Epiphany 5: Practicing the Way of Love

The Way of Love has become the guiding vision of the Episcopal Church or, as Presiding Bishop Curry has reframed it, the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement. Its seven steps–turn, learn, pray, worship, bless, go, and rest–are intended to take our attention off the church as a structure and on to the ways Jesus is moving in our lives and our communities.

I’m prone to feeling overwhelmed by all the practices in the Way of Love, which made this week’s Gospel lesson from of Mark all the more remarkable to me.

I’ve always loved Mark’s Gospel for its breakneck speed, expressing the compressed urgency of Jesus’ brief three years of ministry. So it doesn’t really surprise me that where the Way of Love sends my churchified brain spinning down the road of long-range visioning, mission and outreach plans, Mark’s Jesus just goes out and gets the whole thing done in the 42 verses of the first chapter.

The Gospel opens with John the Baptist, who is, of course, all about turn. Jesus faces and turns away from temptation in the desert shortly afterward. He then heads to the synagogue in Capernaum and amazes people with the authority of his teaching, nailing learn and worship in just two verses. Before he even leaves the synagogue, he’s blessing others by expelling and silencing demons, then heads off to new disciple Peter’s house to heal his mother-in-law, who immediately catches the refrain, rising from her sickbed to bless her houseful with food and a place to rest.

It’s good that Jesus has a little time to eat because as the sun sets, the entire town gathers outside the door and, once again, Jesus blesses, healing the sick and exorcising demons. He needs, maybe, to work on the practice of rest because after just a few hours of sleep, he’s up and off to a deserted place to pray. But before long the disciples (as the Common English Bible puts it) track him down (the Rev. Mark Davis translates it as stalked him!). I imagine the panic in their voices as they tell him that everyone is looking for him. Instead of returning, though, he completes the circle of love’s way, saying, no, we need to keep moving–let’s go. And in the last verses of chapter one, he’s off, teaching and healing throughout Galilee.

I’m exhausted just retelling it. But point made that even if we don’t move as quickly as Jesus, the Way of Love is one of constant circling, constant movement, and getting mired or overly focused on one or two of the practices that come most easily to us is not what it takes to bring in the Kingdom of God.

The other readings this week make it clear that when you’re not Jesus, this stuff is hard! Today’s Isaiah reading is from the second of the three Isaiahs that make up that prophet’s book in the Bible. First Isaiah prophesied in a time when God’s people had completely strayed from the Way of Love. They were warring with their neighbors, oppressing the poor and needy in their midst, and neglecting the ancient practices of worship that defined them. The catastrophe that the first prophet kept telling them would come their way finally did, and they were carted off to Babylonia to live for 70 years in exile.

It’s here, at their lowest point, that Second Isaiah slowly starts to lead them back to YHWHs Way of Love, patiently offering them the comfort of God’s blessing and re-teaching them the ancient traditions and understandings of God that they had neglected. Today first lesson comes from that period, reminding them that YHWH is “he who sits above the circle of the earth…its inhabitants…like grasshoppers” the one “who brings princes [even Babylonian princes] to naught.” In captivity, the people of God practice the Way of Love by learning and by opening themselves up to accept the blessing of the One who gives “power to the faint and strengthens the powerless.”

Third Isaiah is also the setting for today’s psalm. In both, the people have been returned to Jerusalem and given the opportunity to rebuild both their city and their temple. Psalm 147 echoes Third Isaiah’s full-on activation of the Way of Love. Now that they are home, Isaiah insists it is time for God’s people to turn from their past mistakes and revive their practices of prayer to YHWH, the one true God, “who counts the number of the stars and calls them all by their names.” It’s time to bless and comfort one another as YHWH has blessed them, serving and remembering the weak and needy and living in peace with their neighbors. It is the time to go, particularly to rebuild the temple. so that the people again have a place learn and worship. The people do slowly rebuild, but the way is not easy. The temptation must have been great to avoid the uncomfortable work of remembering how to be God’s people, especially in a land now filled with strangers with whom it would have been easier to just blend.

In today’s second lesson, Paul is writing to a community who worship together in Corinth about fifty years after Jesus’ death. The Corinthians are full of prayer and learning. They are, in fact, maybe a little too full of all of that, full of themselves, because they seem to be falling down when it comes to going out and blessing others. They spend too much time arguing about who has the greater spiritual gifts and considering how much better they are than the Jews and Gentiles around them, rather than going out and serving others where and just as they are. As Paul reminds them and Bishop Curry reminds us, God’s Way of Love means continually turning from our comfortable lives and our complacent selves to cross boundaries we’d rather keep in place, to bless and serve where we are least comfortable and most needed.

With God’s people in the time of the Isaiahs and the early Christians of Corinth, I’m good at practicing some of the Ways of Love and lousy at others. For example, I love learning, studying Scripture and especially the Gospel. I also like the service that is part of blessing and going–even crossing boundaries and getting uncomfortable. Weekly worship helps me think about those things I’ve done and left undone and do my best to turn. But praying and resting–that is, quietly listening to God and seeking God’s peace and restoration–I neglect on the daily. And yet without that connection to God, studying Scripture can become an intellectual exercise and blessing others more about feeling good about myself than, in Paul’s words, doing it “all for the sake of the gospel, so that I might share in its blessings.”

So what about you? Riffing off the Godly Play question: where do you see–and where do you NOT see –yourself in the story that is the Way of Love: turn, learn, pray, worship, bless, go, and rest?

Epiphany 3: The Struggle Is Real

I have lived most of my adult life in a house full of athletes. More than once, I’ve helped Will limp off a marathon finish line after a PR or revived a teen who raced so hard he’d passed out with sips of Gatorade. I had long discussions with my high school rower about what he might eat before an erg test to keep him from throwing up quite as much into the trash container next to each erg machine—because throwing up is just what happens during an erg test if you’re pushing your limits. Most recently, I watch astonished as my daughter comes home after a long workout with her team and launches into an hour of core exercises that I might be able to sustain for two minutes.

My favorite exercise is a walk or ski chatting with a friend, followed by tea and a good book on the couch. Honestly, I don’t understand what drives any of them, but they are athletes, each of them following the inner urge to compete, to push their bodies to the limit, to always do better the next time. I see that discipline reflected in their studies, their work, their relationships, and I know that they would not be where or who they are without the pain.

Last week, I spent my time here reflecting on the importance of finding a call that is true to God speaking within us, rather than to outside voices telling us what we should do. But I didn’t say that that inner call, should we accept it, would be free from difficulty, struggle, or pain. No one living in a household of athletes, and no one who follows Jesus’ way of love, could promise that.

Seeing how quickly the first disciples leave their boats behind when Jesus calls in today’s Gospel might suggest otherwise—that what they see ahead of them is the pure, immediate excitement of following the Messiah, the promised one, the Savior of the world. That that rush drives them to leave their family and their work behind.

I suspect their vision was much clearer than that, though. For one thing, they had to be aware that John—the first to recognize Jesus as Messiah—has just been arrested. Following Jesus was a dangerous choice from the start.

On the other hand, fishers on the Sea of Gallilee in a land occupied by the Romans existed at the bottom of the economic ladder, more medieval peasants who worked for a wealthy landowner than modern small business owners. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy and taxation ensured that they and their families would live out their lives in poverty and deprivation no matter how hard they worked.

When one day, Jesus calls them to be fishers of men, they must have heard the echo of the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall catch them.” Jeremiah is prophesying a time when God will restore Israel, gathering God’s scattered people and punishing those who have oppressed and polluted Israel with idols. Where we hear a call to save souls, it’s more likely that Andrew and Simon, James and John heard a call to change, to upending the corrupt social and religious structures of Rome and Jerusalem that kept them firmly and painfully in their place. Despite the risks and dangers, I suspect they heard his invitation to follow, deeply and immediately, as a call to rise and make life better for themselves and the people they loved. Then, though Jesus doesn’t lead exactly where they expected, they continue to follow that call through all confusion, pain, and despair that follows into the mystery, wonder, and joy of Resurrection.

In contrast, in today’s first lesson, Jonah tries to run from God’s call to save the people of Nineveh. Jonah is not running from his vocation—he is a respected prophet to Jeroboam II, the king of the people of Israel. But God is sending him off to the Assyrian infidels, who, in Jonah’s opinion, are totally NOT worth saving. Not even being vomited onshore after three days in the belly of a fish is enough to convince him. Grudgingly, he does what God tells him to do, but then immediately goes off to pout under a shade tree. I like to imagine that before his story is over, Jonah finally gets it, understanding that his call isn’t only to the easy stuff—calling God’s people to repentance when they stumble; that it’s also the painful work of calling those he considers least worthy into God’s circle of forgiveness and love.

Just under fifty years ago, Martin Luther King was imprisoned in Birmingham County Jail for organizing protests in Birmingham against the racial injustice in that city, including the uninvestigated bombings of black homes and churches. Despite his deep calling to his work, the conditions in the jail were harsh. He was particularly hard hit when someone delivered a newspaper with a letter signed by eight white clergy (including the Episcopal Bishop of Alabama, just saying), calling for the end of protests that they claimed incited violence–though the protesters themselves were uniformly peaceful and nonviolent. They asked the protesters to exercise patience instead and work through the justice system that had repeatedly failed them to achieve their goals. Out of an enormously discouraging and painful time, in the margins of that same newspaper, Dr. King began writing one of the most important documents in American history, the Letter from Birmingham Jail. In his response to the clergymen’s letter, he patiently, carefully uses biblical, classical, and personal examples to lay out the reasons why nonviolent protest is necessary in the face of unjust laws. Then, prophetically, he calls them to turn and do what is right:

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

And here we are, fifty years, 2000 years, 6000 years later, still following the call of God into dangerous territory. I’m not going to tell any one of you where or what God is calling you to. I’ve got enough of my own listening to do! But I can guarantee that if the call is real, at some point, it’s going to be a struggle. It’s going to exhaust us. It’s going to hurt. We’re going to want to run in the other direction or settle down on the couch with a good book and shut out that voice in our heads.

Still, as my family of athletes show me every day, rising up from that pain to do what’s needed is an inevitable and essential part of committing yourself to something, heart and soul. It’s part of what the prophets, the disciples, the heroes of our faith, and Jesus himself show us is the sure, unsteady path to the Light. In the words of our Junior Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman:

For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Epiphany 2: Here I am, but where am I?

Lord, you have searched me out and known me;
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar. Psalm 139

When I was growing up, once or twice a year, the priest would round up all of the Sunday School classes, bring us into the church and give us a talk about listening to God to see if we had a vocation to the priesthood (boys) or to become nuns (girls). We were told to listen quietly and to pray and if we had a calling, it would come to us. Usually, he reminded us of the young boy Samuel’s response when God called him. I think he also told us or had a guest priest or nun tell us the story of their vocation, but I can’t remember because every time, at that point, I was too stricken with fear to listen.

There was nothing terrifying about my priest, and his words weren’t meant to scare us. But from a very young age, I knew that I wanted to be married and have children, and having spent my childhood in fractious relationship with my two sisters, I was also certain that I did NOT want to spend my entire life with a conventful. So if some time in the night, God suddenly woke me up, a voice said, “Mary, I want you to live your life as a nun,” what would I do? Like Samuel, I’d have to say, “Here I am,” right?

It’s not like Samuel was given a choice. His mother turned him over to Eli, the high priest, when he was barely weaned; when Eli told him what to say the next time God talked to him, what else was he going to do? And then, God tells Samuel to tell Eli that he and all of his descendants would be punished because he hadn’t controlled his wicked sons. What a burden for a small boy to carry back to the man who he probably loved as a father!

The story of Samuel is important to our faith tradition in all sorts of ways that I am not dismissing. But I think that maybe we should stop using it as a model for how we listen to God’s call, how we find our vocation and life’s work.

When my priest told us to listen for God’s call, my younger self imagined that that call would come like a disembodied voice in the night, and that what I felt inside was irrelevant. To the Quaker writer and teacher Parker Palmer, this idea that vocation that comes from outside the self is “rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be ‘selfish’ unless corrected by external forces of virtue.” True vocation, he suggests instead, comes when “the soul speaks.” Martin Luther King, for example, described his call to ministry “not as a miraculous or supernatural something. On the contrary, it was an inner urge calling me to serve humanity.”

It makes sense that the call of the God–who, in the beautiful words of today’s psalm, created our inmost parts and knit us together in our mothers’ wombs–would come from deep within us. And yet, most of my life, I’ve persisted in the belief that vocation is a call that comes from outside me, disconnected from the longings and desires of my inner self.

I became a teacher because my mother told me she thought that was my gift and my calling, despite spending all of college telling people that yes, I was an English major and no, I didn’t want to teach. I trusted my Mom’s viewpoint, so I started subbing at the school in my home town, and thirty-five years later, I’m still in the classroom. Over the years, too, whether it was to teach Sunday school, serve on a committee, or fight for boulevard trees, when someone called, even when I was already overcommitted, I always said, “Here I am.” Good has come out of that work. But as I’ve actively lived into my vocation as a priest in these past few years, it now seems to me that all of that other work was just throwing shovels of good soil into a deep hole that needed to be filled with something else.

Because here’s the thing. While outside voices can call us to work that might not be our innermost vocation, but that is still good and important, they can also keep us from that inner call. When I was a girl, being a priest at all, never mind a priest who could have children, was not even a possibility, at least in the faith tradition that nurtured me. The voices explaining with gentle logic why only celibate men should be priests stamped out that spark before it even had a chance to flame. Maybe that terror I felt as a child wasn’t actually fear that God wouldn’t let me have babies some day, but a deep mourning for that inner urge King experienced, that soul speak that was silenced before it could even whisper.

So what’s the alternative? Parker Palmer suggests, “Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” To hear the voice of the soul, the voice of the one who searches us out and knows us, we need the space and freedom to listen to our lives. The soul, Palmer tells us, “speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.” Instead of outside voices directing our path, we are helped most by the voices of others who echo today’s psalm by simply, quietly affirming that we are marvellously made.

In the Gospel, Jesus and Philip both provide this kind of freedom and affirmation to Nathanael, the skeptic sitting under the fig tree who responds cynically to his friend Philip’s excited declaration that they have found the Promised One: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

First, Philip doesn’t try to argue with Nathanael, just tells him to come and see, opening a space. Then when Nathanael does, Jesus doesn’t come at him like that voice in the night, directing him to do something completely out of his comfort zone. Instead he says, “Here he comes…Look at him! He’s a real Israelite. Genuine through and through…I saw you under the fig tree” (John 1:47-8).

Fig trees provided sacred space in biblical times, where people would go to study God’s word, together or alone; their fruit or lack of fruit is frequently used in the Bible as a symbol of the spiritual state of God’s People. Jesus looks at Nathanael and lets him know that sees something in him that is fruitful and real, something that God’s People should be. Recognized and loved for who he truly is, Nathanael’s skepticism gives way, and he opens to truth and light.

It’s not so easy for some of us. It’s only now toward the end of middle age that the fog begins to lift, and I can see the road I’ve been stumbling along for years. I suspect I’m not alone: that many of us, as Palmer says, “ if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss… spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.”

And yet that voice has also always been there, directing my hands and feet, even when my eyes couldn’t see. And there have been those like Martin Luther King with clearer inner vision from the start who model another way. In the end, maybe what’s most important is not when or where or how we hear our soul speak, but what happens once we do.

Epiphany 1: All God’s Children

My second son was the sunshiniest of all my children. With a precociously verbal older brother always nearby, he didn’t say much, but he smiled constantly. When he should have been experiencing peak stranger anxiety, he’d happily hang out with anyone: sitters he’d never met, neighbor friends, the older folks at church. When he was a toddler, and his brother or one of his little buddies would push or bite or pull his hair, his eyes would widen, and he’d look at his small assailant with more astonishment than distress: What’s fun about THAT? Like Tigger, instead of walking, he bounced.

He also lied. A lot. He never lied in a way that got another person in trouble, and the lies themselves were so minor that with one exception, I can’t remember any of them. He lied to avoid conflict and keep his world peaceful and happy when he’d sense that something he had or hadn’t done would make someone else (particularly his mother) upset or disappointed.

Each time I caught him in a lie, he’d own up to it, and we’d talk. Each time, I’d repeat how much I loved him. I’d tell him I wanted to trust him and how if he continued to lie, I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. He’d squirm and say he was sorry and, as quickly as possible, move on, back to his happy little world.

One morning, as a homeschool assignment, I sent him off to his room to write a poem. Reading and writing weren’t easy for him, so I was surprised and delighted when he came down an hour later with a simple but sweet little poem. I praised him up and down. Over the next few weeks, whenever I’d ask him to write a poem (trying to encourage his newfound talent), he’d come back with yet another lovely little rhyme that would always make me smile and praise his work.

Then, one day, when I was sitting in my room, he came to me in tears. Worried, I asked him what had happened, and he confessed: the poems he’d been “writing” came not from him, but from Frances the Badger.

You might justifiably wonder how the mom who read him those books over and over before he was able to read them for himself didn’t recognize those poems in the first place. The English teacher in me was honestly pretty embarrassed.

But here’s the thing: I loved that little boy more than anything. I wanted to see him shine, especially where he struggled. I wanted him to have written those sweet rhymes. And it was, I think, that blind, full-strength, admiring love that finally broke through.

As I looked at my son, filled with so much remorse, guilt, and worry that his mom would finally not trust or love him anymore, my usual speech fell away. I hugged him. I told him I was proud of him for coming to me. I told him I thought he probably wouldn’t lie anymore. And he didn’t.

I’m not saying that as he grew older, he didn’t sometimes choose to not tell me things, but if I asked, he always told me the truth. When he was a teen, he once told me, “I know you and Pop trust me and give me a lot of freedom, and I’m not interested in doing anything that is going to mess that up.” That boy grew into an adult full of integrity, who values honesty and open communication as much as he still values living a happy and peaceful life.

This week in our nation, we’ve seen the way words can destroy trust and threaten the core institutions on which our democracy stands. We’ve also seen people of faith and integrity courageously risk their futures to counteract those words with the truth.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this: about what motivates some people toward deception and others toward truth; why some are willing to sacrifice character to ambition and others their ambition to integrity. I’m thinking about why it is so hard for all of us to admit when we’re wrong, to see the ways that our words and actions have hurt others. I’ve been thinking about our Presiding Bishop: how he can describe the violence around us so unflinchingly and passionately yet never stop imploring us to act in love toward one another. I’ve been thinking about that day long ago and my teary-eyed son. And as I think, I keep turning over the words at the end of today’s Gospel, when Jesus has been baptized, the heavens open, the Spirit descends like a dove, “And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you, I am well pleased.”

Truth and integrity, kindness toward others, admitting when we are wrong, and doing our best to make things right are biblical values central to our faith. In the words of the Prophet Micah, what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

But who can live into those values who does not know that they are loved? My love and admiration for my child broke through where my words did not. The love and open praise of God sends Jesus on his way to proclaim the love at the heart of God’s kingdom all the way to the Cross.

The great Civil Rights leader Howard Thurman describes how his grandmother, a former slave, told him about the slave preacher who would end every secret religious meeting by saying, “You–you are not ni[**]ers. You–you are not slaves. You are God’s children.” These words, Thurman explains, did not solve all of their problems, but it “established for them the ground of personal dignity, so that a profound sense of personal worth could absorb [their] fear.” He contrasts this with the explanation a woman who had escaped from Nazi Germany once gave him why so many young Germans were drawn to Hitler’s Youth. Hitler, she said, told them,”‘No one loves you–I love you; no one will give you work–I will give you work; no one wants you–I want you…overcoming their sense of inferiority.”* In the first case, God’s life-giving love helped enslaved people rise from their bondage; in the other, the professed love of a narcissistic, genocidal leader drove those who felt hopeless deep into the shadow of death.

God sees us. God knows us. God loves us, entirely and absolutely. God recognizes our deepest shadows only as a place that light can fill. We are called, again and again, to accept that we are God’s beloved children and then to let that Spirit of Love fill us and work through us until we, also, learn to see the shadows all around us as nothing but space to be filled with God’s light.

*Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, Chapter 2. https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.260684/2015.260684.Jesus-And_djvu.txt

The Feast of the Epiphany: Shaken Kingdoms

The Magi story is the stuff of fairy tales: wealthy, wise strangers appearing out of nowhere, bearing treasure for a king recognizable only to those who have the eyes and the heart to see. Over the centuries, legends sprung up around these visitors to baby Jesus. Someone decided there must have been three because that’s how many gifts there were. Others gave them names from faraway countries–Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar–and the carol “We Three Kings,” written in 1857, cemented their images into our collective imaginations.

All of this has led to some beautiful storytelling, and stories (your English teacher priest will always insist) carry essential truths. However, considering the original story in the context of the Gospel itself reveals entirely different treasures.

Right before the story of the Wisemen from the East in Matthew, we read about the birth of Jesus in a simple home in Bethlehem, just six miles from Jerusalem, the seat of Jewish power. In Jerusalem stood the palace of Herod and the great temple, and the most important Jewish religious and political leaders of the day lived and served there. Both Isaiah and the psalmist in today’s lessons promise that all nations will one day bow down and bring tribute to God and to the King’s son there.

On the other hand, Bethlehem is mostly known as the birthplace of David, the youngest and least significant of Jesse’s sons–the one who is sent to the fields to watch over the sheep–who eventually became the most celebrated king of Israel, ruling from Jerusalem. Today, the sprawling city of Jerusalem extends to Bethlehem, but the two are divided by the great wall that separates the West Bank of Palestine from Israel. Graffiti covers the Palestinian side of the wall.

The magi clearly know the ancient prophecies directing them to Jerusalem because they go there first to seek the new king. King Herod, alarms blazing, immediately summons Jerusalem’s religious leaders to find out what this visit is all about. Those leaders could have calmed his fears by quoting from those more comforting passages from Isaiah and the psalms about nations bowing down to Jerusalem but instead point to an entirely different piece of prophecy: And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;for from you shall come a rulerwho is to shepherd my people Israel.'”

Herod, who is not from Bethlehem and would almost certainly not describe himself as a shepherd, responds swiftly and brutally, not surprising for a ruler who senses a threat to his power. The rest of the story–traditionally read on this Second Sunday of Christmas–immediately follows the Magi’s coming in Matthew’s Gospel. An angel warns Joseph to flee to Egypt, and the family escapes, just before Herod sends his henchmen from Jerusalem to kill all the boys aged two and under living in and around Bethlehem. Those of you who know the Duluth singer Charlie Parr will appreciate his lyrics to “Bethlehem,” telling that story from the perspective of a grieving and less fortunate father.

In a church blessed with so many children, I’m honestly happy most years to replace this painful reading with the gift-bearing magi, and the lectionary itself skips over the bloody details. Still, the massacre of those small ones has been on my mind this week. The graffiti on the barrier between the people living in Bethlehem and Jerusalem brings me immediately to the walls–physical, emotional, and spiritual–built between the people on our continent and the way that our own children have suffered over our battles for power.

In these fraught times, we have perhaps never been closer to experiencing the great mystery and the great, revolutionary power of the birth revealed and described in these passages–a birth that, if only we had the eyes and heart to see–shakes all of the powers of the earth to their core.