon unless and until enough people who don’t see their sons and husbands and loved ones in that grainy footage work up enough umbrage and will to do more than just issue condolences on Twitter.”[3]

I got nothing to say unless and until I feel the full weight of the scandal that I can watch that grainy footage and not immediately see my son or my nephew or myself in the place of the victim.

When Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,”[4] he doesn’t mean do not let your hearts be touched or shaken or broken.

Quite the contrary. Trust in Jesus. Trust in God. Trust that you are worthy of saving, not because you are great, but because you are loved. Trust the promise of reconciliation and the hard labor of love it inspires. Trust that the way of Jesus is indeed the way of life.

We live in the house that slavery built. We live in the house where every corner, every rafter reeks of injustice and exploitation. And whenever we feel like we have finally renovated a few rooms in the colors of freedom and equality, we turn around, and violence and fear have added a whole new floor of hurt. But this house is not our home.

“Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a house whose cornerstone is Christ, a house whose every dimension and angle is determined by the vision of life that Jesus embodied and served with his whole being. First Peter and all the words of scripture give us only glimpses of a house under construction, not a complete set of drawings and 3-D models built to scale. But we can trust the master builder: The house that love builds is a house where justice is at home. In the house that love builds we name without fear the fatal dreams of supremacy, and we hear each other’s stories, the whole story of each of us and all of us, and we see each other, we really see each other, and together we grow into salvation.

[1] 1 Corinthians 3:2; Hebrews 5:12-13

[2] Penelope Duckworth, “Milk (for Clare),” Congregations 30, no. 3 (2004), 19.

[3] Michele Norris https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ahmaud-arberys-mother-will-take-part-in-a-very-different-mothers-day/2020/05/08/2913c5dc-916c-11ea-9e23-6914ee410a5f_story.html

[4] John 14:1

Fullness of joy

I love listening to Iris DeMent sing a song. She’s written a few of her own, but she’s also recorded some of the songs she grew up with in the Pentecostal church, like Sweet Hour of Prayer and Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. I’ve heard others sing those songs, and all I wanted to do is run for the doors. When she sings them, she takes me to places I’ve never been, and I fall in love with them and the people who live there. She said, a “thing that I learned from my parents, who had pretty difficult, challenging lives, to put it mildly: I saw my parents use music to survive. They had to have that music. My mom had to sing and my dad had to go to church and he had to hear that music washing over him and through him. It wasn’t a, “Oh, this is nice”; it was a, “I’m not going to make it if I don’t have that.”[1] He needed that music like bread. It was medicine for his weary soul.

When my dad died, we met at the house where my siblings and I had grown up and where my mom still lives, and the pastor came, and we sat around the table in the dining room. I don’t remember any of the details of the conversation or what time of day it was, but I can still see the surprise in his eyes when he asked about songs for the funeral, and we said, In Dir Ist Freude. It’s a Reformation hymn from the late 1500s, and we regularly sang it in worship, and Bach had written a chorale on it that my brother and I had sung a few times with the choir.

In dir ist Freude in allem Leide,

o du süßer Jesu Christ!

Durch dich wir haben himmlische Gaben,

du der wahre Heiland bist;

hilfest von Schanden, rettest von Banden.

Wer dir vertrauet, hat wohl gebauet,

wird ewig bleiben. Halleluja.

Zu deiner Güte steht unser G’müte,

an dir wir kleben im Tod und Leben;

nichts kann uns scheiden. Halleluja.[2]

We loved this song and thought it was very appropriate for a funeral. There’s an English version and it goes like this:

In Thee is gladness amid all sadness,

Jesus, daystar of my heart!

By thee are given the gifts of heaven,

thou the true Redeemer art!

Our souls thou wakest; our bonds thou breakest.

Who trusts thee surely has built securely

and stands forever: Allelujah!

Our hearts are longing to see thy dawning.

Living or dying, in thee abiding,

naught can us sever: Allelujah![3]

On the day of my dad’s funeral, we did sing that song or rather most of the people who gathered outside the cemetery chapel that day did. I didn’t. I stood there with my eyes closed, crying and swaying, and the song washed over me and through me, and the waves of grace and joy lifted me up and carried me. I don’t remember a word the preacher said that day, but the song they sang was consolation and hope and the communion of saints, that song was the gospel.

It doesn’t happen often that I lose myself in a song. “Doxology is difficult for the overly analytical,” says Thomas Steagald. “Even a mild case of scepticism affects the vocal cords, pinches the nerve of praise, makes it hard to stand and sing.”[4] And who doesn’t have at least a mild case of scepticism? It doesn’t happen often that a song becomes a world I enter without asking questions at every turn, and I let go and let the Spirit lift me up and hold me. It doesn’t happen often, but often enough for me to think I know why Iris’s dad had to go to church.

There’s something about singing together that can’t be recorded, mixed, and played back, and it’s just one more thing I miss terribly these days, more than I thought I would. For the next few weeks, there will only be three or four of us in the sanctuary for Sunday worship, and so beginning today we’re following an even humbler liturgy. A humbler liturgy means there will be less singing; perhaps you wonder why. Just about all of us can sing like nobody is listening but God when we’re standing amid the congregation and many others are singing with us. And it’s wonderful to sing like nobody is listening when you’re out in the middle of the lake by yourself early in the morning and you can safely assume that nobody can hear you but God and the ducks. But singing in an empty sanctuary with just two or three others, with a camera running and mics recording, is probably about as awkward for us here as trying to sing along at home with your tablet or phone is for you. So what do we do?

Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. The passage we heard from First Peter begins,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Even those who believe they can’t carry a tune in a bucket want to shout their Alleluias in a crowd, because the great mercy of God calls for our joyous and grateful response!

Even though you do not see him now, writes the apostle, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy!

God has raised our brother Jesus from the dead! God revealed that nothing will get between us and the life for which we have been created — neither fear, nor guilt, nor shame! God’s desire for life in communion with us is not limited, neither by the number of years we are given on earth, nor by our falling short of the glory of God, our failure to love God and our neighbor faithfully. God’s desire for life in communion with us even reaches beyond the ultimate horizon we perceive death to be. We want to sing, we want to shout, we want to clap our hands — good God, we may even want to dance a little with the saints in glory in indescribable and glorious joy… but not yet… and until then, until we will gather again, let’s practice the songs that rise in solitude: let’s name each ordinary thing we once took for granted and now recognize as essential; let’s join the doxologies of the hills and trees even from our windows and our decks; let’s behold the lilies of the field and the lilies in the pot; let’s greet the loons that left for the north, the owls that stayed, and the hummingbirds that have started to return; let’s hear the manifold witness of all living things, reminding us how we’re all connected in the miracle of one creation. One Easter song is to let our praise of God burst forth, another is to let creation’s praise of God sink in and astound us.

Our ancestors have given us the psalms, songs that have been chanted and sung, spoken and quietly read, listened to and meditated on by multitudes, generation to generation. The psalms, like few other texts in Scripture, remind us that even when we cannot come together in worship, we live and pray and sing with a great cloud of witnesses. And the words our ancestors in the faith have passed down to us show that they have been where we are – in seasons of profound disorientation and uncertainty, seasons of fear and isolation – and that in those seasons they discovered new dimensions of God’s fidelity.

Today’s psalm contains a single petition, “Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” Then unfolds, in line after line, the relationship between this refugee and the God of Israel, a relationship of deep trust and intimate knowledge between the divine You and the human I.

You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you.

Because you are at my right hand,

I shall not be moved.

I am particularly drawn to the closing verses, where trust blooms into fullness of joy:

Therefore my heart is glad,

and my soul rejoices;
my body also rests secure.

This is what those who seek refuge in the God of Israel may hope to find: gladness and joy and peace. At the end, the psalmist affirms,

You show me the path of life.

In your presence there is fullness of joy;

in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Fullness of joy, that is the life into which Christ rose, the life into which he draws us. Fullness of joy is not somewhere, sometime, somehow, but now and forever in the presence of God. And that fullness does call for songs of loudest praise as well as words of quiet joy, found and practiced in solitude.

Notes:

[1] Iris DeMent on Fresh Air https://www.npr.org/2015/10/21/450521621/for-iris-dement-music-is-the-calling-that-forces-her-into-the-spotlight

[2] Text: Cyriakus Schneegaß 1598 / Johann Lindemann 1598; tune: Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi 1591. The second verse: Wenn wir dich haben, kann uns nicht schaden Teufel, Welt, Sünd oder Tod; du hast’s in Händen, kannst alles wenden, wie nur heißen mag die Not. Drum wir dich ehren, dein Lob vermehren mit hellem Schalle, freuen uns alle zu dieser Stunde. Halleluja. Wir jubilieren und triumphieren, lieben und loben dein Macht dort droben mit Herz und Munde. Halleluja.

[3] Translation by Catherine Winkworth https://hymnary.org/text/in_thee_is_gladness_amid_all_sadness The second verse: Jesus is ours! We fear no powers, not of earth or sin or death. He sees and blesses in worst distresses; he can change them with a breath. Wherefore the story tell of his glory with hearts and voices; all heaven rejoices in him forever: Allelujah! We shout for gladness, triumph o’er sadness, love him and praise him, and still shall raise him glad hymns forever: Allelujah!

[4] Feasting, Year A, Volume 2, 391.