In God’s gospel truth, the day comes
when nothing is to be done,
except to shiver below the lowering sky,
crouch within the trembling earth,
wind down the body into
the new-hewn tomb
*
*
*
The birds are the first to recover their voice.
Riding the up-draft, they have seen beyond
the turning of the world;
they have overflown the flood,
from their crop dropping scant hints of melody,
feeding us on broken hymns
A version of this was first posted four years ago. My prayers go out, too, for those we sorrowed with then, whose hearts are rent open, whose pulse rises, whose fear returns with each new atrocity that we visit upon one another.
Guns are not choosy. Guns just kill people. It’s what they do.
We are hearing more, bit by bit, about the latest victims of the latest American massacre. Each detail chips a little more flint from our hearts. The woman who found heaven in a softball diamond. The police officer and football coach. The “superhero who loved country music.” The man who died in the lap of his best friend. The father who was shot shielding another, and whose son tried so hard to save him. God heal their souls from their violent passage and bring them to peace; God help his mother, her brother, their daughter, his friends; God console all those who are in grief.
A hotel room stocked as an armoury of enviable firepower, and it was legal, meaning we allowed it, according to news reports:
Of those weapons, 12 had devices known as bump stocks attached that allowed semi-automatic rifles to mimic fully automatic gunfire. The ATF agent, Jill Snyder, said officials had determined the devices were legal. The weapons – rifles, shotguns, pistols – were purchased in Nevada, Utah, California and Texas, she said.
We failed to control those guns, and because we did, a previously law-abiding, unsuspected citizen of these United States used them to kill dozens of people, dancing on a Sunday night, and to injure hundreds – hundreds – more.
At the risk of repeating myself, and with all respect to the dead and the injured and those who mourn them: Guns kill people. It is their raison d’etre. That being the case, we must control them. We must clip their wings and limit their clips and we must do it before more blood is shed, because if we do not, that blood is on our hands.
We, the people, run this country, so we say. Guns kill people. We, the people, need to fight back.
“Should this be your first go of sabbath, don’t write that you want to observe a strict twenty-four hours in a mountain cave while doing a headstand atop hot coals.”
Good advice abounds in this new book by J. Dana Trent, as does good humour. I had the pleasure of meeting the author at a writers’ conference this summer, and was further rewarded with the pleasure of reading an advance e-copy of her book, For Sabbath’s Sake: Embracing your need for rest, worship, and community.
This Sabbath thing is different from a prescription for self-care whose end is to extend our productivity or general usefulness. It is not a Puritanical penance for the other six days of living large. It is a remembrance that God made time, and hollowed out within it a resting place for us to share with our Creator. Who would knowingly turn down such an invitation?
There is no hint of reprobation here for those of us who struggle to keep the Fourth Commandment; only an invitation to wonder how it might be to revel in the gift of God’s time. That’s not to say that I felt no guilt reading this book. As an Episcopal priest, the experience of a new Episcopalian seeking and failing to find guidance or example within her church of how to practice Sabbath caused me to think about the messages I am giving my congregation (by sitting at my computer, for example, after service and before the next public activity, writing this book review).
Towards the end of the book, a sub-title declares, “Ego is the Enemy.” Since meeting Dana this summer, and being provoked by her to consider my own approach to Sabbath, I have been reminded regularly that God, in the story of Genesis, after six days of Creation, decided that a day of rest would be a fine idea. “Who am I,” I find that I keep asking myself, “to decide that I need less rest than God?” Ego is the enemy of letting myself into that time hollowed out by God as a resting place to share with my Creator.
But just as God is slow to anger and abounding in mercy, so this book offers the grace of companionship through the hurdles and hobbling that come between us and our Sabbath rest.
These is even, for those keen on a check-list, a helpful Appendix of suggestions, including scripture references, and guidance towards Trent’s trinity of Sabbath practices: rest, worship, and community.
My take-away, though, is a certain wistfulness, a longing for that hollow space where God is waiting for me. This book has reminded me what I am missing, and like a helpful spiritual friend, nudged me in the direction of finding my own way back to Sabbath, back to the beginning, back to God.
An abbreviated version of my review was posted on this book’s page at amazon.com
Not long after the First World War, William Fraser McDowell, a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, gave the Mendenhall Lectures at DePauw University, addressing a class of young men living in a world, as he says, which had been blown apart, and which was only now beginning the work of picking up the pieces and trying to set them back together. McDowell’s only and all-consuming prescription for this generation of rattled and scarred human beings was the instruction of St Paul: “Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5)
This mind: the mind of one who knows his own value, the Son of Man, the Son of God; and yet who knows, too, that he is the brother of slaves, the descendant of wanderers, co-citizen with the least and the lowest ranks in the Roman empire. He “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.”
Even Moses found his way out of oppression first by stealing the heart of an Egyptian princess, and was raised in a royal palace; but not Jesus. Although he, too, was saved from the infant massacre of a mad king, escaping to Egypt, his flight was as a refugee, with a family of refugees displaced and dispossessed by violence and war. Jesus, from the first, was associated with the humble and the homeless, crossing borders without fanfare, hiding in the plain sight of his humanity, his posture one of humility.
He knew his own value, made in the very image of God, born of the will and Spirit of God; and instead of using that knowledge to lord it over humanity, he made it his mission instead to show as clearly and as unambiguously as possible the love of God: healing the sick, raising the dead, bringing the good news of salvation to the poor and freedom to the prisoners of sin and persecution, from among their very own communities and families and lives.
The hymn of praise that Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians continues (Philippians 2:9-11),
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
In the Gospel reading for today (Matthew 21:23-32), Jesus talks about the difference between paying lip service, tongues confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord, and acting as though it were true. It is easy to create pomp and ceremony, rituals and hype to pump up the name that is above all names. It is more important: crucial and critical to find this mind that is in Christ Jesus, and follow him, in all of his glorious humility. There is nothing wrong with kneeling before him in silence.
It is no good, he implies, to rely like the second brother on our own privilege, saying, “Of course, we are always doing our Father’s will,” and then turning aside as soon as the last Amen fades away to go our own way.
It is better, he murmurs, to own up to our doubts and our uncertainties, as long as when push comes to shove, we know how to do the right thing: to heal the sick, raise the dead, bring good news to the poor, the parched, the storm-tossed; to proclaim God’s love among those in dire need of a word of good grace.
McDowell has one more piece of advice for his students about having and applying this mind of Christ:
“The life decisions of Jesus ran straight into personal relations, his relations with persons. And these relations were immediate, direct, and wholly his own. He was not an armchair friend of humanity in the abstract … He had personal concern for and personal contact with all sorts of persons.”
The one son may love the idea of doing his father’s work; but unless he is prepared to get personal about it, he is not carrying it out. We may love the idea of relieving suffering, but if we are cruel, or unkind, or unfeeling in the way that we treat the grocery store clerk or the clueless pedestrian, or dismissive of the human feelings of our most inconvenient neighbour, then we have contributed to the deficit of peace and happiness, instead of reducing it. It is no good relying on grand gestures and proclamations of faith, unless we are prepared to get down on our knees in the dirt and do the work that our great faith demands of us, up close and personal.
As McDowell says, have the mind in you that was in Christ Jesus: “Having loved his own, not a very lovely or lovable lot, he loved them clear through to the end. He did it. It can therefore be done.”
Such fertile soil is the humus, the humility out of which humanity was made in God’s image.
The Christ whom we follow, before whose name every knee shall bow and every tongue confess him king; that Christ Jesus did not grasp equality with God, but equality with us, taking on the form even of a slave. His equilibrium rested on the bedrock, the foundation of our humility and our humanity, the humus out of which we were created in the image of God, so that we would know, if he can live for God’s will, then if we put a mind to it.
In other words, when we bend our knee at the name of Jesus, and our tongues confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God his Father; well, then, let the same mind be in us that was in that Jesus, who bends his knee with the first and last of us, and confesses God’s love for sinners and the sorrowful as well as for the saints, without regard to rank. If we bend our knee to Jesus, then let us also kneel before one another, and place our pride on the ground before the feet of one another.
As St Paul says elsewhere, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6:14) Our only acceptable pride is in the holy humility of Christ,
who, on the night before he died, stripped off his robe, and tied a towel around his waist, kneeling before his disciples to wash their feet, in an intimate gesture of completely selfless love; then he told them; then he told us, “Do for one another what I have done to you.”
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”
Amen.
_____________________________________________________
All non-scriptural quotations are from This Mind: The Mendenhall lectures, 8th series, delivered at De Pauw University, by William Fraser McDowell (Methodist Book Concern, 1922)
An earlier version of this post was published at the Episcopal Cafe on September 27, 2017
I had been traveling in a country not previously visited; we drove past houses, both small and a little larger, surrounded by fortressed fences, and I wondered about the fearful stories behind those defenses. Then, there was the cemetery, bounded by angles razor wire of the kind and style I am used to seeing around correctional facilities and military installations.
The proverbial banality of evil is such as to acclimatize us to a certain level of violence – that which we might consider “normal,” “occasional,” “random,” until something – some incident, scene, or someone catches our attention, provokes us to examination, self-examination, repentance, and prayer.
I wondered, in passing, why would you need to set up barbed wire fences to guard the dead?
In 2 Samuel 21, Rizpah set herself to watch over the bodies of her sons and their brothers, whom David had considered of sufficient value to pay off the wounded debts and demands of his enemies. For an entire season, she lay on the hillside, scaring the crows from their bones, until the king finally took notice and restored the dead to a place of honour and acknowledgement.
Those who kneel to watch over the dead – Armoni, Mephibosheth, Michael, Trayvon, Tamir, Freddy, Philando, Anthony and the others – they make us alive to the fact that the violence we are tempted to accept as normal, occasional, random, is nothing of the kind. It is sinful, oppressive, deadening.
Pilate set a guard against Jesus’ tomb because, he said, he was afraid that Jesus’ followers might steal his body; but perhaps he was a little afraid that the rumours of resurrection might be true, and that real justice might undo his rule of violence.
For such is the reign of God: a country in which violence does not wield power, oppression has no weight, even death has lost its sting, and war has been drowned, dissolved by the flooding rivers running down from the throne of God, washing away barbed wire fences, rolling rocks, opening at last our deadened hearts to the possibility of another life.
You do not reward us
according to our loveableness,
thank God, you are less fair,
unlike our exacting, you err
always on the side of mercy,
balancing justice by melting down
wood and iron, recasting the scales
to create love’s crown.
Will the world end on end on Saturday?
For some, it already has. Those caught in storms of unimaginable strength & devastation. Those whose very bedrock is shaken like a jar full of beach pebbles, shattering glass, spilling blood & pain. Those gripped by the vicelike jaws of war & terror.
Will the world end on Saturday?
For some it will. For those who wake from the sleeplessness of grief to find the world transformed overnight into an alien landscape, unfamiliar & unkind.
Who will build us an ark?
Promises of rainbows are not enough, our God, to sustain us, when the waters have risen up to the neck.
I will give praise to our God, who is gracious, slow to anger, whose mercy endures forever.
Have mercy on us, our God. Speak peace to the storm; calm the mountains; settle the ocean floor. Soothe the sudden earth & let restless hearts of stone cease from creating chaos by their commotion. Make all things new.
But for those whose world is ending, in your mercy, drown with them; do not rush forward to your new creation. Do not leave us alone, at the end of the world.
The readings for the day include the first Passover meal, to be eaten hurriedly, with shoes on and staff in hand, in anticipation of Pharaoh’s frantic release of his Hebrew slaves after the devastating tenth plague hits his house.
You could be forgiven for feeling apocalyptic lately. Between wars and rumours of wars, earthquake, flood, wind, and fire; even the sun turned dark for a moment. Hundreds have lost their lives in mudslides in Sierra Leone. Entire island nations have lost their homes in the past week. Closer to home, the image of Aaron and Moses eating their Passover meal hastily, ready to run, can’t help but bring to mind those persuading themselves to leave or not to leave Florida, Georgia, the Carolina coast ahead of Hurricane Irma; those hoping that the storm might, after all, pass them by.
Just to be absolutely clear, the idea that these natural disasters are some kind of pseudo-biblical punishment upon our political or social enemies does not bear up under the weight of the gospel, is contrary to the teachings of Christ and the cross, and has no place – no place – in our churches. God so loved the world; all of it, all of us. God loves the child who died as the hurricane battered Barbuda, the first responder who drowned in Houston, the mothers crying out in Sierra Leone and South Asia. The passover that we pray for them is not a relief from punishment, but the compassion of a God who draws us out of the deep waters, and speaks peace in the midst of the storm.
A lot has happened since we last met Moses near the burning bush. His own people, not to mention the Egyptians, must have been feeling pretty apocalyptic themselves, after suffering undrinkable water, infestations, and rampant disease; aka rivers of blood, plagues of frogs, flies, locusts, and boils. Through it all, Pharaoh has barely wavered from his initial position, the one in which we found him three weeks ago when Moses was born, placing himself in the throne of God with the power of life, death, and liberty over the people of God.
It would be nice to think that Pharaoh was converted by the compassionate actions of his daughter to adopt a Hebrew child, to relinquish his racial animosity against them; but he wasn’t. It would be great if a plague of flies had convinced Pharaoh of the error of his ways, turned him to the abolitionist cause, and ended his system of slavery; but it didn’t. A few times, under extreme pressure, Pharaoh almost conceded justice for the Israelites, promising to let them go; but each time, once the pressure was off, he rescinded his orders, and resumed the status quo.
Even after this night, the night of the Passover, the Pesach, in which God had compassion over God’s people and protected them from evil and death; still Pharaoh failed to understand, and obey. If Pharaoh had learned mercy earlier, perhaps the story would have had a different ending. This is, after all, the story of a God who desires mercy, not sacrifice; a God slow to anger, and full of steadfast loving-kindness. But the bond forged by Pharaoh’s daughter’s act of mercy, drawing the infant Moses out of the deep waters, was not enough to build a bridge of mercy to connect for Pharaoh the cry of the Hebrews to the cry of the Egyptians.
But God hears their cries.
We have a tendency to read this story as though we were the people oppressed and imprisoned by the Pharaoh. We read the Passover as our revenge, and our righteousness as the lintel that saves us from the punishment of God, well deserved by Pharaoh. We tend to make the story our excuse for escaping the storms that afflict others, literally or metaphorically; we make it our justification. But when we do that, paradoxically, we become Pharaoh, placing ourselves above our neighbours, who are like us the people of God, made in God’s image. We wear our skin, our immigration status, even our geographical location as our badge of office. When we sit on Pharaoh’s throne, we fail to notice the intimate mercy that God enacts through little things like a family meal; signs of God’s love and presence with God’s people.
And perhaps it would be an occasional comfort to think that we could daub our lintels with lambs’ blood and be delivered from the effects of the hurricane, flood, or fire; but we know that it doesn’t work that way. If we thought that we could anoint our heads with oil and be protected from cancer, heart disease, and heartbreak; but that is not necessarily how it works, either. The idea that daubing the lintels of houses with lambs’ blood directs God, guides God, diverts God’s punishment away from our family forgets that God already has counted every hair on our heads. God knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows what we deserve, and what we desire.
But what if the Passover is not the story of God turning a blind eye to the people of God while wreaking devastation on everyone else in sight. What if the moral of the story of the Passover meal is not “duck and cover,” but the story told by the prophets: ‘“I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” says the Lord.’
The Pesach, the Hebrew word that we translate Passover, is about protection.[i] It is a sign of God’s mercy. We anoint ourselves with oil, we daub our lintels not to divert God away from us, but to draw God close. These signs are not to point God away from us, but they are signs of God’s covenant with us; a covenant of mercy and compassion, to bear with us and be with us through thick and thin, hell and high water, come what may.
Something terrible happened that night in Egypt, and after it was over, Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron, and tells them to take their people and leave; but that is not all. Something terrible happened that night, and in the darkness, Pharaoh finally saw that there was a compassion available beyond that which was his to grant. He summoned Moses and Aaron and asked them to bring him a blessing. Pharaoh, in the depths of the darkness, had finally the humility to ask for the grace of God, to recognize the compassion that he was missing, and to know that even now it was his for the asking. It is the most human face that we have seen Pharaoh wear, and it will not last till morning. Still, for a moment, his heart was broken open, and he saw God waiting on him with compassion, offering mercy.
In times such as these, our prayer is not for God to pass us by, nor to turn a blind eye. Our prayer is not to batten down our defences, but to break open our hearts, to hear the cries of those in need of a blessing; and to admit our own need of grace. Our prayer is for God to be with us, to share with us a sign of God’s covenant: the blood poured out, the meal hastily shared.
We pray for those in danger of death, dispossession, deportation, destruction. We pray for those hiding in closets and in plain sight, not that God would pass them by, but that they would hear Jesus’ promise to them: “Wherever you are gathered, I am with you.”
[i] The Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition (Oxford University Press, 2001), Exodus 12:11-13, text notes
This was first published at the Episcopal Cafe on September 6, 2017
I once heard a bishop tell a curious congregation that the cross is where religion and politics meet, conjuring up for my imagination a picture of the Pavement: Pilate and the people, religious and political leaders’ intersecting interests leading to the forced march through the city, and the planting of a cross on the hillside outside its walls.
People who filled the pavement with palm branches now filled the air with lament, with their longing for victory, with loud slogans of support for one faction or another; even with prayer. Did they crucify religion in favour of politics, or is politicking skewered by its own condemnation of an innocent man of God?
Most of us in religious leadership have at one time or another been accused of allowing politics to infect our religion, and/or of attempting to infect politics with our faith. The fact that the practice of religion, like that of politics, has to do not only with higher powers but with how we live together, with one another, makes it inevitable that the two will intersect.
Both are also prone to the pitfalls of false idols.
The one who pulls us out of the pit is, of course, Jesus Christ himself; a man not unfamiliar with politics and prayer.
Only if it is for his sake; only if it is for the sake of his love –
love that feeds the stranger and recommends the practice;
love that welcomes the children and rebukes those who would turn them away;
love that breaks open barriers of class and caste, and in the breach finds their repair;
love that heals the sick and restores those presumed dead to life;
love that calms the storm with a word of Peace;
love that carries that strange banner, the cross, through the streets of the old city, silently protesting all that organizes against the kingdom of God;
if it is for the love of Jesus that we pollute our religion with politics, and our politics with religious fervour, then that cross-pollination bear indeed bear rare and blessed fruit.
codified, commodified,
corralled in free fall; if no one will
stretch out her arms to pluck you
from the unsolid state,
unsuspended, groundless,
unfounded, such weightlessness,
spooling out forever
over the water 