You can see him from afar,
made taller by the child
on his shoulders, a smaller version
of himself; another in a carrier
on his back looks like
a wizened old man.
Little dogs gambol about his feet,
with every step threatening to
take him down and bury him in
a flurry of fur and teeth.
Closer, you can see the trolley he
pushes before him,
heavy in the sand;
his grandmother sitting proud,
jabbing with her knitting
needles, punctuating his life.
Whoever welcomes you welcomes me; whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me (Matthew 10:40).
When my parents took me home, they invited into their family a whole other set of DNA, a whole other history, a whole other family. I am not sure they saw it that way.
When I met my birth mother, it was not as the baby that she had known, but as a mother myself; I brought her grandchildren, with more on the way; a whole other family.
The first time that my parents and my mother met, they brought her a photo album, with pictures from the first time they met me, five weeks or so after she last saw me, up to my wedding, a few years before we were reunited – it was very sweet, and vaguely threatening, although meant innocently.
None of us arrives alone. Our ghosts and our guides shadow us and blur the shades that our own bodies cast; they tremble at the edges, undefined.
I once was called upon to claim the body of a woman I barely knew. Her family left her to me; but they came to her funeral. They came, they said, to honour her mother. Whoever welcomes me welcomes the one beyond me, behind me, before me.
We all come with cases full of bodies trailing behind us, carried on our shoulders, some pushed ahead of us like a supermarket grocery cart, all angles and sharp edges, crashing into those who meet us without warning around a blind corner.
None of us arrives alone.
Today is the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist. According to the Gospel of Luke, when Gabriel (an archangel) announced to John’s father that his wife would conceive, Zechariah was doubtful, and Gabriel, as a sign that this was indeed the truth, banned Zechariah from speaking any words, true or false, until the child was born. On the day of his birth, however, Zechariah was still mute. His tongue will be released on the eighth day, when he names his son, John.
Gradually, he had fallen
silent, as though retreating
from his own voice; his
mumbles and his wordless out-
bursts strewn across the floor
as he backed away, shuffling,
an old man who had
forgotten how to speak.
When he saw his son, he
opened his cracked lips,
flailed his tongue wildly,
choking on his rusty breath;
a catch, a swallow then he wailed
like an infant bellowing at
the sheer effrontery of birth;
the audacity of life.
First, a little bit of context. This gospel starts in the middle of Jesus’ instructions to his disciples as they are getting ready to go out into the world on their own for the first time as his emissaries, his missionaries; fishing for men for the first time without a safety net.
Jesus tells them, “Go to the lost sheep of Israel. And preach as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven in at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons… Behold I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men; for they will deliver you up to councils and flog you in their synagogues… When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next.”
This is the backdrop to Jesus’ words of “comfort,” or of caution: “Do not fear.”
Fear prevents us from living our lives as we would want, as God knows we are able, as Jesus commands.
This is something of a confession, and something of an illustration: the other day, I came home to find two successive calls on my answer machine, both claiming to be from the IRS and telling me that I must return the calls the second I received them or “legal allegations” would follow. “Take care and have a nice day,” concluded the first one.
I wasn’t born yesterday, so I didn’t call them back. The next day, I was sitting at my desk early in the morning when the phone rang. I grabbed it on the first ring. It was my would-be IRS agent calling back. I invited the IRS to put any questions it had for me in writing and ended the call. When I hung up the phone, it just kept ringing. I picked it back up. My caller said, angrily, “You have to hear me out.” No, I said calmly, I actually don’t. “Then I have no choice but to report you to the sheriff and have you arrested.” Ok, that’s fine, I replied. Have a nice day.
There were a few things going on here. First of all, I was in the middle of writing the day’s Bible Challenge blog post. I was writing about corporal punishment; we’d reached the “spare the rod, spoil the child” verse in the book of Proverbs. Of course, corporal punishment is a highly emotionally charged subject for many of us, and I am by no means the exception. Laden as it is with threat, with false authority, with issues of guilt and control, it was the perfect preparation for a stranger threatening legal and punitive action to sow seeds of fear. And my children were sleeping. I grabbed the phone on the first ring, to protect them from rude awakening. Another kind of fear.
I have a policy of treating all callers with respect and at least basic manners, but it was only an hour or so later, after researching the scam and posting a warning on our parish facebook page, that I was able to recall myself sufficiently to remember what Jesus said about praying for our persecutors; and I bethought myself to remember that I had no idea how this person came to be in the situation of calling me this way, what pressures he was under to sustain a life or a family, how he might be exploited, or misled. Only then was I able to take one step beyond the normal social contract of good manners and add to my own concerns a prayer for him.
A couple of hours after that, I remembered that I am a priest. I should, I thought, given that this man is endangering his soul and spirit with this soul-destroying, lying, cheating, threatening kind of work; I should have offered him prayer there and then. I should have offered to hear his confession, if I were a real priest.
See how fear holds us back, held me back, in the first instance by confusing my blood and my brain and walling me away from compassion in the name of self-protection; and then, after the threat is over and rationality returns, even after the turn to prayer and compassion, the fear came back from a whole new direction, from the inside: if I were a real priest, I would have offered him reconciliation.
No wonder Jesus tells his disciples not to be afraid. He certainly doesn’t say that there is nothing for them to fear: on the contrary, they are to expect trouble, to be called after Beelzebul, to be driven out of town and derided. But he urges them not to act out of their fear, but to step beyond it, because only then will they be able to do the work that he has given them to do: to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. Left in our fear, we would be too scared even to try. Left in my fear, apparently, I can’t even bring the gospel to a phone conversation with a remote stranger who is no real threat to me at all.
I’ve been obsessing about sparrows a little bit this week, ever since reading that I am of more value than many sparrows. I like sparrows; I wonder how many of them I am worth.
The thing I like about sparrows is that they are small and fairly nondescript, yet everyone knows them. They get everywhere and into everything; they seem not imprudent but quite fearless. They enjoy sharing the food of others.
Jesus says, “Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
We cannot work effectively as disciples, proclaiming from the housetops the kingdom of heaven, healing the sick, casting out demons, welcoming the leper back into community, proclaiming release to the captive, as long as we are shackled by fear. But scripture tells us, “Perfect love casts out fear;” and God loves us perfectly. God has numbered each of the hairs on our heads. What have we to fear?
Jesus never promises his disciples a rose garden. He is honest about the risks as well as the rewards of discipleship. One of the benefits of knowing ahead of time that there will be trouble is that it removes the fear of the unknown: we know that the cross will come, so we need not be afraid that it will take us unawares. Instead, we can focus on the love that God has for us, that will sustain us and see us through; love that survived even the grave; love that is not diminished by our fear nor even by our sinfulness, but which abounds in grace and forgiveness.
We in the church have a lot in common with the sparrows. We feel, on our own, to be a little small and nondescript, hardly the ones to be raising the dead and so forth. Sometimes people feed us; sometimes they call us names. Yet we have the capacity to be fearless, because we know that God is with us, that God loves us, that God wants us to succeed in spreading the gospel.
Here’s something I learned about sparrows this week: “In Australia they’ve learned to open automatic doors. Some hover in front of the electric eye until the door opens. Others, mostly females, sit atop the electric eye and lean over until they trip the sensor.” (Blue, 147)
Sparrows have found new ways into new opportunities to spread their sparrowy, chirping gospel. And you are worth more than many sparrows.
Next time you are presented with an opportunity to proclaim from the rooftops what we whisper to one another here at church: that God loves each hair on your head, no exceptions; and your heart begins to race with fear, remember the sparrow, with its fast little birdbeat, its quick breath, its cunning and its commonality, and remember that you are of more value than many sparrows, and fear not.
Debbie Blue, Consider the Birds: A Provocative Guide to Birds of the Bible (Abingdon Press, 2013)
A crossover from the bible challenge blog:
“Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (Ephesians 3:20-21)
We cannot conceive of that
beyond imagination;
ergo,
all that we attribute
to the deus ex
machina is
ersatz impossibility;
we cannot conceive of
that which God can
not create.
Trinity Sunday. In essence, it’s all about relationship. The relationship God has with us, the relationship we have with God, the relationship we have with one another. The whole three-in-one, one-in-three thing works well as a slogan but is famously difficult to unpack, pretty much impossible to explain without falling off the rails into one heresy or another. But essentially, it’s all about relationship.
We talked a couple of weeks ago about the Father and the Son. Jesus, in John’s Gospel and especially in his farewell discourse and prayer, tells his disciples repeatedly that if they have seen the Son, then they have seen the Father. It’s a little bit like seeing a child and knowing, without ever having met her before, who her family is, because she looks just like them; she looks as though she belongs with them.
Of course, Jesus isn’t talking exactly about a family resemblance; but he is saying that through him we can see God the father, because of his own unique relationship to God as his own father.
In other words, it’s all about relationship.
I had a couple of conversations recently around the verse where Jesus says: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Some people find that very challenging, usually because of anxiety about family or loved ones who do not seem to be able to find their way to or through Jesus; sometimes because of the pluralism of the world in which we live and the simple desire to be friendly, hospitable, inclusive.
Gail R. O’Day, in The New Interpreter’s Bible, puts this claim in the context of the community of John the Evangelist which this Gospel addresses as its primary audience. She says that:
“Jesus’ claim that ‘no one comes to the Father except through me’ is the joyous affirmation of a religious community that does, indeed, believe that God is available to them, decisively in the incarnation. This claim has been announced from the opening lines of the Gospel, ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known’ (1:18). … It is important to try to hear this joyous, world-changing theological affirmation in the first-century context of the Fourth Gospel. This is not, as is the case in the twentieth [or twenty-first] century, the sweeping claim of a major world religion, but it is the conviction of a religious minority in the ancient Mediterranean world. … The claim of John 14:6-7 becomes problematic when it is used to speak to question that were never in the Fourth Gospel’s purview. To use these verses in a battle over the relative merits of the world’s religions is to distort their theological heart. … These verses are the confessional celebration of a particular faith community, convinced of the truth and life received in the incarnation.” (NIB, 743-5)
“No one has ever seen God. It is God the Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known,” writes the Evangelist.
The same God, who made heaven and earth and whose loving kindness and steadfast mercy sustains the whole, whether we see it or not; that God has been hidden from our sight by the gulf between the human and the divine, the Creator and the creaturely, immortality beyond the imagination of the mortal. Yet Jesus, the Son of God who is close to his Father’s heart, has become our Revelation, our Redeemer, our Way to the Truth and the Life of God. This is not about exclusivity: but it is a new way of seeing our relationship with the God.
The God who made heaven and earth has been in relationship with us, of course, from the beginning. In the beginning, says the book, the earth was formless and empty.
The metaphor which the poet uses is that of a pitch dark, raging ocean; the waters of the womb gone wild, unable to bring forth life; a mess of futile struggle; labouring for nothing; the antithesis of relationship. Not only nothing, but beyond nothing; the opposite of good; the opposite of life.
Yet even the darkness on the far side of nothing is not enough to negate God. The Spirit of God, sometimes translated as a breath or a wind – think Pentecost, of Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit over his disciples, the rush of a mighty wind in an upper room in Jerusalem – the Spirit of God already was on the move, surfing the waves of negativity, soothing the ocean of all that is not to be. Some interpreters use the image of a great bird brooding over the primordial waters, ready to bring life into being out of less than life. Karen Armstrong points out that in most ancient Middle Eastern creation stories, the God himself (or herself) has a backstory: parents, siblings. This God alone appears out of eternity, and the first relationship that God has beyond God’s own self is with the less than nothing out of which creation is spoken into being (Armstrong, 10-11). Out of which we are called into being.
The sweep of the Bible from that moment to this moment of the gospel, when we stand on the mountaintop with Jesus and his disciples; the sweep of the Bible is like an exhalation, a breathing out of creation to replace that which is beyond nothing and to fill the air with life; and an inhalation, a drawing back into God, back into a relationship that sees God clearly, as our Creator, our Redeemer, our Sustainer; as a Father, encountered through his Son, into whose family the Holy Spirit wraps us with her brooding wings and her playful wind…
It is a relationship at once personal and universal; particular and profound, but open and inviting. On a day that we celebrate the particular relationship of fatherhood, we lift up the image of the Father revealed in the Son, and we celebrate the beauty that it mirrors; but if we have trouble with that image of relationship, either as fathers, or as disappointed fathers, or as disillusioned sons or daughters, we have other ways into the relationship of Trinity; drawn under the wings of a brooding Spirit, lifted out of less than nothing into the climax of creation.
We live in a world that is thirsty for relationship. Witness the explosion of social media and the apparently endless new creative ways that are invented for us to stay in touch with friends and strangers at any hour of the day or night. And yet we live in a world where relationships are breaking down alarmingly. In the past two weeks we have witnessed three school-related shootings in this country; in the midst of communities based on relationship – because teaching and learning are definitely relationship-based activities – we have witnessed the negation of relationship; we have seen what is on the other side of those waters of chaos.
Jesus said, “Love one another.” Pay attention to relationships. Fathers’ Day is as good a day as any to start taking stock. We may begin with the relationships within our own families; but we should pay attention also to the relationships of our community. What is the joyous affirmation that Epiphany claims, which needs to be shared with the people who live around us? Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations;” share with others the good news that you have heard; that God is beyond the chaos, above the raging waters that oppose life; that God has power over them. Do so knowing that we come from a particular point of view, and do so with grace, and humility. It’s all about creating, redeeming and sustaining relationships.
In the beginning, God lived in relationship: three in one; the Creator speaking the Word carried on Spirit breath, hovering, brooding over that which was less than nothing; a long breath out which longs to draw us back in; the Holy Spirit breathing into us the knowledge of the Son who is close to the Fathers’ heart, who can show us all the way into a living relationship with God.
The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IX: The Gospel of Luke; The Gospel of John (Abingdon Press, 1995)
Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)
On the other side of nothing,
the waters of the dark womb
rage and writhe, resisting God,
labouring the eternal void.
On the other side of nothing,
over the pitched waters,
the breath of God hesistates;
surfing the storm, hopeful waits
to discover deep-sunken desire,
to offer the kiss of life
to the lost ones drowning,
to bring to its crowning
all that is; to soothe the dark sea
of all that is not to be.
Genesis 1:1-2 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”
Free kittens. Free manure.
Town Hall Meeting: Noise
& Shooting Tonight;
signs of our times.
I can only imagine that you fell
asleep on the sofa, bolt upright,
clenched paper tissues holding your hand.
Waking in the dark, too
bewildered not to zombie-walk to bed
to lie awake, watching for dawn, in
serious doubt whether the
sun will ever rise again. Waking
in the pale light, it seems
almost rude that the world should
turn on its axis to another day without
even pausing for a moment
of apology.
Browsing the shiny cellophaned produce section,
soaring over fields of grain on the
updraft of the bread ovens.
Sealed in our tin cans,
concentrated and reduced,
we must be such a disappointment to you.
