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.