“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Matthew 13:34

~~~~~

Thinker and commentator Heather McGhee has her fingers on the pulse of politics and economics, but feels for the blood of racism flowing through both.

This morning, she posted this piece: Witnesses Should Not Have to Apologize for Not Saving George Floyd.

McGhee can’t shake the wrenching words and tears from those on the witness stand, innocent people who saw Derick Chauvin put his knee on George Floyd’s neck, citizens who were going about their normal day-to-days: shopping, strolling, working, and even simply being a nine-year-old girl who simply happened to be standing right there simply wearing the T-shirt she picked out that day: “LOVE,” it said, simply, across the front.

She noticed the guilt that wracked these people, that cracked their composure on the stand when they had to reenact what happened on that day, a day that began in an ordinary way, when they were ordinary people going about their ordinary business until the moment when they couldn’t counteract the killing.

They couldn’t save George Floyd—even though they tried.

They couldn’t, McGhee points out, because of the law of the land which threatened them as much as it did George Floyd.

“In the middle of the night,” she writes, “I lay awake wondering: What are all the laws and institutions that stop us from being able to do what our humanity cries out for us to do? To protect one another, to cherish the lives of our neighbors?”

It’s a Maundy Thursday set of questions.

~~~~~

Today is called Maundy Thursday, Maundy being directly related to the word ‘Commandment,’ meaning, well…commandment. The original Latin is mandatum (hence, also ‘mandate’) and carried then sense of a “legal order.”

So in the sphere of the liturgical church, we pay this day attention because on it, Jesus gave two new commandments, two, if you will, new laws, i.e., “Do this,” namely give thanksgiving to God and share Holy Communion with one another (see 1 Corinthians 11:23-25); and love one another as God has loved us.

But in McGhee’s sphere, she pays attention to every day.

She pays attention to how the commandments, that is how the laws, of prevailing systems circumvent, supersede, suppress what those in the Christian tradition might see as God’s Maundy Thursday law (though rooted far into the Old Testament) to love God and love your neighbor.

It’s difficult no matter what, sometimes, but she knows it’s especially difficult always if you aren’t white.

McGhee begins her article by speaking of empathy, this remarkable capacity with which humans have been given to know someone else’s perspective, to care about someone else’s experience, to feel someone else’s emotions, and to therefore be invested in them.

But in this case, it’s exactly empathy which causes these ordinary people extraordinary pain: they knew George Floyd’s helplessness, they cared about his life slipping away, they felt his fear, and they were invested in saving his life.

See, I think these witnesses did exactly as God commanded.

They loved George Floyd powerfully.

In that moment, even though they’d never known him, these children of God, loved by God, loved George Floyd.

And oh, did it, does it, hurt.

~~~~~

On that first Maundy Thursday, Jesus wanted the disciples to understand that love is risky.

He was not talking saccharine Precious Moments-like love here.

Jesus was talking about the sort of love that recognizes that every moment is precious, and every moment is precarious, and every moment calls us to passionate love.

Christians call this week “Passion Week.”

It causes some head tilts, because the word ‘passion’ is typically associated with sensual, sexual love.

But it’s rooted in the Latin word passionem, which means suffering.

To love is to suffer.

These people, these unwitting witnesses and would-be rescuers, they loved George Floyd and they suffered for it.

Any of us listening to this trial are also suffering, for we have come to love both George Floyd and these bystanders, and we suffer for our love.

~~~~~

McGhee ends her reflections on the witnesses who have wept on the stand with this observation and this question:

“We are all bystanders. How are we going to take our stand?”

I think what she’s saying is this: We are all witnesses to injustice, all the time.

I think what she’s asking is this: How are we going to love?

This Maundy Thursday, I think Jesus is saying and asking much the same thing.

She’d settled in to write an essay for her early admission college app, one in which she was asked to reflect on what it is to be a servant-leader.

As an aside, Else is brilliant, generous in spirit, compassionate, principled, wise, loaded with chutzpah, and did I mention I get to be her mama?

So with this prompt, E got to thinking about the word ‘hospitality,’ and did what she, both by nature and by nurture, is prone to do: she looked up its etymology.

”I often tease my English-major mother,” she began her essay, “about her love of etymology. Growing up, when I didn’t know the meaning of a word, I wouldn’t just get the definition of the word, oh no.

Instead, I got the definition along with its etymological origin. It was the admission fee to learn the word.”

Yes, yes it was and I am unrepentant about it.

But here’s what my Else learned while figuring out her take on the topic: the word ‘host’ comes from ghost-i, a root word in the Proto-Indo-European family that means host, sure, but it also refers to stranger and guest!

All at once!

Host and guest and stranger!

One stop hospitality shopping, I tell you.

Insofar as that is true, then, ghost-i less describes one of those particular roles, she discovered, but rather the relationship between them.

How cool is that?

You can’t just be host, and you can’t just be guest, and you can’t just be stranger, because if you are any one of them, you are related to all of them.

~~~~~

I’ve been thinking about this etymology ever since.

Can’t quite shake it.

It’s completely claimed my attention, I think, because of two reasons.

The first has to do with a show that Else, my son Karl, and I stumbled on recently: Netflix’s Somebody Feed Phil.

We’re positively hooked.

It’s chock-full of good will, good nature, good humor, and, of course, good food.

The basic premise-y schtick, of course, is that Mr. Rosenthal loves food, drink, travel, meeting people, hearing their stories, and learning the history that informs what’s on his plate and in his cup.

Left there, though, we could have a set up for a show that would be fine, that goes after the low-hanging fruit of co-mingled cute and cultured, and, like I say, it would be fine.

But what has captured our hearts about Somebody Feed Phil is that instead, Mr. Rosenthal and the producers infuse not just the show but—even though we can’t see it, it’s so palpably evident—their entire on-location stays with sheer delight, humility, vulnerability, and openness to new ways of being, thinking, acting, and, of course, eating.

See, it’s got this ghost-i thing going on, this inherent interrelationship between host, guest, and stranger.

Mr. Rosenthal is the host of the show, and so clearly has some measure of direction and authority, free to make people comfortable as they talk, on camera no less, about their home, their restaurants, their families, their cultures, their histories.

But he is also a stranger in these places, unfamiliar with the language, or where to go, or what he’s eating, or even, on regular occasion, how to eat it! He’s thrown to trust the host as guide or the host as restauranteur, or [gulp] the host as producer, aka his own brother.

And in addition, he is guest, dependent on the savvy and welcome of those who have agreed to take him in off the streets and make him feel, well, at home.

As my daughter wrote in her essay:

“Just like the etymology suggests, hospitable people can simultaneously be host, stranger, and guest. They know to welcome and initiate conversation, like an experienced host does. But they also know what it is to be the stranger, to be in unknown places surrounded by unknown ways, to be vulnerable and subject to the grace of others, to search out meaning and answers for the immediate context, and as a way of life. And they are guest, coming into unknown situations with openness and gratitude.“

Just another quick reminder that I get to be her mama.

Anyway, for exactly these reasons, although I hadn’t thought of it quite like it until my daughter wrote this essay, Else, Karl, and I, we bask in Somebody Feed Phil, I tell you, because we are so blame parched, thanks to these last several years, for this sort of generosity of spirit, of glee, of wide-eyed wonder, of the thrill of risk undertaken, of human connection across divides too many to count.

~~~~~

The implications of the ghost-i etymology has also merged with all sorts of conversations being had these days in the two pools in which I regular swim—church and politics—about whether and how people should be hospitable to one’s opponents.

For example, in his victory speech, our (hallelujah!) president-elect—and, in many ways, therefore our nation’s host-elect—Joe Biden said that “Trump supporters are not our enemies. They are Americans.”

That rankled people.

I was one of said rankled people.

It’s the word of a host who is not familiar with the perspective of a stranger.

The word ‘stranger’ comes from the Latin (get this) extraneus (!!!!!) namely “foreign, external, from without.”

You can be a stranger in one’s own land, of course: that’s what it is to be dis-enfranchised, a word which in its ‘enfranchised’ root means to be free, to be recognized and to have privilege, to be one sharing the collective rights of a land.

So if you are disenfranchised, you are none of these things.

Ask blacks, migrants, immigrants, Muslims, women, the disabled, the poor, and arguably even creation itself, how these last few years have gone, let alone an average day in US life, in comparison with those in standard power.

Disenfranchised people are, in more ways than one, really really extraneous.

So if you are in these ways a stranger, when, say, you have a group of people who, not least of all by their vote, are striving, in one way or another, to see you exclusively as a stranger (like for example, saying to those who are non-white citizens that they should “Go back home,” all the worse when ancestrally speaking, whites, in point of fact, are the strangers in the land), to see you as a hostile stranger (by way, say, of building walls or refusing amnesty to refugees desperate to flee violence—violence often enough caused by US policies), to see you and to exactly therefore disenfranchise you (seen in the GOP knack for gerrymandering and the Trump campaign’s recent attempts to toss out Biden votes exclusively from black and poor counties), to see you and consequently quite possibly off you (Black Lives Matter is founded on this very real fear), when you have Nazi and Confederate flags being waved and maskless people breathing on you as a form of assault, well…you got yourself a real live enemy, a not-exaggerating-about-it enemy, a person whose very adjective quite literally means ‘not a friend’, not (en-) friend (amicus).

So while at first blush, Biden’s words seem magnanimous, they reveal an understanding of a role less of a host than of a harborer of privilege, one who in preparation for visitors doesn’t actually clean but rather sweeps things under the rug.

Biden’s words were well-intentioned, of course—he has a big and unenviable task on his hands, to heal our nation after Trump—but in his attempt to create solidarity, he instead—and I do think inadvertently—created a haven for harm-mongers.

It’s a ‘whatevs’ response to deep insult, injury, and real and present harm and threat.

The host’s attempt at reconciliation did not make the vulnerable stranger safe, but rather all the more vulnerable, and made guests out of those who would prefer to change out the host, and in fact become the host, making everyone but those like them the unwelcome stranger.

~~~~~

As it turns out, we are having similar conversations in the Church—at least in my denomination, the ELCA—about how is it that we bridge the elephant/donkey divide.

Again, it’s a magnanimous notion, this yearning to respectfully disagree.

One could argue it’s even a Christian notion.

But in this present moment, we have the present day GOP calling in the Proud Boys, hanging with the Nazis, calling for the now-free murderer Kyle Rittenhouse to run for office, supporting a ham-handed coup attempt, spreading conspiracy theories, not to mention four years of tolerating such things sexual assault from our President, his mocking of people like my son with disabilities, and babies being ripped from the breast at the border.

See, the thing of it is, none of that is consistent with Jesus.

Jesus wasn’t so much known for both-sides-ing hate and harm.

It leads me to recall a story told by my mentor Walt Bouman, the time he up and excommunicated a parishioner of his.

Just told him flat out that he was not welcome at the Table.

Walt had discovered that the man was an unrepentant racist of deep conviction, and the moment that that became clear to him—the man was giving Walt a lift to the auto repair shop right then, as it happened—Walt said, “Nope.”

You can’t maintain that you’re a Christian and simultaneously wrap one’s arms around racist beliefs and ways.

Chose one or chose the other, but one cannot chose both.

You got two mutually exclusive things going on, my friend.

Now, although the story begins with that, and ensues with heaps of unfun phone calls and church council meetings, the story ends in an interesting way: Walt and the man engaged in conversation.

And in these visits, Walt learned that the guy had grown up steeped in prejudice. The man was 70 years old and had had absolutely no incentive to change—in fact, every incentive not too—until Walt drop-kicked him out of the church.

That drastic move, and the ensuing long-term conversation that Walt was willing to have with him, was exactly the necessary incentive for the guy to re-evaluate who he was and how he was in the world, precisely as one who had labeled himself a Christian.

“As we talked,” Walt writes, “he…allowed how his perspective and behavior could be a problem, something to struggle with…That was a great learning experience for me, because I think it was a final personal breakthrough in my understanding of how struggling with problems happens in the church. The church is not the place where all of our issues are solved or settled, but it is where we struggle with them.”

Walt was, actually, being a brilliant host and guest here: making clear to this man about the place and way of being to which he was being invited, and welcoming a stranger to discover themselves actually at home after all, though not the home he thought he’d had, and being open to discovering something new about Walt himself, and about the place he had thought he’d known all along!

It’s worth noting that the bread which Walt denied this man is called the Host, again tied to the root word of ghost-i, except this time with an emphasis on the stranger, or the victim, as the reference is to Jesus, who was the victim, and also simultaneously the host of the meal.

Etymologies are so damn cool.

~~~~~

Recently, Sarah Silverman told of her friendship with a man who was, at age 14, welcomed by a group of white supremacists.

It’s easy to condemn and hate his views, and, in fact, we should.

The thing of it is, she said, when you condemn his people, you condemn the only people who hosted him as stranger, transforming him into guest.

And you also make him all the more estranged from the possibility of discovering a different way of being, because why would you want to be part of a people who hate you?

Now, to be clear, it shouldn’t be the victim’s responsibility to bear the weight of the oppressor’s wrongs.

The ones being threatened need not make room for those who threaten.

You need not host hostility—ask anyone who has endured and finally left an abusive relationship.

Nonetheless, I think, that there is something here, something at the ghost-i nexus, that might serve as a model for some ways to go forward as a nation and as a Church.

A host sets the tone: this is who we are and this is how we do things here. If you are so inclined to join in, welcome!

That is, insofar as we are talking either about who we are as church or what we are as nation, each has to mean something. We welcome people to an identity: we are this and distinct from that.

For example, Mr. Rosenthal travels to places that are unique, embedded in their context and history and traditions, and that is what makes the episodes so engaging: you know when he’s in Saigon that he’s not in Tel Aviv, and yet when he’s in Saigon you learn about Saigon, and when he’s in Tel Aviv you learn about Tel Aviv, and yet somehow, even in the quiet background, you learn about both.

They are this but not that, and insofar as that is true, they are distinctly beautiful each in their own glorious uniqueness.

So you welcome people to a place with an identity.

But the thing is, I’m not at all sure that either the Church or our nation know what our identity is.

As Church, we’re wrestling with whether we are a place where the history and claims of the likes of Isaiah and Micah and Mary, people and prophets who proclaimed God’s allegiance with the least of these (not to mention, oh, I dunno, Jesus, who proclaimed that death is real but life is real-er), are central to our present and future claims.

If so, or if not, what does that mean?

As a nation, are we a place where all are created equal, and the tired, poor, and huddled masses are welcome?

If so, or if not, what does that mean?

Without some measure of clarity here, some sort of answer to these questions, we are at risk not only of not being able to host people to these places, but of not knowing these places ourselves, and of not knowing ourselves in these places.

A host is also alert, though, and attentive to the various needs and postures of those who are coming: guests may come with confidence and curiosity, and strangers with distrust and disgust.

So as host you recognize each as who they are, welcoming stranger and guest alike with nimbleness, humility, and vulnerability too.

To boot, and perhaps most important of all, the best hosts recognize that it could very well be the guest, or the stranger, who are the actual host in disguise, welcoming us to a new way of being, a new way of thinking, a new way of acting.

Near the end of her essay, Else wrote this:

The best leaders don’t build walls but rather open up borders of thought, of habits, of experience. They lead by welcoming and by wandering, by offering and knowing what it is to depend on offerings, by establishing possibilities while inviting new ones from new places.

When, that is, you embrace delight, thrill, joy, courage, vulnerability, perseverance, and humility in the co-mingled midst of others, you experience holy ghost-i.

(Also, did I mention I get to be Else’s mama?)

That’s “to give thanks” in Greek.

It’s where, of course, Christians get the word “Eucharist,” the ‘fancy name’ for the Lord’s Supper (“he took the bread, and having given thanks [εὐχαριστήσας], broke it..he took the cup, and having given thanks [εὐχαριστήσας] gave it to them…”).

I sit here writing, just having polished off leftover turkey on a homemade bun spread thickly with butter, mayo (yes, both), and cranberry sauce, with a leftover homemade pumpkin pie and homemade whipped cream chaser…

…which itself (*ahem*) chased a mid-morning snack of leftover homemade chocolate pecan bourbon pie…

…which itself (*ahem*) chased a breakfast of French toast made with the leftover homemade cranberry orange almond slow-rise bread.

While I may not give thanks tomorrow when I stand on my scale (though I totally gave thanks on Thursday that I had the foresight to wear a tunic, i.e., no waistband, for dinner) I certainly gave thanks at and for our Thanksgiving meal and the company that joined Karl, Else, and me to enjoy turkey and the trimmings: my father, a couple from our home congregation, my son’s PCA and her roommate, and a friend who has become an adopted member of our extended family (I may legit own my dogs, but let’s be clear: they belong to Dode).

The day was so peaceful and glad.

At one level, giving thanks really couldn’t be more simple: you take a moment, or a day, or a season, to recognize the things, or people, or circumstances you have surrounding you, and you pause to be grateful for them.

I for one have heaps of reasons for gratitude: my children are the light of my life in every possible way. My father is a regular part of our lives, and gives me occasional bottles of vodka. I love my vocation. Our home is filled with laughter and love and gladness and full-on cozy, all the time. We are all, more or less, healthy. We are, more or less, financially secure.

But the more you think about giving thanks (and let’s be clear, I have not just a vocational calling but a personal predisposition to think [*ahem* too much *ahem*] about things…) it’s more complicated.

Everything, you see, everything that we have for which we give thanks could be gone in an instant, and might even have come to us in the first place only via an instant of grace or luck.

Health. Home. Family. Food. Job. Love.

The more that one thinks about it (see above) the more one realizes that one can’t give thanks without experiencing a) some measure of humility in the face of the capriciousness of it all; and b) some measure of solidarity with those who don’t have what we do, again because of the capriciousness of it all.

I am so powerfully thankful that my glorious Karl is with us…and I still grieve his TBI and that his papa isn’t.

I am thankful that Else is strong and wise and righteous and I get to be her mama…and I know all too well that next Thanksgiving, or even tomorrow, something unspeakable could happen, making her chair forever empty.

I am thankful that I am strong and healthy and fit (either in spite of [or because of?] regular homemade pies, breads, rolls, etc…)…and yet so was my mother before pancreatic cancer suddenly claimed her.

I am thankful that, single mama that I am (and freelance theologian that I am), still and even so, we are not broke in this moment…and I know from lived experience what it is to have no cash in the credit union, and that when that happens, a dozen eggs is as affordable as a dozen diamonds (as it is, thankfully, I’m not at all a fan of diamonds, and would far rather have a carton of eggs, because then pies, breads, rolls etc. All evidence to the contrary, I’m awfully low maintenance. Really.).

I am thankful that I have a safe and loving family, but am fully aware that not all families are (despite outward appearances), and that even people with resources to leave unhappy and abusive circumstances legitimately find it terribly hard to do so, and so daunting even that despite the dysfunction and pain, it seems more viable, if not just plain necessary, to stay in toxic relationships that kill spirits and senses of self.

Upshot is, the more I’ve mulled, the more I’ve come to think that it isn’t possible to be thankful and self-satisfied, and even safe from the randomness of it all, at the same time.

Any of us, at any moment, could lose all about which we are thankful.

So perhaps more than being thankful for people, or for things, or for circumstances, perhaps it behooves us to think about whether our thankfulness can transcend the flukes for which we are grateful.

If, that is, these are all taken away, would we still be thankful?

It makes me wonder.

(And yes, I am a huge fan of “Stairway to Heaven,” and most especially this rendition by Heart at the Kennedy Honors, which I’ve listened to a zillion times and which makes me tear up every single time which is super embarrassing when I’m caught wiping tears while singing at the top of my lungs at a stoplight. And yes, I just listened to it again and am wiping tears while I type).

It makes me wonder, if something isn’t a sure thing, and moreover a sure thing for everyone, can one be thankful for it?

It’s a question that, albeit from a different angle, Joseph Sittler posed in his tiny book of large profundity and wit, Gravity and Grace, when telling the story of a woman who believed that Jesus always found her a parking space for her at the hospital where she worked.

It goes like this:

Once at a church where I was interim pastor for a year, there was a woman really hooked on the “me and Jesus” movement, and she used prayer as a kind of personal lubricant to everything she wanted. She worked at a hospital in Chicago, and she used to tell me, “Every morning when I drive from my house to the hospital, I pray to Jesus that he will find me a parking spot. And you know, pastor, he always does.” I kept asking myself, “What kind of God-relationship is built on this parking-space-finding Jesus that will sustain this woman in profound deprivation and tragedy? Is it enough?”

One Sunday morning I said to her, “Emma, suppose there is another woman driving in the second lane on the highway taking a sick child to the hospital, and you drive right in to the parking space that Jesus found for you, and this woman who is frantic with a sick child can’t find a space. How about her?”

“She didn’t pray hard enough,” was her retort.

That really stumped me. So I tried to think of how to correct her, but she was immune to argument.

Well, finally I found one, and I am sinfully proud of it; I think it was a straight gift. The next time I saw her I said, “You know this speech you give me about Jesus finding you a parking space, Emma. What do you suppose Mary was praying about jogging along that donkey on her way to Bethlehem?” Emma never mentioned the topic again. If Mary couldn’t find a parking space in which to have a baby, particularly that baby, then there must be something wrong with the parking-space-finding Jesus.” (Gravity and Grace, 26-27)

”If Mary couldn’t find a parking space in which to have a baby, particularly that baby, then there must be something wrong with the parking-space-finding Jesus.”

In the same way, if not everyone has food and clean water and a home and safety and health, then there must be something wrong with the thanks-giving that offers up gratitude for what you have, when we know darn well that others don’t have the same…sigh, ‘blessings,’ people call them.

But truth be told, I confess that even the use of the term ‘blessings’ gets under my skin.

[Is there a Thanksgiving equivalent of Scrooge? If so, some of you might think that I’m it—but hold on, hold on, my heart is not tight, I promise!)

How can we count our blessings without noticing that others don’t have them to count?

When surveying our array of blessings, does it not strike us as odd that God has apparently blessed us more than others?

Why is it that we have proverbial parking spaces all the time, and others don’t?

Can we be thankful for good circumstances that, in many ways, are utterly beyond our control, received by birth, luck, and the seat of our pants, and even momentarily forgetting that others don’t have them, and that ours could disappear in a moment?

Is it possible to be abundantly thankful and not therefore and thereby abundantly humbled?

~~~~~

I’ve always found it interesting that Thanksgiving immediately precedes the first Sunday of Advent.

As regular readers of this blog, not to mention people who know me well, know, I am a bit…rigid…about Advent.

Let’s call it ‘protective,’ rather than rigid.

Or…principled.  Principled will work.

Or let’s just call a thing what it is: I completely and brazenly judge people who put up their Christmas trees and decorations right after Thanksgiving.

The very point of Advent is the very thing that such people so wantonly, ruthlessly, and with nary a notice skip over: anticipating [she types with gritted teeth and staccato keyboard taps and a Seagull-annoyed-Yoda-like harumph].

Granted, granted, the word ‘anticipate’ literally means “to cause to happen sooner,’ or ‘to take care of ahead of time.’

Vis-a-vis Christmas decorations, whatEVER.

As its meaning…matured, though, ‘anticipate’ developed the meaning of ‘expecting,’ or ‘prepare for.’

See, you can’t anticipate something that is already here, because if it’s here, there’s no need to anticipate it.

~~~~

Maybe this is where the serendipity of Advent chasing the calendar heels of Thanksgiving can be…dare I say it…a blessing?

Seems that just as we wouldn’t need to be thankful for things that are givens, that couldn’t disappear at any minute, we wouldn’t need to anticipate something that is already here.

The reign of God is not here in its fullness yet.

To varying degrees and in varying ways, we all know this.

So the season of Advent invites us to prepare for the fullness of God’s reign, to anticipate it, to be alert to ways in which possibilities arise for it to break in.

This is not done à la that T-Shirt/bumper sticker/Sermon Illustrate Quip, “Jesus is coming back! Quick! Look busy!”

Instead, this is done by intentionally and habitually crafting spaces and ways for the reign of God to show forth, not least of all as a way to prepare the way for Jesus.

Maybe the whole thought experiment boils down to this:

Thanksgiving invites us to consider what is.

Advent invites us to consider what isn’t.

And both invite us to participate accordingly: to create new realities that are in accord with the way God intends it to be, so that the thanksgiving can be all the more widespread, all the more transcendent, and the anticipation of Jesus’ presence all the more a present reality.

~~~~~

Lest I be misunderstood, I am not suggesting that our thankfulness is a sham, and self-indulgent, and myopic, and that any joy we have around the holiday should be guilt-ridden.

No, no! Expressing thanks is a way of honoring God, of valuing the moment, of treasuring those whom we love, and of recognizing our finitude: all good things.

Perhaps above all, joy defies death, so I am all in on that.

Instead, I’ve found myself reflecting that the quite immediate juxtaposition of Thanksgiving and Advent has made me mindful of gratitude for what is right and of the call to lament what is not.

Also, I am so ridiculously, irredeemably, unapologetically Lutheran: always with me the already/not yet; both/and; saint/sinner….

In that Lutheran spirit, then, and the spirit of both Thanksgiving and Advent, I invite you to spread the possibilities for giving thanks, and to tangibly (and proleptically) anticipate the reign of God by sponsoring or volunteering with any of the organizations below (or any like them) in and through which you too can make the world a better place for which more people have reason to give more thanks, and in which more people can more fully live in fuller anticipation of the reign of God.

For even if/when we do not have the things for which we might wish we could give thanks, we always do have the promises of God.

And the promise of God is not least of all that God’s agenda is that of life and love, and that God wills us to have them and have them abundantly.

That promise is worthy alone of thanksgiving, along with giving thanks for the people of God who carry out the promises of God in word and in deed and in hope of the fullness of the advent of God in time, some time, soon and very soon.

~~~~~

CLEAN WATER

Clean Water Action

The Water Project

Water.org

POVERTY

The Poor People’s Campaign

Bread for the World

Meals on Wheels

JUSTICE

American Civil Liberties Organization

Common Cause

Equal Justice Initiative

HEALTH CARE ACCESSIBILITY

Families USA

Be A Hero/Action Network

Universal Health Care Action Network

HOUSING

National Low-Income Housing Coaltion

Mercy Housing

Rental Housing Action

FOOD

Second Harvest Heartland

Feeding America

Big Green

REFUGEES

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service

Refugee Council USA

Amnesty International

WOMEN’S SAFETY

National Domestic Abuse Hotline

Rape, Abuse, Incest, National Network (RAINN)

Equality Now

GLBTQIA RIGHTS

Human Rights Campaign

GLAAD

TransEquality

ANTI-RACISM

Race Forward

Anti-Defamation League

Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative

A WHOLE MESS OF ADVOCACY RESOURCES SUPPORTED BY THE ELCA

ELCA Action Center

 ~~~~~

Anna’s new book, I Can Do No Other: The Church’s New Here I Stand Moment is out.  Order it here or anywhere fine and nerdy books about theology are sold.

~~~~~

This holiday season, consider gifting your colleagues, friends, family, or rostered leader sessions with me through OMG: Center for Theological Conversation, or a stay here at the Spent Dandelion Theological Retreat Center.  Click on those respective links, or contact me at anna@omgcenter.com for more information.

Below is the text (and links to the audio and video) for the sermon I preached this last Sunday at my home congregation, Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, in Duluth, Minnesota.

This summer, our community is taking a short break from the common lectionary to focus on creation, dedicating a Sunday apiece to rain, trees, the cosmos, animals, and rivers.

I was asked to preach on the Cosmos.

That is, I was asked to preach on pretty much Everything.

What I learned, in preparing to speak on Everything, is that everything is related to everything.

Unfortunately, like Narcissus, we tend to be so obsessed with our own concerns that we fail to look up, to raise our heads, to see the beauty—and the pain—surrounding and connecting us all.

As it happens, the gospel text was from Luke, an apocalyptic passage which included (happily, for my sermon writing slant) the command for us to raise our heads, because our redemption is near.

Below, then, I considered Narcissus with his head bowed low, and our calling as Christians to instead raise our heads up high to notice and engage beauty—like the stars and feasts and love—and suffering—including by way of protesting in the streets and in letters to politicians about the abomination of the migrant camps and white supremacy.

As Christians, we are called to trust the One who not only raised heads, but who himself was raised, and who frees us to savor beauty and denounce suffering, all in the name of God.

You can access the mp3 here; the gospel reading begins at 24:40 into the service.

If you would like to see the video, download the free App Sunday Streams, and login using gloriadeilutheran. The video of the sermon begins at about 31:50 in.

I confess that I got emotional when I spoke about the policies to separate children and families, and about white supremacy: such real, horrific threats, and all too often enforced and condoned by those who self-identify as Christians.

Also, you will note that at the beginning of the sermon, I do tease our congregational chaplain, because during announcements she inadvertently invited everyone to happy hour rather than coffee hour, which segued quite nicely into my sermon.

More people than usual did show up, come to think of it…

At the very bottom are links to available resources to fight the abhorrent migrant detention centers, and lists of religious organizations—including the ELCA—which raise their voices in the name of God to object. The lists overlap, and the lists are hardly exhaustive.  I’d be grateful for additions to each category in any comments you offer!

Peace to you all.

______

GOSPEL  Luke 21:25-27

25There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

OK.

Buckle up and settle in, because we’ve got more or less only a handful of minutes to cover only the Cosmos and God before Doug Maguire is going to cut off my mic and turn out the lights, so let’s get cracking.

The other day, I was talking with Else about the daunting task at hand, and mentioned that while preparing and researching for this sermon, I had been learning and been reminded about all sorts of things, including that technically, we are indeed all cosmic star dust.  And, with a grin, I also pointed out that it had dawned on me there are at least three different ways of thinking about what you all wanted me to address today: Cosmos, as in the universe, or Cosmos, as in the flowers, or Cosmos, as in the adult beverage, to which Else, without missing a beat, said, also with a grin: Hmmm. Given that, if we really are all star dust, it does make a person wonder to what we are returning when we die: the universe, a garden, or the bar. 

OK.  

First of all, let’s just point out the obvious. Today is…Sunday.

Sun.Day. Like, it’s not a Dad joke, or even a bad joke, or even a joke! 

The day that we gather to worship has embedded in its very name the Sun—a fairly key body in the wider cosmos.

The name that we have for this day of the week is Sunday, because the Romans marked the day for devotion to the Sun God, and called it the dies Solis, the day of the sun. 

In fact, though not one of the texts assigned for the day, if you know that the ancient pagans believed that various heavenly bodies and earthly elements were themselves gods, it makes the text especially found in Genesis 1 particularly rich with Hebraic shade: “Oh, oh, I’m so sorry: that sun that y’all call a god? Our god made that sun. That water that you believe is a god? Ooops! Our god made that water. And that sky? Yup. Same. Thing. Bye Felicia.”   

Anyway, the ancient Germans happened to like that idea very much, and so also named the day after the sun (they had their own ancient German gods, and the tradition segued quite nicely) and so they up and adapted the tradition by calling the day Sonntag, the remnants which you also find in other languages, like the Scandinavian Søndag, for example.

It goes without saying that Christians picked up on this convenient connection too, albeit in a different fashion and for different purposes. In my studies I ran into a quote from St. Jerome who said, more or less, “If pagans call the Lord’s Day the ‘day of the sun,’ we willingly agree, for today the light of the world is raised, and today is revealed the sun of justice with healing in his rays.” 

Nothing new is ever under the sun, as they say.

But the thing about the cosmos is that it really is everything. It’s the sun, and thank God for that…but it is also the moon, and the stars, and the nebulae that we can’t see, and the black holes that we can’t seem to understand, and the possible other-forms-of-life that we can only imagine about and make movies about which range from the terrifying (Alien) to the adorable (ET). 

Closer to home, it is the water and the earth and the humans upon both, and the creatures who call one or the other home, and it is the electrons and protons and quarks that confuse us but make us who and what we are even so whether we can wrap our minds about the odd but true nature of quantum physics or not. 

So to think about the cosmos is, in short, to think about everything.

And this morning, everything in 15 minutes, give or take!

And it is not only to think about everything, but it is to realize that everything is connected to everything.

Everything is connected to everything.

Everything is connected to everyone.

Everyone is connected to everyone.

To think about cosmos, therefore, is to be humble, and to be humbled. 

I have a marvelous book by a late theologian, a man named Jeffrey Sobosan, a book with what I think went to print stuck with a kitschy name, but is a powerful text anyway: It’s called Romancing the Universe: On Theology, Cosmology, and Science.  There are marvelous and poetic ways he looks at the cosmos, and implications about our lookings and musings about it, but one small paragraph grabbed me in these last few weeks, thanks to the texts for the day.

Sobosan writes of the tale of Narcissus: you know, the beautiful young man of Greek mythology who found himself so stunning, so enticing, so gob-smacking gorgeous that, once he discovered his reflection in the water, he could not stop looking at his reflection.

Narcissus could not stop making himself the center of his life, and depending on the version of the tale you hear, he either melted into the earth to become a flower, or he threw himself into the pond out of despair because he could never have the one he loved—himself.

Sobosan does something interesting with this myth, though: he says that our tendency, as humans, is to be obsessed with ourselves in a very similar way. We love ourselves, and do so at the expense of loving others (as our poor Narcissus was wont to do). 

We spurn relationship—even recognition—of the other, and dedicate ourselves instead to…ourselves.

We care a lot about ourselves.  We look and muse about ourselves. 

A. Lot.

But in our obsession with ourselves, we tend to find that by being so self-absorbed, we are either left alone or we die alone, and have missed out on the glorious richness that is and is in the cosmos.

It’s a fairly distressing take on the State of Things, I will grant.

But Sobosan takes it further, looking for some hope and a different way to think through it all, and he pondered, what would have happened if Narcissus would have just looked up?

What would have happened if Narcissus had simply raised his eyes to the wonder and beauty that was all around him?

What would have happened if he had leaned his head back when the night sky was too dark for his reflection, but perfect to behold stars and galaxies to flicker his imagination…and perhaps even his humility?

What if he had recognized that the universe was not just about him?

Was not just him?

It is not too much of a stretch to ask the same of us, I do believe…which, of course, is what Sosoban is hoping readers will figure out is his ask.

What would happen if we would raise our heads from mulling our own self-absorbed fixations?

What would happen if we would raise our heads and see the world around us?

What would happen if we would raise our heads and see the world around us matters?

What would happen if we would raise our heads and thereby realize that we are obsessed with ourselves—our needs, our privilege, our ways, our wants, our prejudices—at the expense of the other—those who want to love us, and those who want to be loved by us, and those who simply need to not be harmed because our fixation on ourselves?

And what would happen if we would raise our heads and behold not just the beings but the beauty?

For there is so much beauty in the universe to behold: stars, and stained glass windows, and small frogs underfoot, and water, and music, and art, and falafel and red wine—I really like good falafel and a good red blend—and smiles from boys who would never smile again, and quick-wits and grins from girls who would otherwise have many reasons to be dour, and 82 year old fathers who relatively late in life they love soccer so much but love their daughter just that much more so they come to church and sit in the back to slide out right after this sermon to dash home and watch the rest of the women’s world soccer match, and congregations like this one that makes as a way of being: Welcome! We are glad you are here—yes, even you, because of course even you. All are welcome.

Now, there was much that struck me about Sosoban’s musings on Narcissus, but all the more because of our text from Luke. It’s short, so I’ll read it again:

25There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Now, first, I understand the gulp that this text inspires. 

But stick with me here, for a moment.  

Note that the people were to…raise their heads.

They were to look around, as the world and the heavens and the seas were roiling about, they were to raise their heads and in confidence no less.

Redemption is near.

The old order is passing, and a new one is beginning.

They were—we are—to be like Narcissus should have been.

Now it’s worth noting here that many scholars believe that Luke—the gospel writer who was particularly concerned with the poor, the dispossessed, and the disempowered—is speaking to people, Gentiles and Jews alike, who have been living in fear of the power of Rome.

It was a merciless regime, threatening people who disobeyed, who yielded to a different authority than it, who were impoverished, who were hapless and hopeless, who were not like the prevailing culture, with persecution of the most unpleasant sort. 

One Lutheran biblical theologian I know, Dr. Richard Swanson, notes that while Jews and Gentiles were both oppressed, the Jews had hope in a way that the Gentiles didn’t, for the Jews, they had Torah. In their religious tradition, they had not only an identity that reminded them of who they were and whose they were: they had hope.

And therefore, Swanson says, the text is referring less to the end times, and more to the way that things are every single day.

Anyone in this space who has suffered understands what he means here: when one is overwhelmed, is frightened, is alone, is desperate, is grieving, is hopeless—it seems as if everything is upended, everything is psychedelic in its presence, everything is unpredictable and unsteady.

But, to this experience and impression, what does Luke say? 

Not that we are to settle into the fetal position.

Not that we are to obsess about ourselves.

Instead, Luke says that we are to raise our heads and look around.

We are to Behold.

Like, in the beautiful poetic sense of the word: behold.

Notice.

Observe.

Be awed.

For God is present, even if it seems as if God is not.

God is present in the cosmos, for God created it, and if that is true, than the cosmos and all that is in it is worthy of being treated as if it is of God.

The earth.

The water.

The air.

The creepy crawly things of the earth.

Your family.

Your friends.

You.

And the immigrants.

The children at the border in shameful, in fact it is not too much to say evil, inhumane conditions.

Those suffering under white supremacy—both as oppressed and oppressors.

The poor.

The hungry.

The homeless.

Those in ill health.

Those who can’t afford insurance or treatments to heal.

The belittled.

The lonely.

The enemies.

Every single text today reminds us not that we are nothing, but that we are all, it is all, something.  

Even that gloriously snarky text from Job: “Where were you, you…name that should not be uttered from the pulpit.” 

Even there, and certainly in our psalm, and certainly in Colossians, we are reminded that God is named as the Creator of All.

All.

And given that, not to mention the awe that Sobosan carries for the cosmos, and not to mention the text from Luke, today we are being called to raise up our heads, and notice it all!

And if we do lift up our heads, we are not to put them back down again!

If we lift up our heads, we see where the unity, the integrity, the care, the concern for God’s creation is threatened, and we as people of God stand up, like the text says, we stand up, our heads raised and high, and we be the presence of God in those cosmic breaches.

Because, as I said above, to about the cosmos is, in short, to think about everything.

And it is not only to think about everything, but it is to realize that everything is connected to everything.

Take out the sun, for example, and we have troubles.

Stick a child in a insurmountably offensively misnamed “camp” separated from family and food and medical care and even hugs, we have troubles.

Remain silent in the face of such abominations—for that is what they are, abominations—and we have troubles.

We have troubles that we can’t see or even care about if our heads are down looking at our navels instead of looking up and noticing both nebulae and needy people, all of whom are of God!

To ponder the impossibly wide cosmos, that is, is to ponder the impossibly deep questions of despair, of apathy, of cruelty, of self-preservation…and of hope, and of compassion, of interconnection, and of beauty. 

We know something of God’s agenda for creation, because we have this marvelous (and not assigned for the day) text from Genesis where, after God created on every day, God set back, scanned the accomplishments of the day, and said, “Tov,” which in Hebrew means, “Good,” and then on the very last day, when God was really impressed with all the handiwork, God called it “Tov Meod,” really good.

This is, as the late theologian Robert Farrar Capon said, “terrific stuff.”  

We know that God loves God’s creation.

And we know that God is unpleased when it is maltreated, for we here gathered today have for varying reasons and degrees up and self-identified as Christ-ians. 

We also know something about God’s agenda for creation because we know Jesus.  

And Jesus just happened to care about creatures!

He cared powerfully, not just in head-shaking ways, but in head-raising ways—he noticed people’s pain, because his head was up, and he raised people’s heads who were down, down, down.

And he also cared about the beauty of the world: consider the lilies of the field, the sparrows, the super lousy wine that deserves an upgrade. 

As people of God, as creatures of the Cosmos, as followers of Christ, we are called to do the same.

We are so, because not only was Jesus’ head raised up—he was!  

And that resurrection proclaims that not only is the cosmos God’s, but so is the future, which is one where death will not win.

We are here, in fact, being fed with that Word, fed with the bread and wine, being fed with the news that Jesus did not stay dead, and then find ourselves walking out the door with our heads up, noticing pain, noticing beauty, and responding to it all as people of God to steward life where death reigns, and to steward awe at the cosmos where self-absorption has hold.

Like, really.  

Not making it up.

Like, write a letter to your Representatives about policies and politics which are obnoxious—with the emphasis on noxious.

March in the streets.

Welcome a stranger.

Buy a telescope and look for the Milky Way.

Take a hike.

Listen to music.

Make a feast. 

Fall in love. 

Show your love. 

Raise a beverage of your choice to beauty and the God who makes it.

People of God, lift up your heads.

It is Sunday.

The God of the Sun has made you with love and joy for this cosmos, and this cosmos needs you to love with joy—and to care about and care for—the cosmos.

That would be, specifically, caring about and for everything.

Including the cosmos, and perhaps even, if you are so inclined, the cosmos.

_____

Resources

https://www.texastribune.org/2018/06/18/heres-list-organizations-are-mobilizing-help-separated-immigrant-child/

https://secure3.convio.net/sojo/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1312

http://www.interfaithimmigration.org/resources/

https://support.elca.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1151

https://www.episcopalchurch.org/OGR/migration-refugees-immigration

https://www.ucc.org/justice_immigration

Religious Groups Who Denounce the Treatment of the Migrants

https://ministrylink.org/elca-presiding-bishop-faith-leaders-issue-statement-on-children-in-detention/

http://www.interfaithimmigration.org/2019/04/29/31-faith-organizations-call-for-moral-roadmap-in-federal-funding-allocations/

http://nationalcouncilofchurches.us/2066-2/

https://www.pcusa.org/news/2019/6/17/stated-clerk-sends-letters-congress-urging-protect/

I have Peter on my mind, and that he denied Jesus not once, not twice, but three times.

I have Peter’s denials in my mind and I have his weeping, once he heard that bird, his weeping is in my heart.

These three days, we live them differently than we do the other High Feast of our Christian tradition, namely Christmas.

Christmas we gladly import into our own experience: sweet swaddled babies, images of tenderness and quiet and a surround sound of love.

Let’s recreate that.

Let’s do that.

Let’s be that.

But betrayal and death? Anxiety and grief?

Who wants to vicariously live that out, let alone admit that we do all the damn time?

And so we tend not to.

We hear the stories read on Palm Sunday and we wave our palm branches like we are enacting a play, and we get quiet as we hear how the story both winds down and winds up. We sneak a listen like flies on the wall as the drama of a meal gone simultaneously awkward and deep is told. We wish that Peter could count and stop at two, have a metanoia moment, a “whoops, that was close,” and ‘fess up to his friendship with Jesus. We cringe at the ring of the nails, and we pucker at the thought of the vinegar touching our palate, and we wonder at (and may even whisper ourselves) the wail of Jesus’ feelings of forsakenness.

And then we go and we whip up a feast, and we color and hide eggs, and we lay out our Easter best, and that’s that.

It is best, we’ve latently decided, to keep the story of these three days at safe bay.

It is best to keep it there, and then, and not transpose and transport them to here, and to now.

But when we do that, you see, we deny not only the enduring import of the passion more or less safely rendered in text and music and preaching and table; we also deny ourselves the painful, cleansing weep that Peter sobbed when he realized how he denied Jesus.

Those tears.

Those ashamed, convicted tears that washed his face and washed his soul, searing both with repressed truth that his love for Jesus was true and solid and worthy of trust—when, it turns out, when it was convenient, when it was safe, when it didn’t threaten to harm his life, or his way of life.

See, we’d prefer to deny that we are Peter.

But we are.

Every time that we deny the hungry food, the stranger welcome, the sinner forgiveness, the sick healing, we deny Jesus.

Also troubling?

When we deny them food, and welcome, and forgiveness, and healing, we are denying them their humanity.

Also troubling?

When we deny them that, we are simultaneously denying them our own.

Also troubling?

We deny that all are made in the image of God. 

And (do you hear the bird croon?) therefore, when we deny another their humanity, we deny God.

Babies are easier.

Birds are harder.

Listen to the babies cry before the bird cries out.

Weep.

Then, this Good Friday, stop living in denial.

Below is both the text and the audio of the sermon I preached at my home congregation last Sunday: you can hear the sermon (with the gospel reading first) via the audio link here.

In it, I fussed a bit with how dangerous it is to speak unwelcome truth, how anger can be holy and righteous, how walls are neither holy nor righteous, how love may mean being angry and leaving someone behind, and how although we might want to think twice about inviting Jesus to our dinner parties, he invites us to his, every Sunday, even though he’s probably angry with us, in spite of and because of his deep love for us, for all of us.

One-stop shopping for a mess of matters of faith, really.

The texts for the day included Jeremiah 1:4-10, Psalm 71:1-6, I Corinthians 13:1-13, and Luke 4:21-30, found below.

(A huge thank you to Doug Maguire, the Computer Man of Duluth, not only for managing the video streaming of the services at Gloria Dei Lutheran, but for spending his precious time excerpting the text and sermon above! Grateful!)

_____

Luke 4:21-30

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free, 

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ 

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21Then [Jesus] began to say to [all in the synagogue in Nazareth,] “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” 23He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’ ” 24And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. 25But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; 26yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” 28When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

—————

Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

So the last Sunday that I stood in this pulpit, it was because Pr. Carlson had a wedding commitment that, happily for him, fell on Trinity Sunday, because no pastor wants to preach on Trinity Sunday, because nobody really gets the Trinity anyway.

This Sunday he’s gone again, and I stand in this pulpit again, and this time the texts largely have to do with people being called by God to preach dicey words, and for their faithful troubles right after that having to hide in rocks or almost ending up themselves being chucked off of them and in related news my van is already running and ready to go.

I’m detecting a trend, here, sisters and brothers of Gloria Dei.

So.

Unless a person has some large vats and water at the ready for a quick H2O-to-super-good-wine number, I’m not so sure that it’s the best idea ever, depending on the vibe you’re looking for, to invite Jesus to your dinner party. 

Pictures of Jesus laughing broadly, hymns about him ever so meek and mild, these probably true and notwithstanding in their own right and way, but let’s be clear: the guy could also be a real kill-joy.

We tend to want to romanticize him, spiritualize him, domesticate him, but in point of fact, Jesus was often untamed, unpredictable, and, occasionally uncouth.

Take our text from today. You’ll notice that I read the verses before those ‘officially’ included in the readings for this morning; I did, because without knowing the lay-up, it’s impossible to understand what got everybody all riled up. 

So Jesus shows up in his hometown, Nazareth.  

This is, by the way, the same Nazareth about which we hear in the gospel of John, when Philip announced to Nathanael that they had discovered the Messiah who had been long expected, and Nathanael said, fairly untactfully, gotta say, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”

It’s not that Nazareth was necessarily a bad town, one that might call up Mos Eisely-like images, the “”wretched hive of scum and villainy” where Obi Wan, Luke, Han Solo and Chewbacca met up for the first time. 

Nope. 

Nazareth was just…tiny.  Humble.  Were it to be around today, you might just see right on its outskirts proud signs the likes of which you see in communities where famous politicians, sports people, or actors grew up: “Nazareth: Proud Home of Jesus the Christ!”

So here’s Jesus, just having been baptized, just having been badgered by Satan in the desert, and just having inaugurated his public ministry in Galilee, and now he makes a stop in his hometown Nazareth.

And because rabbis are going to rabbi, he went to the synagogue, as, we hear was his custom, and he reads these words from Isaiah, words that at the same time anchor Jesus both to the communally shared past and the communally shared present moment:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free, 

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ 

And we get a sense, not from anything explicit in the text, but rather because of the hinted mood created by Luke’s retelling, that Jesus read this Scripture, silence all around as people listened to his voice, and he sat down, the silence still echoing in the room, people leaning in to hear what teaching would come next, and then came this:  “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

In short, implies Jesus, I’m the guy. I’m the One who is ushering all that this text promises.  The one you knew as a child who slipped from his parents for a few days in Jerusalem at Passover, the one you knew who pounded nails for your steps and your fences, that one now is God’s anointed one. 

So imagine the thrill of those gathered: amazed not only because they could say, “I knew him when,” but also because they began to collectively wonder whether the One for whom generations had waited was right, right there.

So, because elders gonna elder, Luke tells us, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’”

You can almost hear the proud clucking.  “He did so well! A remarkable young man! Why, I recall when he was just knee-high to a locust.” 

Now, it’s not quite clear why the “Is not this Joseph’s son” question is asked. 

Lots of theories here: maybe it falls under the clucking-rubric, a proud repetition of what everyone knew, as in “Is not this Joseph’s son;” maybe it was because some people felt that Jesus was getting a little too proud himself, and they wanted to bring him down a few notches, as in, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” or maybe Luke mentions it ironically: technically he wasn’t, actually, Joseph’s son, which is precisely the point of what Jesus was trying to say.

Still, you get this important sense: Jesus came back to his home town and home worshipping community, he preached, and people were proud and glad.

So what does Jesus do? 

Say, “Aw shucks, thanks?” Say, “I couldn’t have done it with out Mom and Dad” and so forth?

Nope.

Instead, he picks a fight. 

He up and picks a fight, yes he does, right there for God and all to see.

Out of nowhere and straight away, he hauls off and sneers: “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’ ” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” 

Look at the text! It’s right there and sheesh.

Where did that come from?  On what wrong side of how many beds did he get up on?

Here these people were doing nothing other than go to synagogue, be pleased to have the hometown boy make good in their presence, praise him…and what do they get in return? Slams, smears, and huffy insults. 

Except he wasn’t being merely cross, terse, and bad-tempered. 

Rather, it seems like it wasn’t just the locals who knew Jesus well.  

Instead, it seems as if Jesus knew the locals well right on back.

And it seems as if he could sense that they were expecting a little extra something from him, a holy bonus, if you will.  

Because he came from them, because he was one of them, they should probably get some special attention from the hometown boy, right?

Wrong, said Jesus. 

Dipping into more scripture—scripture with which they were all familiar, which they all knew—Jesus reminds them of two times when a prophet decidedly did not give preferential treatment to the locals, but instead, decidedly offered it to the outcasts, to the foreigners, to the “they’re not from around here’s” instead.

The ones who consistently get special treatment from God are, as Fr. Robert Farrar Capon said, the last, least, lost, little, and dead.

So….upshot; neither Isaiah nor Jesus went down so great that day.

What we’d like to have happen next, I think, is that people go, “OHHhhhhhh. We get it. Sorry! Tell us more!” And then Jesus sticks around, has conversation that further illuminates their minds and their hearts, and a few loaves and fishes turn into bushelfuls to show it’s all good and all wine under the bridge.

Instead, the people become enraged.  

That is a powerful word: Luke says that “they were filled with rage,” and decide that the best course of action is to hurl him from the cliffs to off him.

This, by the way, is the same him whom they were lauding a moment before, when they thought he was who they thought he was, instead of who he is, namely a truth-teller who ticks people off when the truth cuts close.

Recognizing that not only is he not welcome anymore in his hometown (pretty much proving his words right about prophets as he spoke them), he also realized that no good was going to come from either preaching the truth or seeking reconciliation.  

Instead, he leaves them to speak elsewhere truth, to change hearts and minds, of those who instead might have the ears to hear and the hearts to change. 

He…up and left. Not once, not once do you 1 Cor 13-esque patience or kindness, but instead you see even Jesus naming some truths, riling people up, evaluating the situation, and throwing up his hands and leaving.

Some people can’t cope with truth. They flare, they attack, and there is nothing doing to change their minds, at least in the moment.  The best and only thing to do is to leave.

Several additional things to note:

The words that the people from Nazareth initially liked were these: the poor would be encouraged, the captives would be released, the blind would see, the oppressed would be free. 

Theoretically, we’re down with that, they said.

Sometime when there is pie in the sky pie and by, we are so in. 

But it was the implication of these words that they didn’t like: that actually means that you have to change your economies, your systems, your assumptions, your ways of being, your hearts…now.  “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled.” 

Truthfully, this good news might not feel so good for those who have it good now.

But for those who do not, this news is good, today.

For everyone, though, it is ultimately good news, that fairness, equity, and justice are restored for all. 

Directly related here is another thing these folks didn’t like to hear so very much: God apparently has no time for boundaries, for barriers, for human-constructed walls of any sort that seek to portion off God’s welcome and well-being. 

Nobody is privvied in God’s reign, except the last, lost, least, little, broken, and dead, no matter their nationality, skin color, desperation, gender or gender identification, sexuality, and wealth bracket. 

If you build a wall, if you say that these people are in and these people are out, turns out that God is actually with those on the other side of your arbitrary, heinous boundary, Jesus said.  

These folks didn’t like that, so very much.

It made them mad, which is precisely what seems to wash over this entire text: anger. 

It’s a five-letter word that in Christians circles could just as well be a four-letter word but here it is all front-and-center-y: Jesus and the people of Nazareth are flared-nose angry.

 Jesus is angry because the people do not understand his words, don’t want to, and actively refuse to.

The people are angry because, in fact, they actually do understand his words, annnnnd don’t want to, and actively refuse to.

We Christians? We don’t really know what to do with anger.

Nobody likes it, of course, anger: being angry or being the recipient of it.

We’d much rather be all about 1 Corinthians 13, right? Love, patience, kindness, and the like.

Goes far better with water and wine. 

But the hard truth, though, is that sometimes anger is not just necessary; it is the only thing called for in a situation.

It’s righteous. It’s holy. It’s aligned with God.

Truth is, I can’t decide whether the committee that opted to lump this text from Luke with this text from 1 Cor. was malevolent or inspired.  

We love love, and love talking about love more than talking about anger, and we sure as heck like being loving more than being angry, but here’s the thing: Jesus was angry with the people of Nazareth because he loved them and because he loved those who were being excluded by them.

If he hadn’t loved them, he wouldn’t have cared a whit!

But he did! 

He loved them so much that he was not just snarky, but ticked, and cared enough to name an unwelcome truth!

Anger can, you see, in fact, be an expression of love. 

I’m not talking, of course, about abusive anger, or petulant anger, or petty passive-aggressive-unwilling-to-hear-truth anger. 

I’m talking about anger that is aligned to a holy intention, anger that is aligned to righteousness, anger that reacts to a threat to God’s way in the world, which is whenever life is threatened by death, hope by despair, truth by lie, welcome by isolation, freedom by captivity, love by hate.

Kindness, patience, and gentleness at the expense of expressing righteous indignation is kindness, patience, and gentleness extended only to those doing the oppressing.

Too, in abusive relationships—personal, professional, or communal—kindness, patience, and all-too-quick forgiveness enables the harm to continue. 

The harm gets a pass, and, as a result, the harmed can’t pass through it.

Yesterday I reposted a blog I wrote a couple of years ago about the Danish playwright, pastor, and martyr Kaj Munk: it’s a deeply personal blog, as Munk was a friend of my father’s uncle, assassinated in the deep of the night by the Gestapo for his words against the Nazi regime and agenda. 

Munk’s words caught my attention again as I prepared this sermon, because he reflected on the words from this beloved text of 1 Cor 13. 

He said this: 

“What is, therefore, our task today? Shall I answer: ‘Faith, hope, and love?’ That sounds beautiful. But I would say–courage. No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness. For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature…we lack a holy rage–the recklessness which comes from the knowledge of God and humanity. The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets, and when the lie rages across the face of the earth…a holy anger about the things that are wrong in the world. To rage against the ravaging of God’s earth, and the destruction of God’s world. To rage when little children must die of hunger, when the tables of the rich are sagging with food. To rage at the senseless killing of so many, and against the madness of militaries. To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction peace. To rage against complacency. To restlessly seek that recklessness that will challenge and seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the Kingdom of God. And remember the signs of the Christian Church have been the Lion, the Lamb, the Dove, and the Fish…but never the chameleon.”

A holy rage, I think Munk was saying, in part, comes precisely out of faith, and hope, and love.  

Mulling this text then, I mused this:

The recklessness of which Munk spoke is not recklessness that is self-serving, that is hateful or spiteful or violent or mean-spirited.

It is recklessness that speaks the Word, hears the Word, and then acts on the Word, regardless of the cost.

It is recklessness that refuses to be tamped down by fears, by avoidance of conflict, by ducking the facts of injustice and suffering, by questions about timing or process or appropriateness.

It is a holy rage, a righteously indignant fury that we would feel if our own children were hungering, if our own children were taken from us at the border, if our own water were polluted, if our own children were shot for the color of their skin, if our own religious group were profiled, if our own parents were sleeping in boxes, if our own families were denied health insurance, if our own loved ones were rejected, scorned, maligned, threatened, killed.

The holy rage manifests itself in Word and Action that names wrongs, that speaks truth, that protests, that changes, that repudiates, that calls out injustice, that works to change oppressive systems, that stands up to manifest death and fear and embraces manifest faith, hope, love, and life.

What we see, here, in the text from Luke is the conflict between self-serving anger and anger that is generated because we are called to serve another, even at the expense of ourselves. 

The other night, I was invited to a couple’s home where most every Friday night a group of them get together: this small clan has been gathering for thirty-some years.

I don’t get out much, and so it was a kick to be invited, but, as I said to the hosts later, the three most elemental things about me are exactly the three elemental things that nobody is supposed to talk about at a dinner party: religion, politics, and family trauma!

Add a knack for righteous indignation, and it’s no wonder I don’t get asked often to dinner parties!

At least I brought the fixings for a Manhattan; no substitute surely for the sort of wine that Jesus could call up, but still. 

I’m no Jesus, but for the same reasons he too might not be the sort one wants to invite to pull up the chair: religion, politics, family trauma, and a habit of some really, really righteous indignation.

But at one level, that’s ok.

It’s ok, because Jesus has invited us to his dinner party—even though we tick him off, and on a regular basis.

Nonetheless, he keeps sending out these invitations, and here we are, here we keep coming, yet again about to make our way to his table. 

It’s a table where all are welcome; no really, all. 

It’s a table where we are fed, not least of all so that we can leave the table to do the work of Jesus.

That work includes the very work that annoyed the folks from Nazareth so: bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, letting the oppressed go free, and proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor, all of which make no mistake still tick people off mightily, especially those with the most to lose when these things come to pass.  

See, we call Jesus the Christ because he didn’t stay dead. 

We call ourselves Christ-ians because we believe that Jesus didn’t stay dead.

We act on behalf of Christ when we see death insisting on its way and we know that there is another way.

Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes it means that anger is called for: Not retributive anger, not mean-spirited anger, but holy and righteous anger that says I will not be afraid of death, I will announce life, and I will be its ambassador too….though I may or may not keep the van running while I’m doing the Lord’s work.

For in the name of this Lord we are called to love all people, which can mean getting angry with people, which, paradoxically, might exactly be the good news you need to speak and they need to hear, today.

Amen

______

Consider coming to the Spent Dandelion Theological Retreat Center not only for personal retreats and continuing education opportunities, but also for group retreats throughout the year.  Find out more here!

Straight from the ancient get-go, in a sentence that leaves no room to wonder about mediating, asterisky caveats, God laid it out: Every thought, word, and deed is to be directed by our fidelity to our Creator.

Our allegiance, in positively everything, is to be in keeping with the ways of the One who made us and all the rest of it.

Everything.

We can all rattle off, of course, the daily, garden variety competing claims on our allegiance, tugs to our faithfulness that masquerade as necessities or acceptable norms: security, self-preservation, enjoyments-that-become-addictions, and the like.

Rattling off those sorts of trespasses doesn’t mean that we actually avoid them, of course, and many of them cause horrible, wrenching pain to us and others, no doubt.

They are, though, manifest-across-the-millenia slights to and slams against First Commandment fidelity.

A sin, however, facing us now broadly and culturally, and one that is quintessential First Commandment stuff, is the degree to which we put the present nationalistic agenda before God’s agenda.

Our support of, our silent acquiesence to, our apathy about the nationalistic priorities of this administration and the policies and postures it sets into motion are an affront to the fundamental commandment, the one that frames all the rest and everything that comes later.

We are experiencing nothing less than a First Commandment crisis, for the well-being of the creatures and creation of God are at stake.

Moreover, what Christians do about it, or don’t do about it, ripples far beyond the dangerous effects of the rhetoric, especially when codified into law and policy.

Christianity is being equated with nationalism.

When people call themselves Christians but act out of faithfulness to nationalism, we become seen as disciples of Trump when we purport to be disciples of Jesus.

Worse, the reigning political agenda gets consequently confused with God’s. People think that this administration reflects how Christians understand God’s way of being in the world.

So directly into this crisis, along comes Maundy Thursday into the mix.

This evening, Jesus gives up a new commandment: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:34-35

Turns out, Jesus is saying, that not only is an act of love toward another an act of healing and compassion, but there’s a double bonus: when we offer Jesus-like love to another, it’s like a PSA is sent out about who this First-Commandment God is, this one to whom we’ve promised our allegiance.

Keep in mind, Jesus is not talking to his disciples about schmarmy love, or ‘what evs’ love, or enabling love.

Jesus is on the cusp of crucifixion precisely because of the kind of love he showed to his followers and non-followers: welcome, hospitality, food, water, wine, forgiveness, healing, and no-restraint honest calling-outings.

Jesus is talking about the kind of love that gets a person killed, because it is a love that places faithfulness to the Power over faithfulness to the powers that be.

We will be identified not as nationalists, but as Christians, if we love one another.

Christians cannot be nationalists.

We cannot be faithful to the First Commandment and this First Commander.

They are antithetical allegiances.

Jesus’ life was about sharing radical love that is defined not by exclusion and privilege, but rather inclusion and sacrificial service.

Jesus’ death was due to his unwillingness to bow in allegiance to authorities of his day, who, as it turns out, were the nationalists of his day.

In Jesus, we see God’s definition of Love in Action, and we therefore see God.

By our acts of love done in allegiance to Jesus, people will therefore see God.

The Maundy Thursday gathering of Jesus and the disciples carried such poignant heft to the early Church that the apostle Paul heard of it decades down the pike.

Here’s what he learned about the evening of the Last Supper:

“For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.” 1 Corinthians 11:23-29

Linger at this line: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.”

This eating and drinking matters, for they either consecrate or convict what we do after we partake.

Maundy Thursday (which means, literally, ‘Commandment Thursday,’) completes two points of the obvious arc between God’s first commandment and Jesus’ last commandment:

Love God.

Love one another.

No mediating asterisks or caveats.

Love only God.

Love everyone.

For then, they will know that you are Christians, and they will better know the true God.

___________

Sign up at www.omgcenter.com to have OMG blogs delivered straight to your inbox!

Check out OMG on Twitter @omgcenter too.

Contact Anna at anna@omgcenter.com to visit about personal or congregational consultations, as well as to speak about booking her to present at your next event!

She also runs The Spent Dandelion Theological Retreat Center, where you can come to Retreat, Reflect, and Restore at her North Shore home. Visit www.spentdandelion.com to learn more!

It’s not an isolated moment of anti-Semetic rhetoric: the recent spike in incidents hostile to the Jewish people has a regrettably long list.

A few:

In January, Jewish Community Centers became the target of violent threats.

In February, gravestones in Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis, Philly, and Rochester began to be desecrated.

In March, swastikas started to appear at yet one more school, this time in California, shaking the community and involving the school board and police. It’s hardly the only school to suffer anti-Semitic slurs and threats.

Since January, since Trump’s election, the Southern Poverty Law Center notes a sharp increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes.

Trump used a Nazi slogan in his inaugural speech, much to the gladness of the bevy of anti-Semitic supporters throwing their weight behind his presidency.

Sebastian Gorka, a man with proven Nazi sympathies, now serves on President Trump’s Deputy Assistant, even wearing the emblem of a far-right Hungarian Nationalist group, of which he is a member, to Trump’s inauguration.  (He claims that the pin was in honor of his father, to which this author asks, “…but really, now: Didn’t Dad leave a tie? How many of us wear Nazi-sympathetic medals to remember our parents?”)

On Holocaust Rememberance Day, Trump didn’t mention the genocide of the Jews. When questioned about it at a press conference, Sean Spicer retorted that the representative from the Anne Frank (yes, that Anne Frank) Center for Mutual Respect should have voiced their appreciation of the President instead.

This year, Maundy Thursday takes on new heft.

It is almost customary for Christians to believe that at the Last Supper, Jesus was celebrating the Seder, the traditional Jewish meal which recounts the history of God’s saving hand in rescuing the Israelites from Egypt during the Exodus.

The elements of the meal are similar, the timing of the celebrations gel, and the words Jesus uses seem to hearken back to the customs of the celebration of Passover.

However, more and more scholars are saying it isn’t so.

Jonathan Klawans writes a brilliant piece for the Biblical Archeological Review which calls pretty much every tenet of this argument into question.  Most interestingly, the concept of celebrating the Seder ritual seems to not have been even in place until after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.

It’s a timely question, as it seems as if with each passing year, more and more Christians celebrate the Seder meal, either within their Christian community or by invitation from Jewish families or communities, as part of their Holy Week festivals.

There is much debate about whether Christians have any business participating in the Passover Meal at all.

Rev. Ann Fontaine offers her thoughts about the matter in this thorough and nuanced blog.  In it, she spells out an array of pros and cons, the essential points boiling down to the Yes: the Exodus is part of Christian history too; and the No: Christians have no more business appropriating/mis-appropriating the Seder Meal than Jews do presiding over a Eucharist.

It is not just a theological question these days, but a regrettably pressing one given the distressing rise of anti-Semitic acts, not least of all by those professing to be Christians (the irony, of course, is that they and all Christians are indelibly Jewish: Jesus was, after all, a Jew).

Given that even within the Jewish Community, there is no clear consensus about the appropriateness (or lack thereof) of Christians celebrating the Seder Meal, it’s difficult to know how best as Christians to respect and honor the desires of the Jewish people.

Still.

Still, in these days during the rise and rule of Trump, and precisely during and beyond these our Holiest of Three Days, Christians have an especially clear responsibility, a mandate, to attend to the history and the earned fears of Jews, their justified deep apprehension due to the long history of hateful actions by those who identify as Christian.

Two thoughts, then, on the Eve of Maundy Thursday:

One: As is often the case, this year the Christian Holy Week falls at the same time as the Jewish Passover.

Exactly becauase of the increased incidents and toleration of anti-Semitic actions, as our Holy Week and Passover are entwined again, this year all more so we Christians are called to manifestly reject any and all evidence of anti-Jewish bigotry.

Why?

Because of Thought Two: We call the day Maundy Thursday because of the etymological root of the word related to “mandate,” as in “Commandment.”

During this Last Supper, Jesus gave two commandments: to love one another as he has loved us; and to hold the meal together, namely to give Thanksgiving over bread and wine together, in remembrance of him.

In these two Commandments, Christians learn about our identity and our mission: we are to be the tangible presence of the loving reign of God in the world.

Fed with the promise, we are to be the promise: the promise being, of course, that death doesn’t win–even the death, threatened or real, caused by religious bigotry, not least of all that which is implicitly and explicitly condoned by Trump, and fostered across the nation by his rhetoric and political recruits.

While it may or may not be appropriate for Christians to celebrate the Seder, it is nothing but appropriate for us to remember that Jesus was a Jew; that God never forsakes God’s people, of whom the people of Israel were the first, whom God brought out of the land of slavery; that religious bigotry and hate still enslave us; and that God’s history of love and promise to those who suffer still shows us a way (‘odos) out (ex), an ex-‘odus, an exodus.

That, of course, is worthy of giving thanks (Eu, good, and charis, grace, or thanks), not least of all at the celebration of, and the living out of, the Christian meal, the Eucharist, the first celebration of which we recall on Maundy Thursday.

Mr. Berry is a farmer and a writer and a poet and an advocate of economic justice and the deep and intimate care of community and creation.

He’s delightfully ornery and that’s why I like him.

Wendell Berry has stumbled on a phrase that I like a lot: a “pattern of reminding.”  He uses it in several places and ways, but always yoked to the importance of community, as he does in the essay “The Work of Local Culture.” Here, he writes:

It does no good for historians, folklorists, and anthropologists to collect the songs and the stories and the lore that comprise local culture and store them in books and archives. They cannot collect and store, because they cannot know the pattern of reminding that can survive only in the living human community in its place. It is this pattern that is the life of the local culture, and that brings it usefully or pleasurably to mind. Apart from its local landmarks and occasions, the local culture may be the subject of curiosity or of study, but it is also dead.

In other words, to state the obvious, culture is alive only when it is lived.

His words are no broadside against museums or libraries or archives of any sort.

They are, though, a rail against simply caching the essence of a community, stuffing the stories and songs in a memory box never to be opened, the treasures never to be touched, hiding them away like any of us might place something important in a spot so secure that we forget not only where it is but that we’ve even put it there.

I’ve been thinking about worship, in light of Berry’s words.

I get that some people—people of faith, I’m talking about here—don’t like going to church so very much or often.  “Sunday Morning Worship at St. Mattress” and all.

I get the Christmas and Easter crew.

I get that there are reasons why congregational worship can be a drag, a bother, an imposition.

I really do.

But then Berry steps in and speaks about the importance of this pattern of reminding.

I think his words speak to why communal worship is worth a conversion from St. Mattress to St., well, Wherever You Could Go To Church.

Turns out that the word “pattern” comes from the same root as the word “patron,” and meant, originally, “something serving as a model.”

A model, of course, is an example, a way of doing things.

That is, in the original sense, a pattern need not be rigid. It is a theme, however, a template, a blueprint…a reminder of a common motif.

When people of faith come together, we remember our shared pattern.  We recall our collected motifs, we draw together the threads that weave through us all.

So to boot, these songs and stories and rituals remind us that our faith isn’t just ours, nor is it just about us.

Instead, God has a pattern of being in the world by way of loving the outcasts, calling out the oppressors, soothing the hurt, transforming the old, and making things new. It’s a communal thing, a joint effort, a way of being within and also beyond ourselves.

The fact is, it is very easy to forget who and whose we are when we, for the bulk of any given week, are surrounded by the overriding patterns of stress, and fear, and materialism, and despair, and fatigue, and self-preservation.

Gathering together reminds us of an alternative, distinct, organic culture patterned by the claim that we are People of God with history and heritage and that it, and we, are alive.

One quick but important thing: patterns need not be dull. There are infinite numbers of variations on a theme to spice things up, subtle tweaks that begin a new pattern within the pattern.

That is, the kinds of patterns found on this link are just icky.

I’m not talking about these kinds of patterns.

(Yikesies.  Who was in charge in the 70s? Who let these nice people wear such things?)

I’m talking about patterns–by way of rituals, readings, music–that remind us of solidarity, of hope, of compassion, of life of a community that is worthy of being re-membered.

Check out a place of worship near you, and discover a new pattern in your life.

http://www.elca.org/tools/FindACongregation

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/find-church

http://www.umc.org/find-a-church/search

https://www.pcusa.org/search/congregations/

http://www.ucc.org/find/

http://www.masstimes.org

http://www.mennoniteusa.org/find-a-church/

But several people have asked me to compile some of the more recent private posts about my mother’s dying into an OMG entry.

I hadn’t thought about doing that, frankly.

Between her rapidly declining health, her funeral this week, and Christmas being upon us, I’ve simply had no time to sit and ponder it all (I have often noted the irony that Mary, mother of Jesus, “pondered these things in her heart” while those of us who follow her son struggle to remember the meaning of the word “ponder” during the pre-Christmas rumpus).

Writing a blog about her death needs some strung-together-seconds that I haven’t had.

And, well, it’s personal stuff.

But a number of friends have said that that’s precisely the point.

Dying is both personal and universal, as is watching a loved one die.

And so here is my offering to you for this morning.  A glimpse of my mother’s last week–excepting her repeated references to the angels.

That is worthy of sitting and pondering before I write.

One more thing: I wish only that I could reprint all of the stunningly kind and beautiful comments that the Facebook Communion of the Saints wrote after these posts!  What traces of the grace of God they were!

Peace to you.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

December 12, 2013

A mama update: Yesterday, she was essentially comatose.

Leaving on the wall the decorations we’d brought, I gathered up all of her other belongings last night, stuffed them in some bags, and brought them home.

All night I expected The Call.

But by this morning, it still hadn’t come.

And so I went back to hospice this morning, and found her like I’d left her. Once in her room, I touched her gently, and told her that I’d arrived. She smiled faintly, eyes closed. I said I was going to make some coffee and then be right back. Her eyebrows went up, eyes still closed. I asked her if she wanted some of my strong coffee, and she mumbled that she did, and nodded.

So I made some press pot brew, found a swab, rinsed the mint flavor out of it, dabbed it in the cup, and offered it to my mother.

She barely opened her mouth for the sponge, but when the coffee hit her lips, her eyes flew open, and she said, “Oooooooohhhhhhhh, that…is….so…..gooooooood.” And she asked to sit up, and she had more coffee, and she had a very little lunch, and said a little of this and a little of that.

Dad and I were stunned, and he joked with her that perhaps now all she needed was a little gin.

This time, her eyes got really big and she said, “YES!” and Dad looked for the bottle….which I’d brought home the night before!!

ACK!

And so now I’m going to drink a glass of it myself on her behalf, raising it right on up to my coffee-loving-gin-drinking-still-living mother.

Feel free to join me in the toast, with gin or coffee or any other life-giving beverage of your choice.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

December 14, 2013

Well, last night, while I held my mother’s hand, Dad and I reminded her about joyful reunions, and we sang her Shalom, and Silent Night, and even warbled Willie Nelson’s “I’ll Fly Away,” and we told her of Jesus’ and the angels’ reassurances to not be afraid, and we made the sign of the cross on her forehead, and of course we raised our gin, each of us tipping our fingers in the libation to share on her lips our toast to her with her, and her breath became gentler, and lighter, and at 9:39, it stopped. Death came and it, coupled with hope, gives us all peace.

The funeral will be at St. Mark’s Lutheran in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Wednesday, December 18th, at 10:00 a.m., with burial following in Brookings. You are all welcome to join us in mourning and celebrating Marge Stenslie Madsen. Thank you so deeply for your words and care along this two-year-long path!