Community and etymology

So first off, here is a good song for Advent, when we look towards a promise and a world that seems too good to ever come true.

I didn’t make it to the midweek Advent service this week, because Sleepy (Grouchy) Children. But I did have a wonderful conversation with Pastor Elaina over coffee about building community, which is a way we can see, dimly and imperfectly, a bit of that promised world. Specifically, we talked about eating together.

Remember the story “Stone Soup”? Where everyone was afraid they didn’t have enough, and so they hid and hoarded it, until finally they were persuaded to share, and suddenly there was abundance. In the church newsletter, Pastor Elaina wrote about this contrast between our fear of scarcity and the abundance of God, in which 2+2 doesn’t equal 4, but 100. And when we each bring our little bit and pool them all together, suddenly there’s more than enough. Like loaves and fishes.

In many cultures, the role of the host of a feast is deeply significant--remember the panic at the wedding of Cana, when they ran out of wine? It’s a matter of honor to be able to provide for your guests, and the guests in turn are expected render honor to the host (hence Sir Gawain’s infamous quandary in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Our modern English words “lady” and “lord” are derived from Old English “hlaf”--loaf. Lord comes from “hlāford,” which in turn came “hlāf-weard”--bread-keeper. Lady comes from “hlæfdīge”--bread-kneader. Basically, the most prominent members of the community were those who provided food for the others and hosted the feasts.

So what happens when we all feed each other, at a potluck or pitch-in? When we each bring a little something, and lay everything out on long tables--casseroles and chicken wings and salads and the bag of chips we grabbed on the way because we didn’t have the energy to cook--the feast multiplies, and so does the honor we owe to each other.

Later in the day after that coffee conversation, I came across this post--it’s mostly about current political events, but I was struck by the repeated phrase “the kindness of cooks”--this conviction that there is something inherently generous in the act of cooking for someone else, and that this is reflected in the character of those who make a habit of it, that they are the kind of people who won’t support hatred or discrimination. Obviously this isn’t necessarily true, but it tells us something about the power of feeding our neighbors with the best we can provide for them.

There’s a reason that Jesus told so many parables about parties and feasts to describe the Kingdom--wedding feasts, celebrations of finding lost sheep and lost sons. Eating together, feeding each other, sounds like a good place to start when it comes to (re)building communities in a time when we’re fractured and broken.

Afraid of hope

Tomorrow begins the second week of Advent, the season when we wait, peering into the darkness for the quiet, secretive entrance of the light. During the midweek Advent service on Wednesday, the Gospel reading was Luke 1:5-20, about Zechariah’s encounter with Gabriel while he was offering incense in the Temple. Instead of a sermon, we took time to reflect on the story with the help of some questions in the bulletin.

The first question was “What do you think Zechariah was afraid of?” The congregation’s discussion afterwards focused on Zechariah’s very understandable terror when Gabriel first appeared (if it were me, I would have been afraid I had been caught inadvertently offering the incense wrong or something), but my mind immediately went to the next part of the story.

It seemed to me that fear was also the reason that Zechariah doubted the angel--fear of getting his hopes up. Because he and Elizabeth had experienced decades of disappointment already--hoping for a baby, then being crushed. Over and over, with every randomly nauseous morning or late cycle, until they just couldn’t take it one more time. And now that they were old, perhaps it was almost a relief to have put it behind them and know for sure that that particular door had really and truly been locked and sealed shut, and they never had to think about it again. And then God took him by the hand and led him back to that bricked-over door and said, "No really, I'm going to open it." No wonder he didn't welcome the promise. To be disappointed one more time would have destroyed him.

That’s Advent, though. Sitting here in the dark, where we’ve been squinting into the blackness so long, imagining that we see the first glow of dawn when it’s really only in our own eyes, that we can no longer believe that light will actually ever come. Zechariah and Elizabeth were living under an oppressive foreign government, waiting for God to fulfill the promise to free them and restore the true king to the throne, but all they had was a puppet king. Just when we start to hope that maybe love and community and honest efforts to listen to our neighbors really might be more powerful than fear and violence and willful ignorance, we’re crushed to discover that disgust and ignorance are winning out again. We were promised that Jesus would return and bring in the kingdom of God and restore everything that has been broken or lost, but it’s been a couple millennia now.

The darkness is so heavy it can leave you speechless sometimes, because you can’t bring yourself to repeat those promises of hope that have been made to look like lies so many times before. I sometimes think that the silence imposed on Zechariah was a gift, because he couldn’t try to argue about it or make up justifications or excuses. He just had to sit there in the dark and listen.

Thanksgiving Sunday sermon

Preached at Bethany Lutheran Church on Saturday evening, November 19 and Sunday morning, November 20.

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Psalm 100

Philippians 4:4-9

John 6:25-35

I’ve been doing a little exercise on Facebook this month, coming up with something every day to be thankful for. Pictures are bonus. Because thanksgiving--the holiday--is challenging for me. Instead of basking in the glow of all the things I have to be grateful for, I have to pack up three kids’ worth of stuff, and also the dog, then spend hours in the car driving to Indianapolis and then ricocheting between houses visiting everyone we’re related to, constantly at least a little overstuffed, and then it’s over and I’m exhausted and I just want to go home and crash. The fact that we have that many people who love us and the resources to go and visit them is itself a huge blessing, but I’m usually too overwhelmed to see it. On Thanksgiving Day I don’t really ever get a chance to sit and just be thankful. So this year I decided would be different--I was going to be thankful, darn in! I figured if I started getting warmed up early, I’d be ready by the time Thanksgiving itself rolls around!

Most days I’ve come up with one or two things really easily. Some days I find a whole bunch of them. Some days I struggle to find any. Thankfulness, I’ve been learning, isn’t so much an event as a habit of thought. like a muscle you have to exercise. I hate exercise. It’s boring and repetitive, and it makes me sweat. And when I look around, giving thanks feels so cheap and lazy. There are protests, riots, and hate crimes here, wars and human rights violations overseas (and quite possibly some here too), and  the political climate makes me want to become a hermit. Being thankful for a cup of hot earl gray for my afternoon pick-me-up reminds me that many people, even here in the United States, don’t even have clean water for their children to drink. And then I feel like a jerk.

Being told to “give thanks” or “count your blessings” can feel so useless, even counter-productive. Like a cop-out--hey, instead of actually solving these problems, distract yourself with things that make you happy! Leave things as they are and don’t upset the status quo, because everyone else is fine with it, and if you’re not, you’re clearly just ungrateful. Then I resent the exercise even more, because I feel like I’m just tricking myself into being passive, even when there’s a lot of work to be done.

But that’s exactly what Paul recommends in his letter to the Philippians--“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”

In every situation. Not just good situations, or just on special holidays--every situation. That during times when you have a lot of concerns--when things are going badly and you’re praying your heart out--you especially need to be giving thanks. It’s not to distract yourself--you’re still praying about the problems and presenting them before God--but you do give thanks even while keeping your eyes fully open to what’s going wrong. Paul doesn’t say, “Be thankful instead of dealing with your problems,” he says, “Be thankful instead of being anxious about your problems.” The opposite of thankfulness isn’t action, but anxiety, because thankfulness brings the peace of God to guard your heart and mind while you go about your work, carrying out the things you have been taught.

In the prayer group that met over the summer, one of the types of prayer that we explored was the examen. It begins by first asking God to be present with you, and then in the company of God’s presence you review your day, looking for the ways that you were blessed that day and the ways you saw God moving in the events of the day or in other people. And it’s only after you’ve put yourself in a position of gratitude that you move on to addressing your mistakes, your concerns, your plans for tomorrow. And I was really anxious during those weeks. I was very, very pregnant--like, could have a baby any day pregnant--and every morning I woke up wondering if this was the day, and every night I went to bed disappointed that it was not.

And then I started doing the examen in my journal, writing down the things I was thankful for before getting to my frustration about STILL BEING PREGNANT and my worries about birth and bringing a newborn home and how my worries and frustrations were spilling over into impatience with my older kids who didn’t deserve to be snarled at the way I had that evening, but by the time I got to those worries, I felt so much more peace about it--maybe even what you might call “the peace of God that passes all understanding,” and even though my worries were still there, that peace guarded my heart all night long so that I could sleep, and maybe even snarl at the kids a little less the next day.  

Gratitude transforms us, and a habit of seeking out even the smallest and most superficial blessings helps us practice finding deeper, hidden gifts--like a friend who understands our frustration or our grief and supports us while we’re overwhelmed, or the grace to remember to take a moment to breathe before we react, or seeing the people who are already out there, fighting against the injustices that we can’t even begin to imagine how to tackle yet. The problems are still there, but now we can see that the problems are not all that there is, and perhaps we’re being given the grace to push back against them. Paul tells the Philippians that “what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me--practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” Gratitude gives us the grace to practice the kingdom work that we’ve been taught, even when we feel overwhelmed by just how much work there is to do, because now we are aware of the presence of the God of peace.

We can see this move from gratitude to grace in the gospel reading, in Jesus’s response to the people who came to him.

This was right after the feeding of the 5000--he had miraculously fed a whole crowd of people, which is a tremendous blessing! and they thought this was pretty great and came back to him for another blessing, another free meal. But this time Jesus doesn’t give them more food--he doesn’t give them another easily-facebooked blessing. Because you know if facebook or instagram had been around everyone would have been posting pictures of their free fish sandwiches tagged with #blessed. But Jesus tells them that they’ve missed the point--it’s not about the loaves and the fishes. The food was just to get their attention. It’s about him, and if they thought that the gift of bread was good, they ain’t seen nothing yet.

Once you start noticing those little gifts--the bread and the fish, or the autumn foliage, or the buy-one-get-one-free at Starbucks--that’s when Jesus can get your attention and point you past the leaves and the coffee, which feed your soul for an afternoon, to the bread from heaven that will feed you forever, the God of peace who will stick with you and give you grace through even your most impossible work.

Anne Lamott wrote a book about what she considers the three essential prayers, “Help, Thanks, Wow” and in the “Thanks” chapter describes the power of gratitude. She says,

“‘Thanks’ is a huge mind-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and public demonstration and is deeply interested in our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed. You breathe in gratitude, and you breathe it out, too. Once you learn how to do that, then you can bear someone who is unbearable. (...) When we go from rashy and clenched to grateful, we sometimes get to note the experience of grace, in knowing that we could not have gotten ourselves from where we were stuck, in hate or self-righteousness or self-loathing (which are the same thing), to freedom. The movement of grace in our lives toward freedom is the mystery. So we simply say ‘Thanks.’ Something had to open, something had to give, and I don’t have a clue how to get things to do that. But they did, or grace did. Thank you.”

I like how the Message translates the last lines of the passage from Philippians--after Paul says to give thanks and pray with hearts full of gratitude, he says, “Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.” Practicing thankfulness--breathing it in and out with every little ordinary, everyday gift--leads to practicing even more hard and holy work--bearing the unbearable, loving the unlovable, becoming part of God’s work in the world.

Thanks be to God. 

It was a really disturbing dream

I had a dream early, early Wednesday morning, after I had woken up to nurse the baby and saw who won the election. In my dream there was a toilet overflowing with rotting viscera, all slimy and purple and oozing--someone had tried to flush down a corpse. And I could look through the walls (like you can in a dream) to see that all the pipes were clogged with it, too.

I felt sick when I woke up, and that image has stuck in my mind ever since, as I read about the massive increase in hate crimes, the 81% of white evangelicals who voted for this man, the protestors who are called "peaceful" by one account and "rioting" by another. While Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock are new phenomena, the ugliness that they reveal about how white America treats her non-white citizens is as old as Columbus. And as their voices get louder, more and more people have tried to drown them out by yelling back that All Lives Matter, or that they needed to go through the proper channels before they can be taken seriously, or that it's not that bad after all and they should just be grateful that they're (at least theoretically) allowed to vote now.

And they try to shove the rotten corpse, the racism and violence and corruption, down into the toilet to flush it away and pretend it's done and over with, and the mess has been cleaned up. But it's not. And now we have to rip out the whole wall and replace all the plumbing.

one-handed update

I thought I would have updated a long time ago, but late pregnancy and then the postpartum period have taken all my words and sent me way down into myself. I’ve had brief bouts of guilt over this inability to write anything that isn’t scrawled in my private journal, but it isn’t a problem, really. I remember trying to force some writing out a few weeks after Mr. B’s birth (a looming dissertation seemed like reasonable motivation!) and it was all crap that never went anywhere anyway. Dramatic changes--good and bad--have always required me to do significant internal recalibrations.

Six weeks to get back to normal after giving birth is bull. Six weeks to go for a nice long walk, sure. Six weeks to have the exact functionality as you had before giving birth? Ha! And wtf is “normal” anyway? I’m pretty sure my body has permanently changed shape in ways that it hadn’t after my older two were born, and that’s just fine. It’s not surprising if maybe the part of me that thinks the things has changed shape a little, too. So I’m going to be patient and slow and quiet so I can listen and watch and feel to learn what the new normal is as everything settles out. It may be awhile.


I wanted to have some profound thoughts to share about Baby C’s baptism the weekend before last, but it’s mostly a deep happiness that he has such a loving community to surround him as he grows. It matters--belonging to God and to each other--though at the moment I still can’t quite articulate how, plus I’m typing one handed while the other arm supports this little one while he lounges on my lap. But so far we’re doing well, we’re taking our time, and we’re surrounded by love.

On Pentecost and PMTs

When I was about her Highness’s age or perhaps a bit younger, my Mama told me that her favorite color was red. At that moment, I decided that red was my favorite color, too. Even though I probably wear purple more often these days because it’s almost as fun as red but with the advantage of being easier to put outfits together around, red remains my favorite.

Today at church we celebrated Pentecost, when everyone is supposed to wear red to church, and the vestments are red and all the flowers and drapey stuff on the altar and other front-of-the-church fixtures (why yes, I did grow up in a church where the only furniture was chairs and podiums—how could you tell?) are red. The kids made red windsocks with fiery streamers and paraded around them the sanctuary. I was tremendously disappointed that my bright red jeans don’t currently fit, but I made do J

Red is for fire and for the Holy Spirit’s descent like fire on the first Christians at Pentecost—God with them even after Jesus’s ascent—so at Pentecost the church is practically blazing with it. I can’t really grasp it—it’s almost too much for me.

It reminded me of the Tenebrae service. Which seems counter-intuitive, since that service on Good Friday involved every single light in the church being gradually extinguished with each Scripture reading until the moment of Christ’s death, leaving everyone in total darkness. The space that had held the Christ candle (now removed) seemed especially black and empty, and there was a corresponding hollowness in my stomach—that feeling that I get sometimes when it seems like the world itself is empty underneath it all. It feels like the inversion of Pentecost—God wasn’t just gone, but God had been killed.

Except that it wasn’t actually completely dark—the red sanctuary candle reminding us of the eternal presence of God was still glowing in the corner. Even when God was dead, God was there.

In the lab my husband worked in as a graduate student, there was one room that was completely sealed off from light so that they could use special instruments that could count photons. If someone accidentally opened the door and let too much light in, the sensitive photomultiplier tube (PMT) would be overwhelmed and explode. But he also told me that once your eyes adjusted to the darkness, even your human eyes could count the individual photons. It’s kind of miraculous, how our eyes can bear the brilliance of full daylight while also being able to adjust to seeing only the tiniest unit of light.

Sometimes it feels like God’s presence is overflowing, running over and spilling on the floor where we can all splash around, so bright we have to squint. And sometimes it’s just the tiniest point of light, not even bright enough to light our next step. Maybe I can train the eyes of my heart to see the brilliance of God in the same ways—both in the overwhelming fire and in the tiny flicker.

First attempt at another teaching philosophy (this time for Sunday school)

Anyone who has applied for more than a handful of college-level teaching positions is probably familiar with the so-called “teaching philosophy”--a document that attempts to summarize the author’s priorities and philosophical approach to education. I’ve written a few, and while none of them were eloquent enough (or used sufficiently trendy pedagogical lingo) to land me the tenure-track position of my dreams, the process of writing one turned out to be useful for my own classroom. I even made my students write their own “learning philosophies” at the beginning of the semester. In general, writing through a personal philosophy often clarifies it, both for me and for my students. I understood more why certain activities in my classroom were more productive than others, how I could prioritize my time more effectively, and how I knew when something had been a success.

On Sunday afternoon, about a week and a half ago, I was wondering what had possessed me to decide that it was a good idea to show my 3^rd and 4^th grade Sunday school students “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies” during a lesson on the Holy Spirit and the Trinity, much less to follow that up with a little detour on the femininity of the Holy Spirit. Not because it went badly (the faces of the two girls in the class lit up when my response to the question, “So wait, is God male or female?!” was “yes!”), but because it seemed like an odd choice.

And then I realized it was probably time to start thinking about my Sunday school teaching philosophy. At its heart, it’s not radically different from my philosophy of teaching college English—that learning is a lifelong process of exploration and revision that often happens most vigorously in community. But with younger students and subject matter that is primarily tested over the course of lived experiences rather than in coursework and career success, it works itself out a little differently.

When I was in 3^rd grade, I knew all the answers—at least, all the answers to any questions that my Sunday school teacher might ask. For a long time, I thought that was what it meant to be a good Christian—answering all the questions right. That’s about the age I was baptized, and when my pastor met with me to talk to me about whether or not I knew what I was doing, I answered all those questions right, too, or at least right enough that he decided I was enough of a believer for a believer’s baptism. I loved seeking out the right answers—I was a front-row, straight-A student at both school and church. I loved raising my hand and announcing those right answers even more, whether or not anyone had even asked a question. And when I made my faith my own, and stepped out of the church I had grown up in, it was for another church that seemed to have even more right answers to questions that my childhood church hadn’t even asked. I might call myself an answer-addict.

Naturally, I eventually started have questions that my church didn’t have satisfactory answers to—I mean, they did have answers, but they didn’t seem nearly as clear and obvious to me as they did to everyone else. So I scrounged and scrambled and read a lot, but the only thing that became clearer was that those answers weren’t nearly as right as I was told. I found a lot of other answers that *might* have been right, but I couldn’t be certain of any of them. The experience was profoundly disorienting, but eventually my questions and I learned to live together, as I discovered that not knowing the answers often meant it was easier to keep my eyes, ears, and heart open when I encountered new people and new experiences that didn’t square with my previous assumptions.

So, what does this have to do with teaching Sunday school?

I don’t think that 3^rd graders need to be given only answers, or to be encouraged to see answers as being the Answer to their challenges. Kids are good enough at being know-it-alls—they don’t need my help! What they do need is someone who will validate their wonder at this world that grows bigger and more mysterious and beautiful as they grow up and become aware of more and more of it. My students arrive every Sunday full of questions. Some of them are easy: “How do I find 2^nd Samuel?” Some are a little more involved, but I can give a stab at them: “Why did Jesus die?” And some are the questions that used to keep me up at night when I was their age, but I quit thinking about them because not knowing made me anxious: “What existed before God created the world? Where did God come from?” And I’m not doing them any favors if I blow those questions off.

Instead, I go out of my way to show them that they should be asking questions. Everyone should. Hence St. Patrick’s bad analogies. The handout for that day gave them several activities intended to help them get a handle on the concept of the Trinity, but I couldn’t help noticing that an example in one of the activities was also one of the “Bad Analogies” (specifically as an illustration of modalism). My purpose wasn’t to claim that the handout author was an evil heretic (because with the Trinity it's almost impossible to talk about it without accidentally saying something heretical, as poor St. Patrick did, and anyway I'm hardly someone to get my undies in a bunch over a little heresy between friends), but to emphasize that in church we often throw around words and phrases like “Trinity” and “created ex nihilo” without actually having any idea what we’re talking about, and it’s good and proper to find it strange and confusing, no matter how old or how smart or how faithful you are.

I try to make my Sunday school classroom a space where it’s ok to ask those questions, and to make it clear that having answers isn’t what makes you a good Christian. I hope I encourage my students to grow into their questions, because someday they'll probably need to remember that questions don’t have to have answers.

My chat with Aragorn about Donald Trump

Last night, as I watched the presidential primary results trickle in and realized that Donald Trump was about to win everything except Ohio (including my own state), I wondered, “What can one do against such reckless hate?”

My personal internal Aragorn replied, “Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them.”

“Beg pardon?” I mean, Viggo Mortenson as Aragorn is gorgeous and there really isn’t a whole lot I wouldn’t do if he asked me to, but still.

“For death and glory.”

“No, actually—you see, I don’t actually have a horse and these aren’t really orcs—“[i]

And that’s the problem. The same people who support banning Muslims from entering the country, or deporting all undocumented immigrants, who stand by and watch as fellow rally-attendees assault protesters, are also our neighbors and relatives. It’s easy on the internet to dismiss them as little better than orcs, but that’s a lie we tell ourselves to make it easier to be righteously angry about the very real evils that are being propagated through this campaign.

They’re not evil, or at least not remarkably more evil than any of us. They’re just scared. And as we all know, “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate.”

So how do you ride out against fear? Especially fearfulness of wide-ranging cultural shifts and nightmarish, unpredictable attacks across the world? Because honestly, I’m scared too. I got my positive pregnancy test the evening after the attacks in Paris back in November, and had spent most of the day agonizing over the burning of a French refugee camp in apparent retaliation for the attacks and the hateful rhetoric I was reading online against desperate, innocent people whose only crime was being a similar shade of brown to the attackers. When I got the positive result, my first thought was, “Oh God, what have I done?” Realizing how many people are so openly full of hatred for others and disdainful of their shared God-imaged humanity is terrifying. And it makes me want to hide away and lob insults from the safety of my computer keyboard and to Other those Trump supporters in the same way that they’ve Othered those who look differently or think differently or worship differently from them. I can only see violence and death down that path. We’ve been there before, and there’s no reason to think we won’t do it again.

But as Fred Clark (linked above) concluded, “I think there exists a more excellent way.”

In one of my absolutely favorite books of the Bible, the author says that

“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love. We, though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first. If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.”[ii]

My love is not particularly well-formed. It’s a half-assed, when-I-think-of-it kind of love, but God has loved me first. And I’m not so idealistic as to think that I, by myself, can somehow fix everything, but perhaps I can bring a little more love into my own community. If God’s love in me can drive out my fear, maybe more love can help other people take a deep breath and step back from their own fears, too. So ride out with me. Ride out and love them.

---

[i] Though if this primary season really were the Battle of Helm’s Deep, Marco Rubio would probably be that poor elf guy whose name I can’t remember because he was only in the movie and not in the book and died tragically in dramatic slo-mo without having been able to affect the plot in any meaningful way.

[ii] 1 John 4:17-21

In which I preach about stories

For my church's midweek Lent services this year, the pastor has asked members of the congregation to do the preaching on a series of assigned themes and passages. It's been a wonderful opportunity to hear voices that I don't usually get to hear, especially loud and clear and up front. Yesterday was my turn. I was very loud and up front--hopefully I was also clear. 

"Open Our Ears"

Texts: Isaiah 50:4-5, Psalm 40:1-8, Matthew 13:10-17

By the time we get to today’s Gospel reading, Jesus and his disciples have had a busy day—he starts off by getting in trouble with the religious leaders for breaking the Sabbath, follows that up with some healings, tells a bunch of parables, offends his family who have come to see him by announcing that anyone who does the will of God is his family, and then tells another story—the Parable of the Sower. He’s thoroughly confused everyone around him. And finally his exhausted and exasperated disciples ask, “WHY do you always only teach in stories?” And Jesus answers them.

It’s easy to criticize the bewildered crowds for not understanding his stories. We see ourselves as the disciples, the ones who Jesus says have “been given insight into God’s kingdom.” We like to imagine that we “know how it works” and when we hear Jesus say that “Not everybody has this gift,… it hasn’t been given to them” we maybe feel sorry for everyone else, and maybe even a little smug, imagining ourselves as the ones with the “ready hearts” who have all kinds of insight. Or maybe that’s just me. Which is why, incidentally, I’m using the Message’s translation—it’s so very different from all the other translations I’ve used my whole life that the stories get my attention again and I actually listen to them. Which is important!

But anyway, as I was reading the other passages for this evening, I found it harder and harder to blame the people for having trouble listening to Jesus. You never know what could happen when God opens your ears. For the psalmist, God opening ears brings delight. In the Message, in fact, it says,

^“So I answered, “I’m coming.
    I read in your letter what you wrote about me,
And I’m coming to the party
    you’re throwing for me.”

That’s when God’s Word entered my life,
    became part of my very being.”

It sounds great. BUT—when I was reading Isaiah, I accidentally read the next verse when I was first preparing for this, and then I couldn’t get it out of my head. Here’s what happens to the speaker in Isaiah, in the verse right after the passage we read in which God opens his ears and he listens:

The Master, God, opened my ears,
    and I didn’t go back to sleep,
    didn’t pull the covers back over my head.
I followed orders,
    stood there and took it while they beat me,
    held steady while they pulled out my beard,
Didn’t dodge their insults,
    faced them as they spit in my face.

Jesus’s audience was probably aware that listening to God—really listening—waking up, getting out of bed instead of pulling the covers up over your head to hide from the truth, and facing whatever is out there—can be risky—sometimes painful, and even dangerous.

And this is why God is described in all these passages as the one who opens ears—because it’s very unlikely that we’re going to do it on our own. “Being religious” and “acting pious,” like the Psalm says, seems like a safer alternative. But the psalmist already said, “Doing something for you, bringing something to you—that’s not what you’re after. that’s not what you’re asking for.” More than anything else, God wants us to listen—to hard things, to joyful things.

And God has an amazing tool to help us to listen—stories. In the Message version of this passage, Jesus explains that he tells stories because, “Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight.” When I sent this version of the text to a friend, she replied, “Wow, that sounds a lot less condescending that I remember!” And it explains why not only did Jesus tell stories, but often afterwards he would explain those stories to his disciplines, who then wrote down the stories and their explanations for us, later. The stories, and the explanations, are a gift to us from a God who loves us and wants us to understand.

When God met us, we didn’t get a book of theology. We got a Person who told stories, and who lived a story for people to wrestle with and retell to each other. A painful, awkward, confusing story full of things we don’t understand and things that sometimes make us uncomfortable. All we have to know Jesus are the stories he told and the stories other people told about him, and the ponderings of other humans trying to make sense of those stories.

Even now, the only way to hear Jesus, and through Jesus, God, is to listen for the voice speaking within stories, giving us clues about how God is moving in the world today, and how God wants us to move in the world.  This is true for the big stories on the news AND the little stories we tell each other, that seem so minor but can mean so much. When we listen to stories, we can hear the subtle ways the Kingdom of God is growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk—for example, as Pastor and I were able to do when we visited RefugeeOne’s offices late last fall to deliver the coats from the coat drive and hear the people who work there tell stories of how their own families had once been refugees and now they were able to turn around and give that help to others. Or when I was at the food pantry booth during Hometown Holidays and met a man who’d been helped by the food pantry in the past and now was giving back, both to the food pantry and to other vulnerable lives he encountered. Small stories about struggling families who have been loved with full pantries and warm homes don’t seem like much, but God is speaking love all through them.  

But, it can also be hard to listen to some stories—the families who don’t get fed, the refugee families who never make it to a haven someplace like Chicago, the many people who are marginalized or abused by those in positions of power—and it’s easy to dismiss them, tell ourselves we know what’s really going on, and close our ears to the pain of the storyteller.

And again, this is true for the small stories and small, secret hurts, too. I used to follow a lot of parenting pages on facebook, but I quit most of them because so often when a mom told her story about how she fed or birthed or disciplined her child, an army of moms would appear and tell her she was wrong wrong wrong and asking if she’d tried this or that (and she almost always had!) and it was obvious that very few people listened to her and heard how tired and anxious she had been, how difficult it was to get through the day trying to mother the way these moms wanted her to. No one loved her the way she needed to be loved or understood the struggles in her story. Instead almost everyone tried to rewrite it into the story they thought it ought to be—a story a little more like their own story.

But when someone is telling their story, the most important thing in that moment is to let God open your ears to hear the story rather than rushing to cover it up with, “Well, they must have done something wrong” or “They’ve got to be exaggerating,” or whatever.

And the good news is that God does open our ears so that we can understand those stories and respond to them with love! Jesus has done it over and over—for the disciples, sometimes that even meant taking them aside after telling the story and explaining it for them.

So if God is still speaking to us today and teaching us how to live and to love others, then the first place to look for those messages is in stories. If we want to carry out God’s love to the people around us, we have to listen to their stories too. God speaks to us through their stories, and that’s when God and God’s word enters our lives and we hear the things God wants us to hear. It’s through their stories that we’ll be able to know them and love them and bring God’s love to them. We don’t write other peoples’ stories—we listen to them. Listening—really listening instead of prejudging the storyteller or glossing over the ugly parts with our own assumptions—is loving. And when we do we may even hear God speaking through the story, telling us how much he loves the storyteller, and us, helping us love them better too. And that’s when God’s word enters our life, and their life, and we can delight in God and each other.

Cake and ashes

Yesterday I baked a cake and celebrated the day I was born. Tonight my pastor will put ashes on my forehead to remind me of my death. These moments when birth and death run up against each other sometimes feel like thin places, those moments when the veil ripples a little in the breeze and we catch a glimpse of something behind it all.

The reveal isn’t always so subtle, though. A few summers ago when I was breastfeeding my newborn at his uncle’s funeral, it felt more like a jagged crack. A famous poet once described eternity as “a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright”[1] but at the time it was very dark, as if the world was breaking apart, a thin shell enclosing nothing at all.

I’m not feeling any particular existential angst this time—just an unsettled sense that this is not where I expected I would be at this age. The crack isn't a gaping chasm oozing darkness—it's an uneven split on the sidewalk that I trip over Every. Single. Time. I thought that by the time I turned 30 I would have a more established place in the world, which I would have of course built on my years of education and experience, a place that would include what my husband, tongue firmly in cheek, calls “an established daily dress code.” 

He’s not very sympathetic to me, as you maybe noticed. When I told him I felt like I was still in just as much a state of *becoming* (as opposed to *being*) at 30 as I was at 20, he remarked, “You know when that stops, right? About six months after you’re dead.” Thanks, love.

Though of course he's right. Growth will happen no matter where we are. And a crack might be a spot of damage and weakness, but it’s also a wonderful place to put down some roots and bloom in unexpected places. Here’s to another year of finding those thin places and gaps in the world, of becoming and blooming where I never imagined I could.

This sprouted in our front steps last summer, and I hope it comes back this year, too.

---

[1] Henry Vaughan, “The World”

Speech and silence

I’ve been feeling weirdly restrained lately, especially online. There's been a lot of news online that I’ve had powerful feelings about that I’ve just—swallowed. I haven’t blogged about it and I’ve barely reacted to it on Facebook, either (aside from some passive ‘likes’ of things other people have posted, and even those I’ve scaled back). And it’s been wearing on me—while I tend not to get super opinionated online, having a voice to talk about the things on my heart is essential to me, even if no one’s reading. It’s not like I made a conscious choice to be quiet, either—I just keep choking when I want to talk.

One reason is that I’ve had a lot of things going on in my life that I’m not ready to talk about online yet, but they take up so much head space that they keep encroaching on the rest of the things I want to talk about, and it’s hard to untangle things. So sometimes it’s easier to just be quiet. The other reason is that I’ve found myself afraid of my audience.

While we were visiting family over Christmas, I found out that a couple (somewhat distant) family members had gotten upset by something innocuous I had posted on Facebook that revealed that I supported (or at least, didn’t not support) a political candidate they found appalling. So appalling that they felt compelled to tell another (closer) relative how appalled they were by my post, and this other relative then relayed this information to me.

It came at a time when I was already feeling particularly overexposed (due to those other things going on), and I wanted to shrink back in myself and hide. It wasn’t the fault of the person who told me (or really even the people who were upset by my post)—if I had been in a different headspace at the time, I would have laughed it off and maybe cheerfully (and invisibly) flipped off the offended party and gone on writing. But now I’m scheduled to preach during one of our church’s mid-week Lenten services, and as I started writing my sermon I realized how much I hadn’t been saying lately.

Ironically, the post that got people upset isn’t even the sort of thing I can control or predict—it was a sci-fi joke comparing a presidential candidate to an Asimovian robot—and there’s no way I can self-censor enough to prevent that kind of misunderstanding or overreaction. But I don’t want to unnecessarily provoke conflicts, either. So it’s got me thinking about what sorts of posts I would be willing to risk hearing, “So-and-so was really upset by Thing you wrote last week” at family gatherings (because there’s a difference between Anonymous Jerk online and Real Person you actually know).

I have some thoughts, but none particularly settled yet. Friends who post things on Facebook beyond recipes and pictures of cats/kids/dogs/bunnies: how do you decide which things are worth posting and which things are worth letting slide?

3rd and 4th graders are awesome

My 3rd and 4th grade Sunday school students are officially some of my favorite people. They jockey for more verses to read aloud and they ask ferociously indignant questions when they don’t understand something, whether or not it’s related to the actual reading. Sunday we read about Jesus’s baptism:

“Wait—this book is called LUKE!! Why are we reading about JOHN?!?!”
Me: “Different Johns.”
“Oh! That makes sense!!”
(Later) “What happened with Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection? Where’s that?”
Me (after pointing out which chapters in Luke tell that part of the story): “Don’t worry—we’ll spend LOTS of time on that later.”
“Oh good!...But WHY was Jesus crucified?!?”
Me: “…..You mean, why did people crucify him, or why did God—“
“The first one!”
“Well, that’s a long story [tells the long story]”
“That WAS really long!”

They’re all brilliant, and even though they’ve all grown up in the church, so much of the story is still weird and wonderful and confusing to them. We never get to the activities on the handouts because there’s so much to talk about. I’m really ok with that—yesterday the suggested activity involved flicking water at each other as part of the baptism discussion, and I’m thinking that it’s 5° degrees outside and the only reasonable explanation for someone thinking a children’s lesson in January should involve playing with water is that the author is Australian.

So yes, I sometimes play fast and loose with the lessons. When I saw the reading for today was Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 with a big gap in the middle, I decided that darn it, we were going to read the whole thing! I’m a bit of a completionist, and I think it’s important that kids be introduced to what kind of a person Jesus submitted himself to be baptized to—a loudmouth in the middle of the desert who wasn’t afraid to call out the powerful, but of whom the powerful were so afraid that they locked him up and eventually executed him. That matters. So we read that part too, even though it wasn’t going to be the focus of our discussion. And it was initially a weird digression, and they were confused about why Luke stuck that piece of the story there in the middle, but when my student asked (entirely out of the blue) why Jesus was crucified, having that context helped explain why powerful people might have it out for people like John the Baptist and Jesus (no one likes being called a “white-washed sepulcher” or a “brood of vipers”).

I take these stories for granted—I’ve been reading and hearing them for so long (for years I was even taken midterms on them!) that they’ve seeped into my subconscious. But then my students ask questions about something that I always assumed was obvious and I realize it wasn’t really obvious at all—they know individual stories, but they haven’t seen the connections between them. And by having to fill in those gaps I’m reminded of pieces of the story that I barely think about anymore, and suddenly realize how important they are.

Basically, everyone should spend more time talking with 3rd and 4th graders. Especially about stuff that matters.

My kids still complain that I don’t bring them candy every Sunday, but not as much as they used to, and I’ve promised them a LOT of candy if they can memorize the books of the Old and New Testament. Honestly I would be happy with them just being able to identify which book goes in which testament, but I won’t tell them that because they’re smart cookies and I’m sure they can do it. 

The view from the 9th day of Christmas

Christmas (ok, actually most of the month of December) isn’t really a time that lends itself to sitting and writing blog posts. Mab’s home from school, we’re often sleeping in (so B can’t be depended on to take his usual afternoon nap), and my down time is spent on Christmas shopping and sewing projects for gifts, not to mention all the family visiting and cookie-eating. And now it’s 2016 and I’m supposed to go straight from first to fifth gear and resolutely reform all the bad habits I’ve picked up as the weather’s gotten colder and I’ve burrowed deeper and deeper under a thick layer of sweaters, wool socks, throw blankets, festive baked goods, and hot cups of tea with way too much honey.

I do in fact have some healthy practices I dropped last year that I want to restart, but with the new year beginning on a Friday, I’m actually going to start on Monday when our family gets back into our usual routine.

Right now, though, it’s still Christmas. The little hand wheel lectionary calendar I use with my third and fourth grade Sunday School students labels tomorrow “Christmas 2,” and the 12^th day of Christmas isn’t until January 5^th.

The tree may still be up, but I gave up replacing all the ornaments
B pulled down about a week ago.

My daughter and husband are still on break, so our tree is still up and we are still sleeping in and having pancakes almost every morning (when we’re not making egg+bacon+cheese sandwiches on the English muffins my husband baked. He’s fabulous). We’ve gone to the Museum of Science and Industry to look at all the Christmas trees twice, and we’ve been doing a few projects and made a couple big purchases for the house, but only the fun ones (like taking out the little white ceiling fan in the kitchen that tried to illuminate the entire room with only a single inadequate bulb, and replacing the whole thing with a glorious chandelier. I am obsessed with chandeliers—our house currently has four and I’m angling for more).

Let there be light!
Also, the ReStore is the best place for chandeliers.

I moseyed my way through Advent to Christmas, and now I’m continuing to ramble on through Christmas itself. There’s no rush to get back to everyday life if I don’t have to. My best friend and I were discussing how rituals that reinforce different values can help us get ourselves back into balance after a time of getting ourselves out-of-whack while scrambling through a difficult patch. And while my life has, on the surface, been pretty serene, inside I have been all kinds of worked-up, for many reasons. Taking some extra time to drink coffee in the morning with my husband in the light of the Christmas tree and going sledding with the kids has been exactly what I needed to slow my racing thoughts down. Hopefully on Monday I’ll be ready to spring back into action.