This blog, I am revealing my second and also very much my last tattoo.

People tell me that I’ll come to feel differently about it, but nope: I said what I said.

This will do it, though I’m bracing myself for the few planned touch ups to this latest one.

Tattoos remind my of my late mother, who, as we pulled in to a station to fill up the car, would say, “I hate getting gas, I love having gotten gas.”

Cars need gas, though, and I don’t need another tattoo.

But I did want/need this one.

This delightful woman rests on my right arm: Mary sings her Magnificat on my left because the tattoo artist refused, although not in so many words, to have her facing backwards as the artist Ben Wildflower drew her. The flow of the tattoo is intended to go with the flow of the body, I’m told, and so Mary is on my left and the dancing woman on my right, each facing forward, as most of the time I (try to) do too.

The late Danish artist Bjorn Wiinblad brought the woman into being.  You can find the original artwork here and here.

Turns out that she has a name, and a story: Myrine is her name, and her counterpart, seen from the backside in the second of Wiinblad’s sketches linked above, is Kleonike.

Apparently Wiinblad took his inspiration for these drawings from the Greek comedy Lysistrata, an ancient play which tells of women who revolted against their husbands who had long been battling it out in the Peloponnesian War.

The women on all sides were over the extended battle, and so banded together across factions to ban their men from their bodies and from sex—a pastime which both the women and men very much enjoyed—until the warring soldiers called a truce.

I swear I did not know this history when I opted for this tattoo.

What I did know is that I love Bjorn Wiinblad.

I have candle holders and posters of his art on my walls, and the logo for the Spent Dandelion (designed by the amazing graphic artist Heidi Mihelich, whom you should use for all your logo needs) takes inspiration from his art too.  (After I showed her some of his art while we were trying to hone in on the logo vibe, she joked that I now had to pay an upcharge to fund her Bjorn Wiinblad habit.  You can see his influence in the whimsical dots found on the dandelion!).

This particular work captured my imagination because of Myrine’s rounded hips and breasts and belly and thighs; she’s sensual and sexual without being reduced to that; she’s playful and beautiful and confident; she loves life in all its color and delight.

She’s fleshy.

I am some of that and wish I were more of all of that, and so Myrine represents a reminder of what I am and what, with some practice and re-prioritizing, I could even more so be.

~~~~~

Those of you who have been following me for a spell know that I understand the gospel to be the announcement that Jesus is risen.

Perhaps Easter seems an odd reference to make on Advent Four/Almost Christmas Eve, but when you get right down to it, it isn’t, so very much.

The Gospel announces that death has a word, but it is not the last one.

As an obvious extension of that, Christians believe that God:

~is the God who brings life out of death;

~offers beauty where there is bleakness;

~rejoices when there is abundance for all;

~called creation into being not with a monotone palette but with vibrant hues;

~creates tunes and beats and rhythms of music of wild and wide variety;

~summoned into being foods and flavors that may include bland, but also delights in the spicy and buttery and sweet and tart, with juices and oils and gravies and creams and beverages that make the tongue and the spirit sing;

~is fleshy. God arrived as a baby, burping and farting and crying and growing and defying his parents and loving good food and good wine and good humor and good snark and inviting people to feast and find safety and forgiveness and radical welcome extended to all.

It’s all so ridiculously glorious: tangible, edible, visual, audible, celebratory, gratuitous grace.

~~~~~

Now, I realize that there is so very much in the world, especially these days, which give powerful reason for despair and righteous rage.

Every day I watch the news, and/or write letters, and/or give money, and/or blog or post or speak or simply cry with the weight of it all.

I can never do enough, but there is always so much to do.

Mary on my other arm knows of that truth.

She calls us to stand defiantly with her against all that threatens, undercuts, and maligns the will and the ways of God, and to invariably stand with the oppressed, to harbor unwavering hope that the oppressors will be open to redemption, and to actively work against them when they are intransigently against mercy, generosity, humility, welcome, justice, and kindness—a stance which, of course, in the end even harms themselves.

But Myrine reminds us that we can protest death in more than one way.

We can protest it by joyfully defying it.

We can embrace the goodness that God has made—and made known—for us, we can embrace the bodies that are ours, we can embrace each other, and we can share and welcome others to the whole lot of it all as a way of celebrating, thanking, telling of, and making incarnate the God who loves life and the richness of it all.

I love being “balanced” by Mary on my left and Myrine on my right: defiance and joy; hope and gratitude; restlessness and contentment; action and rest, each representing something of the woven reality of living into and out of the Gospel, and illustrating women’s complexity, strength, wisdom, power, and beauty.

~~~~~

Today is a trifecta: we are wrapping up Advent Three, which is traditionally designated to lift up the theme of joy.

We are entering into an awkward handful of hours of Advent Four, a time set aside to especially treasure the notion of love.

Then, this evening and for the next 12 Days of Christmas, we collectively cherish the notion of God With Us, Emmanuel Who Has Come, Jesus the Christ, the Prince of Peace.

Joy. Love. Peace.

The baby Jesus came into the world by way of blood and tears, as well as welcome and wonder.

He arrived as the heavens showed off and ragtag shepherds showed up.

He was awaited by a ruthless paranoid ruler and those who enacted the violence the ruler condoned and incited.

Hope, cynicism, fear, comfort, fatigue, courage…it was all there, just as it is today.

Today, it’s still all true.

Nobody knows that more than Mary.

But Myrine has a word for us too: whimsy, sensuality, beauty, delight…these are all pieces of God’s intentions too.

To forget, overlook, set aside such things, even if for righteous reasons, is to forget or overlook or set aside that God loves the world, and the world is fleshy, worthy of love, and is lovable.

I think that today is especially a day to lean into the fleshiness of Myrine.

God loves the world.

The word became flesh.

God loves the fleshiness of the world.

We are fleshy.

So, given that, let us rejoice, and let us be glad in it!

May the joy of Advent Three, the love of Advent Four, and the peace of Emmanuel, Jesus the Christ, be with you all!

To be clear, it wasn’t a nightmare, per se; hardly the stuff worthy of even a B-movie plot.

What shook me awake rather was simply two women berating me—like, with well-honed contempt delivered with a master-class facial and verbal derision—for, get this:

I hadn’t yet shoveled the snow off our ugly tarpy car ports.

I mean, how northern Minnesotan can you get.

But wow did the women in this dream rattle me, both in my dream and when I woke up.

I felt so appropriately indicted there was a bona fide lump in my throat, working its way up to a lip tremble and a cry.

To make it weirder:

a) there isn’t snow on the car ports;

b) of all the things about which I’m (consciously, anyway) feeling somewhere between sheepish and ashamed, snow on the car ports is not one of them;

c) I can’t shake the dream. I never remember dreams, but here we are, days later, and (were I to have any artistic capacities at all), I bet I could draw to perfection the (unfamiliar, for the record) face of one of these two women. Her voice was harsh and disdainful, and it still echoes in my mind, making me wince when I think back to that blame dream.

So a couple of things make me go hmmm.

First, I’m simply not motivated by guilt or shame.

Both really torque me off.

Truly, if you want me to do or feel something and, to that end, employ either guilt or shame, I guarantee I will budge in no direction other than the opposite one.

So there’s that.

Still, contrary to that consciously cultivated and practiced healthy-boundaries/rejection of passive aggressiveness/I-am-saved-by-grace-anyway-so-bring-it-on approach to relationships, it seems guilt and shame do work in my dreams.

Second, women (women!) were scolding me.

Like, women of all people should know how often and how many Really Important Tasks don’t get done in a Day In The Life.

Instead of raised eyebrows at my snow-sagged car ports, a raised glass with a “Solidarity, sister!” would have been the absolute appropriate Woman Code of Conduct.

So, yeah.

The dream represented a betrayal, of sorts.

We women are supposed to have each other’s backs, and they only had my kiester in a sling.

Third, can I just say, my husband…there is no word yet invented for my husband.

David ups the communal ante on the collective meaning of ‘partner’ and ‘supportive’; he is generous in every regard and assuredly to a fault; patient with my numerous—countless, really—idiosyncrasies; good-natured and good-humored; deeply dedicated to his children and mine; thoroughly committed to Karl’s well-being; and he cooks, fixes stuff, creates stuff, can mix a very fine drink and deliver it unbidden too, and is so very ruggedly handsome [sigh] that I can’t even.

It’s not, then, that the dream surfaced stuffed resentment about being some conscripted contemporary Enjoli spokeswoman, and yes I’m dating myself.

So.  What gave?

Any number of things, just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve decided.

First, Marie Kondo told us of her metanoia, thanks to her third baby arriving on the scene.

Most important is to congratulate her and her family on the advent of this new baby. Everything pales to that.

The birth of this new one served as the catalyst to Ms. Kondo’s revelation that actually, it turns out that it is really hard to keep everything tidy and together all the time when you are a stay-at-home mom, or a working mom, or a working woman, or a woman with a partner, or a chronic caregiving woman to an aging parent or loved one in need, or…an ordinary human being.

Add in the legit claims of the legit callings of activism, self-care, volunteering, worshipping, and daily adulting tasks of grocery shopping, laundry, taxes, paying bills, taking care of pet scheisse, reading about children in politics during the day and then reading to actual children at night…I’m here to say that folding the clothes, let alone folding them into quaint pockets, let alone caring enough to make that a Life Goal asks too much.

Martha Stewart got under my skin for exactly the same reasons (though I’ll admit that some of her recipes weren’t bad).

To be clear, I am all about apologies—I welcome them, actually.

It’s all too rare when someone admits, privately let alone publicly, that they were wrong.

So I’m impressed that she went there, and I thank her for that.

But part of the courage and the risk it takes to acknowledge a screw-up is that you know two things are about to happen: you validate others’ experiences of your wrong, and you validate their right to tell you about them.

So wow, did her teachings and her influence establish not just unrealistic but unreasonable, not to mention unhealthy, expectations, especially on women.

They caused harm.

Ms. Kondo strove for perfection, and made a convincing case that Perfection is desirable, attainable, and corresponded with her definition of it.

Instead, as for me and my house, I’ve come to believe that Perfection is far more akin to My Beautiful Oops, a tale from several years back of my flooded toilet and a rug that inadvertently and relatedly became and still hangs as a Work of Art on my wall and a Symbol of My Life because I messed up.

Second, and third and fourth and on, so many Things, a cascade of Things:

~the vicious beating of Tyre Nichols;

~intransigently violent police culture which confuses authority with abuse of power;

~4530 instances of gun related deaths in 2023 alone (that shot up from 3718, just since February 4, when I began sketching out this blog); 

~60 mass shootings in 2023 alone (shooting up from 52 in the same time frame);

~politicians that eagerly ban books but not guns;

~persistent violence and injustice against Palestinians in the Holy Land, escalated by right-wing extremist Netanyahu’s election.

~anti-trans legislation rooted in bigotry and allergies to science and compassion;

~racist and, in fact, fascist legislation regarding what someone may or may not teach about our country’s history and present;

~World Holocaust Day made all the more poignant because of rise of anti-semitism and increasing tolerance of it.

~the devastating earthquake in Türkiye and Syria.

~persistent climate violence and ignorance;

And the list could continue to unroll.

In our little world, we were rocked by the revelation of further sexual, spiritual, and emotional abuse by Jean Vanier.

He was the founder of L’Arche, a beautiful world-wide movement which establishes home communities for people with and without disabilities to live and work together.

It’s an unwelcome discovery that hits particularly close to home for our family, as David and I have made our primary pursuit this year is to identify safe, stable, and joyful long-term living circumstances for Karl which honor both those with disabilities and their caregivers. We have found none that meet our expectations, though L’Arche has been, and still might be, a beacon of possibility.

And in my little world, my beloved ELCA is breaking my heart.

~Entrenched racism is baked into our constitutions, and yes, every sense of the word is intended here;

~Our structure roots itself in exploitative capitalism more than our liberating theology, and while those on the margins suffer thereby the most, we all do and will suffer too;

~My colleagues are burned and burning out, with very few clear internal or external vocational options forward;

~And I’m not convinced that, to the church-at-large, we are calling a thing what it is, namely that institutionally, our long-term viability is sincerely in question.

Blergh.

It’s a lot. So much.

Especially as a person of privilege, there are countless reasons to speak about and into these grave circumstances.

Silence is violence, and when it is a pattern, that is true.

Which adds to the internal pressure to constantly engage.

The pull and the push can be overwhelming.

Moreover, as People of the Word—and for rostered leaders, as those called to proclaim it—we’re supposed to have words when times call for them.

We should post more, agitate more, meet more, write more.

But I confess that lately, I’ve been left without words, able to muster only those deep sighs of which Paul speaks.

I’m not depressed, though all that is swirling around can be and is valid grounding for depression.

I’m certainly not apathetic.

I’ve been feeling, rather, tired.

A bit uninspired.

Irritated and impatient with the power of white supremacy and white supremacists.

Restless with and within my denomination.

It’s led me to wonder whether it’s possible that the constant urge to do something say something be somewhere could be a form of violence too: violence most especially to one’s spirit, which is the very thing that everyone, including your own self, needs.

Sometimes, quiet is about all that one can muster.

To be clear, I can’t consistently shake the sense that retreat and silence feels a bit like an abdication of duty and an embracing of privilege.

But, certainly since this dream caught my attention, I’m coming to terms with the notion that retreat and silence can be rather an abdication of hubris and an embracing of finitude.

In measured doses, or when your spirit is being nagged by The Spirit to stop for a spell, silence is holy and both initiates and represents self-extended grace and self-love for one’s limits.

~~~~~

The dream, I think, was a fusion of both a recognition that there is so much to do, and that no matter what the world tells you, what ex-and-internal expectations tell you, what your dreams tell you, a person can’t, actually, do it all.

For that matter, just when you get that snow shoveled off those roofs, you look up at those grey skies, and you know exactly what they are bringing more of, you know you do.

Now.

It’s not the first time that I’ve (temporarily) come to terms with this concept.

Just look at this Advent blog here, and this Ash Wednesday blog here, and an ordinary day-in-the-life blog here.

For starters.

Sigh.

So, it smacks a bit like Christians who make it a liturgical practice to confess their sins week after week…because despite having done it the week before, and receiving absolution the week before, and being exhorted to go and sin no more the week before…week after week, these same Christians keep right on sinning.

That is, I know this knack of mine, this capacity to take on too much, to set and aspire to unrealistic expectations for myself, to assume that if I don’t do it then it will never be done, and to feel just plain old badly about myself when I can’t Do It All.

And I know not to do it.

But I keep on doing it.

I’m betting I’m not alone.

So, albeit yet again, I’ve come to the same conclusion as I have so many times before: that it’s actually freeing—liberating, even—to know that you can’t do it all.

In fact, once one realizes that to be true, one finds that it’s easier to give time to building yourself up, not to do more (though that can be a collateral effect, let’s be honest), but because you are worth more than to live a harried, stressed out, anxious, self-justifying and therefore self-depleting life.

For example, I’ve decided that I’m worth 30 minutes every day of exercise, even if that means that all told, I get a later start on my day.

For six weeks now, I’ve kept up a morning routine, which is something, because I really really hate exercise.

But I have to (and hate to) admit I’m more fit, I have more energy, I move better, I feel better, and my blood pressure is down significantly (is it due to the cardio or to the exercise as an antidote to stress? Both, probably).

And rather than grudgingly thinking of it as losing an hour of work, which I have and to be fair is true, I’m reframing it as that I’m gaining an hour for my well-being.

That’s a win.

~~~~~

We’re coming up on Lent (I was struck by how many of my Lenten blogs have to do with Limits, as an aside).

But before there, we encounter the Transfiguration, this next Sunday.

It’s a text that has been used, though not exclusively so, to encourage people to not settle into comfort, to come down from the mountain vistas, to get out from the tents, and then re-enter the world in service.

As Jesus was transfigured, so too should we be transfigured from complacency into engagement with the world.

These interpretations are not wrong.

But I wonder if, given this last…decade or so…it might be worth thinking of being transfigured in a different way.

Maybe we can be transfigured in the traditional ways—I’m nothing if not bent on the relationship between justice and justification—but also to do two other things:

~Surround one another with encouragement and accolades not only for what they do, but for when they don’t or can’t do it.

~Give ourselves encouragement and accolades for the very same.

There will always be proverbial snow on your proverbial car ports.

Perhaps the weight of the heavy snow on your spirits can be transformed—transfigured, if you will—into a glowing affirmation that others can (and, ideally, anyway, thanks to the Communion of the Saints, will), shovel it off for you.

It can wait.

Your well-being can’t.

#DoWhatYouCanDo

#StopWhenYouCanDoNoMore

#Repeat

“Be still, then, and know that I am God,” Psalm 46:10.

Sunday, October 29 is Reformation Sunday, a High Feast Day of sorts in the Lutheran Tradition.

This year, we mark the 505th Anniversary of the day, this auspicious moment when German monk and scholar Martin Luther published a…few…objections to the practice of selling “indulgences.”

These, of course, were pieces of paper given out by Catholic priests of the day, notes which promised that any post-death misery brought on by sinfulness would be, to one degree or another, lessened.

But the Church wasn’t just giving these indulgences out like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers Bars on Halloween.

Nope: any sinner wanting to stave off or tamp down eternal judgment had to pony up some pennies—the more the better—to earn God’s grace.

To brother Luther, this practice seemed like a heretical if not well-played racket.

So Luther, never one to mince words, decided to point out 95 ways that the buying and selling of grace was theologically and biblically skiddelywompus.

Here was what got under his craw:

If you have to purchase grace, if you have to earn grace, it’s many things, but it is not grace.

For that matter, no one, not even the pope of his day (especially the pope of his day, actually) is without sin.

When you get right down to it, it’s a matter of definitions, and they aren’t even theological.

A reward is based on merit.

Grace is straight gift.

That’s not to say that there isn’t theology in play though.

Luther was a biblical theologian, and after spending more than a little time in Scripture, Luther (and, now by extension, Lutherans) came to believe that the biblical witness makes it clear that ultimately, God doles out grace rather than rewards.

This discovery is a super fortuitous thing, because when you get right down to it, no one could ever have enough merits to earn any reward from God anyway.

Now, this thesis of Luther’s was, and 505 years later remains, a hotly disputed point among various religious traditions, but to make it, Luther only had to turn to passages like the Romans text above, a passage happily assigned for Reformation Sunday.

”For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.”

Lutherans are all over this take.

We hold this banner high and proud and with huge sighs of relief: there is nothing that we can do to “save ourselves” from our sinfulness or from God’s judgment.

To say otherwise a) renders Jesus’ death and resurrection for naught; and b) renders everyone totally and permanently without hope and screwed.

To trust the idea that works “make up a difference” implies that an intangible and unsullied part of us can carry the rest of our sloppiness through.

But in order for that to be true, there would have to be a sliver of purity within us not in need of redemption, some part that urges the messy parts of who we are, the potentially irredeemable parts of us, to engage in good works—be they indulgences, acts of piety, generosities, etc—to make up the difference and to prove our worthiness to God.

An E for Effort and (if God’s paying attention) Eternity.

Buuuuttttt…mind-bending though it is, at the end of the day, these good works themselves would be in need of redemption!

Their expressions would not be altruistic, but actually be veiled acts of self-preservation rather than pure manifestations of one’s faith and desire to follow God.

In some measure and to some degree, we’d do them to prove to God that we are deserving of heaven and not of hell, as if God trucks in rewards and not in grace, and as if God wouldn’t know that, if we’re honest with ourselves, at least a teensy weensy part of the drive to do good and be good is the hope of being spared rather than scorched.

So that part bugs us Lutherans, yes it does.

And very much along this line, we don’t like equating God to the Big Santa Claus in the Sky, a divine figure with lists of who is naughty and nice.

Luther and Lutherans know that life is messier than those binaries, and God is more nuanced, not to mention charitable, than Santa.

Bonhoeffer, the closest we Lutherans have to a saint, wrestled with this question of the dualistic Good and Bad, not to mention the matter of grace over against works.

His answer—and his execution—was grounded in radical trust in the grace of God over against his own futile efforts to earn it.

But we don’t need to be faced with the stakes of Auschwitz to know something of the wrestle too:

• Does God want us to enjoy a late-Fall hike, to build a bonfire with family, to bake an apple crisp to savor, OR, looking around at all the suffering there is in the world, would God rather that we use that time to volunteer at a food shelf, or advocate for the Least of These, or transform that spare room which no one uses into a space for a homeless person?
• You need a certain phone service or streaming source or retirement investment option, but the more you poke around, the more you learn that the meta-companies fund harm in this world, and so your support of these necessities funds their hate and hurt.
• Do you speak faithful words of prophetic speech from the pulpit as we were baptized and called to do, assuaging the oppressed and suffering but annoying the powerful, or do you remain quiet, to appease the privileged and those who fund the righteous ministries that would be otherwise threatened?
• Do women drink red wine because it is healthy for our hearts, or abstain because alcohol can cause cancer?
• Carbs or no carbs?
• Cloth diapers or disposable?
• Wood heat or propane?
• Be fruitful and multiply or, with an eye toward overpopulation, abstain from bearing children?

Phew.

It’s exhausting to strive for righteousness, or to be righteous, or even to know what righteousness is!

So Luther named all that, and Lutherans claim all that:

• You are justified.
• You can’t accept God, or Jesus as your personal lord and savior for that matter, because God has chosen you.
• You can’t be saved because you already are saved.

Because this theological thrust is so significant to our history and our identity, Lutherans have come to equate the gospel with the statement that our sins are forgiven.

Ask most any Lutheran, lay or otherwise, to preach or identify the gospel, and they will proudly proclaim that we are saved by grace and not works.

We are justified by faith.

And this makes sense, right, because Martin Luther radically re-oriented believers’ trust, wrenching it from faith in ourselves and our own works and to faith in God and God’s mercy.

And this is all right and good and true.

But the trouble is, right and good and true message that the forgiveness of sins is, it isn’t the gospel.

The gospel is that Jesus is risen.

That’s the good news, that’s the thing that makes Christians Christians, that’s the piece that allows Christians to radically enter the world with a new awareness of death and a new definition of life.

Sinfulness is a form of death (obvs), but we are freed from it because Jesus is risen, rendering any death, due to sin or otherwise, ultimately impotent in the face of God’s triumph over it.

See, it’s not like there is some asterisk that hovers next to Jesus’ resurrection leading to some fine print statement that “*some conditions may apply.”

But.

Here’s the thing:

That tendency of ours to trust in grace has made Lutherans almost allergic to works.

We are so acutely aware of how easy it is to fear that God is watching and taking notes, and therefore how a person could be tempted to do a good work in hopes that one would earn an extra notch in our ‘pro’ column, that we have tended to misunderstand grace to mean this:

Because we don’t have to do any good works, we ought not do any good works.

Which, spoiler alert, is malarky.

Lutherans have leaned on grace so much we’ve become prone.

Quiet.

In fact, there’s even a name for it: Lutheran quietism.

We remain still when we could be, should be, at work, stewarding God’s reign in the world.

~~~~~

This brings us to the second text above, the verse from Psalm 46: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

I have long confessed, at the risk of being accused of irreverence (and, to be fair, of actually being irreverent) that I am not a fan of this verse.

But for two reasons, this verse has gotten under my craw.

First, I have had these words said to me—offered in good faith and as good advice—in times when I have been beyond overwhelmed, tapped out, and unable to find a way forward.

These folks meant it well.

But the fact was, had I been still in those times, especially as a single mama of two small and one very wounded children, nothing would have been done by nobody, including by God.

In order for some order to come into the midst of chaos, some reason for hope in the midst of despondency, some actual balm over some actual wound, some body needs to do some thing.

Second, stillness been a dangerous partner to the Lutheran tendency to avoid works and instead to be quiet and trust in God.

The train of thought goes like this: if we don’t have to do any works, because God’s grace prevails, and we do have to be still, because God’s got this, then we can, with God’s blessing, do nothing.

It’s a perfect combination for divinely blessed passivity.

Turns out, though, that the word rendered “still” might not mean what we think it means.

Rather than bidding us to be inert, instead, the word (רפה) rapha is perhaps better understood as “be weak,“ or “be vulnerable,” or “be open,” or “let go.”

In fact, the plural has been used to refer to “the place of the dead.”

See, now I can totally get behind that sort of understanding of ‘still.’

It’s a stillness that is brought about by humility rather than passivity.

It’s a stillness that acknowledges death, but refuses to cede power to it, because we know that God is God, and that this God is a God who brings life out of death, who does not deny our reasons for fear, but who bids us to rise through and above the fear even so.

~~~~~

This Reformation Sunday, one could and should dwell on the grace of God which meets us in the moments of our greatest depravity.

And there is gospel to be found there, to be sure.

If it weren’t for that radical insight, that transformative news that we are:

saved by grace and not by works;

chosen and even as babies sealed by the Holy Spirit in our baptisms;

and justified,

we would have no reason to remember Luther, to celebrate Reformation day, or to live without anything but dire fear of God.

But as grateful as we can be about Luther’s kicker of a theological claim, it is possible that, as people of the Reformation, we could also use this opportunity to reform our definition of the Gospel, and of how we steward that gospel in the world.

It is possible to consider that the gospel, as we’ve typically understood it, is pretty narrow.

So maybe we could use this Reformation Day to reflect on the possibility that:

• Left with Luther’s take on it—key though his take was—we are left with a gospel that is only relevant to the sinners, and not those sinned upon, or who grieve, or who fear, or who hurt, or to the groaning of creation;
• In our reduction of the gospel to the forgiveness of sins, we have also reduced sinfulness to those of the individual, rather than also those of the collective;
• Thanks to Luther’s context (which is not ours) maybe we’ve have focused on the idea of personal post-death salvation, rather than present personal and communal well-being too;
• By focusing on justification we have neglected it’s corollary, namely justice;
• If grace is all there is to say in the matter, it implies that there is little to no need for repentance, and little to no need for judgment;
• Cheap grace means that sinfulness doesn’t matter, because we’re all in, but costly grace claims that although grace wins the day, there is some confession to be offered, some hard truths to be told and heard, and some repentance to be had;
• Lutherans can celebrate Luther’s re-orientation of the Church toward grace, while also, as people who are predisposed to reformation, do some re-orientation of our own toward a new notion of gospel news in today’s context.
• Apart from all conversation and thought about sin, we can engage in joy, delight, appreciation, and celebration of all things beautiful, creative, and which point to the love of God.

Paul was right: we are justified by faith and not by works.

The writer of Psalm 46 was right: we can rest in the trust that we are finite, and that even in the places and times in which we are dead, God is present and active.

Luther was right: we cannot save ourselves, but are already saved.

But this proclamation is also right, and more right than any of these other claims: Jesus is risen.

As followers of Jesus, we trust that death is powerful but not most so; that we follow Jesus into places of death to steward life; and that nothing, nothing in the greatest or in the least, can separate us from the love of God.

(To see me stand even higher on this soapbox, pick up my book I Can Do No Other: The Church’s Here We Stand Moment, published by Fortress Press).

Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.

On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.

Psalm 22:9-10

Once you’ve been betrayed by someone whom you’ve trusted, two things happen, and it’s hard to know which is most devastating.

First, you learn that this person, or relationship, or institution, or Way Things Have Always Been, render your investment of time, vulnerability, and faith as utterly dismissible, utterly misplaced, and utterly for naught.

Second, you learn that if it’s possible to be betrayed by this one whom you trusted with all your being, it is possible to be betrayed by anyone whom you trust.

With that in tow, you can never trust in the same way again.

You can lose faith in faith.

~~~~~

 The two verses topping the blog come from Psalm 22.

It’s the psalm from which we hear these wrenching words on the dying Jesus’ lips, words lifted from the very first verse of what is nothing less than a hymn of betrayal:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”

In these three holy days, we tend to focus on this verse, and perhaps also on the writer’s words a bit further down the psalm’s pike, verses which describe not just the psalmist’s despair, but Jesus’ despair, anguish reflected centuries later in his torment on the cross too.

But this year, it’s the above passage, these two verses quoted at the very top, that won’t let my spirit go.

Look at them again: “Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast. On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.”

They’re astonishing.

First, God is identified as a midwife.

A midwife!

This God rendered almost exclusively in the Christian tradition as male, as father, as baptized omnipotent Zeus, here this God is the woman who ‘took’ (but all the more literally, in the Hebrew, ‘pulled’ or ‘yanked’) the child from the womb (belly [!] in Hebrew).

And—as midwives are wont to do—this God knew to bring the safely delivered infant safely to the mother’s breast to suckle.

In that move, God the Midwife provided milk, bonding, and oxytocin to shrink the uterus and calm the spirits of mother and child.

But, magically and suddenly, in the next verse, God the Midwife morphs into God the Mother.

God now becomes the breast-bearer, the life-giver, the embracer.

(And people say that God is male.  Harrumph.)

I often draw people to scriptural references and to theological notions that God is a woman and mother, not because I feel God is female rather than male—God transcends gender—but rather because when one thinks of a woman and a mama one naturally conjures up images of tenderness, of suppleness, of softness, of fierce protection, of enveloping arms and hands that wipe tears and exclaim in joy.

It’s a stark welcome and faithful contrast to images of God the Father, which can be naturally associated with sternness, criticism, judgmentalism, power, authority, and evocable fear. To make the point, for a week—better more—pray to Heavenly Mother rather than Heavenly Father, or Mother God rather than Father God, and see if or how your perception of and relationship to God changes.

So how radical is this: the writer of Psalm 22 grounds their understanding of God as woman, first as midwife, and then as mother.

But how all the more disorienting, then, that it’s this God, this life-creator/life-bringer/life-sustainer/life-cherisher to whom the psalmist cries out for protection, who suddenly, no longer laying the psalmist on the mother’s breast, later lays the hymnist in the “dust of death!”

From life-giving breast to death-dealing dust.

That right there is a betrayal of archetypal power.

And that right there is precisely what Jesus felt on the cross.

For all the times that Jesus called God abba, ‘father,’ at his moment of death, he called to God as imma, as ’mother.’

That’s breathtaking, and breathtakingly tragic.

Reading the texts in these Holy Days, those who loved and followed him felt the same tragic betrayal too.

They knew the psalm.

They trusted Jesus.

They put their faith in them.

They gave their lives to him.

He’d given them new life.

But now, there they were, in the dust at the base of the cross, in the dust of the road bringing his limp body to the tomb, in the dust that swirled as the stone was rolled before the cave’s mouth.

Life to dust, the lot of them.

~~~~~

Holy Saturday is not Easter.

It’s not Good Friday either, of course.

On this day one enters this liminal space between experiencing the bewilderment of betrayal and the recognition that one must trust again to live again.

On this day we encounter the disorienting sensibility of knowing that one has good reason to have lost faith…

…and yet.

See, that’s it.

Holy Saturday is the day of ‘and yets’ and ‘still and even sos’ and ‘neverthelesses.’

It’s a day when, despite it all, one still feels the stirrings of faith pulling oneself into belief—dare we say trust?—that despair must be refused, cynicism must be quashed, hope must be given room to root.

~~~~~

Roman Catholic theologian Anthony Kelly writes:

“Optimism is no bad thing in itself. It is a kind of implicit confidence that things are going well in the present situation…Optimism is happy enough with the system.  In contrast, genuine hope is always ‘against hope.’ It begins where optimism reaches the end of its tether.  Hope stirs when the secure system shows signs of breaking down.  Hope is at home in the world of the unpredictable where no human logic or expectation is in control…In this respect, it is never far from humility, for it acknowledges that in birth and in death…human existence is never a realm of total control.  We are not the center of the universe that has brought us forth, and the ultimate.” (Anthony Kelly, Eschatology and Hope, Orbis Press, 2013. P. 5. 

Holy Saturday is a day for honesty and for hope.

Optimism has reached the end of its tether.

Hope, like grace, is what comes about precisely when a very different response seems to be called for, reasonable responses like despair or fear.

But hope bridges the abyss of betrayal and begins to lead one to faith, maybe even joy, again.

~~~~~

Turns out that the psalmist discovers this truth too, even within the confines of the hymn.

This God “did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted,” but rather showed the divine face again, and heard the writer’s cries.

So not only does the psalmist wrap up the hymn by saying “I shall live for him,” but the author speaks of those who are not yet born, of “posterity” and “future generations.”

Betrayal be banished, despair be damned.

That psalmist is throwing his/her/their lot to life.

~~~~~

The truth is we want to rush to that sensation, that posture, that way of being.

We want to rush to Easter.

But the truth also is, the day-to-day truth is, there are good reasons to feel despair, to feel abandoned, to feel betrayed.

Whether we are talking the ravages of illness or of tyrants or of zealots or of capitalists or of victimizers or of cancer, brain injuries, ticks, the stomach flu, and unnecessarily complex tax forms, life is not what we want it to be, and is not what it should be.

I’ll be the first to tell you, no one has a good answer as to why these hardships exist, and if anyone says that they have it figured out, walk away.

There is good reason to feel betrayed by God.

If Jesus felt betrayed, as did the psalmist whose words were in Jesus’ mouth while dying, then so can we.

And yet.

Though I won’t be the first to tell you—that would be the women on Easter morning, thank you very much, not the men, who skedaddled and were content with wallowing despair and self-imposed impotence—I will tell you this:

Brimming with the news that arrives with the dawn of Easter, we know that God is not a God of betrayal but of promise.

We know that God does not will or create suffering but calls life out of it.

We know—by faith and sometimes even by experience—that this is true not just by looking back at God’s intentions as seen in the first stories of creation, but by looking forward to, leaning in to, our own discovery of the empty tomb.

Today, it’s all true.

The disorienting betrayal.

The asphyxiating despair.

The defiant hope.

The anticipatory joy.

Today, and, in fact, every day, the whole lot of it is true.

~~~~~

Commentaries by Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, a womanist theologian who studies the First (Old/Older) Testament; readings by Rev. Dr. Soon-Cha Rah, particularly his book Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times; insights from  Second (New/Newer) Testament Theologian Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope; and insights about the feminine metaphors of God in Psalm 22 as noted by Jonathan D. Parker in The Expository Times, October 19, 2019, in his article “‘My Mother, My God,’ ‘Why Have You Forsaken Me?’: An Exegetical Note on Psalm 22 as Christian Scripture,” were not only helpful for my reflection on these Holy Three Days, but also are worth the read—especially by white and white male Christians—to be all the more informed and enriched by womanist, black, Asian, and feminist theologians and theological perspectives.

That’s embarrassing: three of the highest holy days of the Church, I’m a theologian of the Church, annnnnnnnd…..I didn’t get a blog done.

Turns out that the legs of my son Karl, who has a TBI, are acting up.

Happened in January, too. Then, the trouble stretched over two interminable weeks.

Gosh, I hope that we aren’t entering into a repeat of that: this poor boy, his legs bicycle, intensely springing up and down, and almost constantly, day and night.  Poor kid hasn’t had any sleep to speak of for the last two nights.

We don’t know why it happens, and we don’t know why it stops, but we do know that it’s all related to the brain injury of nigh upon 16 years ago.

When I asked Karl how he felt about this whole matter, and named a variety of possible emotions, Karl, normally happy, content, never one to want to cause concern, said, for the first time about anything near as I recall, “mad.”

Low. Whistle.

And who wouldn’t be?

I’m mad too. This son of mine suffers every day the unwelcome effects of a trauma he incurred by absolutely no fault of his own.

And I’m sad.  I’m sad that the three of us had been so looking forward to making our Easter feast—it’s one of our favorite family bonding times—and instead, I’m in the bedroom with my boy, trying to calm his poor legs down and help him rest, and my girl is in the kitchen, making our meal alone.

I’ve been through way worse.

Others have been through way worse.

But man, still and even so, it’s just not right, on so many levels, and we are beyond ready for a TBI cure.

~~~~~

In the seminary class I’m teaching on the Lutheran Confessions, we got to talking on Maundy Thursday about ‘atonement’ theories, the fancy name for the different, what…reasons…why Jesus died on the cross.

Traditionally, there are about three that are most often floated around, and naturally have labels: the Classic Theory, the Substitionary Theory, and the Subjective Theory.

In the Classic form, Jesus is considered to be a victor over death. It’s very dualistic, very bad vs. good, very Satan vs. God, and often very violent. It’s a way of thinking about the cross that informed C.S. Lewis’ notion of the White Witch and Aslan, and the Deep Magic and the Deeper Magic.

Jesus is Aslan, so to speak, who on behalf of the enslaved, in-bondaged humans, fights the good fight, and ultimately vanquishes the enemy and saves humanity.

It’s not like there aren’t Scriptural texts for it: Genesis 3, the tale of the servant who taught Eve and Adam the difference between good and evil, and tore their allegiance from God; John 8, especially verse 44, in which Jesus says that he is from the Father, but that our father is the Devil, for we do our father’s bidding, and not his; and Hebrews 2:14-18, in which the author tells of how we share flesh and blood with Jesus, who on our behalf destroyed the devil and thereby freed us.

The Easter human “Welcome, Happy Morning” expresses this theology: “…Hell today is vanquished, heav’n is won today….” and “Source of all things living, you came down to die, Plummed the depths of hell to raise us up on high….Died as a mortal man to save us by your love…” and “Free the souls long prisoned, bound with Satan’s chai; All that once had fallen raise to life again….”

For that matter, so is “A Mighty Fortress.” “He breaks the cruel oppressors rod, and wins salvation glorious…” and “No strength of ours can match his might! We would be lost, rejected.  But now a champion comes to fight, Whom God himself elected, You ask who this may be? The Lord of hosts is he! Christ Jesus mighty Lord, God’s only Son, adored. He holds the field victorious.”

So, as we’ll find in all of these forms of atonement theories, there’s scriptural tradition, and there’s historical tradition. But there are also problems afoot.

For example, we really don’t need to do anything but watch the battle from the sidelines.  We can be grateful to the vanquisher, because without him we’d still be the vanquished, but still, the change was made outside of ourselves, rather than within us.

Too, given that, we really have no motivation to change. “The Devil made me do it” cuts it, in this model.

So there’s neither much motivation to make structural and personal changes, nor, as far as that goes, much reason to form a framework of ethics.

Jesus’ got this one, and therefore we don’t have to.

But wait!

There’s more.

There’s the Substitutionary model too.

We might know this approach musically best as “Ah, Holy Jesus.” The folks at Live From Here did a beautiful rendition of it, which you can find here.

“Ah, holy Jesus, how hast though offended/That man to judge thee hath in hate pretended?” “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee/‘Twas I, Lord Jesus/ I it was denied the/I crucified thee.” “Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered. The slave that sinned/and the Son hath suffered/For man’s atonement/while he nothing heedeth/God intercedeth.” “For me, kind Jesus, was thine incarnation/Thy mortal sorrow/and thy life’s oblation/Thy death of anguish/and thy bitter Passion/For my salvation.”

Roots for it are everywhere in Scripture. Mark 10:45, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many;” 1 Timothy 2:5-6 “For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all…” Revelation 5:9, ““You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation,” and that’s just for starters.

An infraction has occurred, and a price has to be paid.

It’s our fault, but Jesus takes one for the human team. (Here also Aslan can be a reference). For this reason, it is called the Substitutionary Model, because Jesus, pure and sinless, is substituted for sinful people.

It’s arguably the theological bent that has made the cross such an element of the faith of Christians, over against that of Easter: we are so horrible, Jesus is so pure, Jesus sacrificed himself for us, and we are (literally) undyingly grateful.

But it’s got troubles too:

God the Father (always the Father—I do believe we’d realize a bit more quickly the troubling elements of this approach if our primary notion of God were as Mother) is nothing but an angry executioner, appeased only by righteous blood. We have every reason to still live in fear, because that sort of divine being already has the street creds for capricious decisions.

Too, sin is nothing but immorality, and makes the reconciliation of it violence rather than mercy born out of love.

And again, because the change took place this time in God (rather than the devil), we don’t have reason to change, to do anything else.

It’s been done.

And last, the Subjective Theory of Atonement.

This framework has a different spin on matters, for here, the goal of Jesus’ death on the cross is that we are changed.

“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” is thoroughly grounded in this approach: “When I survey the wondrous cross/On which the prince of glory died/My richest gain I county but loss/And pour contempt on all my pride.” And “Forbid it Lord that I should boast/Save in the death of Christ, my God/ All the vain things that charm me most/I sacrifice them to his blood.” And “Were the whole realm of nature mine/That were a tribute far too small/Love so amazing so divine/Demands my soul, my life, my all.”

You can surely find textual basis for it in Scripture: John 13:15 says, “For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you,” and 1 Peter 2:21 “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.”

Here, Jesus is a teacher, and we are the students.  We most of all have to learn to love. We have to learn because we are sinful, and weak, and thick-headed.  Jesus loves God this much, and so should we.

But while more liberal theology is more comfortable with some elements of this take on the cross, it is ultimately insufficient, just as the two prior atonement theories are.

Here, we are reduced to being blockheads.

The depth of sinfulness, therefore, is not just relativized, but is rejected.

So, all of these approaches: Classic, Substitutionary, and Subjective, have truth, and none of them quite do the trick, and none of them entirely quite tell my son whose legs are tremoring or my daughter who is in the kitchen by herself what the cross has to say to them.

~~~~~

I’m not audacious enough to say that I have it all figured out.

I definitely don’t have it all figured out.

But there are a couple of things that have bugged me about these three approaches, these three takes on the cross that get, in one form or another, or in a Venn-diagram-esque-y way, the bulk of attention in the life of faith.

All of them have to do with sin.

None of them have to do with my boy’s legs.

None of them have to do with my girl’s default love and default sacrifices for her brother.

None of them have to do with the immeasurable grief at the deaths of thousands of people who died because of accidents, of cancers, of Coronovirus.

None of them have to do with the starvation and the desperation of those utterly at the mercy of robber barons and base politicians and the voters who are down with it all.

None of them have to do with those suffering from depression, bi-polar, alcoholism, abuse, or prejudice.

These theories speak to sin, and only to sin.

But here’s the thing: there is suffering to be had, injustice to be had, victims of sin to be had, and sweet Jesus the cross must have something to say to them!

It must have something to say to my son.

And it must have something to say to my daughter, who rather than making a meal with her mama has been (and ever so gladly, for which I am so grateful) helping her brother by stretching his legs, by rubbing cream on his skin, by sleeping downstairs in case I need her in the night, and by readying for Easter in the kitchen alone while I sit with my spasmodic boy.

~~~~~

To write this blog, I flipped to my old, old systematic lectures, written by Walt B.

In them, he teased out all of these atonement theories, more or less as I have above.

At first, his lecture notes didn’t seem to notice this pesky detail, though, this piece that each of these theories, while decidedly different, reduce the cross just various ways of thinking through forgiveness.

That they speak to the sinners, but not to those sinned upon, nor to the sufferers.

That they don’t speak to the why of forsakenness felt not just by Jesus, but by people still, every damn day.

But then I came across these points, three of them, all under his Point D: The Cross of Jesus is something that happens to the world. He wrote:

1. The world—all of humanity—crucified the Messiah: religion and politics, Jew and Gentile, enemies and disciples, men—women—children.

2. Jesus’ death on the cross calls the whole world into question.  Jesus is, in some sense, vindicated in the resurrection.  But the unmasking of false gods is in the dying.  “Pilate and Herod are revealed” (Gollwitzer). The world is revealed as “old alone” IN the death of Jesus its oldness—its way of death-dealing in order to cling to the illusion of power—is revealed. The old has passed away; it has come to an end (II Cor. 5:17).

3. In the death of Jesus God has made a final and irrevocable decision about the world. He will not abandon the world.  He will not give up on the world.  Atonement means that the world has been changed by God’s identification with it in the depths of its oldness.

That, all three of those points, that helped me, as I sit in this bed mid-afternoon, my legs wrapped around my son’s, trying to press the tremoring muscle groups with my toes and knees, and by knotting his legs around mine in hopes that this odd position will perhaps break the tone.

At the very least, perhaps after two sleepless nights, he’ll rest?

But these points reminded me that God did not kill Jesus: we did with our quests for power and our fear of its loss; our hubris and our anxious unwillingness to transform hope into a new way of being.

I was reminded that death can come naturally or it can come with violence—and one doesn’t even need to lose one’s breath for this to be so.

And I was reminded of how easy it is to make despair the god, the thing I trust most.

I was reminded that death is real, and that God entered into it.

And I was reminded that the way of God is not the way of the world: We crucify. God raises up.

So as I sit here with my boy, yet one more twist of my ankle to help untwist his, all the while listening to my girl clatter away in the kitchen making the meal that we had so looked forward to cooking together today, I am reminded that that’s exactly what Holy Saturday is about.

Death is real.

God must not just know that, but enter into that, for I need God to ache with me as my son’s TBI-born muscle spasms tremor into my own heart, and I need God to ache with me as that same heart reaches to my girl in the kitchen around the corner.

And I know that my son’s tremors and my daughter’s loss once again of mama-daughter time is someone else’s virtual farewell because of COVID, someone else’s inability to access water to cleanse their hands, someone else’s frightened self behind a locked closet door of a raging abuser, someone else’s despair at being alone.

The cross must speak to that.

But there must, there must, be more to the story than that.

We can’t make sense of the cross if we don’t hold out hope for that.

If there isn’t reason to hold out hope for that.

If there isn’t the possibility that perhaps, though death is real, life is real-er.

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.

In fact, if you look up its etymology, you discover that a paradox is ‘incredible,’ that is, unable to be believed.

‘Paradox’ comes from the Greek words ‘para,’ meaning ‘contrary to,’ and ‘doxa,’ meaning ‘opinion.’

You have to be cruel to be kind, you won’t ever reach where you’re going if you try to get there by halving each remaining stretch, silence is deafening…all are examples of paradox.

Grace, too, is paradoxical.

You receive exactly what you don’t deserve and that’s precisely why you receive it.

My late father-in-law and late husband, these two men whom, paradoxically I loved and who made me crazy precisely for the same reasons I loved them, taught me the paradoxical truth about grace.

~~~~~

Father-in-law Don and I, we saw the world very differently.

Generally on our best behavior around each other, extended visits together took effort for me, and when staying at his place, I depended on routine self-care naps curled up in my husband’s childhood bedroom.

And although Don would have been diplomatic about admitting it, if pressed he’d have acknowledged that perhaps an extra round of 9 holes when I was around was a welcome thing.

Don was a staunch Republican.  I am a staunch Democrat—a Democratic Socialist to be specific, though I didn’t know that at the time. I suspect he did, which made matters worse.

He was fastidious, I am…free-spirited.

Also messy.

He came from strict German stock, I from the Happy Danes.

But the biggest barely-kept-at-bay clash between us was this:

Don brewed his coffee every Sunday, in copious amounts in a restaurant-sized Bunn Coffee Maker, then poured it into thermoses, which stood like waiters on the counter at the ready to serve us our coffee.

All.

Week.

Long.

Just so that I make this abundantly clear, so that you understand the situation, so that you grasp the extent of the ick-factor of it all: I had to drink Sunday’s weak coffee re-warmed all. week. long.

Coffee, you see, coffee is less to me a vehicle for caffeine, and more an invitation to settle in for a moment, to breathe in a gentle aroma, to appreciate warmth, to welcome the incoming day, to appreciate momentary serenity.

It is therefore a beverage worthy of honor.

But what he poured into my cup, even on the first day, let alone the fifth day, was not coffee.

It was a liquid abomination to all things good.

But I was in his house.

And I already had a knack of annoying him because, well…reference above.

And yet I had no intention of offending Don—not least of all because he fathered my husband, after all.

So instead, I did two things.

1) I drank his “coffee,” albeit with heaps of cream and sugar, which was horrible, because I like my coffee so black that not only can I not see the bottom of the cup, but I’m left to wonder whether I’m cradling a black hole in my hands.

2) Every night, I’d set my alarm for 4:30 in the morning.

When it rang, I’d grab a bulky bag from my suitcase.

I’d tip-toe down the hallway, I’d hope to God I’d remember to turn off the house alarm on the keypad before I hung a left to make my way to the kitchen, I’d silently place my sacred satchel on the counter, I’d open it up, and I’d pull out, with a smile and a sigh of relief and a “Thank You Jesus,” a package of Starbucks French Roast Ground Coffee, along with a press pot.

Some mornings I’d even hug the bag in the dark of the early morning kitchen.

Ever so quietly I’d pull out a pan that I’d secretly set aside the night before, I’d pour the right amount of water in it, let it simmer to the perfect temperature while I placed the perfect amount of grounds in my press pot, I’d pour the water onto my coffee, then stir the grounds, then place the water pot quietly back into the cupboard, and, then, with my bag, my favorite coffee cup that I’d packed along, and my press pot, I’d tiptoe right on back to our bedroom, remembering to rearm the alarm, and I’d crawl back into bed with my coffee, the solitary opportunity for good coffee I’d get that day, and I’d savor every sip.

With this cup downed, I was confident that I could meet the rest of the day, and the rest of last Sunday’s coffee, with pleasantness and even a smile.

To boot, I was confident that I wouldn’t sabotage my already somewhat tenuous relationship with my father-in-law by insulting his well-earned and even noble Depression-Era born pragmatism when I reflexively spat out his weak, week-old, god-awful brew.

It worked.

For two years, it worked.

Then came Christmas Eve, 1998.

We were gathered around our Christmas tree, in our cozies, and opening our presents—it counted that we could agree that Christmas presents are to be opened up on Christmas Eve, and Santa presents on Christmas morning.

So it came time to open the gift from Don to me.

He gleamed.

I could tell something was up.

I warily opened the present—meticulously wrapped, of course.

And there, in my hands, was this:

A Bodum portable Coffee Making Set: an electric tea kettle, a tiny press pot, a storage container for coffee grounds, two small cups, and even a tiny spoon to “break the crust” of the grounds after the water is poured in.

Don was chortling.

I was speechless.

”How,” I sputtered, “how did you know?”

”I shall never say,” he said with his booming voice and a grin. “I will say this: you can just leave the alarm off tomorrow morning, and every morning after that too.”

I still use the coffee maker he gifted me, regularly bringing it with me on almost all of my travels. Alas, I’ve lost the yellow spoon, but it has made more space for my wine opener.

And every time, I think of the lesson in hospitality I receive, steaming up from a cup of wonderful, piping hot, dark roast, strong, freshly brewed coffee, delivered by Don Coning, brewer of the worst coffee in the world, and exactly therefore and thereby a gifter of tremendous grace.

~~~~~

Just days before the accident, my late husband and I had a significant argument.

Like, the kind where it ended with a suffocating, silent fume that endured for at least a day.

And over what?

Paper plates.

Of course, it wasn’t really about paper plates.

The issue was this: later that week, I had the final obligation of my tenure at the Universität Regensburg, when our department hosted the Birthday Fest for my Doktor Vater Herr Prof. Dr. Dr. Hans Schwarz.

It wasn’t any ordinary birthday celebration, the sorts of which we North Americans might expect for an respected friend or colleague.

Oh no.

It was a German birthday celebration, offered in honor and gratitude for an esteemed, prolific, and nearing-retirement professor.

And it was so significant that it was the very reason we’d stayed for another year after my dissertation was done: I got to plan a party.

Of course, that entailed compiling essays written by Prof. Schwarz’s former students from all over the globe, and corresponding with invited speakers, and coordinating festivity venues, and so forth.

So the week of our tiff, I was busy.

Really busy, because it was the Week Of The Party.

Unbeknownst to us, of course, it would also be the weekend of Bill’s death.

Meanwhile, Bill was a stay-at-home dad, tending to Karl, then almost three, and Else, only 8 months old.

We were also in the throes of packing for our return back to the States.  Shipping had gotten complicated, post 9-11, so we had regulations to learn, items to sort, and suitcase-stuffing to do.

We’d been there for five years, and accumulated not just precious things but two precious babies, so it wasn’t an easy task.

So this week, I was always gone.

Karl was always trying to ‘help.’

Else had determined that it was a social justice issue that her milk was coming from a bottle and not her mama, so she was always unhappy.

End effect: my time and patience was short, and Bill’s time and patience was short, and the kids were just short, and needy, and picking up on the stress.

So with the best of intentions, I suggested that we make our lives easier, and buy some paper plates and chuckable forks, knives, and spoons, just for this last week—after that, we were anyway planning on finally touring Europe, which, oddly, we hadn’t done like we’d hoped: between my dissertation work, two children, my parents having moved to Slovakia for two years, and our love of the Alps, we simply hadn’t seen much beyond Bavaria.

“Absolutely not,” he angrily said.

”Why NOT?” I replied, immediately ticked by his reaction.

”We are called to be stewards all the time, not just when it’s convenient.”

”Sooo….” I said, “you’re pulling stewardship out when we are stressed out of our gourds. I kind of think Jesus would understand a week full of paper plates, babe, under the circumstances.”

“We are not getting paper plates and plastic silverware. We can handle the dishes.  The Earth can’t handle more paper plates and plastic silverware.”

At which point I glared at my righteous husband, who in this moment seemed to me more self-righteous than righteous, and left him to do the dishes righteously by himself.

So, super petty, right? As are so many marital arguments.

A week later, I was back in the apartment.

It was four days after the accident.

I’d stopped at the apartment only once before, just briefly the day after the accident, just to pick up clothes for E and me, as she and I basically moved into the ICU to be with Karl.

My parents had flown straight away from the States after the news, and were staying at our apartment: we lived on the top floor of a tower that dated from 1215, along a cobblestoned alleyway in the center of ancient Regensburg, just a handful of blocks away from the northern most point of the Danube.

It was so, so beautiful.

Right across from our spot was a tapas restaurant.

I’d just come home from the ICU to shower, and to pick up a change of clothes for Elsegirl and me, and most horrible of all, to pick out the outfit in which Bill would be dressed for his memorial service.

My father loved the tapas food from this place, and he loved bantering with the owner, and so had popped over to get some small bites for us to eat while I was ever-so-briefly home.

As he was pulling out the delicious array from the bag, he called out this fateful sentence:

“Where are your paper plates?”

I burst out into tears and fury.

“DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT !@$#$&%#! PAPER PLATES! WE DON’T HAVE PAPER PLATES AND LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE MOMENT IT’S ALL BILL’S FAULT.”

Unified parental silence.

”…Baby?” said my mama. “Baby, yes you do.”

”NO WE DO NOT.  I WANTED PAPER PLATES LAST WEEK AND BILL PULLED JESUS ON ME AND SO NOW WE DON’T HAVE PAPER PLATES EXACTLY WHEN I NEED NOTHING MORE THAN SOME DAMN PAPER PLATES! AND COME TO THINK OF IT JESUS WOULD BE HELPFUL NOW TOO,” I hollered and wept and raged.

I saw my mother look at my father, and then walk from the small dining room to the small kitchen, from where she came back holding…paper plates and plastic silverware.

“Here, honey,” she said softly. “Here they are. They were right on the counter.”

So sometime between Friday, when Else and I’d left for the town where the lectures were being held, and Saturday morning, when the accident had happened, Bill and Karl had taken a break from packing and playing and gone to the store to buy some unrighteous paper plates and plastic silverware, and, post-death, gift me some righteousness.

~~~~~

I’ve often made the case that grace is that good gift you get when you don’t deserve what you’re getting.

If you deserve it, whatever ‘it’ is, you’re getting something for sure, but it isn’t grace.

It’s a reward, it’s a commendation, it’s a benefit, it’s a consequence.

But grace, grace is an extension precisely of that which you haven’t earned.

At. All.

Grace is exactly opposite of the way the world works, of the way we work, of what we believe to be just.

In fact, given that I have absolutely no athletic ability whatsoever, it is not a far stretch to imagine that I fell in love with the Twins and baseball precisely because I fell in love.

I don’t know what else would have gotten me to the ballpark except for the promise of my hand being held by a boy who held my heart too.

Before this particular boy entered my world, I’d never entered a baseball stadium ever, except to go to the one at Carson Park, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, but that was just for the annual outdoor service held by the church my father served as an associate pastor at the time.

I imagine that both loves were aided by the fact that at the time, in my mid-to-late teens and early 20s, the Twins were on their late-80’s/early ‘90s winning streaks, with the likes of Kent Hrbek and Kirby Puckett sending out the hits and bringing in the runs and the World Series Titles.

It also didn’t hurt that my high school love was Lutheran, and handsome, and stole my heart the way Dan Gladden stole bases, sent kisses my way as finely as Bert Blyleven pitched his ball straight across the plate, and was as dependable a presence in my young life as shortstop Greg Gagne was in all of our lives, standing out on that field.

Truth be told, there isn’t a single Twins game I watch without thinking of those days, days that are precisely what Van Morrison had in mind when he crafted what is perhaps the best summer love song ever, “Brown Eyed Girl.”

~~~~~~~

This year, my kids have gotten into the game, and are now officially as fiendish about the Twins as am I.

My daughter Else is as old as I was, back in those halcyon days, so it is a bit mind-bending to watch her leaning into those squeaker-innings like I did, and do.

But E is learning the lingo, and when she doesn’t know the rules, she looks them up to learn, and wields that info like a pro while we are all munching our routinely home-made Cracker Jacks, which we gnaw on every game when we aren’t doing the same to our nails.

She’s my resident Dick Bremer.

And Karl, 18, traumatic brain injury be damned, he knows when our boys are up to the plate, and he knows when to say that we need a home run (sometimes desperately), and thanks to our five years in Regensburg Germany, he knows when the moment calls for a resounding “Scheisse!”, and though he can’t jump up when we get a run like his sister and I do, he beams his grin which is just as good if not better a celebration.

A friend of mine, Pastor Matt Steinhauer, stayed at my Spent Dandelion Theological Retreat Center a few weeks back.  He knew something of my love of the game, and so brought up this book by his friend Robert Benson: The Game: One Man, Nine Innings, a Love Affair with Baseball.

It’s a great read: lolls around like most of a baseball game does (in the book, he quotes that saying by Ray Fitzgerald, lover of baseball, who said, “A critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two and one-half hours” [28].)

But that’s part of the ambiance, the personality, of the game, right?

Baseball is less about a constant rush, is not about adrenaline fixes demanding regular top-offs, but is instead more about just showing up, about paying attention, and about being at the ready for the occasional thrill of those double plays, the exhilaration of glorious line drives, and the bask in the glory of the noble home runs.

That’s not to say that fans object to a series of pellmell cracks over the fence (I’m looking at that gorgeous win over Kansas City on Aug 3, thank you very much, where Nelson Cruz got 3 homers, sailed over the line in the same game as Jorge Polanco and CJ Cron offered a couple of their own to the sky by and by).

But while we all hope for those, much of baseball is not that.

Much of baseball is an unglamorous E for Effort at the plate, a slow pop fly hit or caught, a patient waiting for a batter to be either walked or struck out or maybe just maybe to hit that grounder that’ll be so unexpected and fast it’ll be missed by the pitcher who will inevitably reach for it, to no avail, and who will then turn to see the ball do everything short of wave as it passes on by.

Cue the obvious analogy to life: it’s mostly about showing up, and then expecting or hoping for a bit of lively drama injected into what is otherwise somewhat…routine.

But that low-hanging-but-still-bittersweet-fruit truth aside, here’s something else I’ve been thinking about, now that we Twins fans are somewhat in a wince-inducing “much of baseball is not that” phase of the Twins season.

True baseball fans, like the kind who buy their tickets and proudly wear their gear even in down periods, down seasons, down decades, true baseball fans still show up.

We might groan at the pitches so far to the East that they land in Wisconsin, the dervish-like swings that miss all but the dust they stir up, the coulda-caught-it-with-your-eyes-closed dropped flyballs, but the fact is, no loss is ever just due to one person, and deep down we know that.

We might point to one Boy of Summer with one hand while smacking our forehead with the other, but still, we know that, generally speaking at least, no game is ever entirely lost just because of one play, or one player.

We don’t say, for example, “Player X lost.”

We say “The Twins lost.”

In fact, we might even say, “We lost,” even if “we” weren’t ever on the field.

It’s a collective loss, a collective “Scheisse.”

It’s that ‘collective’ responsibility—both for wins and for losses—that I find interesting.

Outside of the game, when some event brings about or notes Life, even the passing of it, we do so with a communal marking, and we throw open doors: wedding receptions and birthday bashes and baby showers.

Even funerals are most often held with other people who grieve, or who care about those who are.

But when we drop the ball, so to speak, gosh do we do that either in isolation, or we are left in isolation.

Suddenly the collective interplay becomes the individual error.

Think divorces.

Think addictions.

Think arrests.

Think garden-variety poor choices.

In these sorts of occasions, then it’s awfully clear that “Player X struck out.”

There is rarely an acknowledgement of team responsibility, of compounding events, of the awareness that the ratio of good at bats to lousy at bats is about the same.

As Benson points out:

“Generally speaking the team that wins its division in the major leagues will win somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 to 95 games in the course of the season.  The other side of that statistic, of course, is that these winners will have managed to lose between 67-77 baseball games. You may be winning every other day, but you are pretty close to losing every other day too.” He goes on to note that in one season, after 150 games were in the books “one could check the statistics for the top home-run hitters in the majors and discover that two of the top five were also in the top five in strikeouts….‘Every pitch is a potential home run,’ said the pitcher Preacher Roe. That is true, but every pitch has more potential to be a strikeout or a double-play ball or a pop fly to left.” (86-87).

So who, I ask you, among us hasn’t dropped a ball, hasn’t swung and missed in a critical inning, hasn’t committed an error of epic proportions?

At least we’re out there, one could say.

So sure, we all strikeout, sometimes quite gloriously.

And yet, if you’re not a player, if you are just like rest of us mere mortals, never putting foot to field but only swinging foot out of bed to a regular life, you, we, are often left to our losses alone, because our actions, or lack thereof, in down periods, down seasons, down decades, are deemed undeserving of patience, support, or public allegiance.

What’s most remembered are our really bad plays.

That’s messed up.

I think more of us need to go to more baseball games to be reminded of some humility and some humanity.

Benson points out something else, though, something else that up and reminds me of Orthodox worship: in certain expressions of that liturgical tradition, see, no one is ever late or leaves early.

There’s a common understanding that God is being worshipped all of the time, even when we aren’t in church.  So there are always people in the sanctuary, and there are always people who aren’t there, and yet God is being worshiped all the time all the same.

Even during worship, there’s a line of people coming, and a line of people going, and it’s all good.

Benson writes something that smacks of the same.  It’s baseball’s version of the Communion of the Saints, in a way. He reminisces:

Every time I stand in line at a ballpark, I am aware of the people who have stood in such a line before, and of the people who are somehow still standing beside me.  There are my childhood friends Ricky and Nicky and the rest. There are my brother and my dad. Coach Taylor, who taught me how to play in the days when I thought I would be the next great Yankee infielder. I think of lying on my back on the hook rug in my grandfather’s living room watching the Game of the Week on black-and-white-television and learning to say “Podna” with Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese.  I remember watching the World Series on television at school, back in the days when the Series was played in the sunlight and teachers were following it as well.  I remember the stickball games played with broomsticks and tennis balls, teh ones that we used to play on camping trips with families who’s fathers were named Henry and Billy and Joe….

I remember arriving before batting practice began and standing in the line at the gates to get into Coors Field in Denver on a hot summer afternoon the year that the ballpark opened.  And I remember the long line of cars trying to get into the parking lots of Camden Yards in Baltimore and Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.  I remember the line of Yankee fans on the steps coming down from the elevated train in the Bronx, and the lone line of people that stretched out along the sidewalks that run down the hill to Turner Field in Atlanta.

Every line is different and every line is the same. (18-19)

Every line is different, and every line is the same.

If that isn’t the Communion of the Saints, well then I’m a Milwaukee Brewers fan (bless their hearts).

~~~~~~~

I’m not the first one nor will I be the last to notice that going to a baseball game is like going to church. We may believe in different teams/congregations/denominations, but we all go to worship just the same.

We’ve been going to the cathedrals for years and years, and we’ll keep going for years and years to come.  Outfits change, rules even change, but the love of the game and the crowd and the Cracker Jacks don’t.

Baseball even has saints, those who are the best that baseball offers up, and while we might all hope to be one one day, most of us just stand in wonder and awe before them, inspired by their stories, encouraged that maybe, just maybe we could be sort of like them one day, and in the ordinary (and reality-grounded) meantime, we are simply reminded of the incarnate beauty of the best of the game that we get to see in living, breathing motion.

In some ways, you see, baseball is what church, what a believer, aspires to be.

You struck out? Go on, sit down, come on up to bat again in a spell. Maybe you’ll do better. Maybe you won’t. But you’re still welcome on the plate again, regardless, again and again.

Getting tired on that mound of yours? Well done, good and faithful servant. You go take a rest now. Someone else has got it from here on out.

You sick and tired and hurt? You seem like a good candidate for the Injured List. Sit down, we’ll help you heal, and meanwhile, others have it covered.

You committed an error for all to see? Who hasn’t, I ask you. So, yeah, we’re mad. But we’ve got your back. We’ll come back. We’ll cheer you on again, because although we know that your stats won’t ever shake that blunder, your stats are more than that blunder too.

~~~~~~~

This August the 25th, the bottom of the summer’s 9th, I’m taking my two kids and my father to one last Minnesota Twins game. It’ll be their second ever, and my father’s first.

The kids and I, along with our Danish exchange student, went to a game this past May.

Twins against the White Sox.

We won.

I made the tickets while crossing my fingers and breathing a bit faster, less about pre-worrying about who would come out on top.

Instead, I was awfully fretful about accessibility.

Now, I’m not saying that Target Field is heaven, but I am saying that the place is as accessible a place as a person in a wheelchair could hope for, this side of those cloud-born turnstiles at the divine stadium entrance.

Ahem.

I mean of those heavenly, pearly gates.

We had a special entry point, adapted security measures, designated escorts: I seriously felt as if we were VIPs—and why wouldn’t we be? Karl can’t wait to tell his class about his home run he struck in this summer’s Miracle League.

Else and I have decided that this time, we might try paying more intentional attention to stats by way of grabbing a scorecard.

Being that we will be sitting smack dab beyond Left Field, we’ve also decided to be hopeful and bring a mitt along, just in case.

As for today, though, as on every day that the Twins play, the three of us, plus our two hounds, will be sitting in front of our TV.

On the wall next to each side of our TV—really only used for watching the news and playing the Wii with Karl and cheering on the Twins—is a pennant and two Homer Hankies: turns out that my late mama, who was a flag maker, was spotted at the Renaissance Festival in the late 80’s by someone or another affiliated with the Twins.  She didn’t so much know a baseball from a soccer ball, but was thrilled anyway to be asked to make two 8’ x 8’ Homer Hankies, during their Series streaks, one of which ended up hanging over the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Newspaper building, and the other over the Metrodome. The one that flew over Star and Tribune building got stolen, and to her dying day, she was so proud that someone had her 8’ x 8’ Homer Hanky hanging in their fraternity or basement den.

Come pregame time, homemade Cracker Jacks in hand and mouth, Karl, Else, and I will gather around that TV, and eagerly watch for the Twins trotting onto the field.

Hopefully the Twins will trot off of it with a win.

I’m a bit fearful that this season, they’re going to break my heart like that first boy did years ago, and like most every one since then, come to think of it.

But if they do, I will forgive them.

I’ll be back.

And so will they.

And who else do I need, anyway?

I have my son, I have my daughter, I have my father, I have my two hounds, I have gratitude and grins that far outweigh any regret and remorse about the loss of those sweet young-love-and-young-life days, I have Van Morrison, and I have the Communion of the Saints, those folks who not least of all loved, love, and will love the boys of summer (almost) as much as I do.

And I have tickets to see the Twins with my family one more time this season.

It is enough.

(P.S. Is it coincidence that the logo of my favorite wine almost mirrors the logo of my favorite team? I think not. A sign of something, if not the reign of God, the way I look at it.)

~~~~~

My new book, I Can Do No Other: The Church’s New Here We Stand Moment, published by Fortress Press, can be pre-ordered here.

In it, I make the case that while justification was the key matter of Luther’s Day, social justice is the key matter for ours.

Both delving into and departing from Luther’s framework, and by exploring historical and present-day expressions of righteous opposition to such blights as slavery, Hitler, white supremacy, patriarchy, religious bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia, and lack of concern for the earth, I seek to find both means for resistance and reasons for hope, grounded in the gospel that announces freedom, welcome, and life.

The reviews are in, and while I may not be worthy of them, I sure am thankful for them.

“Rev. Dr. Anna Madsen has a unique, prophetic voice as a Lutheran theologian. With passion and erudition, she brings Martin Luther’s liberating discovery of grace as a charge for Christian communities today to make justice happen, with hope embodied. ‘Our God is revealed in every move we make, and people are watching.'” –Kirsi Stjerna, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary

“Anna Madsen’s work is an unfolding wonder to me; her deeply spiritual reflections on very real issues in life and society hit me sometimes like a prophetic slap–and yet, beneath the critique and the concern for real human sin, the whisper of God’s mercy and love can always be heard. I am grateful for all I have learned–and continue to learn–from her.” –The Rev. Dr. Guy Erwin, Bishop of the Southwest California Synod, ELCA

“Rev. Dr. Madsen has gifted us with a systematic response to this divided, tragic, beautiful world, to her own personal tragedy and how it affected everything, and the call that Christians desperately need to hear right now to truly practice ‘justice and peace in all the earth.'” –Rev. Beth Birkholz, Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Livonia, MI

“In the word’s of Habakkuk 2:2 paraphrased, write it down, make it clear and run with it. That is exactly what Anna Madsen has accomplished in this book. Anna has connected the dots across time and space to help individuals and the Church to continue to reform. The church today is not our grandparents’ Lutheran Church (The church for that time served as called by God). The church of today is called to address the current issues facing the least of these, through the Gospel of Jesus The Christ.” –Rev. William C. Hamilton Jr., pastor St. John’s Lutheran Church, Jacksonville, Florida

“Anna Madsen was able to take ‘what we’ve heard and learned’ from Sunday School, Catechism, sermons, conversations and Bible studies, and expound her theological thoughts, in such a way, that will help those who read this, take pause and reflect on a wider view of possibilities. A seasoned learner or not so seasoned learner, is sure to get a broader sense of their own faith sense and practices as they help others to stretch their concept of God. Our challenge as disciples is to not always accept the status quo but to put our faith into action. Action in everyday life. I, personally, was moved by the concept of ‘The Anticipatory Church,’ and pray that somehow this is lifted as a vision of God’s possibilities.” –Rev. Victoria Hamilton, Jacksonville, Florida

I simply uploaded this picture on Facebook:

I meant the photo and my post as a tribute to my Grandma Madsen, and as leavened proof that free will is a demonstrably total illusion when a person (*cough* me *cough*) is left home alone with homemade sticky buns from my Grandma’s 100+ year old recipe from Denmark, and (in related news) as a confession that given a decent carb, I’m helpless.

Positively helpless.

Let’s be clear: I am fit.

I am a very healthy weight, and eat a healthy diet of mostly organic foods, and I drink lots of water and green tea and a glass of red wine per day and go on regular walks (though admittedly it’s a bit harder around here in the winter).

Let’s also be clear that all of that is a bit so that I can live a longer healthier life….but mooooooostly so that I can eat more carbs.

Like these sticky buns (in fact, in very much related news, as I was writing this blog, I rediscovered another blog I wrote for Thanksgiving about my grandmother, and my love of butter, and her love of butter and how it cost her a job).

The trouble is that, after sharing this picture, people began to ask, then beg, then clamor for me to share the recipe.

Both on the post’s thread, and then even in private messages, they wanted my Grandma’s recipe.

A lot.

Here’s the thing: it’s not my recipe.

Technically, it’s my grandma’s recipe, but this amazing woman, this stunning person who emigrated from Denmark to the States at but 23 and then built a family and a life and a legacy, this breathtaking Kristine Olesen Madsen died on January 1, 1993.

But before she died, she wrote two small books: one was a family history with pictures and tales of her days, and one was a small cookbook with not only recipes from her time as a Danish girl growing up on a small farm in Jutland, but also with stories that accompanied each dish.

All of the children and grandchildren received a copy of each.

So, you see, the recipe for my grandma’s bread dough, which can become either a loaf or buns or sticky buns, isn’t really mine to give out.

It’s my family’s.

So that was my pickle, you see, which in the great scheme of things isn’t on par with other world crises, of course.

But at least in my mind and heart, it was a Situation.

I’ve never been quite able to totally understand people’s recipe-sharing reticence, but a bit of me does appreciate the apprehension, because a recipe isn’t just a recipe: it’s a memory.

I have indescribable warm memories of my grandmother making her buns—the recipe calls for shortening, but what she meant was goose grease, so they are still called (even when we make them with the most obviously and righteous on-hand substitute, butter) Grandma’s Goose Grease Buns.

And then my mama (Grandma Madsen’s daughter-in-law) made them, with her own twist, and I can still see the sticky buns upturned on the cooling racks with a puddle of hot caramel under each pan with a pat of butter melting on each roll, and my mother grinning and nodding that yes, even though they were still hot (in fact, because they were still hot) we could break one off and pop the brown sugar ooze into our mouth.

In college, I started to try my hand at them.

I distinctly remember staring at the small cookbook, in awe of the legacy of this particular recipe, deciding to give it a try anyway, and then noticing, horrified, that there was an inconsistency in the directions.

The ingredients said that one needed ¼ of a cup of warm water in which to dissolve the yeast, but the recipe proper said that we were to mix the yeast in ½ cup warm water!

That could make all the difference between Grandma’s goose grease buns and a wretched attempt at The Legacy, I was sure of it.

So I rang up my father’s sister, my beloved Auntie Es.  “Auntie Es!” I said. “Is it a ¼ of a cup or a ½ a cup of warm water?!?!”

She harrumphed. “Anna Margrethe,” (I knew she was annoyed when my middle name got pitched in there) “it makes not a particle of difference.”

And I heard it for what it was: both rebuke and blessing.

Yeast dough is forgiving, within certain parameters.

Between the basic non-negotiable of nothing hotter than lukewarm liquid to get the yeast doing its thing, and not forgetting to take your bread out of the oven, there’s a lot of grace.

Sometimes the flour has more humidity, and therefore is bulkier in your measuring cup, so you need less than you did last time: no reason to fret. Sometimes you have a hankering for a handful of sesame seeds: go on, be bold, pitch them on in. Sometimes you get a phone call mid-knead, and then your dryer buzzes, and then your kids come home from school, and like a boomerang thwapping you on the back of your head, you suddenly remember your dough, which has since taken on a life of its own and taken over your kitchen, but no worries: it is wrestled to your counter again in no time, and is quite playful about the whole thing.

It’s really hard, that is, to bung up bread, which is perhaps why I like baking it so much. It’s knowledge and intuition and palpable grace.

So, back to my pickle (which, by the way, I have never and would never stick in a loaf of bread, but if it’s your thing, give it a whirl).

I decided the right thing to do was to connect with my cousins: many of them are on Facebook, and so it seemed like a good reason for a Facebook group message.

What, I asked them, should I do? Share the recipe with wild abandon, or change the thread’s focus to, say, green jello?

And before long, we got to talking about how this recipe is not just a bun recipe, but is a heritage.

And then we reminisced about my Auntie Es’ gingerbread recipe (itself, along with a so-precious picture of her and her granddaughter Lis overlooking a spread of her frosted perfection, published in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune: one of their most requested recipes), and my Auntie Ann’s pork roast recipe, and how some in our family can make one or more of them to perfection, but few can do them all just as they should be done and we remember them being done.

It’s not just following a recipe, that is: it’s a feel, an intuition, and maybe, in a weird way, a relationship with what you’re baking for loved ones now, just as it has been baked countless times by other beloved hands for other beloveds.

Although there was no official consensus, during the course of the thread, I felt a bit of a blessing to share the recipe, and all the more when I looked in my tattered copy of my Grandma’s cookbook.

Here’s the cover, with a photo of my grandmother and her mother, after whom I am named, and the inset page:

And then this gorgeous introduction:

Did you read that last paragraph?

“These few recipes and recollections are written here to help you enjoy your Danish heritage, and encourage you to ‘pass the blessing.’ I love you.”

Gosh, I love that line, to “pass the blessing.”

I am choosing to take it as a blessing from her to pass the blessing of her recipe on far and wide.

I posted that picture of her gooey sticky buns in the first place because although I make the recipe often, every holiday I make it 8-fold (the scribbled math is more or less correct in the recipe photo below) to offer both the buns and the sticky buns to other tables: it’s a small way, I suppose, of passing the blessing.

But…it seems only right and good to test them, though, before I dole them out to others…right?

So I did.

They were fine.

I am about to do the same with the batch I made today.  A person needs strength for Thanksgiving preparation…right?

The point is, in this season of giving Thanks, at tables where we pass the dishes, there is also a reminder that we are also passing on the blessings, and, in fact, are ourselves only passing blessings.

And so, from this blessing of a grandma who has passed, I pass on her blessing: her Kaffekage recipe.

May this Thanksgiving be an opportunity for you and yours to be blessings and to pass the blessings (and the basket of buns while you’re at it) on not just to those at the table, but to all who have a no tables and hunger in their bellies or their hearts.

And now, the recipe, with a few small adaptations.

2 packages of yeast (4 ½ teaspoons bulk yeast)

¼ cup warm water

½ cup sugar

2 eggs, beaten

1 teaspoon salt

½ cup butter (or goose grease!)

1 cup whole milk

4-6 cups organic bread flour (or more…)

(For sticky buns, you’ll also need some whipping cream, and brown sugar, and cinnamon, and almond paste, and butter)

Scald milk and add shortening and sugar; let stand until lukewarm.

Dissolve yeast in the ½ cup of warm water. Add to the cooled milk mixture.

Add two beaten eggs.

Add flour, mixing first, and then kneading until the dough is no longer sticky and (not making this up) feels like your earlobe.

Let rise in a buttered bowl in a warm place until doubled or until you remember it.

Knead the dough again, and then….decision time:

Make half into buns (which, to get a largish size, makes about a dozen), and the other half into sticky buns; or all buns; or all sticky buns.

It is a hard call, for real.

If you opt for sticky buns, pour about a ¼ inch of cream into the bottom of a pan, and pour, what, a ½ cup or more of brown sugar in, and mix it up (not going to judge if you swirl it with your finger and lick when no one is looking).

Roll the dough out until it is ⅛”-¼” thick, then slather with soft butter, pour some cream on for good measure, sprinkle cinnamon or cinnamon sugar, and ¼-½ cup brown sugar, and then a ½ cup or so of almond paste.

Roll up, cut up, stick in pan.

Let buns and rolls rise until double-ish.

Bake at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes for the rolls, and 15-20 minutes for the sticky buns.

I sort of got distracted with the rolls, must confess: was one of those days…

And now, finally: please pass the blessings!

A very Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

Anna M.

~~~~

In case you missed it, the last three blogs!

Of Dominent Men, Subversive Courage, and My Very Fine Woodpile

If You Had Been Here: An All Saints’ Day Sermon

Knowing Each Other in the Biblical Sense

For example, now that it’s wintery up here in the Great White North, and all the more because we have a wonderful Danish foreign exchange student, we’re thoroughly about ‘hygge.’ Hygge, this right here, is how my brood and I roll all year long, but especially come The Cold.

The notion of hygge auf Deutsch is, naturally, a bit…heftier in pronunciation: Gemütlichkeit. It means more or less the same thing, though: each word just expresses the idea with a bit of its own linguistic and cultural accent (e.g., look for images of hygge, and you find photos of fires and warm feet and be-windowed rooms with blankets thrown over comfy couches; look for images of Gemütlichkeit, and you’ll see such things…annnnnd you’ll be seeing some pictures with a distinct bent toward beer gardens, brats, and spätzle).

There’s something of ‘cozy’ in hygge and Gemütlichkeit, but it’s more than that: it’s warmth and love and gladness and contentment and peace all rolled up into one word.

Or two, depending on how you look at it.

(Turns out that there is even a dispute about whether Danish hygge or German Gemütlichkeit is a stronger force in each culture, which seems to be very un-hygge and un-Gemütlich, but I digress.)

To the point of the blog, though, here’s another way in which English could benefit from more nuance in its language: the word ‘know.’

We pretty much use that word for one-stop-knowledge-shopping: I know my friend Sara, I know her address, I know German (though not as well as I once did!).

But other languages, like German, and French, and Spanish, have variations on the knowledge theme.

So, for example, in German, if you know someone, as in you have met them, or are friends with them, you would use the root verb kennen. The French use connaître, and in Spanish, it’s conocer. So, for example, eating a schnitzel I’d say Ich kenne Sara, eating coc au vin I’d explain that Je connais Sara, and over pozole I’d tell you that Yo conozco Sara.

But if you know something, there’s whole different verb at your disposal in these languages; its root form is wissen in German, savoir in French, and in Spanish, saber. So, to assure someone that I know where Sara lives, I would say auf Deutsch, Ich weiss ihre Adresse; en Français, Je sais ton adresse, and En Español, Yo sé su dirección.

But Hebrew.

Hebrew outdoes itself in the Language of Knowledge scene.

Hebrew has (drum roll) ) ָי ַדע.

Some of us would be more familiar with its Latin script version: yada.

It means ‘to know,’ too, but in the biblical sense.

Immediately, of course, we know (wissen/savior/saber) what “I know someone in the biblical sense” euphemistically means: to have made love to someone.

If you know someone in the biblical sense, you know them intimately; not just physically (left there, a different sort of sexual encounter is experienced, but you aren’t yada-ing).

Instead, when you yada someone, you know (kennen/connaître/conocer) who this person is, and why you are drawn to this person, and what about this person makes them uniquely desirable to you, and that you cherish this person, and that you want to be unqiuely vulnerable with this person, and then you share that knowledge with each other.

That’s lovemaking at its best.

But the word and the concept of yada is not just used in the Bible for those sorts of intimate love-exchanges.

Oddly, and in a head-cocking cool way, as I was researching and crafting this blog (based on all sorts of recent conversations about language and knowledge and wisdom and yada) I stumbled on this other blog written by, it seems…a webdesigner…about webdesign.

I did not see that coming.

I can’t speak to their web-tech savvy, but they have a great summary about, of all things, yada.

Here’s what they say, for they say it better than I could:

Yada: Showing Mercy

Another occurrence of yada can be found in one of the Hebraic wisdom books.

The righteous know [yada] the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel. (Proverbs 12:10)

Wisdom literature frequently creates a dichotomy between good and evil. In this case, a good person knows the needs of their animals and takes care of them; an evil person neglects the needs of their animals and shows no mercy. In other words, yada is understanding the needs of those around us and taking care of them.

Yada: Acting Justly

We’d like to bring your attention to a very important illustration. In one of the prophetic writings found in the Hebrew scriptures, we see an incredible blending of the word yada.

“But a beautiful cedar palace does not make a great king! Your father, Josiah, also had plenty to eat and drink. But he was just and right in all his dealings. That is why God blessed him. He gave justice and help to the poor and needy, and everything went well for him. Isn’t that what it means to know [yada] me?” says the Lord. (Jeremiah 22:15-16)”

In this chapter, Jeremiah (a prophet) is delivering a scathing rebuke to the king of Judah. This king had acted selfishly, neglected the poor and needy, and exploited others to build his kingdom. The LORD tells this corrupt king what it truly means to know [yada] the LORD. 1. Doing justice, 2. Showing mercy to the poor and needy, 3. Exemplifying good and righteous character. In other words, yada is faithfully living out our covenant relationship with the LORD in every area of our life.

Whoever you are, yadadrop, I want to know you, and just to be clear, as in the kennen/connaître/conocer fashion.

This summary is terrific.

When we yada God, we can’t help but yada others.

And what does this mean?

Upshot according to my read is that it means that we get to know as many others in the biblical sense as humanly possible!

Woo Hoo!

At least, that is, according to biblical values like mercy, kindness, concern, compassion, tenderness, justice, and tangible extensions of aid to those who yearn to be known and have their sufferings and grief known.

I’ve often said—quite recently, in fact, in Ohio and Pennsylvania—that it was quite the juxtaposition to have spent four years working on a Ph.D. that considered suffering, and then to live it.

Before the accident, I knew (wissen/savoir/saber) about suffering, because I’d studied it.

I even knew (kennen/connaître/conocer) suffering, because as a pastor I’d attended to people who had experienced it.

But I didn’t yada it.

Now I do.

I don’t think that one has to go through suffering to yada it, thankfully.

There are any number of ways to know it, not least of all getting out of our comfort(able) zone and participating in the suffering and the grief of others who are discomforted, who are uncomfortable.

That means not only being beside them, and wiping their tears, and holding them, but it means offering them food, and child care, and gift cards for coffee drive-thrus, and it means looking at the broader issues of why they are suffering, and advocating for political and social change even if it means that our best interests have to be sacrificed for the sake of others who struggle.

Conversely, though, there are other ways to yada others.

For example, a person could share some holiday hygge and Gemütlichkeit, offering welcome and cheer, and maybe even a pair of cozy socks and a fire.

As for us at 808, we happen to know how to do both hygge and Gemütlichkeit well (Gløgg and Glühwein and Kinderpunsch are hot hygge and Gemütlichkeit in a mug, as an aside, and we have all on hand all the time) so if you’re in the area, come on over so that we can know you.

Grow up.

You know what I mean.