2023.11.19 An Annoyingly True Balance, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

The gospel story in Matthew 25 about what to do with gifts of money is quite clear if harsh.  You invest it and it multiplies. You hoard it or hide it away, it stays safe yet benefits no one, not even yourself.  Whichever way you chose there are consequences. That’s the idea! AND, if you invest and thereby multiply your wealth the “Master” is very pleased with you.  

The idea behind this harsh little story is obvious and not obvious. If you think of real money you’ll be frustrated and seek everything from stock market advice, much of it flawed. If you think of “money” as loving kindness you will fare much better.  

In what do you invest your heart?  Because where your heart is there also will be your money or other gifts. Simply so.

*  *  *  *

Today is my youngest son’s birthday #53. I am grateful for his life, his one precious life he almost lost to ulcerative colitis when he was a young man. He had invested his time and energy in making a living, being successful, doing a job well. He was young and did not heed his bodily symptoms carefully enough. He suffered a brush with death. He survived this brush with death thanks to excellent surgical care, the love of his family, countless prayers, and a brush with what I can only call The Light of Christ, offering him a choice—not a sentence, a choice.  He chose to live.  

When you heed the Great Commandment, basically true in all religions, to love your neighbor as yourself do not forget yourself! 

 

2023.11.12 Light Stretches, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 11/12/23

BEHOLD the American Purple Gallinule of Florida Everglades Park! This crazy lady stretches and reaches everywhere at once. Can we?  

I know that the parable of the “bridesmaids” and their “lamps” is to be an analogy for the arrival of the Heavenly Kingdom to earth, ushered in by the light carried by these girls. Some girls were ready and some were in disarray. It’s a lesson in preparedness. 

First, in the ancient world there were NO oil lamps. Also there were NO “bridesmaids,” and NO messianic “bridegroom” ever arrived to “save” the cosmos in chaos, governed by WARS, VIOLENCE, CONQUEST, AND SUBMISSION. 

Why do we pray, “Thy Kingdom Come”—over and over?  Our kingdom has not come! Neither has God’s—by the looks of it. 

The left-behind girls in this biblical parable were not prepared. There is some advice about readiness and preparedness in this story, yet who is ever “ready” for Divinity? And the God of all faith never leaves anyone behind! Not even a Gallinule!  

So let’s rethink our ways a bit. Most of us want a peaceful world. We all in our hearts want Love—of God, self and neighbor—to work, to enliven and enlighten. Everyone has slightly different recipes, rules, but how REALLY do we make a kingdom a “kindom”?

One way is for each of us to stop (all the running around), sit down (rest) and shut up (create silence).This is one way to acknowledge there is a larger, deeper Presence available to us all and in our midst.

Now begin to engage in conversations, especially with those with whom you disagree politically or religiously. Listen to yourself and to these others closely. Do this more and more. I know a story, told by a Christian thinker, Brian McLaren, of four young women friends with radically different religions, points of view, ethnicities, class, and political persuasions. They were, like the girls in the parable, each trying to figure out the best way to remain friends and bear light and peace into their war-torn world. They had to STRETCH—each and all.

"These four women did something too rare: they sat with their complexity, shared, and heard honest and vulnerable feelings. They listened across difference to express their own humanity and affirm the humanity of one another." 

Light stretches, right? 

2023.07.23 Weeds and Wheat Together, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

There is always so much more to a Jesus parable than the surface meaning. The story of the weeds and the wheat is classic. It forces us all to think about much larger social issues than the farmer’s plantings.  A few queries:

- The writers of Matthew’s gospel consistently over-explain Jesus’s meaning. Beware and simplify to get the point. Is it God’s point?  

-Check to see whether this parable is reported by other gospel writers. It is NOT. It is unique to Matthew. This is significant, largely because Matthew is the gospel with the strongest agenda about “selling” Jesus’ ideas to Jews.

-Focus on the primary words attributed to Jesus—the basics, not the explanatory elaborations directed to the disciples alone in private. This story is told as an image of the Kingdom of Heaven—God’s territory and charge, that is not the “heaven” we speak of after death. It is NOW. 

-Think economics: farm workers (laborers) who work for a “Boss” aka God who is in charge of this kingdom. They naturally worry about the wellbeing of the seeds they plant, the crops that represent their livelihood (Business)

-Heroes of story = farmers (suppliers/supply) and good wheat (product in demand)  Think Ukrainian imports in 2023. Think starvation as a looming worldwide threat in 2023. 

-Villains = weeds that grow up alongside the wheat, quite a natural process. 

-Questions posed: what do we do about the evil weed, evil deeds? It is THEY (humanity not God) who think a secret “enemy” has sowed weeds among their wheat. THEY are sure that THEY should pull up and destroy these weeds as evil enemies.

-Jesus says STOP. Let this unholy mess grow together until the harvest when God will do the decision-making—not us. 

What is the central wisdom this parable conveys?  The simple NO from Jesus to so many of our human assumptions about morality: what and who is good, and what and who is evil, then creating an EITHER/OR tension—not to mention foolhardy assumptions that any one person or any one group or religion knows God’s will. 

Therefore: Biblical Wisdom is not based in morality alone; it is spiritual, mobile, blessed, known alone to its Creator. Our work is to watch the signs and pray. 

  *  *  *  *

Right now the EARTH is crying for Mercy. According to a plea from the 7/23 newsletter from the Sisters of Mercy: “Perhaps this is a time to turn our attention, our spiritual attention to Earth, to acknowledge that Earth is a living being that has given us life. We are part of one living being we call Earth. Will we hear its cry, sense its suffering? Earth desperately needs our love and attention, our prayer.” 

2022.10.23 Naked Humility, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I’m spiritual, not stupid.  

You know this story in the Bible (New Testament Luke 18) about these two guys in the same holy Temple—both praying. One’s a Pharisee, respected religious leader of his day. The other’s an unpopular tax collector. Already we’re into stereotypes. It’s a set up. 

Then we listen in on each one’s prayers. The Pharisee thanks God that he is so holy and rich and lofty and so much better than the other scum of a guy. The other just asks for God’s mercy to forgive him all his sins. Now which guy do you think gets points for humility? Right, the sobbing sinner.  What think you?

Well, it’s in the HOLY BIBLE, you whine. So yes, we take it seriously—but not stupidly. 

Both of these praying men tell God exactly how they feel. Both of them tell the truth, the inmost truth. Neither lies. I’m grateful for all my wealth and hard work and disgusted at this other poor slob who is crying for mercy all the time, says the Pharisee. I’m scared and worried all the time that I’m unworthy, worthless, and unpopular. No one likes me, even God, says the tax collector.  

Both prayers are emotionally honest. And both are humble if that means simply telling yourself and God exactly what’s on your mind—your truth, your truth right now. That’s not easy to do. Prayer is come-as-you-are. To stand naked of soul before God is humble, even if what you say gets condemned by yourself or others, and you decide that such condemnation is of God. It’s not. Judgments, positive or negative, imposed from without, even those put into the mouth of Jesus, as Luke does for his own purposes here, cause us to feel either superior or inferior. That’s not God’s assessment. It’s ours. Simply so.

Be spiritual, not stupid. 

Neither beg nor brag, just be. 

Stand naked of soul before God. 

2022.10.16 Importunity

Sometime you just need to give something, or someone, or yourself a kick in the butt—or a knock on the knuckles.

During my young and naive years, that is, before I hit the midlife skids, I’d sit in church pews, listen to the gospel parable called,“The Unjust Judge and the Importunate Widow (Lk.18) and think that “importunate” meant important. I’d wonder how a widow got to be so important—enough to change a high court judge’s decisions about who should be awarded damages and whom be denied. This judge was godless and corrupt—not motivated by justice at all. Still, a mere widow turned his head? She had to be a little important—even to him. 

After I found out that the word importunate means persistent to the point of annoyance and is derived from the Latin importunus meaning inconvenient or unseasonable, I still thought to myself: But a widow? Really, of all the weak sisters to choose as the star of a parable. But then Luke was probably encouraging the Gentiles to engage in importunity to get into the emergent early Christian church.   

I still wonder about widows. I often think about how much I do not want to become a widow—or any variation thereof. I have some female friends who are widows, one twice widowed, one divorced, remarried, then widowed, one too young and alive to be a widow, and one an aspiring widow. They are all lovely, loving, and wiser than ever.  In Scriptures, widows are plentiful and to be pitied, first on the list for charitable giving. The Indo-European root meaning of widow is be empty. Still, God loves them. 

I learned how to be importunate, thanks in part to this little widow and her unjust judge. Such nagging, near-bullying behavior, entered my behavioral repertoire as I was bounced about among a few bishops and committees just trying to be ordained in the Episcopal Church at a time when it was being beset by women—yes, some widows among them. Like the widow in the parable, women wanted justice. The fuel behind my importunity was anger—very far from self-righteous anger, because I knew my own sins and failings, but anger at feeling shut out. I’ve never like slammed doors, and feelings of shame, and fury boiling inside. The Episcopal Church turned out to be pretty lithe for an institution. It changed for justice's sake. 

Every story has transformative power, usually many layers of it, if you read it carefully, then let its many layers of meaning sink deeply into and under your own skin. Every story has its own brand of importunity. 

This biblical story ends with the punch line: “I tell you God will give them swift justice.”  

Still, I do not want to be a widow.   

2022.09.18 God's Wealth, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

 

Jesus, a good rabbinical teacher, is remembered as telling his listeners realistic illustrative stories that often challenge long-held, traditional assumptions. No one goes away unmoved after listening to one of his parables; everyone is called up short.   

The parable in Luke (16:-13) about a businessman of great corporate wealth who suspects his business manager of squandering his properties and profits and threatens to fire him, is one that always leaves me reeling, gets me twisted in knots. Business as usual is obviously not an option in God’s economy. But what is?  Christian scholar and theologian, John Dominic Crossan, calls this story a challenge parable—not morally obvious but spiritually unsettling. Money tends to do that to most of us. 

*  *  *  *  

Once there was this business manager who panicked at the thought of losing his job. He devised a scheme whereby, if he is fired he will be taken care of by those who can least afford to do that. Why can’t he take care of himself? Because he is not strong enough to work, too ashamed to beg, and just plain scared. So he schemes.

The scheme: When debtors come to repay their legitimate debt to the boss, the manager tells each of them to halve the amount due and pay only that. Thus he cheats the boss out of his legitimate profit, and gains some money for himself as well as good will around the neighborhood.

 

He imagines that his “generosity” to the poor debtors might also please God who, according to Jesus’s teachings, likes open-hearted generosity. But Jesus tells the story to warn listeners that wealth accrued by cheating, even if you think the businessman has too much wealth, is itself dishonest behavior not pleasing to God. 

One cannot, Jesus teaches, “buy” friendship with money, and wealth accrued by dishonest means is an insult to the ways of God, or divine economics. And here Jesus delivers one of his best, and probably least heeded yet most preached, one-liners: “You cannot serve two masters, both God and wealth/mammon”  

The semitic translation of “mammon” is “that in which one fully trusts.”  Frankly, I do feel more secure when there is money in my wallet, and in my bank, and a credit card in my bag.   But what good would that do me if my purse were snatched, my wallet and checkbook gone. I’d feel naked, unsafe. I’d report everything. I’d pray. I’d give thanks that I was alive and that my wee phone was still safely tucked away in my back pocket. I would also know that this all was not what God would like at all, and not because of the money I lost.  

*  *  *  * 

God obviously does not despise money or wealth itself. What God despises are two things: first, putting your whole trust in your wealth, as if wealth could save you, or love you, or even give you emotional comfort; and second, the regular practice of “dishonest”—half-hearted— generosity. Pop a coin in a beggar’s cup, but never a paper bill. 

The mental calculation might go something like this: AFTER I have my yacht, my mansion, my diamonds, my fortune, my business, my high moral standing, my religion, my politics, my comfort, THEN I will become a philanthropist and give generously and unconditionally to works of justice, the arts, and the needs of others.

Is philanthropy, the name we often use to describe the generosity of BIG donors to benefit  good causes, and a word derived from philos + anthropos, meaning man-loving or human-loving, in line with divine open-hearted generosity? Or is God’s generosity something we desire but that we are sure is unattainable, because, after all, we are only human? Ah yes, and we are also rich with grace, beauty, love, wisdom, and hope. Are these not the riches of God?

*  *  *  *

Can we, in partnership with God,

be trusted then to waste,

to lavish, spread, fling far too wide

the riches of God’s grace?

-hymn text by Episcopal priest, Michael Hudson, Songs for the Cycle, 2004 

2019.10.20 Importunity

There’s this brief but potent little tale tucked into a series of parables about faithfulness and healing in Luke’s gospel. I’ve always loved this story, nicknamed “The Importunate Widow.” (Luke 18:1-8)

I love the word importunate. It’s a word that demands attention—so startling in fact that later translations of the story substitute the lamer word: “persistent.” But who ever looks up importunate?  It means persistent to the point of annoyance or intrusion, and comes from Latin importunus (inconvenient) and the god named Portunus who protected harbors or ports—protected. Importunity connects to opportune, coming at just the right time, or perhaps the nick of time.  Which time is it for this woman, the right time or the worst time?

The parable is about a woman, a widow and therefore on her own and vulnerable, who raises nagging to an art form for good reason. She will not be put off or sent away by the judge to whom she repeatedly appeals for justice against her opponent. One could assume she’s demanding a retrial without an attorney. Finally the judge, sick of her importunity, grants her request—not because he is just, but because the woman is a nuisance, an annoyance, in the manner of a mosquito whining in your ear at night causing you to slap your own ear to get the thing to shut up.

 Is this a story about faithfulness? Or is it a story about justice won? Or is it a “MeToo” story? I vote for #3 and note history: women have felt importunate for centuries, but have been silenced, publicly and behind closed doors—even unto death—
    - by strong cultural norms dictating how women should behave,
    - by women themselves out of fear,
     -by women who have silenced daughters and sons, passing on the silencer tradition.

When my oldest daughter, Bev, was about five she was unjustly punished, and I failed to stand up for her. My spouse/her dad was not a violent man, nor was there overt domestic abuse in our home. This is one small importunate incident. We had weekend guests who were preparing to leave on Sunday morning. They came down the stairs with their suitcases. As we were bidding them farewell, my daughter spotted one end of a toothpaste tube sticking out of Mr. X’s suitcase. It was funny. She pointed and laughed. Her dad became furious, yelled at her, and sent her upstairs to her room. My heart ached for her, yet I said not a thing. Hardly importunate of me. It was a petit mal trauma, the kind that leaves scars on a soul. You see what I mean.

What is remarkable—and truly importunate—is that this story appears in a tome as ancient as the Bible and is called holy. Jesus, as interpreted by Luke, introduces this story as a story about the need to pray and never lose faith. This is a classic case of someone’s, in this case Luke, putting words into Jesus’s mouth— interpretative words. It happens, you know.

The story purports to be about prayer and faithfulness in prayer to God. BUT……..

Faith is too weak a word for the untimely importunity this woman exhibits. Stubborn trust in her own experience and need is more accurate. We know nothing about her circumstances, except that she’s a widow and has an “opponent.” She “continually comes” at the judge, who is corrupt and NOT anyone to pray to. He grants her justice—“so that she may not finally come and slap me in the face”. The idea of course is that God will grant justice more swiftly and fairly than this unjust judge on earth. But where does that leave the woman? Flip the parable.

I see God incarnate in the woman. I see the God who plunders the depths of God’s own desire for justice, a God who never gives up, a God who is the nag, and the beggar, and the abandoned infant, a God who is importunate in empowering human agency with wails in the night and pounding fists on our souls. Can we hear such a God in our midst?  [Oh, this may seem like very undignified behavior for God, but I assure you, it is not at all above the behavioral repertoire of Ms. Holy Spirit to inspire such importunity.]

Jesus, as interpreted by Luke, seducer of Gentiles into Jesus’s flock, plummets headlong into the fray with the widow and judge, taking us with him. Then adeptly he steps back from the action to deliver a challenging and final crowd-stopper:

“And yet when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” 

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!

2012.04.01 A Day of Fools and Palms

I feel as if I should be writing about Palm Sunday, the time Christians become re-enacters to the maximum!

It is, after all, Palm Sunday. And I can't muster the energy to heave myself out of my mood and follow the flock.

This Sunday we Christians remember the whole enchilada of Jesus as the New Testament story goes: riding into Jerusalem on a donkey thronged by cheering fans. Huge crowds, according to the embellishments of biblical-ese, were more likely small crowds, stragglers probably. They followed Jesus along the road, these hope-against-hopers waving palm pompoms.

Jesus, they hoped, would make it all come true —divine justice for the poor and desolate, a messianic social re-organization. PEACE.

It would be “thy kingdom come” come true, so they thought.

To me just now the triumvalism feels pointless, silly, utterly incongruent. Pitiful really: that we gather in tiny groups and make a tiny parade waving our shreds of palms and singing of glory, laud and honor—our every step shadowed by death.

I have never been present in any parish church Palm Sunday processional “crowd” where enough energy was marshaled to make us sound like a group of enthusiastic believers. Never. The joyful words turned to dust in our hosanna mouths.

We know what happened when Jesus spoke truth to power in Jerusalem. We know that power won, and keeps winning. We know the mission as planned failed.

It is psychologically impossible to move my heart even to imagine the promise of Easter on this messy day of fools and frenetic palm-waving, because I'm living surrounded by a parallel parable.

It’s deafening—the media and politicos each and all squawking and screeching positions. I even agree with some of them, but I can’t bear the cacophony. Its sound is shrill and its energy killing.

So why do we Christians, we Christ-hopers, keep up the charade as we stand on the lip edge of disaster?

I don’t know. I simply don’t know. So I cast my lot with Jesus and the fools and follow anyway, mouthing dry words and fighting back tears.

Where am I going? Tell me the truth, my God.

Please make me a pretty palm cross.