My anti-busy Lent

I love Lent.

Which yes, is kind of weird. But I know I'm not the only person who does! Part of it is that I'm one of those people that Barbara Brown Taylor calls "lunar Christians" and seasons like Lent and Advent are made for people who like to sit in the dark and ponder their doubts. The other reason, maybe, is that Lent is a time for doing less--eating less, boozing less, Facebooking less, whatever, in order to make more space for Good in our lives. For me, more space for God usually includes going to church more.

This year, though, there were out-of-state travels to see people I love, David being on-call on Sunday mornings and so unable to help wrangle kids in the pew, stomach viruses, and a new very part time job (that nevertheless occupied a lot of head space, especially the first few weeks). And I actually ended up going to church less than usual.

At first this really bothered me. But I still kept my little fast and added a discipline that I didn't entirely fail, and I've ended this Lent with a sort of peaceful resignation--I'm not Super Christian Lady, and that's ok. 

I tried reading through the entire New Testament with the read of the congregation. I didn't finish (I got bogged down in Romans, which reminded me way too much of a really unproductive and spiritually pedantic stage in my life) but it was good anyway. I read the Message version, to try to keep away from any automatic responses to passages I've read so many times before, in very different contexts. 
Galatians, of all places, had the most to say to me this year.

4-6 "I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.
(...)
25-26 Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original."

Happy Easter, all you marvelous originals!

Thanksgiving sermon

Preached at Bethany Lutheran Church on Saturday evening, November 18 and Sunday morning, November 19. 

Deuteronomy 8:7-18

Psalm 65

2 Corinthians 9:6-15

Luke 17:11-19

When Pastor Elaina gave me the readings for this weekend, I thought I knew the story of the Ten Lepers really well. It’s in a beautiful illustrated volume of Bible Stories for Children that was given to our family for Blaise’s baptism, and I’ve read that version aloud many times over the past four years. But of course, the authors chose to simplify the story for their audience to keep the focus on the importance of saying Thank You to Jesus for your blessings. So as it turns out, there was a key detail left out: the fact that the former leper who returned to give thanks is a Samaritan.

There’s something about Jesus and Samaritans that keeps popping up, over and over in the Gospels. Today, when the phrase “good Samaritan” has come to be synonymous with “helpful passerby,” it’s easy to overlook how shocking this former leper’s ethnicity would have been, because for the original audience, a “good Samaritan” would probably have been considered an oxymoron. A Samaritan role model? Inconceivable!

It’s not just that Samaritans were foreign. In fact, Samaritans were actually descended from from the tribes that had been conquered by the Assyrians. No, they were also heretics—they claimed to worship the same god, but they didn’t do it in the “right way”—they worshiped on Mt. Gerazim instead of at the Temple in Jerusalem, and 2 Kings claims that their worship had become corrupted by the worship of other gods as well. Tensions erupted a little over a hundred years before Jesus’s birth, when the Jews destroyed the Samaritan temple, and then again around the time of his birth, when the Samaritans defiled the Jewish temple with human bones.

So for Jesus’s contemporaries, when they thought of their neighbors in Samaria, there was disgust, there was anger, there was fear. Everyone has those areas, of course—the parts of town, or the next town over, where you don’t go, where you lock your doors if there’s no way to avoid going through it, where you certainly wouldn’t let your kids go for an event. Those countries where you would never go for vacation, or let your kid go backpacking or do a study abroad. The sort of places where the only Americans who do visit are associated with the military in some way. And if the people from those areas come here, they are often looked at with suspicion, treated with caution or even hostility. For Jesus’s community, that neighborhood was Samaria.

So note that nine of the lepers are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do—go to the priest to fulfill the requirements of the law. In Leviticus, God directs people who have been cured of leprosy or other skin diseases to go to the priest to be officially declared clean by means of a special sacrificial ceremony. I looked it up—it’s eight days long! And finally, once that’s done, the person who has been healed can officially rejoin their community. So these nine lepers already have plenty to do! Besides, Jesus didn’t tell them to be sure to send a thank you note, or anything like that.

But meanwhile, as you might expect, the tenth, the Samaritan, the foreigner from an enemy nation, ISN’T following the directions.

Instead, he’s overwhelmed with gratitude, so he ignores the rules and the eight-day ceremony and runs back in the opposite direction from where Jesus told him to go.

He’s the one who gets it right—or rather, he’s the one who makes the others look bad. I’m imagining Jesus’s disappointed father look—you know the face, right? The one your dad made when he wasn’t ANGRY at you, per se, but he knew you could have done better. The other nine followed the rules! They were fulfilling their responsibilities—things that weren’t just old laws or customs but obligations important enough for Jesus to actually remind them to do!

Instead, the example we’re supposed to follow isn’t the nine responsible former lepers, but the one who who doesn’t live in the right country and doesn’t worship in the right way, the one whose nation has been at odds with Jesus’s nation for hundreds of years. By focusing only on following the directions, the nine responsible former lepers missed out on something. Because by returning, the Samaritan is given another gift—being “well.”

Being cleansed is one thing, but being made well, being made whole, is another. The story uses two different words here, and the first one that’s translated as “clean” means physical healing—their bodies have been made well. The second one, though, that’s translated as “made well” is a spiritual healing as well—it’s the same word that’s translated “salvation.” All of the lepers were made physically well, but the faith and gratitude of the one who came back made him spiritually well, too.

What makes gratitude so powerful that it can bring about that kind of wholeness?

The reading from Deuteronomy reminds us that giving thanks keeps us turned towards God. After the Israelites have settled into their new land, and become comfortable and established and wealthy, God reminds them of the importance of gratitude. “Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.” We often want to give credit to ourselves, for our own hard work or good choices—but thankfulness turns us away from ourselves back to God, who gives us the ability to work and the wisdom to make the right choices.

And now that we’ve looked to God, what happens? The joy is magnified!

In the psalm for today, we catch a glimpse of the intense joy of gratitude--it's full of images of overflowing delight! and it's intended to be sung as a congregation in worship, where speaking or singing your thanks to God amplifies it by sharing it with everyone else. And then again, the reading from 2 Corinthians describes how gratitude leads to generosity, which leads to more gratitude! Gratitude is like a mirror, and when you light a candle in a room full of mirrors, the whole place lights up.

And today, I would like to give thanks to God for surprising mirrors of God’s gifts and God’s glory, like the Samaritan in our gospel reading, who help us turn back to Jesus after we’ve gotten distracted by all our other obligations. Maybe after he ran back to thank Jesus, he turned back around and finished the task Jesus had given him, showed himself to the priest, did all the sacrifices. Or maybe he accepted Jesus’s pronouncement of his wholeness and salvation as sufficient and decided that he was as whole as Jesus said he was without the need to do anything else, and went straight home to get on with his life. The person who wrote the story down for us didn’t seem to care. The story only says that turning back to Jesus to give thanks, before doing anything else, was more than enough, regardless of what else he may have done later.

Gratitude was enough for the Samaritan, it’s enough for our neighbors—even the ones who don’t do things the way that we do and make us a little nervous—and that means it’s enough for us, too. Because it’s not like we always get around to following every rule or fulfilling every obligation exactly the way we’re supposed to, either! Our gratitude, and our neighbors’ gratitude, and the Samaritan’s gratitude, still reflects the light of God everywhere we are, and makes us whole, just as we are, whether or not we ever get around to doing all that other important stuff we know we’re supposed to do. Thanks be to God.

A Halloween Story

When Mab was about Caederpie’s age, as is normal, she started fighting naps. I would lay down with her on the bed and hold her in my arms, and she would scream and scream and scream until she passed out. At some point I realized that she was actually screaming a word--”Gum”. Which didn’t make any sense at all, so I didn’t think much of it, until a months later, when she was putting more words together.

It turns out, Gum was a person. At naptime, she was terrified that Gum would get her. At other times, she was more blasé about him. “He a little guy, but he have a BIG shadow,” she explained. She claimed that he wasn’t scary, but promised that she would protect us anyway. He lived in the walls and floor, and sometimes he was in the toilet, and when he was in there, she refused to sit on it until I told her to yell at him to leave her alone. 

Apparently, Gum listened to her and eventually he faded away, like so many weird toddler phases.

Several years later, we had moved to a new house, and the new owners of our old house contacted my husband to ask some questions about some weird problems they were having with the plumbing. He answered their questions as well as he could, and then, before they hung up, they asked if the house was haunted. Not to his knowledge, he said. Well, they explained, because they’d seen a large dark shadow in the house.

“Gum’s back in the toilet!” we laughed afterwards. But it reminded me of something else that I had forgotten.

When the Golden Boy was the same age Mab had been when she first started fighting her naps and screaming about Gum, we were in a weird, in-between stage when my husband had already moved to start his new job while I stayed behind with the kids to finish out the semester and my dissertation. That day, Mab was already at preschool, but I was still at home, upstairs in the bedroom, trying to rock the Golden Boy down for a nap before my MIL got there to take over for me while I went to go teach.

The door was shut, but there was a line of sunlight at the bottom of it from the hall window on the other side. And for a moment, there was the shadow of a footstep on the other side.

I told myself it was a mouse (not unreasonable in this house) but there had been no signs of mice upstairs, and there was no rustling in the walls. Then I thought it must be tree branch, but it never reappeared the way the shadow of a branch would if it were swaying rhythmically in the wind.

The Golden Boy had finally fallen asleep, and it was completely silent, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was on the other side of the door, and I sat perfectly still for the next fifteen minutes, my heart thudding, until finally I heard my MIL’s car pull up and the front door open. 

Reformation 500, or, why I like being a Lutheran.

To wind up to the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation at the end of the month, members of our church are taking turns sharing at the beginning of the service what about being Lutheran makes our hearts sing. This week was my turn. 

I knew very little about being Lutheran when I first came to Bethany—this is actually probably still true. I had encountered Nadia Bolz Weber and thought she seemed kind of cool, but that was about it! I had a short list of denominations that I thought might be a good fit for us, and this was the one across the street from us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So it’s hard for me to separate the things I love about being Lutheran from the things I love about Bethany, because it’s been the same thing to me. So here goes.

I love the way the church makes room for contradictions and paradoxes. We do it with communion—is it bread and wine, or is it the body and blood of Christ? Yes! The Bible is confusing, Jesus said some strange stuff, life is complicated, our own history—as Lutherans and as Americans—is a mess, people who love God constantly disagree about all kinds of important things, and everyone has, or at least thinks they have, a good reason for what they think and do, and instead of pretending that it’s all quite simple and ignoring the contradictions in one way or another, the church leaves space for people to continue to work and serve together and to see each other as true members of the same church even while they disagree.

So the big one, the classic we are both sinners AND saints! This welcomes all of us into the church, regardless of whether or not we’ve repented “enough” (whatever that means). You’re a sinner, so it’s not like you’ll ever be repented enough anyway, but you’re also a saint, which means you’re already enough, just as you are. You want to come? Great! You want to serve? Even better! You don’t have to have cleaned yourself up to some arbitrary standard before you can start working. You just start.

And since we’re all sinners, we’re never going to have the exact right answers, and neither is anyone else, so rather than get on our high horse about how wrong that person is about this thing or that other thing, we can focus on how we’re all still saints of God and we’d better just figure out how to work together the best way we can, however that is.

And then also to cut ourselves some slack when this is harder than we expected, and we mess up, and get into fights, and other generally un-Christ-like behavior.

When we were preparing to move up here, and therefore also find a new church (which is a terrifying and exhausting task! I have so many strong opinions about church websites now!), I did a lot of research about the ELCA’s positions on all kinds of social issues, and many of them were so refreshing to read—there were statements of repentance, recognizing that the people in the church, even the ones with the very fanciest vestments, are sinners, and others that acknowledged the good faith on both sides of the argument that left space for members to live out these contradictory truths in the best way they could, because the church is made of saints, too.

Here’s another one: we have reformed, and we are still reforming. The church treasures the traditions that have given structure and stability to generations of faithful believers, AND looks for the places where it still needs to grow and evolve. I hope that we’ll be hearing about what these traditions mean to some of you who’ve grown up with them. I didn’t, and I find them very beautiful, and I’m glad my kids are growing up with them, but they aren’t part of my bones the way they are for many people here. That’s something very special here, and unique among the various traditions that I’ve been part of, how the church is practicing looking both backwards for the past good that sustains us, and forward for the future good that we can pursue. We don’t do it perfectly, because we’re sinners, but we’re working on it anyway, because we’re saints.

Body

The baby is now over a year old, and I’ve been a little frustrated in my (lack of) weight loss. By the time my first baby was a year old, I had lost all the baby weight + twenty-some pounds. I was the skinniest I’d been since puberty, and as someone who’d always felt more than a smidge wider than I wanted, it was amazing. And I lost very nearly that much weight again with my second baby. Breastfeeding was like some kind of magical elixir that gave me the body I’d always imagined (not to mention the fabulous boobs!).

Third baby is different. I lost exactly the baby-related weight over the first nine months (which is to say, down to the weight I was before I got pregnant with my oldest child), and then stopped. I’m over thirty now, which probably has something to do with it, but it’s disappointing.

So the other day I started thinking—maybe I should go about being a little more on-purpose about losing weight? Like, make some kind of plan, set some goals? I know that BMI is a flawed metric, but I figured it would give me some kind of ballpark idea as to what I should be aiming for.

And here’s what it gave me.

Turns out there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my weight. Which seemed odd. So I redid the numbers for my weight this time six years ago, when I had felt so amazing.

Oh.

Knowing that my weight is technically fine doesn’t change my feelings about lumpy squishiness, or my fond memories of that short-lived thigh gap. It does change how I should probably try to deal with it, though. It’s easier for me to give up bedtime snacks, or beer with dinner, or whatever, than it is for me to do something that causes me to sweat or be out of breath, to strengthen and de-squish the muscles in my middle.

And it’s even harder to unlearn that lesson summed up Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller,” to allow myself to take up space on my couch or in my clothes.

Siblings

Yesterday afternoon I was startled by the intensity of a thought that has rarely, if ever, crossed my mind. I wish Queen Mab had a sister. (I blame an onslaught of flowery pink facebook memes on sisterhood for the lapse, and possibly a song from Frozen having got stuck in my head) My childhood memories of having a sister close to my age glowed with rosy nostalgia, and I even briefly imagined generic scenes involving fashion and makeup that had never actually taken place.

All this lasted for approximately three nanoseconds. I love my sister and respect the hell out of her badassery. We could talk on the phone for hours if our children would let us, and I often miss her, since we’ve spent much of our adult lives half a country apart.

And when we lived in the same house we were frequently sick of each other, and there was a simmering rivalry that put an uncomfortable edge on the activities we had in common. We never did each other’s makeup. I’m so glad we have each other, and I’m sure we were an education to each other growing up, too, about getting along with someone who is radically different from you! But there was nothing uniquely magical about the sisterly relationship (my sister does bear a striking resemblance to Anna from Frozen, though).

Queen Mab and the Golden Boy are, as I write this, immersed in some sort of fantastical imaginary landscape deep in the overgrowth wilderness of the back of our yard. They spent hours out there yesterday and will probably do so again today. They wear each other's clothes and shoes and cover for each other while they’re sneaking fistfuls of chocolate chips out of the pantry. If they were any closer, they would be a creepy codependent cult. They’re perfectly capable of making their own magic.

Eulogy

I am ashamed to admit that, for someone who prides herself on having all the best words, I haven’t been able to put them together to give a proper tribute to my Gamaw. I’m like a little kid at the grocery store who’s been separated from her mother. “What’s your mommy’s name, kid?” “Mommy.” “And what does she look like?” “She looks like a Mommy.”

What kind of a person was your Gamaw?

She was a Gamaw-person.

My sister and I looking at Highlights with our Gamaw

It seemed so self-evident that it didn’t occur to me that I should maybe be a little more specific until I was flailing around to explain just who, exactly, I had lost. I listened closely to the eulogy at her funeral, to find the words that I needed to explain her. Hospitality. Listening. Welcoming. Commitment to her family.

She wasn’t particularly religious, though she always asked for someone to pray at mealtimes. She had her own liturgy—restocking the fridge with Pepsi, the freezer with chocolate and lemon pies, serving the grandkids biscuits with honey, then wiping the sticky blinds clean again. Sometimes sundaes—vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup and crushed peanuts. She worked in her garden, read a lot of books, and painted folksy designs on the furniture she and my Gapaw sold in their shop. When I was older we—she and I, and later both of us with David—played a lot of Scrabble.

I don't know when this picture was taken--it's at their old house, so at least 20 years old. But this is what my Gapaw and Gamaw will always look like in my head, forever and ever.

Even when she was too tired for long visits with supper and games and dessert, there was always the generous listening. I knew it was safe to talk to her, because I never heard her say anything mean about anyone else, so I knew the things I said would be treated with respect too. She noticed when I had put effort into something I was wearing and told me I looked beautiful. 

Her Highness has my Gamaw's first name.

 Whenever I came to visit after I’d moved away, she would talk about me coming to see her and Gapaw as though I were doing them some tremendous favor. And I would thank her right back, because really, being there felt like she had done me a tremendous favor, too--I felt so very loved. Of course I would be there.