The Pillow

Posted on June 24, 2018 by admin

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

[vi]Matthew 25:31-46

How long?

Posted on June 28, 2015 by admin

A sermon preached on Mark 5:21-43 at Wesley Memorial UMC, at the end of an extraordinary week.

It’s interesting to me how time feels different, depending upon who you are and how you are. Like the way “just a minute” sounds like a scam when you’re a kid, waiting on a parent’s attention. Like the way “just a minute more” with a departed loved one sounds like a blessing beyond imagining.

In Mark’s gospel, we hear two stories of healing, both involving 12 years of time: Jairus’s twelve-year-old sick daughter and the woman who’d been bleeding for twelve years.

When you’re a parent, twelve years is not nearly long enough for your child to live. Twelve years old means she’s on that cusp of childhood and adolescence. Though she may think she’s more grown up than she is, she’s still a child. To be contemplating a funeral for a twelve-year-old is unthinkable. It’s not enough time.

When you’re a woman with a medical condition, twelve years is a very long time. Twelve years without relief from menstrual bleeding. Twelve years of sickness with no cure and no more money left to spend on one if she found one. Twelve years outside the norms of family, and religious and cultural rituals. Twelve years with a lifetime more sickness and isolation in sight.

Both of these stories are about Jesus giving more than what was asked for. Jairus comes asking for healing for his daughter, who’s very sick. When Jesus is interrupted by the hemorrhaging woman, on his way to Jairus’s house, the daughter dies in the meantime. The men who came with Jairus to find Jesus say We can leave this teacher alone now. It’s too late. She’s dead. The time for healing is past; it’s time for mourning now. Let’s go home. But Jesus goes along anyway and ends up not only healing her but restoring her to life, resurrecting her. Jesus gives more than Jairus even knew how to ask for.

At twelve-years old, Jairus’s daughter would have been entering into marriage soon, as it was customary to marry off young girls between 12-15 years of age. She was just about to enter into her next important roles and relationships, as wife and mother.

At twelve years into her continual bleeding, the woman would be without any regular social connections, religious life, or male contact.

Life held limited opportunities for women at the time of Jesus – to put it mildly.

Girls were expected to marry young and bear children, especially male heirs. Girls and women had very few rights and Roman law placed women under the custody or control of men, first your father, then your husband. If a young woman wasn’t married by the age of 20 or if she didn’t bear children, she’d incur penalties, a state tax to be paid by her family for the drain of her life. For enslaved women in that culture, it was even worse, of course. They were considered property, and could not marry at all, though they were subject to any and all desires of their masters and of male slaves, with the master’s permission. Any children born to them were the property of their masters. Jewish women were subject to both Roman laws and Jewish purity laws. Regular monthly menstruation was considered an “unclean” time and had to be followed by a seven-day purification each month. During that whole time of a woman’s monthly period and the purification that followed, she couldn’t leave home, sleep in the same bed as her husband, sit on the same furniture, or go anywhere in public, including the synagogue. (http://www.umcdiscipleship.org/worship/lectionary-calendar/fifth-sunday-after-pentecost7)

That’s the way it was for women. So consider what it was like for this woman. It’s likely, if she’d ever had a husband, that he was long gone – they wouldn’t have been able to even touch each other for twelve years. Bleeding continually for twelve years would have put her so far outside of normal, she probably couldn’t imagine ever getting back. She never had much power in the culture of her day and now she had nothing at all. Really think about the state of mind she must have been in by this point, funds exhausted with no cure in sight, body exhausted with no comfort to be found in society’s regular interactions, spirit exhausted enough to reach out in faith so desperate and hopelessly hopeful that it was the only thing left to do.

Time couldn’t have felt more different for Jairus and the bleeding woman, before they got to the point of seeking out Jesus.

Jairus was a religious leader in the Jewish community. He was a man, wealthy, connected, important. He had a daughter about to be of marrying age so he was almost ready to hand her to the next man in her life, a husband. For twelve years, Jairus felt secure in the course he was on and what lay ahead for his family, his daughter. Meanwhile, for twelve years, the woman who never had much power to begin with, helplessly watched her relationships and connections and possibilities for life seeping away with the flow of her blood.

Whatever the previous twelve years were for each of them, the moment they come to Jesus they are each in the same spot at the same time – desperate enough to try even this.

And faithful enough. Did you notice what Jesus says? The bleeding woman left the confines of her “unclean” house and reached out to touch Jesus’s cloak as he passed by. Standing in the midst of “clean” folks in a place she’s not meant to occupy, she fesses up when Jesus realizes someone’s touched him. She falls down at his feet and tells him everything. And Jesus says, “Daughter, your faith has healed you; go in peace, healed from your disease” (Mark 5: 34). Daughter. He not only heals her illness, he redeems her standing in the community, claiming the woman whom moments before no one would touch, much less claim as their kin. Her entire life is redeemed. This is not just a stop to the blood, it’s a start to her future.

Jairus’s desperation and faith are evident in the fact that he himself goes to seek out Jesus. He’s the kind of man who would have been accustomed to sending people to do his errands and carry his messages. But this request couldn’t be entrusted to anyone else. He wanted it that much. He was willing to forego his powerful position and act as his own errand boy.

The power of this story is that these two were always in the same position, though neither they nor their communities nor the disciples knew it. They were both, always and everywhere, desperate enough to need Jesus and the wellness/wholeness/saving only he can give. At twelve years in they came to the same desperate fork in the road, gave up on convention, neighbors’ advice, self-reliance, and gave themselves over to faith and hope.

This is a week when we have known forks in the road.

This time last week I was about to leave Annual Conference in Roanoke. I was packing my suitcase to go to Roanoke when I heard about the shooting at Emanuel AME Church. All last weekend, I carried my phone around so I could keep up to date on news from Charleston. When I saw the online petitions asking South Carolina to take down the Confederate flag, I supported the sentiment but wondered if we were distracting ourselves from the pain of the shooting. I wondered if removing that hateful symbol would do much to remove hate itself. I wondered if some of our more stubborn states would ever do it. A week later and Wal-Mart has stopped selling them.

A century and a half is a long time to hold onto a symbol of hate and oppression. One week is a short, powerful time in which to forgive and insist on another way.

Twenty-four hours is a short time between seismic Supreme Court rulings. It’s a lifetime when you’ve been waiting to marry the one you love.

2000 years is a long time to spend explaining why women weren’t treated well in the time of Jesus. It’s even longer to be holding onto beliefs like that – two minutes today is too long to endure or accept second-class treatment.

Time feels different, depending on who and how you are. So does healing.

Healing began in some new and unexpected places in our country this week – praise God! There’s more to do. There are miles to go. But it feels like more of us are heading in the same direction together. It feels like the bleeding has stopped and we aren’t alone and outside of the crowd anymore. We suddenly/at last noticed we are in the same place as every single one of our neighbors. Equally desperate and in need of healing; equally blessed.

This time last week, marriage was legal for all our citizens in some states but not in others. Today we can all marry the one we love.

This time last week our Virginia Annual Conference was voting to petition the General Conference to remove language from our Book of Discipline that refers to homosexuality as “incompatible with Christian teaching.” When I got in the car to drive home, the vote hadn’t been tallied. By the time I reached Charlottesville the news was out that Virginia voted to ask General Conference to take the language out.

How long, O Lord?

One day, one drive, one week, one lifetime…

The genius in Mark’s storytelling is that this is all one story: Jairus (and his daughter) and the bleeding woman; rich, male, power and poor, female, powerlessness. In Mark’s telling they are interwoven into one whole story. They are brought to the same spot – desperate hope – and taken to the same place – healing and redemption. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ: we are all in the same story of healing and redemption, no matter how else we are tempted to see it. No matter how we count the time.

It doesn’t matter whether you think twelve years was the blink of an eye or a long time coming. What matters is recognizing Jesus when he calls out to bring you back into the fold of the family, back to life. It feels like healing beginning in the place of deep woundedness and sickness. It sounds like “Daughter,” “Son.” It looks like we are all in this together.

Thanks be to God!

On President Obama, this extraordinary week, and the holy breast pumps of grace

Posted on June 27, 2015 by admin

I spent most of last week on retreat with my writing group, half of whom are nursing mothers with babies in tow. When I made it home late yesterday, my husband and I went straight to the computer to watch President Obama’s eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Perhaps if I hadn’t just been witness to a week of breastfeeding, I would have heard it differently, but I hung up on his repeated phrase “we express God’s grace.”

He couldn’t have done a better job speaking Methodist, with his sustained emphasis on the undeserved, unearned, unmerited grace of God we all receive. (And I was proud to see the United Methodist Church sitting in solidarity with our AME sisters and brothers, represented by South Carolina Bishop L. Jonathan Holston on the front row on stage – yes, geeks like me can spot the cross and flame logo and the bishops’ insignia on a stole in the background of a video shot.) As President Obama spoke, circling back around to God’s grace in our lives, I heard something I haven’t before.

I usually think of God’s grace flowing – gushing – continually into the world and into each of our lives. Sometimes we notice, sometimes we don’t. Either way, it’s always there and we can actively participate in it or resist it or halfway notice it, or not. What I never thought about before hearing the President preach-speak is how we might be able to participate more directly and persuasively than I’ve considered in the past. We might be able to squeeze out another ounce of grace when it seems to be running dry, like a mother pumping breast milk for her newborn.

When President Obama first used the phrase, he said, “by taking down [the Confederate] flag we express God’s grace. But I don’t think God wants us to stop there.” I heard “we express God’s grace” as We are exhibiting God’s grace, demonstrating its existence and power. Which surely we are….But as he repeated it I heard it differently. A little later he said, “The vast majority of Americans – the majority of gun owners – want to do something about [the epidemic of gun violence]. We see that now. And I’m convinced that by acknowledging the pain and loss of others, even as we respect the traditions and ways of life that make up this beloved country, by making the moral choice to change, we express God’s grace.”

As he repeated, “we express God’s grace,” I began to hear the verb “express” differently. I started to think about breastfeeding and how the milk doesn’t just gush on its own, especially when a mother is trying to express (literally, press out) milk into a bottle for her child to drink some other time. A breastfeeding mother who expresses milk needs to spend time and give attention to getting her milk from breast to bottle. She has to push, pull, suck, and squeeze to help it flow from her to where it’s needed. From what I understand, sometimes even with a breast pump, a mother has to wait through several minutes of sucking-pumping for the milk to start flowing.

What if, in some times, places, and circumstances, God’s grace is like this? What if it’s not just gushing all the time like an open fire hydrant? What if it’s ready to do that but needs some active participation from us?

I am not saying God is completely stymied without the likes of us. That open fire hydrant of gushing grace is an image that still works for me. But I have known places and people where, even though I witnessed God’s gushing grace drenching us all from head to toe, someone in the crowd didn’t seem wet or sensible to their drenched state. Surely God’s grace was flooding that Wednesday night Bible study last week when a group of the faithful welcomed a stranger and invited him in. Obviously the grace of God flowed through the families of those who were killed, as they offered forgiveness in the midst of their deep pain and loss. But it’s not obvious to everyone.

There are times and places and people who seem to need more than the ocean we’re already swimming in. Those times and places and people need us, to point to and live out and express every last drop of God’s grace – not just to witness to it and live gracefully and graciously, but to squeeze, prod, suck, and push until every single drop of grace lets down into the situation at hand. Like mothers who want to be sure every ounce of precious milk gets to their hungry helpless babies, God enlists us to help express grace into the world and the lives around us so it gets to every hungry helpless child of God. We are the holy breast pumps of grace. It’s not a sexy job and not as beautiful as the babe at the breast, but it still gets the milk to the sucking puckered mouth. It gets the job done. And sometimes, when the baby’s sleeping or not hungry right then or the mother needs to be somewhere else at feeding time, expressing milk is the difference between feeding and not feeding, between flow and drying up.

I love to hear Barack Obama sing and his rendition of “Amazing Grace” was stirring and soulful, but to my ears, what he said about grace was even better. We are witnesses but we are also tools to help get the job done, the breast pumps expressing (pressing out into the world) the grace of God. We are expressing God’s grace when we answer hate with love and forgiveness, when we recognize how the past is killing the future, when a group of United Methodists in Virginia votes for a new way forward, when we choose to care for everyone’s health and safety as a basic human need and right, when we recognize love looks just the same on everyone and rejoice in everyone’s right to marry…

For a breast-feeding mother, every day brings a hungry baby, so even though this week has been extraordinary, every week brings opportunities to express what God gives. Keep it up. Keep pressing out every bit of grace you know, into a world in desperate need of knowing it, too. Keep pumping.

photo credit: By Beukbeuk (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Emmanuel

Posted on December 7, 2014 by admin

An Advent homily, preached 12/7/14 at a Wesley Foundation at UVA & Wesley Memorial UMC joint worship service.

If we can’t find the connections between what we do here in this place and what’s happening out there, we aren’t really trying. In this messy, desperate, trauma-filled semester at UVA and in our country, if we wonder what Advent and Christmas have to do with all that, then we aren’t thinking at all.

This is the time of year when we sing and pray, Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus…Come, O Come, Emmanuel…..Come and be with us. Come to our aid, be who you promised to be, God-with-us.

And even though we use royalty purple as the color for Advent, the Prince we got came without an army. The Prince of Peace entered defenselessly, in the dark of night, naked, unable to take care of even himself at first.

The Savior of the world came as a despised Jew, born in poverty in a borrowed barn. When God decided to come down here Godself, it was to an unexpectedly, shamefully pregnant teenager. Right from the beginning, God incarnate – Jesus – chose an inexperienced, poor, minority, female teenager to be the first one to hold him. A nobody, easily overlooked. A girl, with no power, who was lucky her fiancé Joseph believed in his dreams enough to marry her and be part of God’s strange plan, rather than leaving her disgraced. (Because some things haven’t changed nearly enough in 2000 years, one of those being our inclination not to believe what women tell us about their own lives.)

Jesus is still showing up in places just like this. Who’s paying attention?

If I say to you Jesus is as interested here and now in sexual politics and violence towards women as he was when he chose to be born to an unwed teenage girl, does it seem like too much?

If I say to you Jesus is showing up right now in Ferguson and New York, looking like a black teenager wearing a hoodie, does it seem out of line?

In a couple of weeks we’ll hear again those beautiful words Mary sang when she and her cousin Elizabeth met, both pregnant and full of promise (Luke 1: 52-53): God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

The sides are not as simple as some of us want them to be: frat boy/ first year woman…real threat/ police officer….protestor/ law-abider … white/black …reporter/subject…

And yet, this is the language Mary sings…powerful/lowly…hungry/rich.

I can’t hear her song this year and not also hear echoes of the old protest song Pete Seeger sang in the 60s, “Which Side Are You On?” The sides are not as simple as we sometimes think but Jesus’ side is always the same one. Lowly, powerless, poor, hungry, vulnerable, defenseless. The nobodies everyone else ignores.

In the past I’ve leaned heavily on the waiting imagery of Advent, the tension of this time when we’ve tasted and glimpsed the full reign of God but we’re still struggling, waiting, for it to come in all its fullness and glory. That’s all still true and Adventy.

But this year I can’t stand here and encourage you to wait, if waiting means the status quo…if waiting means more of the same…if waiting means blind trust in the ones with all the power…if waiting means not looking too closely at my own power and my reticence to use if in service of the powerless…

One of the best things we Christians do is re-tell our stories. There is no way to hear all they have to say in just one telling.

This story bears repeating. We may have occasionally gotten a little too cozy, fuzzy-focus, Hallmark about hearing and telling it again, amidst our decorated homes and churches and trees and holiday parties. We may have replaced our religious fervor with uncomplicated nostalgia, gazing at the familiar manger.

Don’t settle for cozy when God’s offering emancipation.

Where is God calling you this season? “To the manger” is not the answer, unless you are an especially metaphorical person.

Where is God calling you? Always, again and again, to the places and people who are hungry, powerless, poor. The overlooked and unimpressive nobodies, by the world’s standards.

Don’t wait to meet them. Don’t wait for things to settle down. Don’t wait for that sweet manger-baby to turn into a nice young man. Emmanuel, God-with-us, is here for nothing less than a revolution – and he thinks it’s worth dying for.

What we do here is meant to carry over out there. It may not look the same in my life as in yours. For some of us it may look like volunteering with a sexual assault support group. For some of us it may mean becoming reporters and reforming ethical journalism. For others it may look like a “die-in” or a march on Washington or crossing over the color lines at UVA to meet someone on their own turf and terms. For others, it may begin with paying attention to our own language and the ways we abuse our own power and injure others without meaning to or realizing we’re doing it.

There are a million ways to choose to see and support our neighbors as fully human brothers and sisters. There are a million ways to meet God in the process.

The story we tell and re-tell – the one we long to hear and live out in its fullness – is a story about God-with-us, Emmanuel. The long-expected Jesus who came into a real body in real time and a real place – who still comes, and who will not stop coming, no matter what.

Come and be with us! Come to our aid, be who you promised to be, God-with-us.

Thanks be to God!

Snow Day

Space to play, rest, create, feast.

Tag Archives: #BlackLivesMatter

The Pillow

How long?

On President Obama, this extraordinary week, and the holy breast pumps of grace

Emmanuel