Deep Home

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I am from the white farmhouse with the generous porch 

with the generous porch 

and the little red barns 

lined up like ducklings behind it.

I am from flowers wet with rain, 

planted with love, 

bowing to kiss the earth.

         I have stood in a tobacco barn just once. The tobacco was dry and crinkly, hanging above our heads, sweet-smelling like the end of an unburnt cigarette. My grandfather took me to the barn, which belonged to my great-uncle Dennis, my grandmother’s baby brother. I was about nine and I think it was early fall, evening. The barn was cozy, lit in flicker and flame by the fire they were using to cure the dark tobacco. We were in Brunswick County, Virginia, where my dad was born and sold his first crop of tobacco when he was eleven years old. His parents gave him a small section of the family field and whatever he could make of it was his. I grew up hearing of Dad’s early farming skills, but stepping into that warm and fragrant barn for a few minutes one cool evening was as close as I ever got to farming.

         I know tobacco fields when I see them whizzing by from a fast car, though I’ve never worked in one. I’ve never worn long sleeves in hot weather so I could stick the large yellow leaves of flue tobacco, sticky with wax, under my arm as I made my way down a row of plants.  I’ve never worked dark tobacco, the plants my dad calls “beautiful” with emotion in his voice, as he describes their leaves “draping to the ground like wings.”  I’ve never carried a knife to split their stalks down the middle and then cut them off at the base, leaving them to wilt a bit in the sun before I turned them upside down over tobacco sticks, then hung the sticks on tier poles and carried the loads to cure in the barn. My brother worked the fields three summers in a row, though he easily could have worked at Busch Gardens or a tourist restaurant in Williamsburg, where we lived. He chose the fields and he kept going back, for the “camaraderie and freedom,” he said wistfully when I asked him about it twenty years later.

         I opted for summer jobs at Busch Gardens, where my main connection to tobacco was the year I aimed to catch the eye of a chain-smoker who also worked there. I bummed cigarettes and tried to like smoking, but the allure faded like he did when school started up in the fall. Most people in my extended family smoked. A lot. Not my parents or grandparents when I was growing up, but almost everyone else. I made a game of it when we visited aunts, uncles, and cousins all over Brunswick county, where my grandparents lived: Could I find a house without cigarettes and tall glass bottles of Pepsi? 

         As long as I can remember, I’ve known the fabric of life was woven differently in the country than at our house. Like a well-prepared tourist with a few key phrases at the ready, I can say “flue tobacco” or “dark tobacco,” and I know you “pull” (not “pick”) flue and you “cut” dark, but I don’t know much more. I know that even my tobacco-tourist lingo is old school now, in a time when machines do most of this work. I also know how to spot the best homegrown tomatoes, though I’ve never grown them successfully on my own. I call certain roads “four lanes” and I am not startled when the doorbell rings unexpectedly in the country, the way I am at my house, where my first thought is “Who would be coming here?” 

         As kids, we suburban grandchildren dubbed our grandparents’ house The Country House, which made sense of the contrast and the pull we felt between this place and our regular lives. When I hear myself refer to it that way now, I realize it may sound grander than we meant it. Think Oak Ridge Boys and firecrackers in the yard, not gated estates and golf pants. 

         The Country House sits on a spot of land in Brunswick County, about twenty acres worth. The land once belonged to my great-grandparents, who carved it off of their own land to give to my grandparents, who lived on it and loved it and then left it to my dad. Across the eastern field and up the road about a quarter-mile from this spot, my great-grandparents owned the house that’s still there at the top of the rise. Every visit I’ve made to The Country House, I have stood in the side yard, rooted, looking east at that other house. Standing in place, the sight of that white farmhouse and the multiple red barns lined up behind it to the woods’ edge is home to me. I never lived there and neither did my dad, but when I stand in the side yard of The Country House looking out past the lawn and then the field, letting my eyes swoop up the hill and land on the white house and red barns, I am a compass needle pointing north. That’s home. That’s where I come from. Like a magnet, I move in the direction of that comforting, solid, timeworn site.

I am from slanted afternoon sunlight across the cornfield, 

streaking in beneath half-pulled-down vinyl shades 

in my grandmother’s kitchen; 

from long summer nights on the porch, 

listening to cicadas 

and wishing on stars. 

I am from fresh homemade biscuits,

tomato sandwiches, 

salted watermelon 

eaten outside by the woods,

and chocolate meringue pie.

         If you wake up past 7am in Brunswick County in July, it’s already hot and sticky. When our parents dropped us off to visit our grandparents for a week every summer, I slept in the middle bedroom on the east side of the house, nothing but a thin white roller-shade of plastic on the window between my bed and the sun rising over the tobacco field. It curled in at the edges and was framed in piercing yellow sunlight by 7am. That bright rectangle around the curled shade was my alarm clock, warning me it would only get hotter the longer I waited.

         With my brother and cousins, I spent those summer days trekking through the woods behind the house until we found the creek or a deserted deer stand, picking up shotgun shells like archeologists putting together an ancient story. Many days I skirted the edge of the field where it met the lawn, gathering flowers to arrange in a glass for my grandmother, who always received them with sincere gratitude though it’s likely they were all weeds. We helped hang laundry on the clothesline, slinging clothes up and over, using the wet weight to pull the line near enough for our short arms to use the pins. We would go back out later to take down the scratchy, stiff-dried, wind-scented clothes, yanking on the now-higher lines until the clothes came down in our hands and the pins popped off and landed in the grass. Like baseball players with the sun in our eyes, it was hard to follow the flying pins against the lit sky. We took naps from which we awoke groggy and sweaty, wet hair plastered to the sides of our faces and imprints from the sheets visible on our cheeks. In the evenings, we sat on the front porch, cooling down, waiting for stars, and commenting on the occasional cars coming down the road.

         Running up to the store in the truck for a loaf of bread and a quart of milk was a delight we hoped for on a daily basis. My grandparents and everyone in the county called the store Ham’s, after the man who owned it, but my cousins and brother and I called it The Candy Store, after our main purpose in riding along on these errands. It stood at the crossroads of Danieltown (“Daniel” being my grandmother’s maiden name), where the only other thing in “town” was an old school. We rode in the back of the truck, wind whipping our hair and making it impossible to talk, though we shouted at each other anyway. Stepping into The Candy Store was like stepping into my father’s childhood, or my grandfather’s. Most people shopped there for staples like bread, milk, cigarettes, and diapers, in between grocery store runs to town. Other items collected dust, sitting on their shelves a long time without being disturbed. It smelled like cigarettes and wood smoke and oil. Smooth, worn, uneven wood plank floors creaked under our feet as we bypassed the three dusty aisles of canned goods, headed straight for the wall beside the cash register–the candy display–where we were each allowed to choose one treat, and we sometimes made it the whole two and a half miles home before we ate them. 

         The summer of sixth grade, we had a family reunion coming up and my grandmother spent the week beforehand baking desserts. Each morning, by the time the sun reached in around the shade and woke me, she already had the oven on in the west side of the house, trying to get the baking done before noon to keep the heat down. After lunch when the goodies had cooled, she sent me across the road with a sample for her sister, the receptionist at their brother’s oil company. By this time of day, Aunt Dollie was sitting in Uncle Dennis’s office watching her stories on the television. I came in with our samples “to see if they were good enough for the reunion” and Aunt Dollie taste-tested them and introduced me to the world of General Hospital. That was the year I had poison ivy so I sat on the floor in front of the oscillating fan, the back of my shirt pulled up so the breeze could cool the bumps on my back, eyes glued to the travails of Port Charles.

         At every family reunion or holiday, desserts had their own, full table. I loved the pies–pecan, cherry, lemon meringue, chocolate meringue, coconut–and I even loved the “salads,” Jell-O, fruit, nut, marshmallow, and cream cheese concoctions that somehow didn’t count as desserts. My grandmother fried delicious chicken and there were always a few quarts of Brunswick stew in the deep freezer. 

         But the standouts were the fresh fruits and vegetables, straight from the field. The first cantaloupe I remember eating was in the kitchen of my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Marg. The light tan, bumpy-veined rind was sun-warmed and the whole kitchen smelled of cantaloupe even before we cut into it. Entire weeks were spent putting up fruits and vegetables for later, leaner seasons we could hardly imagine at the height of summer. A late summer canning operation was a beautiful and beastly hot enterprise, providing tomatoes for the rest of the year, while seeming not to put a dent in the fresh ones I ate at every meal.

         When I became a vegetarian as an adult, my family thought it was strange and had trouble understanding baked beans aren’t “just beans” if they have pork in them. It seemed strange to me they couldn’t see how my love affair with vegetables began on those weeklong summer visits, overflowing with tomatoes, corn on the cob, butter beans, homemade pickles, and snaps still warm from the field when we started fixing dinner. I often ate an entire plate of sliced tomatoes with salt and pepper, and a biscuit. It was more than enough.

I am from Sunday school felt boards 

and out-of-tune pianos 

playing hymns too loudly.

I am from standing outside after church 

in the gravel parking lot, 

sun directly overhead, 

slapping bare legs and arms 

to keep the bugs away, 

while our grandparents visited.

         Several summers ago now, I attended the final worship service at the church a mile up the road from The Country House. After years of dwindling membership, it was time to shut the doors of the congregation founded in 1803, where my grandmother’s family had been members since the 1830s. A handful of years had already passed since my grandparents each made their final visits to Rocky Run United Methodist Church, where they are both buried in the graveyard out back, along with two sets of my great-grandparents and many other relatives. 

         Wandering around during the potluck after the service, I encountered a little boy looking around the same Sunday school room as I was, marveling over the stacks of hymnals and other curiosities. He picked up an old, dry-rotted, six-inch-long, thick wooden peg, sharpened like a pencil lead on one end. 

         “Know what this is for?” 

         I didn’t. 

         “In the olden days, when they were planting tobacco, they’d take one of these and use it like this.” He used the point of it to move the pretend earth away and create a pretend hole. He looked up at me as he demonstrated. 

         “So you would make a hole with that and then put the seedling in the hole?” 

         “Yep.” 

         “Are you a tobacco farmer?” 

         “Yes, ma’am.”

         It was an odd conversation to have in a Sunday school room piled with musty ancient hymnals, with a child I’d never met, in a place I probably won’t enter again. I was glad he wanted to show me and explain it, pleased to see him puff his chest with pride when I recognized him as a farmer. As I said, I don’t smoke. I’m not a fan of cigarettes or the companies that make them. I’m not even an apologist for my family of tobacco farmers, past and present. But I can’t tell you the last time I spoke to a child so certain of his own talents and his place in the world. Farming in that flat, red clay county with the earth-tethered people there did that for him. Dismiss that at your own peril.

         I’m a campus minister in a college town with competitive and brilliant students. Those whom I get to know are warm and open and earnestly looking for God’s fingerprints in the important stuff of their lives. When I share stories about my ministry with friends who only know the stereotype of University of Virginia students, they are surprised at the quality and character of the students with whom I am honored to spend so much time. 

         And yet. 

         There is a veneer here. Distance. Life lived too much in our minds, trying to encompass too much in too short a time. We’re all just passing through. In this town, we don’t expect anyone to ask us how we are and, if they do, we don’t give the real answer. At this school, we live in semesters and class years; we live by our intelligence and what it can get us next.

I am from the calls 

of the whippoorwill 

and the bobwhite,

from the mist 

rising off the pond in early morning.

I am from trying to put the worm on the hook myself

but needing my granddaddy to do it for me.

I am from the prickly feel of fish scales 

on the one he caught.

I am from backwoods 

and tobacco farms

and red clay earth.

         Our family visited Monticello when I was in grade school and I mimicked my dad’s revered tones in describing it when I shared the experience afterwards for Show and Tell. The more profound reverence came from within me, for the mountains we saw rising up against the horizon, smoky blue above the highway as we drove westward. On that trip, something previously submerged in me recognized mountains, though I’d never seen any in real life before then. I couldn’t get them out of my mind after that. I’d grown up in the Tidewater region of coastal Virginia, surrounded by flat land, marshes, and open water, able to drive to the beach for the day, but the mountains felt like my place. 

         I exhale and reset when I see their profile against the sky. My mom’s family is from West Virginia, so the calling of the mountains makes a certain sense. In my twenties, I lived in the heart of Appalachia for four years and “discovered” my Appalachian heritage. There in the days before the Internet, I both loved and resisted the remoteness of the place and the people. 

         Despite the veneer, I love Charlottesville–artists and thinkers and students all camped together at the edge of the Blue Ridge, in the Piedmont foothills. But I don’t feel known here–even in this landscape and community I love–the way I do in the flat tobacco county I never lived in.

         My grandparents have been dead for years, and the family is large enough that I don’t always know who my relations are, but there are many places in Brunswick County where I could walk in and immediately be hailed as “Blanche’s granddaughter” or “Dudley’s daughter.” 

         It may sound like a small thing. It’s not.

         By now I’ve lived far from home and made my life in different places. The suburban Tidewater girl in me can take one look at a sky and tell which way to big water. I lived with a French family one semester in college and I still crave café crèmes and the art of everyday life in all its French sensibility. I was in Appalachia long enough to know soup beans and to feel my heart tug when the radio station plays Bluegrass Sunday Morning. I’ve spent time in the urban South of Nashville and Atlanta, listening to music in dark clubs, feasting on vegetarian fare in spots formerly known for use of lard, and constantly being told with a wink that I don’t sound like I’m from the South. My British Goddaughter laughs at how I talk, too, but for other reasons entirely. I’ve come to love a lot of places and I’ve been given glimpses of home in strange lands.

         Still, I return to that iconic white house and red barns. My compass needle keeps pointing at that landscape, though I don’t think I ever want to live there. It is about a deep, long, knowing I can barely comprehend. It’s about the way the stretch of land, and the sound of birdcalls in the morning, and the smell of rain in the late afternoon hit something deeper than I normally access.

I am from farmers 

who took second jobs in town 

at the gas station and the bank

to make ends meet.

I am from the second generation, who moved away, 

and the third, who only knew this place in the summers, 

on short visits, 

and whose accents don’t match the terrain. 

I am from feeling at home 

and out of place 

at the same time.

            When I was nineteen, visiting from college, my grandmother and I were sitting in the yard visiting with neighbors, a middle-aged woman and her nineteen-year-old daughter. The woman my age was pregnant and the three of them were talking about young marriages, pregnancy, and small children. Listening, I did the math and realized I was the only one of the four of us who had made it to nineteen without becoming pregnant. I didn’t think I was missing out on anything yet but I wondered if they did.

            My dad was the first in his family to go to college. He still doesn’t know how my grandmother managed to send him money every month when he was away at school, or what my grandfather wore after he’d sent my dad off with the lone wool coat from his own closet. The responsible eleven-year-old tobacco farmer became an electrical engineer and raised his family in the suburbs, where his kids always knew we’d go to college. He and my mom made sure my brother and I took piano and swim lessons and got to go on the school field trips. They made sure we never went a summer without a trip to the country. Our summer trips to The Country House were visits to see our grandparents, like anyone’s family visits, but they were also an introduction to what we otherwise only heard about in Dad’s stories. 

            Maybe they were an induction, too, something deeper taking root. All those summer days, counting time in light and shadow as the sun moved across the fields, all those tomato sandwiches, all those visits up the road to family I’d never seen or heard of, “He’s your cousin” my grandmother’s favorite and sufficient explanation when I’d ask…all of it planting that place in me. I don’t know how else to account for the pull.

            For a while after my grandparents died, Dad visited The Country House for a few days most months, to make repairs on the house or to visit nearby county courthouses for genealogy research. My own visits were infrequent and quick, squeezed in between work, meant for secluded rest apart from the daily rush. Most of the time I found the house empty, clean and musty.

            On one of my last visits, I was in the middle of frying up some Fakin’ Bacon tempeh strips for a vegetarian BLT when elderly cousins stopped by because they saw the car and wondered who was home. We visited a few minutes while I tended the tempeh, their eyes curiously glued to the pan, though they politely never asked what in the world I was cooking. I never stop in on friends where I live. We never just visit.

            The distant cousins we played with as kids–the ones who lived in the white farmhouse with the generous porch–still live there and they still farm. One of them lives in the farmhouse and his brothers are scattered in trailers and houses up and down the road in both directions. One of them mowed the lawn for my dad at The Country House in the years before he sold the property to another cousin. They farm, but they also have other jobs. They have to. It’s that or leave.

            Even my grandparents had to leave the country for a time, for work in other places, with hearts longing for home. Most of my childhood they lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. suburbs and went home for every vacation and as many weekends as possible. This is how they managed until they retired and went back home full time. As a kid, I didn’t question this. As an adult, I never thought to ask what that time away was like for them, the year that turned into twenty. They must have known a pull much deeper than the tug I feel. 

I am from the changing and steadfast landscape

planted 

by the ones who came before.

I am from life 

offered 

one slice of pie

one bedtime story

one pin-pricked starry wish-filled dark night

at a time.

         In the early spring the year after my grandmother died, and almost four years after my grandfather’s death, I visited their empty house and spent an afternoon on the front porch listening to the rain. It had been twenty-five years since our annual summer visits ended when high school did.

         In my youngest years, there was nothing but a circular driveway between the house and the road, so I caught myself surprised at the tall trees and abundant bushes shielding the house from the road now. My grandmother had planted them all, one by one, over so many years I stopped noticing the landscape didn’t match my early memory anymore. When the rain stopped, I walked through the thicket she’d grown, noticing what looked healthy and what needed pruning. I thought of the countless trips she’d made, hauling water in five-gallon buckets to each and every one of these living things. 

         In the side yard, I followed a loose line of flowering shrubs, a windbreak of sorts before the western field. Pale pink, floppy-headed flowers, too weighty for their stems, bent the limber branches to kiss the ground. I had to look them up later to discover their name: peonies. When I lifted one floppy head to breathe its sweet fragrance, tears came unexpectedly to my eyes, and I was overcome with the connection to my grandmother, holding in my hands the bloom she nurtured. 

I am from courage and longing 

and the beauty of the indirect route

home.

Swimming during General Conference

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Warm Up

Today you start with breaststroke, the one where your hands scoop in close to your heart and then out towards the world again, like a prayer.  But that’s not why you start here.  Your head needs to be above water for a while.  You need more air while you get your bearings, letting the water hold you up again.  It feels good to be surrounded and buoyed and to focus on your breath.

You remember the goodtheology – God gathering together the waters of creation, Jesus baptized in the Jordan, Jesus stilling the stormy waters lapping at the scared disciples, the baby-head damp of your own baptism, flowing into your ordination and marriage vows.

Backstroke gives you even more air.  You usually wait to swim backstroke until you’re tired but today you’re already tired.  Face up toward the ceiling, as much air as you can get.

Drills

Remember your stroke mechanics.  Focus on arm placement and high elbows.  Practice breathing to both sides.  Use this time to get ready for the long set ahead.

Freestyle

Or maybe today you will call it “crawl” like the Australians.  Today, time is the least of your worries, though you’ve been watching that count down clock in the corner of the live feed for hours. It’s OK to crawl sometimes.

Dig in.  Freestyle pull set, 1000 yards.  It’s only in the last 200 yards you notice how tired your neck and shoulders are, how you completely forgot to use your hips.  Small adjustments give surprising results.  Remember this when you add the kick back later.

Butterfly

You feel like a bad ass, swimming this at the end of a work out.

All consuming, it clears your mind.  You wonder about installing a pool on the floor of General Conference.

You notice the lap-at-a-time boys headed to the locker room, the ones who dart off the wall in the neighboring lane whenever you are about to turn for the next lap.  They like to race you, but only for one lap.  Not everyone is made for a long workout, or for butterfly.  

Warm Down

Today’s swim was about 4 minutes slower than normal for the distance.  You didn’t realize how heavy your load was, even dragging along through the water.

You haul yourself out and gravity resumes.  

But the lingering scent of chlorine, like the invasive, pestering, life-changing One we know as Trinity, clings to you.  You are not alone or left behind.

For Such a Time

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A sermon preached on Esther 7: 1-10; 9:20-22, on September 23, 2018, at the Wesley Foundation at UVA[1].

“For such a time as this.”  That’s the money-phrase from the book of Esther.  She finds herself in the middle of a situation she did not choose or create. She is one of the people with the least power or choice about what’s happened to her and what she sees taking shape around her.  And she isn’t someone who’s naturally inclined to pipe up and insist on changing the course of things.  It is certainly not her idea to do so, and it takes her some time to agree that she should. But she looks around at herself and her situation, and those words — Who knows?  Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this[2] — epitomize her placement, perspective, and power. 

It was hard for me not to think of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford while considering Esther’s story this week.  If you’ve been following the news you know that Ford is the woman who came forward to say that the current Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, sexually assaulted and attempted to rape her while they were both in high school.  It was hard to miss this news.  And it has been very hard news to hear and contemplate and sit with.  

Ford’s story is very different from Esther’s, but what they have in common is a willingness to step up to a hard task because they were uniquely situated to do so. They both exhibit the ability to recognize and use the (limited) power they have to make a choice and try to set things right.

This is not a sermon about the Supreme Court and it’s not about politics. It’s about plans and the lack thereof. It’s about hope and agency.  It’s about a story.

 

The king of Persia is used to getting anything or anybody he wants and one of those is a beautiful wife named Vashti.  Well, when the book of Esther begins this king is giving a 7-day-long party.  It’s a big blow out and the king is having a great time showing off his power and riches when he decides to call for Queen Vashti.  He wants her to come before him wearing all her finest clothes and jewels.  But something unexpected happens:  Queen Vashti refuses.

The king is so confused by this – nothing like it has ever happened to him before – that he actually has to summon his wisest counselors to consult with him.  The men he gathers around him decide that if the queen can flaunt the laws and customs of their society like this, then surely she’ll give other women bad ideas about how to behave.  They are going to need to nip this is the bud.  So Vashti is banished and it is decided that her title will be given to someone else more suitable.

All this happens in the book of Esther before Esther shows up.  But here she comes. 

Esther, a Jewish orphan, was raised by her cousin Mordecai. Mordecai hears about the king’s search for a new queen and he takes Esther to the palace to try out like the rest of the girls.  “One thing,” he tells her, “There’s really no need to mention you’re Jewish.  Just keep it to yourself, ok?”  You can probably see where this is going.  Of all the beautiful young women, the king chooses Esther to be his replacement queen for the ousted Vashti. 

So while Esther is getting used to her new palace digs, cousin Mordecai encounters the king’s right hand man, Haman.  Mordecai was spending a bit of time around the palace gates, just to make sure Esther would be ok and maybe to say “hi” every now and then.  Along comes Haman, who particularly likes the royal rule that orders all who are at the palace gates to bow any time anyone from the royal court came by.  But on this day he happens upon Mordecai, who is the only one at the gates who doesn’t bow. Haman is furious and orders his people to find out why this man so flagrantly disobeyed the royal rule. When word comes back that Mordecai won’t bow to him because Mordecai is Jewish, Haman determines that Jews are not to be tolerated and begins plotting to bring about their demise.  In fact, he convinces the king that they need to kill all the Jews in the land.

When this plot comes to light, Mordecai sends word to Esther and expects her to intercede with the king on behalf of all the Jewish people.  Her note back to Mordecai says, “You know that an audience with the king has to be at his initiative; he has to hold out the scepter to me before I can approach. I can’t just go in there.  I really don’t think it will work. Sorry.”  Sensible, by the rules.  She knows her place and who’s got the power.

Mordecai’s next note is a little more direct.  He writes, “Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews.  For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish….Who knows?  Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”[3]

Confronted with this hard truth and perhaps a sense of her own calling, Esther sends word back to Mordecai asking him and all the Jews he knows to fast for 3 days while she and her maids do the same, in preparation for her conversation with the king.  She’s now willing to make the request and to accept the consequences.  “I’ll go,” she says, “and if I perish, I perish.”[4]

After three days she puts on her finest clothes and goes to stand just at the edge of the king’s inner court, hoping to catch his eye and to be invited in.  The king notices her instantly and asks her in to talk.  When Esther tells him that her heart’s desire is to host both him and his right hand man Haman at a dinner, he says “yes” at once.

Like a lot of good plans, apparently this one takes time, because it actually takes a couple of dinners for Esther to pop the question.  The first night, after the conversation and the fine meal, the king bursts out his appreciation and says to his queen, “Whatever you want is yours, even up to half of my entire kingdom.  What is it that you want?”

Esther bides her time, and says, “Sweetheart, what I’d like is to have you and Haman back for another dinner tomorrow night.  Would that be all right?” 

So the next night the king and Haman show up at Esther’s quarters again.

Allow me to pause here and fill you in on how smug Haman is after the first dinner.  He’s on his way home that night and his jubilant mood turns sour when he sees Mordecai loitering at the palace gates.  So he stomps home and – after telling everyone in the family and the neighborhood how he was hanging out all evening with just the king and queen – issues the order to build a huge gallows in his front yard.  Thiswill be for that pesky Mordecai!

But that very same night the king peruses the royal records and comes across the information that someone named Mordecai had thwarted his assassination. He asks around and finds that this great deed was not properly recognized.  Haman is back at the palace, high on anger and gallows-building, when the king brings him in to his chambers.  “What would be a great way to honor someone who’s done wonderful things for the king?” the king asks Haman, who, of course, assumes the king is talking about him.

Haman doesn’t hold back. “Well, I really think no expense should be spared.  Here’s what should happen:  Get some of your own royal robes, ones that you’ve worn yourself, along with a horse which you yourself have ridden.  Then get one of your crowns.  Next instruct one of your noblest officials to drape these garments on the one to be honored, along with the crown, and conduct the man on horseback through the center of the city for everyone to see.”  “Great idea!” says the king.  Then he says, “Haman, go and do just what you’ve said.  You’ll find Mordecai outside at the gates:  Do all this for him.”

As you can imagine, this is not well received.

Back to banquet #2.  The king and Haman enjoy the second fabulous feast. The king is overcome with joy and gratitude again, and again he offers Esther anything she wants, up to half of his entire kingdom.

“If I’ve won your favor, I ask for my life and the lives of my people,” she says simply.

The king asks who is proving to be such a menace and she answers that it is he himself and Haman.

Now the king is in a real bind when he realizes that she is a Jew and that he himself has issued an order to kill her and everyone like her.  He leaves the room to walk around the garden for a few minutes and think.

While he’s out, Haman sees that things really aren’t going his way, so he throws himself at Esther’s feet, begging for his own life from one of the very Jews he pledged to destroy. The king re-enters and uses Haman’s prone posture as an excuse… or he assumes the worst… or he surmises the situation correctly…  He accuses him of trying to make time (or worse) with his wife while his back is turned and immediately sentences him to death on the gallows he built for Mordecai.

Then the king sends word to all his armies and officials to let them know the hunt is off and the Jews are spared.   

 

Though she ended up with the title of “queen,” Esther had hardly any power in that role.  If the king were telling this story, he might have referred to her as “play thing #2,” after referring to Vashti as “that horrible disrespectful bitch.”  Or, maybe he would have called her his “beloved wife.” Might have depended upon his mood, how drunk he was, and whether other kings were listening when he said it.  He probably wouldn’t have called this biblical book, “Esther,” centering a foreign, powerless, woman.  He probably would have called it something like “The King Decides to Save the Jews.” 

I said this sermon is about hope and agency.  Which means it’s also a sermon about stories.  In yesterday’s New York Times, speaking about what’s unfolding in Washington and what it means for all of us, Jennifer Weiner wrote this:  “Stories matter tremendously. They’re how we learn about who is real and who’s less consequential; whose pain is important and whose, not so much; who is the hero and who is merely the hero’s reward.”[5]

In this biblical text where God is never mentioned by name, God gives us the gift of seeing how the overlooked, undervalued, marginalized, and powerless are none of those things in God’s eyes.

There are many ways to tell the story of “what happened.”  In retelling this one, I could have focused on the sinful pride of Haman (which is abundant), making this story a cautionary tale for those of us who lust for that kind of power-proximity and think of some folks as “the little people.”  There’s room for that story, too.  But right now, the women are screaming to be seen and heard.  Right now, I’m most interested in the story of Vashti, who kicks off the book of Esther by saying a simple “no.”  I want to spend more time considering the stories of Esther, Anita Hill, Christine Blasey-Ford….  I want to think about why it’s so hard to tell these stories within the usual storytelling frames (and Bible studies and sermons) we use.

The Bible is the startling, challenging, beautifully surprising, mysterious, maddening, all-wrong-by-human-standards story of God’s presence in the midst of every single one of our stories.  It’s a story about looking – sometimes with great tenacity and a “hermeneutics of suspicion” – underneath and behind what’s said, to be certain you can see all of what’s happening….and to be closer to hearing God’s words, as pronounced by fallible, socially situated, sinful folks like the writers of every book in the Bible and every preacher – including this one – whom you’ve ever heard trying to retell those stories.   

God gives us stories like this one for such a time as this one we find ourselves in now.  Who are we listening to?  What are we hearing?  What are we going to do about it?

Thanks be to God!

 

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Photo credit: The Banquet of Esther and Ahasuerus, Jan Victors [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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[1]Portions of this sermon retelling the story from the book of Esther were preached originally in 2006 and 2009.

[2]Esther 4:14, NRSV

[3]Esther 4: 13-14, NRSV

[4]Esther 4: 16

[5]Quoted from “The Patriarchy Will Always Have Its Revenge” by Jennifer Weiner, published on September 22, 2018 in The New York Times.

 

The Pillow

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A sermon preached on Mark 4: 35-41, at Wesley Memorial UMC on June 24, 2018.

One morning last week while we were having breakfast with the news on, I actually said to Woody, “Isn’t that enough for me to be appalled by right now?”  I was tired, I was still working on that all-important cup #2 of coffee, and the news was relentless.  Again.

It feels like I can’t come up for enough air to withstand it sometimes.  Just when I think “this is the worst it can get,” I’m proven wrong.  Again.  Late last fall, I held my breath each morning to see what famous man had been accused of sexual assault.  When Woody or a student or a colleague would say, “Did you see what happened?” I would brace to hear who it was.  After one of our hardest years, in Charlottesville right now we are putting people on trial who were defending themselves and our city during last summer’s white supremacist rally.  The residents of Flint, Michigan, stilldon’t have clean water.  Ordinary citizens are living in tree houses to protest energy companies seizing their lands for pipelines – pipelines which are supposed to be the safest most spill-proof ever, and which, inevitably do spill.  Our president cruelly decided to take children away from their parents at our southern border and house them in cages, claiming he was powerless to change this policy.  Then, whimsically changed it again when almost the entire country spoke out.  Now those families get to stay together – but their detention will be indefinite, which itself is illegal.

It’s relentless.  I know there has always been bad news.  I know that in some American communities and in some other parts of the world, sadly, they are used to incessant bad news as the norm.  I can remember riding in the car with my parents when I was about 8, when the news on the radio said a word I didn’t yet know: “rape.”  I’m sure that day, when they had to define that word for me, my parents thought the news was too much and too bad.  Still, it does feel like we are in an especially torrential time. 

Like the disciples in the boat crossing the Sea of Galilee, the weather has gone menacing and the waves are lapping into the boat, threatening to sink it.  It’s not that they don’t know how to handle a boat on choppy water.  Jesus chose several fishermen to be his disciples, so these aren’t nervous sailors.  Mark tells us “the boat was already being swamped”[i]when the disciples approached Jesus about the situation.  Where’s Jesus?

He’s right there in the same boat with them – but he is napping through all of this commotion.  On a pillow.  That’s the part that really gets me and, I imagine, the disciples.  This story is told in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke)[ii]but Mark is the only one who includes the pillow.  That pillow delights and confounds me.  As a reader at a safe distance from those events, I love it.  It’s a delicious detail and it means Jesus was really settled in for a good solid nap.  But when I consider the perspective of the disciples, I think it must irk them just a wee bit to see that not only is Jesus managing to sleep his way through the storm, but that he is resting his head on a pillow.

The pillow is a symbol of incomprehensible rest and relaxation.  How could anyone sleep through the threatening storm?  How could anyone allow themselves to relax and become peaceful enough to sleep with all of this raging weather?

When the disciples approach Jesus, they don’t ask for his secret meditation app so that they, too, might relax.  They don’t even ask him to quell the storm.  They blurt out, accusingly, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”[iii] 

That pillow really got to them.

What does Jesus do?  He wakes up, rebukes the wind, and calms the sea.  Then, he turns to the disciples and says, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”[iv]  One biblical commentator describes the scene like this: “Faith means trust. Jesus seems to imply, ‘Don’t you have any trust that you’re going to be cared for? I’m telling you that God has come near, that the kingdom of God is breaking in, and you’re worried about the wind?’”[v]  In their fear and panic, the disciples don’t even ask for what they need.  They don’t ask for help.  Instead, they accuse Jesus of not caring enough.  You know, Jesus, who is right there in the same boat and the same storm with them.

They are crossing from the Jewish to the Gentile side of the lake.  Right before this in Mark’s gospel, Jesus tells parable after parable, all illustrations and promises about God’s in-breaking reign or kingdom.  I think the commentator is on to something with her rephrasing “’I’m telling you that God has come near, that the kingdom of God is breaking in, and you’re worried about the wind?’”  Maybe there is something about being exposed on the water in a ferocious storm, while also heading away from known territory and into unknown territory that overtakes the disciples’ common sense and faith.  Maybe some unfaithful questions lodged in their hearts and minds:  Where are we?  What’s going to happen next?  Why are we going to those places?  Who are those people?

I’m conflicted about fear and its role in faith. It’s obviously an impediment since the first thing almost any angel or messenger of God says anywhere in the Bible is “Fear not.”  Whatever other message they have to impart, most begin by reminding folks not to be afraid by what comes next.  But a lot of fear is involuntary.  If I hear a noise in the dark when I think I’m alone, something primal and automatic takes over in me.  I don’t engage in a rational self-debate about whether that may have been a tree limb or an intruder, I’m already gripped by fear and on alert.  And, whichever way that scenario turns out, fear is at least useful in alerting me to something that could be dangerous.  How is it unfaithful or “un-trustful” to experience fear, especially when it’s not a conscious choice?  And yet, some of my most faithful moments involve me feeling fear and choosing to act against the advice of that fear.  Finally saying “yes” to God’s relentless call to ordained ministry falls into this category of fear. 

What if Jesus is telling the disciples that fear is playing an outsized role in their actions on the boat?  What if he isn’t chastising them so much as illustrating in the midst of a real-life example how giving in to fear obscures what’s really happening?

Because it seems to me that the disciples miss the rather important fact that Jesus is in the same boat with them.  Literally. They are so fearful – and perhaps so rankled by that pillow and the “nerve” of Jesus to be resting when they are fretting – that they miss the point that Jesus is resting.  What if, instead of accusing Jesus of apathy, they had pushed their fear aside enough to wonder at Jesus’s nap?  Maybe they would have thought,Well, if he can sleep now, maybe I’ve mis-assessed the situation.  Maybe we will make it across the lake after all.

Fear about what comes next is causing us to mis-assess, too.  There are some in our country who are so fearful about what will happen “if we let them in” that they want to close all borders to all people and operate on lock-down. There are others who are so fearful about our government’s actions on the border that we think we are abandoned – we forget Jesus is in this boat with us, too.

Last week at Annual Conference, right before our closing worship, I was hurrying from the upstairs bathrooms back down to the convention hall.  When I got to the escalators, there was a little girl standing at the top, holding onto the glass side, yelling down to her sisters who were already near the bottom of the escalator.  They had gone on without her and she was scared to step onto the moving steps.  As I approached, I noticed a white man standing a couple feet back from her, not offering help and not pushing past her to get on the escalator.  I don’t know how long he’d been there, but he seemed to be wrestling with how to help. The little girl was black.  When I got to the escalator, I bent down and said, “Do you need someone to hold your hand?”  She shot her hand straight up for me to hold, still looking forward, to her sisters now impatiently waiting for her at the bottom of the escalator.  No look, no questions asked.  I talked her through the scary moment of stepping out onto the forming step:  “OK, we are going to step onto that part right there.  One, two, three, ok now…”  I kept holding her hand and telling her she was doing a great job.  By the time we were halfway down, she looked at me and said, “I used to be scared to do this but now I’m not.”  When we got near the bottom, we did the one-two-three again to step off and then I hi-fived her and told her that she was very brave and that it’s hard to have courage when we are scared but that she did it.

Her fear was transformed into confidence. She had it all in her the whole time; she just needed someone to stand with her while she learned to do it.  She needed a hand to hold so she could feel her own bravery and faith.  My hope is that, besides being her own moment of personal growth, it will be one of many such moments when she can rely on grown ups and on white people to befriend her and stand with her.

I was rushing back for worship that day and I don’t know why I took notice of that little girl in need of a helping hand.  I do know that I’ve been trying to pay attention. Ever since the Black Lives Matter movement began, I’ve been challenging myself to take a second look.  At my own motivations or preconceptions, and at the way someone “looks” to me on the street, at what I assume about him or her based on only a first glance.  Like most white people in our culture, I have absorbed racist notions I didn’t recognize as such.  It’s one thing to be scared when confronted by someone with a gun; it’s another thing entirely to walk around assuming that all black men are dangerous.

Centuries of racist fear-mongering have encouraged us to see threats instead of people.  I recognize this sin in myself and I see it in the bad news from the border. Surely we need immigration reform, but when we see threats in the innocent faces of children and we think indefinite detention in cages is the best way to proceed, our fear has obscured our vision and compromised our faith.  When a Salvadoran family scares us more than a government without compassion or justice, we are afraid of the wrong thing.

There is a ferocious storm out there and it’s scary as hell and I’m not in a position to tell you to have no fear.  I’m scared, too, no matter what the angels say.  But we have to act in spite of it.  In the face of it.  Against it.

These are dangerous waters but we are not alone, and we follow the One who told us that when we welcome the stranger, we welcome Christ.[vi]  Those faces we see crying for their parents are Christ’s.  When the morning news is relentless mayhem and your fear tells you God is absent or not acting quickly enough, remember that the pillow Jesus is sleeping on now is on a floor in a tent in Texas, covered by a space blanket. And he is waiting for us to offer to hold his hand.

Thanks be to God!

 

[i]Mark 4:37, The Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV)

[ii]Matthew 8:23-27 and Luke 8:22-25

[iii]Mark 4:38b

[iv]Mark 4:39-40

[v]Hearing Mark: A Listener’s Guide,Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, © 2002 Trinity Press International, p. 37.

[vi]Matthew 25:31-46

 

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photo credit: “Asleep in the storm, Ely Cathedral,” © 2013 by Steve Day, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

You can call me Al (an Easter story)

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On Easter morning I got up early enough to read and drink coffee before driving half an hour to a sunrise service where I was assisting the pastor. I read the Easter morning empty tomb stories and lingered over the surprise and astonishment of the disciples who didn’t know what else to do besides repeat this strange story. Evidently, they kept telling it and then, eventually, they wrote it down in order to continue telling it. And here I was, hearing it told again.

I know this is obvious, but there is no way those first disciples could have known I’d be reading the stories they helped to tell. It seems obvious to me, now, how powerful the telling is. How profound an act to witness to the truth. But on Easter morning drinking my coffee and reading scripture, I kept thinking about how small and ordinary it must have seemed at the time, shocked and hopeful friends telling one another stories.

The disciples didn’t need to have a 2000-year plan, resulting in my reading the gospels on Easter morning. They only needed to do what was given them to do: tell the story.

That’s where I can get hung up. Sometimes it is resoundingly clear what direction to take. There is no question about what is mine to do. And then there are the other times. Like now, when I brace myself for the daily news, when what we have counted on seems flimsy and vulnerable, when I feel overwhelmed by the vast need for resistance and change and the transforming power of love. In the face of demise and destruction and deceit, I feel paralyzed, seeing way too many things in need of attention and not at all certain what is mine to do.

The unfaithful truth is that I am not sure my small actions will amount to anything. Is anything enough right now?is the question I bang my head against.

And then, I worry about whether the church is doing what is ours to do.

At the country church on Easter morning, the kids proclaimed the Good News and then attached lettered sheets of paper to the cross, vertically and horizontally, to spell out “HE IS ALIVE.” Towards the end of worship, I saw that several of the letters had fallen off the cross and what was left read, “HE IS AL.” At which point, Paul Simon started singing in my head and I saw scenes from the video with Chevy Chase. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing during worship, but I did nab this picture afterwards since I wasn’t sure anyone would believe me or that the description would do it justice.

“And, Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al…”

The second worship service I participated in that morning, at another church, involved the choir processing in with the cross held high, singing “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.” As my gaze landed on one of the tenors, belting it out with his whole body, my throat caught and tears came to my eyes. Moments after this song ended, I was the pastor leading the opening prayer, a little worried my composure wasn’t rock solid. As I projected to the packed church, literally saying the words “This is the Good News,” the man in the third row was yawning without bothering to cover his mouth, and so broadly that it involved his entire face. Within a span of 2 minutes, the full-throated, earth-shattering joy of Easter and we humans yawning in the face of it.

Pastors experience a certain pressure on Easter morning. Many churches are packed more fully than usual Sundays. There are visitors and maybe non-believers in the pews. Now’s our chance to wow them!I find myself wanting things to be polished, so it looks like we know what we are doing. And I struggle with the tension between a polished presentation and the everyday incarnate reality of a simple sprawling yawn or tape that doesn’t stay stuck.

On Easter evening, I attended my third worship service of the day. I wasn’t the pastor, just one of many who watched the live broadcast of Jesus Christ Superstar. There is definitely no way the first disciples could have predicted their telling of the story would reverberate and morph into a rock musical. It’s not the whole story, but it powerfully breaks open tired language and misunderstood characters to make them fresh and current. I had the TV turned up too loud, singing along, the way we are meant to sing hymns.

The thing about stories is, if they’re good everyone wants to tell them. Those first disciples were wise and faithful enough to recognize a good story (though some of the men had to second-guess the women’s telling first). They kept telling it to whoever would listen, wherever they went.

Everything seems like a too-small act to me right now. Then again, small acts are how we grab hold of the big truths. When the women ran from the tomb with Good News, the story sounded like this: “The stone is gone. The tomb is empty.” I don’t know how to love him, either. But I keep trying. Here’s my small act for today.

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Photo © Rachel Chen, used with permission.

 

Advent, patience, and the passage of time

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My grandmother told me more than once that I needed to have more patience. I hated it when she said this. It seemed like a cruel test adults imposed on children who really, really wanted something and couldn’t wait any longer. I remember clearly the first time she said it to me, standing in her kitchen with the windows facing west to the road winding up the hill and out of sight beyond the trees. We were cooking together but my mind was on whatever was next. I don’t remember anymore if it was a trip to visit someone or if I was simply ready for the cooking to be done so we could eat the results. It seems like I was holding a wooden spoon at the time.

She wasn’t exasperated with me. It was a simple statement, something she noticed and was offering so I could attend to it, like pointing out an untied shoelace. She may have even said it this way, “You need to learn patience,” recognizing in the suggestion itself that it is a practice that will take time.

When my grandmother first brought it up, I understood she meant I needed to wait more politely. My focus was on the reward that was coming and patience seemed to be the decorum required en route. It took substantial amounts of energy but it still seemed largely passive. Bide your time; wait it out.

That’s what I thought then and since my southern grandmother also said things like, “Pretty is as pretty does,” she probably did mean it that way, at least on some level. But she knew more than this about waiting. She was valedictorian of her high school class at 16 and desperately wanted to go to college but her father didn’t think it was appropriate for girls. So she kept working on the farm with her family and waited for her life to go in another direction. She married my grandfather at 17 and started having babies at 19. That sounds young and so fast to me now but I wonder how patient she was, waiting for the unknown future as she longed for what she couldn’t have.

My suburban upper-middle-class upbringing had its own versions of expectant time. Study abroad was a formative one, the semester I struck out on my own for France, pre-internet. I was only able to call my parents three or four times the whole semester. My main mode of communication with friends and family back home was through letters squeezed onto every inch of the blue, striped aerogram paper that folded up into its own envelope. I was homesick and spent copious amounts of time in coffee shops writing home while gazing out the window and sipping a café crème. I’m sure if we’d had email or cell phones or social media I would have checked in incessantly and in real time, as today’s study abroad students do.

Like that day cooking in the kitchen with my grandmother, during the space of that semester I was often focused on what would happen next, when I got home. What would fourth year be like? Would the guy I liked when I left still be around when I returned? I wish I could say I was fully present in France and waited until I got home to think about home, but it’s not true. I was impatient to see my friends and family again.

Yet that semester was not all about thinking ahead to what came next. Amidst homesickness and my impatient tendencies, I also experienced a companionable presence. The time itself was like a character in what was happening to me as I became a world traveler, explored other cultures, learned to be on my own. Passing through those months, I was aware I was between things, in a space both large (scary) and generous (intriguing). I let things unfurl. I was not in a position to manage them.

There are some things I have to learn over and over.

I find myself, this tension-bursting year, longing for a less tension-filled Advent. Can’t this be the season of quiet manger scenes and soft snowfalls and small epiphanies about the perfect gift for so-and-so? Must there be bridesmaids with no oil and locust-eating weirdos in the dessert? Must it take so long between the already and the not yet of God reconciling the whole world to Godself? This year, especially, I don’t want to wait out Advent to get to Christmas.

“You need to learn patience.”

I don’t get a say in the waiting but I do get to determine how passively or actively I wait.

It occurs to me that time can do a certain amount of healing all on its own. Just making it through counts for something. But our active, anticipatory waiting is less like biding that time and more like physical therapy. It hurts, it sucks sometimes, and there is every temptation in the world to not engage – but doing physical therapy while you are healing leads to more healing. And the use of that arm again. What’s happening in this kind of physical-therapy-Advent-waiting space? I look around at the world and I want to warn God off. But it’s this world that God loves so much She decided to live in it, in our skin for a while. Are we paying attention?

Almost 40 years have passed since I held that wooden spoon and received my grandmother’s wisdom. I’m still learning to be patient. If I were cooking with my Goddaughter in the kitchen I’d ask her what she’s been noticing. I’d have her describe it to me. I’d talk to her about how it feels to want something that isn’t here yet. I’d ask her where God is in the waiting—what does God do when waiting? I’d brainstorm with her about what we do in the meantime. Then we might take our brownies and sit by the window, watch snow fall, and, after a while, bundle up and walk out into it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rewriting History

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Taking the next step…

A sermon preached on Exodus 1:8-2:10, at Wesley Memorial UMC on August 27, 2017.       

        I wonder if those midwives saw it coming.

        When the Pharaoh shows up to speak to them directly, are they ready? Have they noticed the nervous decrees coming from the king’s palace, first forcing the Hebrew people into work gangs with harsh overseers and finally enslaving them (vv. 11-13)? What complaints and laments have Shiphrah and Puah heard as they spend hours at the bedsides of laboring women – women with husbands still out in fields and making bricks and forced into “all kinds of other cruel work” (v. 14)? Do they know their history – how it hasn’t always been this way between the Hebrews and Egyptians? Do they see how close the injustice and oppression are getting to their own door and the work of their own hands before they hear the Pharaoh’s knock?

            Let’s say they do.

            Let’s say they know it will come to this, eventually, this murderous decree in which they will each be complicit: “When you are helping the Hebrew women give birth and you see the baby being born, if it’s a boy, kill him. But if it’s a girl, you can let her live” (vv. 15-16). Let’s say they see it from a mile away and they know exactly how bad it will be and what they will be asked to do. How long do they watch it get closer? How many hushed conversations do they share with one another before the knock sounds? Do they rehearse different scenarios or do they know all along that they will lie straight to his face and save every last baby?

            Do they know the next step after that?

            I imagine they know they’ll get away with it for a little while, birthing being the domain of women. It will be easy to birth the babies without the king or his men seeing what happens. But after that, when Pharaoh’s snoops notice girl and boy babies, what then? Are Shiphrah and Puah ready with the next step or do they find it along the way?

            This time he calls them in to his house and challenges them directly: “Why are you doing this? Why are you letting the baby boys live?” Well, sir, Hebrew women are much stronger and they give birth before we even arrive on the scene (vv. 18-19). And, birthing being the domain of women, he doesn’t have any information to the contrary so he buys it.

            The next time, he takes another course. He gives up on the midwives and goes straight to his own men, commanding them to throw live baby boys into the Nile to drown (v. 22).

            But justice is a team sport.

            Though none of them is named at this point in the story, we move now to the family of Moses. His mother gives birth to him and, like God surveying the light and the waters and the animals at creation, she sees that her baby is good and she keeps him hidden and safe with her for three months (cf. Genesis creation and Exodus 2:2, as noted by Karla Suomaia at Working Preacher).  When she thinks it’s too dangerous to keep him hidden any longer, she puts him in a waterproofed-with-tar basket and floats it in amongst the reeds at the river’s shallow edge (2: 2-3).

            And while the baby is floating there the Pharaoh’s own daughter happens to be bathing nearby and she finds the basket. And she feels sorry for the baby. The prescribed response for someone in her social and family position is to have the baby killed or at least to show the basket of insubordination to her father. But she steps out of her prescribed role and feels sorry for the baby, and her response is compassion (vv. 5-6).

            At which point, the baby’s sister, who’s been nearby, watching protectively ever since her mother gently placed the basket in the river, steps up to the Pharaoh’s daughter. Helpful royal subject that she is, she offers, “Would you like me to find one of the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” (v. 7).

            This is a handy solution for everyone involved: The baby goes back home, of course. But maybe the Pharaoh’s daughter judiciously buys some time. Would her father kill the baby himself if she brings him home that day? Does she know that in a few months, when the baby is a toddler, he will be out of danger?

            The last leg of the insurrectionist journey – at least in this part of the baby’s story – is the day his own mother hands him over to the daughter of the Pharaoh, right into the family of the man who wanted him killed before his first breath. What does she do when she gets back home? Does she hatch plans to free him from the palace or does she hang around the gates hoping for a glimpse of him as he grows up? Does she know what she will do if she ever sees her boy again?

            I’m asking a lot of questions because this story demands it. (Be suspicious of anyone who wants to tell you once-and-for-all, case-closed, exactly what a biblical text means.) This story is the against-all-odds origin story of the man we know by the last verse of the passage is Moses – the man God will continue to call out of the water and into new lands and up mountains and across deserts, leading a nation behind him. It’s a foundational story, on which a huge swath of the Jewish and then Christian story builds.

            And right there, at the very beginning, are Shiphrah and Puah. Without them, the rest of it can’t happen. Notice how crucial their bravery is. Notice how they are able to influence the beginning of a nation from their precise social situation, in the course of their every day work.

           Do Shiphrah and Puah see it coming? Does the baby’s mother know what she will do after those first three months? Does his sister know what she will do next, from her perch by the riverside, waiting to see who will happen upon her baby brother? Does the baby’s mother break her own heart every day she nurses her own son while wondering what will happen when he is weaned?

            I don’t know about y’all, but I have a fondness for plans. I like knowing the next step. I find comfort in the thought that my efforts are “going somewhere.” Even if you have a more relaxed relationship to planning, you know our culture loves the idea of “cost-benefit analysis” and “demonstrated results.” As a people, we tend to be reluctant to risk when we can’t see the payoff. Even when it comes to something we are passionate about, we might want to study it a while longer and be sure that if we set off in a certain direction, we will get where we think we are headed.

            This is what intrigues me about Shiphrah and Puah. I don’t think they have this luxury or this hang-up. They seem guided by their knowledge of and relationship with God, so that it is crystal clear to them that they will never be killing babies for Pharaoh. I doubt the rest of the story is clear. I doubt they have any idea of their next step until they take it.

            I want to be more like Shiphrah and Puah. I’m afraid that if I were in their situation I might say very “reasonable” sounding things like, So I don’t kill the babies and then what? Someone else kills them anyway – and then comes to kill me? How does that help our cause?

            Or, closer to home: So we take down some statues, and then what? What part of history do we “rewrite” next?

            But they don’t have to know the next step – only the one right in front of them at that moment. And they take it. They do everything in their power, at each point in time where any bit of power is in their hands, to do the next right thing. And when the story moves away from them – when the power to act moves into the womb and the hands of the baby’s mother – she does the next right thing. And then her daughter and the Pharaoh’s daughter each do their things. The ball gets passed – inelegantly, surprisingly, in a completely unplanned fashion – from one woman to the next, resisting and refusing to cooperate with evil, one decision at a time.

            Justice is a team sport and it’s also a marathon, not a sprint. Shiphrah and Puah don’t complete the mission – just their mission. It’s the combined efforts of all of these women, one by one, over time that moves the needle of justice and begins the building of a nation.

            None of us needs to know where this will end in order to risk for Love. None of us needs to be an expert in American or Confederate history in order to listen to the pain spoken by our black and brown and Jewish and LGBTQ brothers and sisters. I don’t have to know, specifically, what I’ll do next week in order to take a step for justice right now. And if obscure Hebrew midwives like Shiphrah and Puah have enough power to start something important enough to become a nation, then so do we.

            Whether you saw it coming or not, whether you joined the counter-protests when the white supremacists marched here two weeks ago or not, there is a faithful next step. You do not have to know what city council should do or how to fix Virginia’s open carry laws. You do not have to re-learn and broaden your knowledge of history before you make a move, though reading might be one next step. On August 12th, Jan was stationed at the jail and our United Methodist colleagues Robert and Phil were providing safe space and medical care at First church; other ecumenical colleagues like Seth and Brittany were on the front lines, staring evil in the face. We are not all called to the same next step. Justice is a team sport and it’s a marathon. There will be more headed our way. If the invitation to cooperate with evil can find its way to Shiphrah and Puah, it will pound on our doors, too. Again.

            I don’t just mean the doors of our town. The church has work to do. The United Methodist church has been complicit in the evils of racism, once splitting into northern and southern churches over it and, even earlier, birthing the AME Church by our refusal to recognize Richard Allen’s call to preach. We have been content to offer charity when we’ve been called to work for justice. We are all called to be midwives for God, helping to bring about the kingdom of God and to live here in this community as if that reality is already here in its fullness. We are all already set free to do this justice work. In Christ, we have been made one family: neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female (Galatians 3: 28)… Which does not mean Yeah, we’ve treated one another poorly in the past but Jesus fixed all that. Nor does it mean that the church has already arrived. Evil pounds on these doors, too. And sometimes, as in the culture at large, we can’t hear it or we call it by other names like “law” or “custom” or “how it’s always been” or “what the bible says.”

            We are set free to live radically loving, rule-breaking, decree-defying, justice-flowing lives – and we are called to start from exactly where we are without much time to plan and with whatever tools we have on hand. Right where we are in the birthing room, the board room, the lecture hall, the barista counter, the cookout, the family dinner, the school PTA meeting…

            Without Shiphrah and Puah and the women who took the ball after them, we might have an entirely different story. It’s the same here in Charlottesville and in our country right now.

            We’ll be writing history, one way or another. One step at a time.

            All you have to know right now is which direction Love is.

            Thanks be to God!

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Photo © Woody Sherman, used with permission.

No need to slap anyone in the face, I promise

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I wrote a review of my friend Jason Micheli’s fantastic book and it’s up today at The Presbyterian Outlook. Especially if you’re the type of person who thinks you don’t like cancer books and you just might smack someone in the face if you have to read a “Christian cancer book,” I recommend you give it a try. No cliché’s, just honest theology in real circumstances. Thanks for clicking over to read the review – I hope it will convince you to read this beautiful, hard, life-filled book.

Unnecessary beauty

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High Bridge Trail, depot in the distance.

One blistering, humid, high 90s day in the middle of the summer, I hiked a couple of miles on the High Bridge Trail with my family. The trail is a converted railroad bed and the bridge is a very high passage trains once made over the trickle of the Appomattox River far below. Until you get out into the middle of the bridge where you can peer down and see that trickle, you walk level with treetops. At intervals across the bridge, there are train-depot-style platforms that jut out slightly from the rest of the bridge, with off-center-peaked roofs sloped over benches facing out over the drop. As we hid from the baking sun, eating our picnic lunch on one of the benches, I noticed how much detail went into making the depots.

Fed, watered, and cooled down a bit, I examined our depot from all angles. It could have easily, predictably been nothing more than a bench with an unadorned roof. But these were made of bolted metal and grooved tin roofing, with gentle arched supports underneath that lit up all the train depot recognition areas of my brain – areas I wasn’t aware of until those delightful sparks of recognition.

Gorgeous.

The depots could have been merely utilitarian and expedient, enough to provide rest and shade. Instead, someone decided to delight. Someone opted for unnecessary beauty in a place where relatively few will see it and where you have to work to get to it – a place where rest and shade are the only necessities or expectations.

When the latest bad news spreads, I hear people say, “Fight back with beauty.” I know what they mean. I appreciate the battle cry but I am weary.

I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

When my grandfather was old and blind and my grandmother was still cooking in her own kitchen, I was trying to help set the table for lunch. With my grandmother, even a simple un-cooked lunch of sandwiches involved ten full minutes of table preparation. I was trying to speed things up and wash fewer dishes later, so I grabbed the empty glass from beside my grandfather’s chair in the living room where he sat listening to the television. When she saw me putting that glass at my grandfather’s place, tears welled in my grandmother’s eyes as she replaced it. “I always give him a fresh glass with his meal.”

Maybe a clean fresh glass doesn’t normally count as beauty but it did then. It was as unnecessary as the delightful depots on the trail – his previous glass wasn’t dirty and he would never see the difference between the two glasses. But she knew – she could see – and the fresh glass was one in a long line of her simple, daily, loving acts of unnecessary beauty.

I keep saying “unnecessary.” When you swim two miles and get out of the pool growling for food, it doesn’t matter whether the table is set properly or the food is a balanced meal. You need calories, plain and simple. Calories are necessary; gourmet is not. I can think of other similar but less obvious routines in my life when I opt for the utilitarian and expedient.

But is beauty an option? Is delight really “unnecessary”?

After the presidential election last fall I re-watched the entire West Wing series. I also decided it was time to purchase my own clergy collar shirt. Beauty, fantasy. Beauty, calling.

There is so much to do and sometimes I choose the crappiest way to do it. Once, when friends asked to use our ministry’s fellowship hall for a birthday celebration, I hastily dumped a bag of ice into a cooler and threw the cooler up on a table next to the drinks. The elderly mother of the birthday guest looked at my attempt and asked if there was a nice bowl we could put the ice in instead. In the kitchen, I grumbled to a friend about how unnecessary that was and wasn’t the mother being a little too much – my friend looked at me as if I were an idiot and told me I was being an idiot. Of course the ice should go in a bowl.

Beauty is relative. It’s still beauty.

I haven’t written much since the election. I want to hide constantly. I mostly don’t.

Here’s what I know: The day we hiked High Bridge Trail was brutal, even for a Virginia summer day. The food and water would have been enough to make the hike and make it back to the car. But the delight of the depot – detailed, intentional, unnecessary beauty – is what has stuck with me. Maybe it had more to do with making it than I thought.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Photos © Woody Sherman, used with permission.

Swimming at the JCC

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As I’ve mentioned, I’m determined to keep up my physical-mental-spiritual-emotional practice of swimming my butt off this winter. As I’ve also mentioned, I’ve had to make special arrangements to swim while out of town for work, something I often do with the help of this handy guide for finding a pool wherever you might find yourself.

In both January and February I spent most of a week in Richmond, and I’ve swum at the Weinstein Jewish Community Center each time. I didn’t grow up in towns with JCCs and had never been to one before my first January swim there. I asked my friend Jake if there were any cultural things I should know about being a good guest in the space and he patiently explained it would be pretty much like using the YMCA – not everyone at a JCC is necessarily Jewish and I wouldn’t stand out immediately as the obvious Christian in the mix.

From the membership coordinator I spoke with on the phone to set up my guest pass, to the front desk guy ready with a “Good morning” and a dry wit, to the concierge-style lifeguard, this is a place that does hospitality well. And I’m not kidding about Pete the lifeguard. He greets each swimmer by name when they enter the pool deck (he knew mine by the second day and remembered me when I showed up again in February) and gets off his chair to assist swimmers adding into lanes when they are all full. Seriously, he motioned and directed me to my lane, as he walked over to the swimmer already in the lane, saying, “I’ll let him know you’re joining him,” and then he tapped the other swimmer as he approached the wall to let him know he’d have company. It was like being shown to my table at a fine restaurant. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, necessary, since swimmers mostly work these things out on their own. But it was oddly nice – especially standing there, vulnerable, in only a swimsuit and my weak-prescription goggles – to be treated like a valued member of the pool community and offered a particular place within it.

“Love your neighbor” has resonated more than any other goal or descriptor of our life and ministry at Wesley this year. Not because we are doing it well all the time, but because we don’t know a better way to respond to hate and xenophobia than with this simple, all-encompassing, daily reminder from Jesus (Matthew 22: 36-40). I’m here to tell you that being welcomed as a guest, greeted by name, and offered a place in the pool is a fantastic embodiment of loving one’s neighbor.  

In the first weeks of the New Year, before I swam at the WJCC the first time, a rash of bomb threats began at JCCs around the country. They are still happening. The first day I navigated my way to the unfamiliar pool in January, in the dark early morning on nearly empty streets, a pick up truck followed closely behind me for several blocks before I arrived. It went its own way before I got there but in this time of threat and hate, I noticed and briefly worried. By my February visit, I’d seen news reports of JCCs being evacuated during bomb threats, and I considered what to have ready in my poolside bag in case we had to evacuate in the middle of my swim. I didn’t consider not going.

This past week, the lobby was full of preparations for Purim celebrations, the Hamantaschen-laden holiday when Esther’s story is remembered and humorously re-enacted. It’s a short book and worth the read, if you don’t know it or if it’s been a while. Esther ends up in a position to make her voice heard and influence a king. She needs a little convincing that sticking her neck out is worth the risk. She’s told her silence won’t guarantee her safety and, “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this?” (Esther 4: 12-14).

My neighbor-loving neighbors at the WJCC know how to stick their necks out. Given the national climate and current threats, I wouldn’t have been surprised or angry if they had closed ranks and temporarily stopped offering guest passes to unknown non-JCC members just passing through town. But they know Whose and who they are, and what they have to offer at just such a time as this.

Frankly, even if the Swimmers Guide showed me a closer pool somewhere else, I’d choose to keep going back to the WJCC when I visit Richmond for work. Not just for laps or for the kind and gracious lifeguard, but because these are my neighbors.

 

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photo credit: “Lifeguard jumping into action in Ocean City, Maryland,” © 2007 by flickr user dbking, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Swimming as resistance

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Friday morning I finished the Advent devotional I started in December – and with Ash Wednesday just under 3 weeks away! In case it isn’t already clear from that statement, I’ll be more explicit: I don’t have it all together. Last week, because we had company coming, we cleaned. I am not exaggerating when I say I can’t remember the last time we did that. (But if I had to guess, I’d say it may have also been in December, right before we invited students over for a meal before exams started.)

These are statements of fact, not self-flagellation. I hope they’ll engender some trust so you’ll hear what I’m saying as one thing I’m doing that’s helping me. One thing in the midst of many many undone or poorly done things. One thing that requires planning, fortitude, discipline, and commitment – in the midst of a poorly tended house, spotty devotional life, and slapdash weekly meal planning “regimen.”

It’s important to me that you get this, that you understand I am not the kind of person who has issues of “Real Simple” magazine fanned out on my dust-free coffee table while the kitchen timer goes off on our baking dinner, just as my husband arrives home from work and I am finishing up my at-home Pilates workout. (And all the bills are paid and thank you notes written and volunteer work scheduled, with plenty of “me time” in the mix.)

Got it? Good.

Because I’ve been kicking ass at swimming. I haven’t set a formal goal for the miles I hope to cover this year, but I have been tracking my swimming and so far in 2017 I’ve swum 40.45 miles.

Screenshot of my Go the Distance progress from the US Masters Swimming fitness log.

At the end of January I had to be in another city for most of the week at a denominational gathering whose schedule ran from 8am until 10pm with no breaks or free time, and I called around in advance to find a pool I could swim in that week. It required getting up at 4:30am, to overlap with their lap swimming times and the only free-time available to me, but I did it – every day I was there. I did not get enough sleep that week and most days I only swam a mile, in order to have enough time to get dressed and eat breakfast and be back by 8am. But it was a life-saving move on my part, to get up and move before a day of prolonged sitting, to spend those first few hours alone and focused on myself before being with and focusing on other people the rest of the day.

More than I would like, these days feel rushed and anxious and overfull and underdone. Too much, too fast, and the constant, demoralizing news from Washington, D.C. The word with the most resonance in my circles is “resist.” Resist the administration’s overreach. Resist racist, xenophobic, unjust policies. Resist and refuse to believe this is normal.

Since my time at Standing Rock, I have signed petitions and called and written letters and closed bank accounts. Since the inauguration, I have signed petitions and called and written letters and preached sermons and forced myself to read more news – and to get away from news and offline. I want just about everything to change right now and it’s tempting to spend all of my time and energy in a frenzy of against-ness, an anxiety ball of activity and worry and strategic next-stepping.

This is why a crucial part of my own resistance is swimming. I am resisting the notion that it’s all up to me so I can never stop writing/calling/posting/protesting. I am resisting the notion that a well-lived life amounts to unceasing work and external and recognizable products/results. I am resisting the idea that resistance itself is one thing.

A friend posted on Facebook yesterday that he was cooking a slow-roasted tomato soup, with the comment, “Sometimes #Resistance means cooking!” Yes!

This is not a call to retreat. It’s a reminder that resistance is a long-term activity and we are in need of more sustenance than just the fast-burning fuel of outrage and anger. We need the parts of life that remind us why we bother resisting.

I need swimming. It literally makes me stronger. It literally forces me to breathe. It focuses me and quiets my mind and spirit. It makes me feel fierce. More than once, on the way home from the pool, I have thought, “Take that, Donald Trump!” And while the defiant attitude feels good, what feels even better is giving myself a healthy, anxiety-tamping way to mark my days and my progress. Some swimmers sing songs to themselves as they swim. I usually don’t, but lately there have been a few times when I’ve pictured the iconic scene from Casablanca when the French resistance drowns out the Nazis by singing “La Marseillaise” at Rick’s, “Allons! Enfants de la Patrie!” echoing in my head at the flip turn, pushing me to keep going.

The Advent devotional I finally finished includes this beautiful sentence: “A baby had been born, they were told, who would show people a way out of their small pinched lives, a way to abandon themselves to the ever-present, unstoppable current of Love that carries all things to radiant wholeness” (All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings, Gayle Boss). If resistance is only about winning on Twitter or SNL or even in the actual law, it’s possible we are still living “small pinched lives.” Cooking, listening to and making music, observing Sabbath, reading novels, watching movies, making pottery and art, running, hiking, and swimming…these are resistance, too. These are life-giving fuel for the long road ahead, and they put us in touch with that “ever-present, unstoppable current of Love.”

The bathrooms at my house need cleaning again. There is a fresh pile of crumbs around my stepson’s place at the dining room table. We are almost out of coffee. I haven’t yet read today’s Bible passage for our Bishop’s challenge. I have a sermon to work on and the day’s news to digest. Some of that will get done today.  I will definitely (defiantly and deliciously) swim.

Still no apologies

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Almost five years ago I wrote, “Maybe the most revolutionary and playful thing we can do is to play unapologetically, to give ourselves permission and to stop seeking it from anyone else.   Play is revolutionary.”  I wish I could say I’ve carried through with the revolution by now, but I’m still working on it.

Thanks to Topology Magazine for re-running this early piece.  It’s a good reminder to me in what has been feeling like a very un-playful time lately.  I hope you will find in it some support, encouragement, and permission to let loose and play with your whole being this week.