2020.08.09. This Very Morning, We..............

This very Sunday morning, my priest-spouse and I were con-celebrating a COVID mass, aka Eucharist with pre-consecrated wafers and no wine. In the middle of this holiness we had a fight. Yes, on this very morning, we fought.

Mercifully, there was no congregation to detain us so we just stopped our homiletic reflections and duked it out until we both felt settled—not right or wrong but settled. 

The gospel reading was the famous story about Peter’s heading out to walk across stormy lake waters—yes, the lake of Galilee, like a sea, is subject to switching currents and frequent wild storms. Jesus, aware that the boat was floundering and that his friends were in trouble, walked onto the waters and calmed the storm with the sound of his voice alone. The faithful had panicked but Jesus reassured them. Peter demanded proof so Jesus beckoned him: “Come.”  Peter trusted Jesus’s authority over that of the lake and excitedly stepped out onto the water. Up whipped a wind, and Peter, fearing he would drown, freaked out: “Lord, save me!”

Now you see, I just did in writing a demo of how Dick and I got ourselves into our spat. Notice my side comment above about the lake/sea of Galilee. I assume my punctuation—em-dashes— will alert the reader that this is an aside, worth noting before moving on to the point about Peter. And now I’m doing it again. You probably want to hear what Dick and I spatted about, right?  It wasn’t those dashes! 

Dick was pensively reflecting at some length about the storm at sea when he swerved to reference his own anxieties about our upcoming move—only a week from Wednesday! To hear the closeness of that date broke my serenity, so I voiced an aside, something like, “Oh no, that’s so close  . . .”   This interruption caused him to stop cold, forget what he was going to say, and shut down. I said it wasn’t important and to go on. Alas, too late. We sat in silent lock-horns fashion for a time. Then the silly back and forth broke the silence: you always do this to me; you always react and then stop, so why can’t you just go on; I lose my train of thought and feel like a jerk; I don’t mean to hurt you; well, this isn’t a conversation; well, I didn’t think it was a proper sermon, for god’s sake—what would you do in a black church where everyone calls out?


More silence. Inner thoughts, maybe a prayer, then we reach across the table, grasp hands, laugh, and each take a wafer. We forget the Lord’s Prayer but he adds it in, and we close with this:

O loving Eternal god,
who gathered us here around the table with Christ
to share this meal with the whole household of God:
in that new world where you reveal the fullness of your peace,
gather people of every race and language
    to share in the eternal banquet of Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN.
 

Let us bless the Lord.
Thanks be to God

This very morning, the grace of God saved us from drowning just as Jesus did when he reached into the waters for Peter’s hand—yes, saved hm. I told Dick the story of how I had once nearly—not quite—drowned when I was about twelve and swimming in the ocean. [Where was that and how old were you? he interrupted. Maybe Westhampton beach, and about 12. What difference does that make?]  I continued: I didn’t think I was drowning, but the lifeguard, who had superior oversight and training, thought I was in danger of drowning. He raced across the beach, dramatically dove into the waters, swam fast, caught me in a vice grip and swam back to shore with me in tow. He rescued me. I was humiliated— sure I was not drowning.

What a great story, Dick said.
That’s how I do scripture, I said.
Yeah, I know, but I just wanted to make the point that Matthew’s Jesus was too self-righteous—        scolding Peter for “little faith.” Then of course the wind died down and everyone worshipped Jesus as Son of God. Really!
Good point. I agree, I said. Not like Jesus to be snarky and toot his own horn.
I’m happy you didn’t drown.
Me too.
Smooch.

He is my loving map, calendar, fact-checker, and historian—the Sitz im Leben (setting) guy.
I am his loving nuisance, pulling for the big picture, the vision—the theology gal.
                                       *  *  *  *

I will be taking a break from my Sunday blogging for the next two weeks—unless I cheat. We are moving to Connecticut to a retirement community. I now recall, thanks to Dick’s homily, that movers arrive in a mere 10 days. I plan to resume blogging with the My “Racism” series after we are settled. 

For now, know your sitz and where God sits in it with you.
 

2020.02.09 Salt of The Earth. Who, Me?

Jesus is on a roll with his platform, Sermon on the Mount, as remembered in Matthew’s gospel, delivering a hefty load of expectations, addressed to his Jewish listeners: “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, then how can its saltiness be restored? It is no good for anything but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

Pretty harsh! Jesus was a wise and compassionate teacher, not one to offer gut courses in how to get into God’s graces. He offered Beatitudes (blessings) to help his listeners feel safe before he unfurled the full syllabus, replete with many images they would not/could not forget. One has always drawn me up short. I remember it often.

You are the salt of the earth. Do not lose your saltiness!

They didn’t forget. Even after Jesus was long dead and it took sixty years for anyone to write things down, they never stopped talking—talking, arguing, wondering, puzzling. We’re still doing this centuries later. The biblical memoir retains its powerful sting and crispness—saltiness.  Why?

First, Jesus was so charismatic they came to believe that he was intimate with their God and Creator—intimate enough to speak for God, and to God. 

Second, the followers, mostly poor and filled with fear and longing, were open to a message of hope against hope, even though it bewildered them and left them reeling. So drawn were they into Jesus’s irresistible message that God had not abandoned them that they kept on coming back for more.

Finally, there was a compelling reason to stay—a promise: energy and inspiration to find their own answers, to become activists if you will.  To stay salty.


You are the salt of the earth. Do not lose your saltiness!


Today this charge looms large on our own horizons in this United States and in our Christian religion. How do we believe in ourselves when we’re so divided? How are we to be salty when so much feels flavorless? When so many do not want even to keep up with the daily news? When we go blind to the salty potential of putative enemies? Whom shall we follow?

Religious and political authority of Jesus’s day were stumped yet attracted as well, but they resorted to politics. They said: Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” they scoffed. Jesus was of course from Nazareth, a veritable slum not worth its own salt.

We are as scattered and in disarray in this country as they were in Jesus’s day. And yet we hear the echo and the challenge of Jesus’s wisdom ring in our ears, and sometimes from our public platforms.

You are the salt of the earth. Do not lose your saltiness!


I don’t know where you look for your saltiness, but I wonder if there is a Nazareth inside you, a hidden place you don’t easily reveal for fear of ridicule?  Or outside you: someplace or group you revile out of fear? We all have our “nazareths.”  Many can still feel stunned by ancient words so profound, demanding, and simultaneously compelling and frightening.

You are the salt of the earth. Do not lose your saltiness!

I don’t use salt anymore for health reasons and plain common sense, so I miss salt, its taste on my tongue, how it enhances an already good meal. Salt can jar my taste buds awake. I miss saltiness. Yet, if salt loses its saltiness can it be restored, or is it really doomed and worthless, a Jesus suggests?

Well, salt is not just a flavor savory, it is also a preservative. Most of us know people who are like the salt of the earth—good folks, often old, who have character, sardonic wit, and crust. There were many old salts in Gloucester where we served a parish for thirteen years. These are the people who remember, who preserve the good with the bad in their history and culture. These are they who are not afraid to argue and fight for what they love—and also to change their views for the same reason.

Our American democracy is at stake right now. It feels to many as if the saltiness has drained right out of it. This is not a new phenomenon. According to Jill Lepore, writing for The New Yorker Magazine (2/3/2020):“It’s the paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to argue about it.” That has been true throughout our history. This is how we preserve it. This is not at all to dismiss genuine concern and worry; it is, however, to say that when we are puzzled and bewildered and sure there’s not any good thing to come out of this, like Nazareth, just keep talking and arguing and loving and caring anyway, just as Jesus’s followers did.

I would say the same thing about the Bible—scriptures some call holy in the way that many Americans reverence the Bill of Rights and our Constitution. Why is this immense Holy Bible still alive? Why still salty?

We argue about what we love the most, and in the arguing process itself come new vitality, new awakenings, new directions, new ways to stay salty—both flavorful and preservative. So it was for Jesus’s listeners. So it will be for us.


You are the salt of the earth. Do not lose your saltiness!

2018.11.18 There Is a Time For Everything—Everything

One of my favorite books of the Bible is Ecclesiastes. That’s odd because it is many people’s least loved book. It’s in the Christian Old Testament and, according to apocryphal story, became the subject of great controversy and was nearly dropped from the Canon of Scripture.

When I was in seminary back in the 1980s, a humorous audiotape circulated among us about Ecclesiastes’s author, Qoheleth, the wise preacher. Many male voices argued vociferously, over-shouting one another, about its qualifications. Was it genuine? Was it holy enough to qualify for holiness? Did a book so cynical, even fatalistic in its approach, belong in a collection of authoritative sacred works? The din of their fervor made us all laugh, and also proved, to me at least, that this earthen wisdom was indeed sacred.

Wisdom and righteousness are elusively mysterious, yet both are essential for the embodied soul. There is a time to struggle against the way things are and a time to let go. Everything belongs. This message was so depressing that scriptural scribal editors added a very small Epilogue, almost apologizing for this nutty sage, assuring us that in the end God will make it all okay. Such dilution! Such lopsided heresy.

Here are Qoheleth’s well known biblical lines: dated between 450-350BCE—perhaps. There is no scholarly consensus about dating, possibly a sign of this book’s ultimate worth.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. (Ecclus 3: 1-8)

You will also recognize Qoheleth’s ancient voice in the popular song written by Pete Seeger in the 1950s: “Turn, Turn Turn.”  Seeger wrote it as a plea for peace, adding a line at the end, “. . . a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.”

Members of an  an EfM seminar group recently listened to a reading from Ecclesiastes and pondered their own responses. As I listened I thought the struggle to have things be one way or the other way, in a kind of binary mentality, was very true to lived experience and a particularly tempting attitude just now. Many scary, even violent things are happening—massacres, bombs sent to political figures, abnormal weather events, and more. There is a time to hate, and a time to love; a time to fear and a time to trust. 

NOTE: Qoheleth does not say either/or; he says both/and. One woman wondered aloud: "How long does a “time” last? " Will this era pass soon?  What about the confusion of trying to land on righteousness—from whose point of view?

I don’t know.

Then I remembered one of Jesus’s parables, a favorite of mine: the parable of the wheat and the weeds growing together in a field. (Matt. 13:24-30) The slaves (slaves no less!) come nattering and nagging about how these weeds got into a pure wheat field. Should they rush in and rip out all the nasty weeds? An enemy is blamed; assumptions are made that the kingdom of heaven must be pure; and self-righteousness takes hold. Final answer to slaves?  No, let them grow together until the final harvest. A warning is issued that in pulling out weeds any human action might pull out wheat as well. Let go and let God.

There is a time for wheat and a time for weeds. Obviously, the parable tells us that we are NOT qualified to identify and separate good from evil individuals. This is not ours to do, not ours to judge, not ours to execute. This parable is only in Matthew, and Matthew has a heavy moral agenda, appropriate for his time, but perhaps not forever and ever amen.

This is a time in our nation when we are living with wheat and weeds and fighting about who is which, making assumptions about the true nature of each.

It is a time to let things grow together, because they will anyway. After all, both wheat and weed do grow and flourish in the same fertile field. God have mercy, this is hard wisdom!