A Mother’s Day poem for a grown daughter graduating college
There was a time
measured in the skipped beats
of a sonogram machine
when you were mine
completely to hold;
you ate my food,
shared my blood,
before the cord was cut
and like a yellow balloon
spiralling slowly, quickened
at times by turbulent air
rising, you flew.
There never will come a time,
when the beats run ragged and out
of time, when they no longer tattoo:
I love you.
Precipitous falling land & water
at the shore where dust turns to clay,
matter moulded to our humanity.
A low fog confuses earth with its firmament;
the mud holds its breath until the star
breaks, rising in the east.
I cannot stand straight.
My body shapes itself to air
that falls away beneath its drooping
head and arms.
Once so solid,
with you no longer there,
I drift as though weightless,
of no substance; I lean against
the empty place presenting
its silent promise
to love me forever.
Silt sinking to your shoes,
knee deep in ooze, you lose
your stream of thought way
down by the river to pray.
Tripping, tickling trout
tumbling upward, hope lifts
labour over falls, life runs
down by the river to pray.
Duck-billed spirit diving
for glory, creation reviving
resurrection array
down by the river to pray.
Acts 11: 12 “The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.” – Peter has a vision of eating foreign food, and is called thereby to recognise the grace of God to all kinds and conditions of people.
When we lived in SE Asia, my husband would travel all over the region for work, often eating out with business partners in restaurants whose menus he could not read, surrounded by languages he did not understand. One piece of advice helped him navigate those meals, which were not social occasions, of course, but like so many other things in life, a continuing negotiation.
The advice given him was never ask what it is that you are eating until after you have finished eating it. The advice is, of partly, to protect one’s own appetite, but also to avoid a gut reaction of disgust or dismay that might offend of provoke contempt in one’s host. Such dynamics are not good for business.
Peter is not seeking a trade deal with the Gentiles, but he has just learned that he is about to enjoy closer fellowship with them than he had ever imagined possible, this fisherman from the backwaters of Galilee.
Now that they are becoming disciples of Jesus, baptized in the self-same Holy Spirit as the apostles themselves, they are to be received as Peter’s own sisters and brothers. And that is not going to go well if every time they sit down to eat together he is visibly wrinkling up his nose and holding his breath.
Peter may assume some privilege, as the Rock upon whom Jesu promised to found his church; but Jesus’ last commandment to him was to feed, not to lead, his sheep.
It’s fitting that this reading should come upon a Community Meal Sunday, not, I hasten to add, because there is anything to fear cooking in the kitchen below. No, but it is a fitting reminder that if it were not for the grace extended to us Gentiles by the vision of God, then we would never have been invited to the table of Jesus, and we would not have a prayer of finding Christ at our table.
You see, we each tend to think of ourselves as the normal ones, the kosher, pukka ones; the ones who do it right, eat right, serve right. Everyone else is the foreigner. But if it were not for the gracious vision of God and its graceful transmission by Peter, we would forever have remained the other, the Gentiles, the eaters of foreign muck.
But Peter heard the Spirit say, “Make no distinction between them and us.”
“Make no distinction between them and us.” You can’t hear it much more clearly than that.
There are a few different ways that this gets worked out.
As our Jewish cousins, Peter’s descendants celebrate Passover, we can celebrate the invitation, the generous invitation that we have been given to share in the Exodus, the flight to freedom, the salvation of the people of God. We can give thanks that no distinction has been made between them and us; that we too have been set free not only by the crossing of the Red Sea, but by the passing over of Jesus from death to life, by the marking of the lintels of our lives with the blessing of baptism.
So there is no distinction between them and us.
There are challenges to our complacency. Did you hear yesterday about the “pro-White” rally that was taking place in Georgia ahead of Confederate Memorial Day? Nine counter-protesters were arrested. After everyone left, the pro-White group planned a cross burning. “Make no distinction between them and us,” the Spirit says, which might lead us to judge a movement designed deliberately to reinforce distinctions and divisions.
Or we may say, “Make no distinction between them and us.” We may own our complicity in systems that allow and promote and perpetuate such ill-willed demonstrations of deliberate offence and contempt. We may admit to small demonstrations of difference in our daily lives, mostly hidden, secret signs of the distinctions we make between them and us.
There is no small danger that the call of the Spirit will lead us to self-examination and repentance.
When our Vestry met at the beginning of Lent or thereabouts, we talked about why the church was founded, and why this parish worships together, and why it matters. When we get back to the basics of the gospel, of the love of God for all that God has made, our distinctions and divisions get put into some perspective. From the perspective of eternity, from the perspective of the heavens, we are indistinguishable from one another. All the more miracle that God loves each of us so dearly.
One of the themes that emerged from that Vestry meeting was the breaking down of physical barriers that create an us on the inside, and a them on the other side. Every conversation that we had included some call to get beyond our own doors and walls – physically, literally – to hang out more closely with our neighbours.
We talked about doing more worship outside, on the lawn, where there are no barriers between us and the sidewalk and the street, blurring the boundaries between the church and the city, the gospel and the everyday lives that live it and need it and bleed it.
The Growth Task Force that met this week went a step further. Growth, by the way, can mean many things in the life of a church. We might be talking about numbers of bodies in the pews. We might be talking about programming. We might even be talking about growing our own discipleship, stretching ourselves, as Peter was stretched by his vision, to new insights, new challenges, new gospel growth.
Anyway, the Growth Task Force proposed breaking down the barriers not only between inside and out, but between our worship and our fellowship, our service and our song; between this Table and our own dinner tables. We talked about taking the Pentecost picnic outside, and taking the worship service with it, and inviting all and sundry to join us, not only for worship but also for lunch, and not only for a free meal but also to join in our praise and our prayers and the falling of the Spirit upon all of God’s people, because, as Peter found out, she makes no distinction between them and us.
So in three weeks’ time, weather permitting, we will celebrate outside around our tables and the Table of Jesus Christ together, mingling our worship and our fellowship and our food with the bread of heaven, making no distinction between the movements of the Spirit in our lives and in the lives of our neighbours. And we will see, we will see how we may grow.
And we will remember that we would not even know Jesus if we had not first been embraced as strangers, foreigners, with uncouth ways and un-kosher kitchens. If we had not been extended grace.
The new heavens and the new earth will not look like anything we can imagine. It will not be what we expect, or what we know, or what we dream. It will be beyond our imaginations. It is worth, then, holding our imaginations open in the here and now, as we make our own world as new and as close to heaven as we can: open to the possibilities of God’s grace, and the most unexpected appetites and variety of God’s banqueting table.
I am making some orange stoles. This was not in my original plan for the week, but it happened almost by accident (as so many gun-related detours do).
A friend and colleague [update: the Revd C Eric Funston tells the story here] posted a call to #WearOrange on June 2nd, to raise awareness of the public health crisis that is gun violence in this country today. Being a clergy person and general church geek, he wanted to find an orange stole to wear on the following Sunday, June 5th.
“I can make that happen,” I thought. Followed swiftly by, “Let’s make this happen!”
So he shared the details to our local clergy Facebook group, along with my promise to make as many orange stoles as people requested, as best I can. I went on out and got some yardage of likely-looking orange cotton fabric, remembering at the last minute to factor into the measurements that I should make myself one, too.
In the meantime, we shared our plans more widely, and invited others to join us. The response that I have seen has been mostly low-key, with a few enthusiastic adopters, and a little caution. I get it, both ways, I do. But I also feel compelled to step into this challenge.
I went to a Faith & Health Collaborative meeting this morning, where the rather wonderful co-founders of the movement, God Before Guns, gave a presentation to inform our further conversation.
They are not anti-gun-ownership, they said, nor anti-2nd-amendment; although they do consider that all of the amendments should come second to God and God’s commandments; hence the name.
I took some notes. In our little county alone, they have found, so far this year there have been at least 47 gun-related deaths, 20 of them people under the age of 30. In our county, the suicide:homicide rate is roughly 1:2, which is the reverse of the national trend. I do not know what to make of that. We are on track to meet or to beat 2014’s numbers (the last year for which data is complete and available), which came to 150 gun deaths for Cuyahoga County, and 1,211 in Ohio as a whole. There are an estimated 310 million guns at large in America today. Since 1968, the year that I was born (coincidentally), roughly 1,516,863 people have died in America of gun violence [I updated the numbers I heard this morning via PolitiFact].
That is over 100,000 more people in my lifetime than have died in American wars since 1774.
That is a lot.
I came back to my church and sat in a lunch meeting with a bunch of other pastors. One couldn’t come, because of a funeral for a young person who died of gun violence this past weekend. That’s one too many.
The word “despair” came up more than once this morning. People of faith should have something to say to that.
I was taught, long ago and far away, that the liturgical colour “green” really means “all of the other colours,” so I am not worried about offending the church calendar by wearing orange. The #WearOrange folks chose the colour that hunters wear to avoid getting accidentally shot after it was adopted by young people on the south side of Chicago to remember their fallen friend, whose death was no accident, but a symptom of a public health crisis that is plaguing that city and our own.
This orange stole is not a statement that I want you to see me. It is a plea and a penance and a proclamation: that we have something to say about this, we people of faith. That we have something to say to the violence of death and destruction. That we have seen, and noticed, and that we are not unchanged, unturned, unmoved, we who are alive.
Updated August 2019: unfortunately, the need for “orange awareness” has only increased since this post was first published. More recent reflections include:
Since his ministry began, Jesus has gone from the playful – turning the water meant for ritual ablutions into the finest wine – through the profound, the revolutionary, the revelationary.
He has broken down the barriers erected by generations, drinking water at the well with the Samaritan woman. If you want to understand the dynamics at play in that little exchange, think of the Israeli army going into an ancient Palestinian city shanty town and borrow your characters from that fraught scene. Choose who you will have play Jesus.
He has broken bread and fed thousands on the hillside. He has turned away death from a child, and turned back the clock on a man’s long injury, 38 years swept away in a moment by the pool of Bethesda. He gave a man the first sight of his life, insisting that it was not original sin, not his own nor his parents’ that made him blind, but that it was God’s will now – meaning Jesus’ will in the moment that he met this man and loved him – that he should be made whole, new, that he should be astonished by the sight of love’s face looking upon him. He has walked on water.
And after all this, there are still those who will ask him, “How much longer will you keep us in suspense? Are you the Messiah?”
By the way, when John writes, “the Jews,” you understand that he doesn’t mean the whole Jewish people by any means. This is a particular group of Beltway elites who think they know the fix for God’s creation and want Jesus to endorse their plan. But Jesus doesn’t do partisan politics; he has his own way of going about things, and there is room for everyone to participate in his programme of redemption.
But still, they want to know what else Jesus will do for them, how he will change their lives. They want to know, even so, where is the miracle for them. Where is the rout of the Romans? Where is the end to earthquakes? They are greedy for even more miracles. They are eager to see heaven on earth, which is understandable.
At the Festival of Faith & Writing, from which I returned last night, I listened to Kelly Brown Douglas, Canon Theologian at the National Cathedral. Kelly Brown Douglas is the author of the book, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, which our Diocesan Council is committed to reading and studying as a body as a way into further conversations about racial reconciliation and understanding within our church.
In a difficult part of a moderated conversation about forgiveness, Kelly talked about the faith that can stand even in the face of death, of violence and even in the bondage of oppression; a deep and abiding faith in the justice of God, that the justice of God will prevail, in God’s own time; that God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven, that there will be a time in which death is no more, nor hunger nor crying nor pain; a faith that is sustained against all evidence that surrounds the faithful one.
This is a similar hope to the one out of which the Book of Revelation is written. The hope and expectation of this strange and visionary book is that the powers and principalities that wreak havoc in this world will be wrestled into submission by God, and that all things will be made new, all things will be made right, all things will be made just and good, as it was in the beginning.
For John, the writer, and for the churches to which he writes, there is tribulation, and there is pain. There is oppression that they cannot by themselves escape. They must instead remain faithful to the faithfulness of God, trusting in the justice of God to make things right, even when everything is going wrong. It is the faith of those who hear the voice of Jesus calling, from however far away.
But the voice of Jesus does not only call us to lie down in green pastures. At the same festival, the poet Christian Wiman spoke about heaven. I wish I could use his exact words, but he said to the effect that we make too often the mistake of imagining an afterlife by projecting ourselves wholesale into it, seeing ourselves beside still waters, eating and drinking at the table set before us without a care in the world, as though there is nothing about us that needs to be changed. Scoured, was the word he used.
We rest in the knowledge of the love of God and the faith that we are changed in Jesus; and we know that we have made promises ourselves to use our own will, our agency, our hearts and passions to further God’s communion right here on earth. That means that we are not passive recipients of grace, waiting for heaven to come to us, but active responders to grace, called to work out the love of God.
The love of God is active, not passive. It calls us to repentance, leaves time and space for us to scour our souls and mend our ways, to respond to the miracles of Jesus not by demanding more, but by working out the grace we have already received by sharing it with others, scouring our own souls to make room for greater love, the love of God and the true and self-giving love of our neighbours.
Our hope is in the heavens, but our work is here in our own lives, in the moment given us to live, and to love, to wield grace and to learn repentance.
And that is a gift. It is a gift that we sometimes fail to recognize – “How much longer will you keep us in suspense, o God? Tell us plainly.” But God has given us a chance to do something better than projecting ourselves wholesale into heaven, as though nothing needs to change. Jesus has invited us to turn water into wine, to turn back the clock, make restitution for injury. He has invited us to contribute to a world in which death and pain do not wield such power, neither cancer and crying, nor the scourge of racism or the plague of gun violence. The chance to scour our lives of sin in order to make more room for the love of God and the great, self-giving love of neighbour – that is a gift. It is the gift of time, of mortality, of lives lived in the here and now, paying attention to the details of the systems within which we swim, and repenting, changing them, instead of projecting ourselves into heaven as though nothing needs to change.
The people who want Jesus to do more, to demonstrate more aggressively, more completely his Messiahship have missed the gift of participation, of the chance to work with God on the ground, literally during Jesus’ Incarnation, the chance of a lifetime.
“I have shown you who I am,” he says in so many words, “Believe me or not, follow me or not, but my way leads to a life with God that you cannot even hardly imagine. And once you have tasted grace, there is no going back.”
Go on, says Jesus. Turn water into wine, wine into blood, bread into body, cure cancer, raise the dead, comfort the mourners and scour your souls of oppression.
And when all else fails, then rest in the promise that none who come to me shall be taken from me, and the promises of God will come to pass, and you will rest in green pastures, and the Lamb will be your shepherd, and will guide you to the springs of the water of life, and you shall dwell in the fields of God forever.
Amen.
It’s day two of the Festival of Faith & Writing. So much to think about, process, reflect upon, enjoy. But halfway across the parking lot at lunch – in the middle of a day that began in the freezing temperatures of winter and ended with young people (and others) sunbathing on the grass – I heard a strange and insistent sound in the distance. The woman near me stopped and looked around. “Sandhill cranes,” she said. The sound was distant, soft, but distinct. We looked around, unseeing, but each time we were about to give up, they would call again, demanding our gaze. “There!” she said, pointing to the sky, where the jet trails marked the path of seven birds, impossibly high, as though they would leave the atmosphere itself and migrate to another world altogether.
Warming my soul against the pale sun,
wrapping darkness around me, the better
to absorb the light. Sandhill
cranes bubble overhead, a mile high,
diving into the deep blue firmament,
breathing heaven, singing alleluia.
Empty clothing, deflating dust with bone fastenings,
faded and stained, deeply wrinkled enough to bury life
within the folds, rolled up like a mat and carried out when
the last breath fails and the softness falls upon itself.
over the water 