Love is... (pt 2)

Readings: Genesis 25:19-34, Psalm 119:105-112, Isaiah 55:10-13, Psalm 65:9-13, Romans 8:1-11, Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Though he’s an ancestor of our faith and beloved to us by default, the barest truth regarding Jacob is that he was a bit of a rascal. Prone to sneaking his way to success, his story is peppered with instances of less than stellar ethical decisions, including the narrative we read this week.

Jacob and Esau were twins, though Esau, born (if by minutes) first, was culturally entitled to the birthrights of the eldest son. We’re told that Jacob resisted this even in the womb: he emerged into the world holding Esau’s heel, as if saying, “not so fast, brother!” (Genesis 25:26).

Jacob’s concern seemed to be what he would be denied; he displayed little linked, inherent appreciation for what he already had.

Jacob’s need to best Esau led to continual problems between the brothers. Our reading continues to a recounting of Jacob’s decision to trick Esau out of his birthright. Jacob waited for his exhausted brother to come in from the fields, hungry and weary, and then bribed him out of the first born position with the evening meal, a bowl of lentils (Genesis 25:34).

In effect, this left Jacob triumphant in his efforts. Practically, it also sullied his relationship with Esau, with whom he’d never enjoy perfect fraternal harmony again. In his fervor to come out on top in their family, Jacob ensured continual discord in it.

Jacob is not someone who we fully want to mimic. If we consider the results of his selfish, if wily, actions, we come to the realization that these are the inherited impulses of his which we have to resist.


We don’t really hear about what Esau feels, beyond his justifiable anger. In his shoes, how would we react?

He, the hard worker, the still less loved son, is continually bested by his mischievous younger brother; he repeatedly loses in their family, despite his certainly superior integrity. Indeed, he’s not even the focus in the biblical narrative which remembers him. Is his story the progenitor to our classic “good guys never win”?

My guess is that we’re not supposed to come up with an outlook so bleak. Perhaps we can read this tale as a cautionary one, particularly in regard to our personal values.

If, as the gospels suggest, we’re supposed to regard the human community as our family, and the parts of it as our brothers and sisters, then perhaps what we can take from Jacob and Esau is a degree of care when dealing with one another.

There’s nothing wrong with seeking the best conceivable life for ourselves. Jacob’s mistake was not that he wanted more; it was that he ultimately took more at the expense of his brother. He could not adopt the perspective that his own blessings were great; he had to, in order to feel secure about his own blessings, erode his brother’s blessings. This was Jacob’s great failing.

What would his family have been like had he not made such decisions? What sort of home would Leah and his children have been welcomed into had his methods not continually alienated others? Did not the costs outweigh the apparent “boons”?

It seems to me that Jacob’s shallow personal desires were akin to the seed sown among thorns (Matthew 13:22). His thirst was for a life that would be admired: for the best portion of his father’s house; for the prettiest partner; for the best portions of his father-in-law’s flock. At each turn, someone lost: Esau, Leah, Laban. And so the life he envisioned—happy, gilded, perfect—could never fully take root.

What if his desire had been guided by the full picture of what makes life good—by the understanding that our personal successes are always mitigated by the effects they have upon those around us?

Jacob’s pursuits echo rhetoric in our own time. Pursuit for wealth that does not consider those hurt in its pursuit; images of family which are only acceptable if they are better than other family images. Why do we need to justify our lives in accordance with our disapproval of the lives of others?

I think of the marriage debate; I think of the continual refrain, from some, that suggests that inclusive marriage—a redefinition in our laws which would make marital relationships accessible to all—corrupts the notion of marriage. As if family only has value if some are excluded from it. As if our margins, or the decision to leave some at the margins, makes the middle stronger, or better.

In our fervor to be worldly and to make our own relationships understood to be the best, we sometimes make these mistakes—and in so doing, in not electing to understand what is purest about those relationships, we toss our seeds among the thorns.

Marriage, like many voluntary relationships, is best because of its most gentle aspirations. Throughout the books of the Bible we read of the virtues of love: of selfless self-giving, of the care for another which, in turn, makes us internally richer, adds depth to our own lives, and to our relationships with the Holy.

We idealize marriage, when only one couple is our concern, as two becoming one; we think of married couples as new centers for the work of the Holy Spirit. Love transforms those beloved, and the glow spreads outward.

This is the dearest hope of the Bible when it speaks of love; and love is marriage’s best potential. It is, consequentially, confusing that any Christian would want to deny access to such relationships to anyone.

We, like Jacob and Esau, are born with certain predetermined blessings, amongst them our ability to grow into loving adults. The way this works in relation to gender varies, but most now understand gender preferences to be predetermined.

We love best as we are made to love, which makes inclusive marriage moves not only just, but essential. Our laws should enable the gifts of God to shine fully through us; and interpersonal relationships are an important facet of our potentialities.

Though New York state’s inclusive marriage laws will never have personal implications for me, I celebrate them. They opened a space for my brothers and sisters to pursue the fullest and best expressions of their hearts, regardless of orientation. I expect that the world will become a better place because of such measures—measures which struggle to understand, and take care with, the soil in which we plant our dearest ideas. I pray that other states will follow quickly behind.

We undermine ourselves if we seek to be too much like Jacob, if we forget that we are born with what we need to make our lives their own best possible versions. We get no further in the world by entering it holding fast to the heels of others—slowing one another down costs us as much as it costs those we cause to falter. We should, instead, enter it with our hands held high in gratitude, and should do all in our capacity to ensure that the path is cleared for others to celebrate their own blessings in the same measure.

Love is a gift which God left open to all; only we prevent its fullest expression.

Love is...

Readings:Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Psalm 45:10-17; Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Zechariah 9:9-12; Psalm 145:8-14; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Our week begins with marital verses. The chapters include both narratives and metaphors—from the story of Isaac and Rebekah’s marriage to comparisons of Israel to brides, wherein its relationship becomes as a marriage to God.

In a way, these readings fall into appropriate time. We emerge with them from June, which is, contemporarily, deemed “wedding month.” We are familiar with announcements and celebrations, are weighted down with words of flower arrangements and festivities.

We treat such occasions as epochs, and not unjustly so: two lives winding into one new life warrant a little poetic imagination.

But such occasions also sometimes carry the burden of expectations. Paul and his letter to the Corinthians are often invoked during wedding ceremonies, and so too are other biblical images, some which have a less comfortable inheritance.

Throughout the year, we encounter such verses: insistences that wives be obedient to their husbands. Glorification of wifely quietude.

Even readings like this week’s can prove a danger: in hasty hands, they can be made to suggest power structures which do not perfectly enable marital partnership, but rather set up something archaic, something against which we, in accordance with our values, struggle.

Abraham sends a servant to the land of his ancestors—the land of his fathers, the chapter says—to retrieve from amongst them a suitable wife for his son. And when the servant claps eyes on her, he claims her: he bejewels her, owning her for Isaac by proxy (Genesis 24:37-38, 47).

There exists, here, a residual sense of property exchange: of marriage being more like ownership than partnership.

Our reading from the Psalms might be made to reinforce this: it demands that the “bride”, presumably a metaphor for maiden Israel, “forget your people and your father’s house” in favor of becoming a queen, bejeweled before all the nations (Psalm 45:10). The bride seems to enter a new life herein, one in which what came before ceases to matter; what she becomes as the wife is endowed with the utmost value.

I have been thinking lately about what we expect of marriage. Most women I know balk at outward suggestions of “property” exchange. We are beyond the age of dowries, obviously. Fathers still give daughters away, but the action is now infused more with affection than anything else.

We choose to read from Corinthians at weddings because Paul encourages steadfast love within it; it sounds more like the partnership which we desire than do portions of his other letters which talk about marital submission.

Still, the message is mixed. The portions of Paul which we carefully avoid during June are brought to the attention of married partners when disharmony is reported—we act as though relationships are boats which should never be rocked. The effusive joy of “wedding season” is confused by conflicting attitudes toward marriage throughout the rest of the year.

We still do not make it easy for Christian women to confess marital unhappiness, even when their safety is at stake. We remain wary of divorce. We are dogged about the term “forever”, even in the face of distress. Discord exists between what we expect of marriage, and what we insist that individual people are entitled to, in terms of respect, in general.

This confusion only deepens if we allow ourselves to get moored in the culture of the scriptures, acting as though it ought to always be reified in our own time. Stories such as Rebekah’s retrieval, on Isaac’s behalf, as well as portions of Paul, can muddle our ideas about relationships, though they ultimately need not to.
What was expected of Abraham in ancient Mesopotamia does not exactly correspond to our own situations; Rebekah and Isaac don’t have a love story which necessarily begins as ours do. Nor do the relationships of Paul’s churches perfectly correspond to our own: Rome had its own mores, its own expectations.

And yet there are portions of all of these books with which we can identify. Rebekah might not enter Genesis perfectly—there is an underlying sense that she is more like her father’s “property” than she is an autonomous being, worthy, owing to her own human merit, of love and respect. Yet this subset of the tale runs out of steam quickly.

Rebekah is brought to Isaac—a prize to her triumphant. But the triumphant groom does not lord over her. Instead, our reading ends with this: “she became his wife; and he loved her” (Genesis 24:67).

The hope is in the conclusion, in the assurance that he loves her. Rebekah becomes a comfort to him. Their relationship becomes a mutual exchange. She becomes, in the words of Song of Solomon, beloved: someone upon whom he depends, as much as she depends upon him.

The scriptures are insistent about the nature of love, and none of their ideals focus upon power. It is selfless self-giving—loving another as we would wish to be loved. It has been articulated as self-emptying, of the abandonment of personal impulses in deference to another. It is an exchange. It is symbiotic.

How much better our world could be if we talked of marriage this way, and not just of the wedding. That too many expectations still arise from the uglier side is attested to by incidents of domestic violence, and by silence surrounding such difficult topics in “polite” Christian society. We recite Corinthians at the wedding—and then we fall silent.

We bemoan “mistakes” when they happen, but often too late, prompted by tragedy, impervious to daily necessity.

I’ve been thinking about relationships lately, worried by the ways in which they go wrong. I lost a beautiful friend, a bright Christian woman, this summer to domestic violence. She was fortunate enough to have supportive family, and a supportive church community, at her back as she combated her difficult situation, though ultimately this proved not enough.

I’ve been thinking about how I’ll speak of relationships now, having seen the worst end to one in which the woman wasn’t afforded her due respect. Too late, I crave the images of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians for my friend: never jealous, never petty, always kind. I crave them for all brave enough to forge marital relationships.

We don’t make much use of terms like property exchange during the “wedding season”; we pretend as though we’ve gotten beyond such things. Yet it seems that not enough respect is given between husbands and wives after the wedding lights dim. We forget to parlay the ceremony’s readings into our lives.

“And he loved her,” Genesis says. Such a quiet, simple statement; so succinct after the rambling story of how Isaac “met” Rebekah. And yet all of the work of a marriage lies therein—indeed, all of the work of any Christian, any believer.

He loved her.

I wish the hope, the confusion, the hard work and the joy of that line upon the marriages which began, are beginning, are midstream, are aging and are anticipated right now. The best lessons of our Bible are incumbent on such love. We are to struggle toward it, and to renew it continually once we’ve attained some measure of it.

He loved her; that remains the example which we’ll be better for trying to emulate. It stands at the heart of our faith.

Because I Have Loved You

Readings:Genesis 22:1-14,Psalm 13, Jeremiah 28:5-9, Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18, Romans 6:12-23, Matthew 10:40-42

Our readings this week begin with the akedah, the story of the binding of Isaac. Not due to this story alone, Abraham stands as a paragon of obedience to God’s word.

While biblical scholars haggle over whether or not Abraham believed he would actually be required to sacrifice his son, the details of the story stand: the doting father, when asked by God to offer up his beloved son, without hesitation set out on a journey whose practical end was compliance.

The journey to Moriah took three days. For three days, Abraham and his son travelled to the mountain, the boy with the kindling for his own eventual burning on his back, the father weighted down by the implications of the horrible task at hand.

They woke on the third day, looked toward the horizon, and saw the mountain in the distance. The whole situation was hopeless and foreboding.

What impresses us is that Abraham seems never to waver. He’s cryptic about details when talking to Isaac and otherwise stoic through the whole of the mission. Though his soul must have been crying out for reprieve, he goes so far as to climb the mountain with his son, to bind the boy, and to raise the knife for the sacrifice.
Not until the angel cries “stop!” do we receive any indication that Abraham ever would have. He was poised, fully willing.

We comfort ourselves when reading this troubling story by assuming God never meant to let the sacrifice happen. Still, Abraham’s three days of torture, and Isaac’s own trauma, seem an unnecessary cruelty to inflict upon two human beings simply to test their obedience.

We hope the story is told as an allegory, a way to assert Abraham’s superior qualities whilst exaggerating the real details, but we have no way of knowing. We are left to admire the patriarch, the whole time quietly struggling not to bestow too much credit on him for his cofounding willingness. We respect him. We do not always know why.

We read Abraham’s story, and wonder. Would we? Would God ask it of us? What incredible sacrifices are solicited from us instead?

These readings collectively suggest that obedience to God’s word becomes a sacrifice in and of itself sometimes, in that it often requires relinquishing our attachment to personally beneficial reasoning. So the Psalmist is able to bemoan God’s hidden face while still discussing Divine generosity: the Psalm knows that God is good without pretending to understand how (Psalm 13:1, 6).

Similarly, Paul speaks of obedience as a kind of slavery, a life to which one gives oneself over at the cost of some autonomy where tasks like love are concerned (Romans 6:18). What God asks is not always easy: the task to love one another without condition itself is one which we, in our particular situations, often are left struggling against. Yet if we love God, we are to bind ourselves to it; we are to become servants to God’s will therein.

Sacrifices are easy enough only in theory; “love” is an easy word to make use of; but who hasn’t wished for reprieve when confronted with a “neighbor” who’s wronged them terribly? We accept and laud God’s word, but it’s human to tacitly hope that there are unspoken conditions, limitations which we’re not expected to love, or obey, beyond. Our readings struggle against that hope: obedience is to be absolute; it is to forego our personal, earthly desires.

In every age, believers are faced with the din of critical voices, voices which decry their obedience as foolhardy or antiquated, as silly and without merit. They flay believers with recollections of an unhappy history wherein God has not always rescued the godly from persecutions which occur despite their obedience.
They mock concepts like absolute love, burdening them with added conditions: are we to love dictators, murderers, thieves? The “yes” we borrow from our Bible only redoubles their scorn; obedience to it resists the “acceptable” limits of reason, and so they reject the obedience of the faithful.

In past ages, some not so distant, obedience has faced such contempt that it’s even been legislated against. Thus we have the examples of the Acts of the Apostles, and of Roman history, which indicate that Christians were persecuted for their beliefs.


We have too the history of anti-Semitism, wherein even Christians have sometimes been wont to forbid their Jewish brethren, by and bye, to be obedient to God’s word. At various times, it has been a dangerous thing to keep kosher, to observe the Sabbath, to celebrate a bris. Such things have been made illegal; they’ve been turned into markers, and used to justify the unspeakable.

We have, sadly, contemporary examples as well. In San Francisco, a group of activists is currently attempting to push through a law which would make circumcision illegal, punishable by fines and imprisonment.

Though these activists insist that their motivation exists wholly in the realm of human rights, it has recently come to light that one of their leaders is responsible for conceptualizing and circulating an anti-Semitic comic book which depicts mohels as monsters, and those who bar the covenantal tradition as saviors.

Despite this exposure of the nastier elements of their ideology, the group continues its campaign. They hold themselves up as enlightened and decry those who would be obedient to the tradition as “barbaric.” It has always been so, and has always so lacked substance.

Abraham was asked to do much which he did not understand. God asked that he become a wanderer, that he leave his home and move toward a land promised to his posterity. God asked that he sacrifice his son, eliciting his obedience without actually requiring that the task go through. God made a covenant with Abraham, and as a sign of it God established the bris, a ritual which would draw believers into the covenantal community on the eighth day of their lives.

God gave Abraham much room, and many ways, to be obedient; he did not provide corresponding whys. They are beyond our purview. We do not need them to justify our obedience. They are almost in the realm of “because I said so”; they are more nearly “because I have shown you so much love, and asked of you so little.”

We honor Abraham for his obedience this week in our readings, and must so honor those who continue to exemplify it. Obedience to God’s word, even if in areas which we think are replaced, for us, by our own “covenant” in Christ, is to be admired and applauded by all who believe. It’s something which we should always defend.

In San Francisco, the obedient are currently under fire. It is hardly the only city on Earth in which believers of various faiths face challenges, but it presents a particular opportunity for us to raise our own voices in defense of obedience.
Our Jewish neighbors, and our Muslim neighbors, are affronted by such laws, which would necessitate their disobedience to God in the name of obedience to a legislative body which is supposed to protect their religious rights.

Our gospel reading this week insists that those who love righteousness for
righteousness’ sake are beloved by God (Matthew 10:41). We don’t always understand righteousness as it’s been presented in the Bible; gracefully, we don’t need to.
God asked that we love one another. God asked the Jewish covenantal community to do this too, but also to perform other acts of obedience, of which the bris is one. Our gospels assure us that such obedience is righteous; we are to awe over, and protect the rights of, those who display it.

People of faith are all asked, in some measure, to travel to their own Moriahs. We face our own tests, and we confront the possibility of faltering each step of the way. Can we, ourselves, bring ourselves to bind that which we love? Can we do these things without asking why?

We hope, but never know, that a voice from Heaven will cry “stop!” at the opportune moment. We hope. Yet our job as people of faith is not to listen for the voice; it’s to do as we were asked. Because God loved us enough to make Divine and incredible sacrifices. Because God has asked, of us, so little in return.

Majestic is Your Name

Readings: Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13,Matthew 28:16-20

We complex creatures, though created in God’s image, have sometimes indulged in the unfortunate habit of being wrong, of mistaking the purpose of our creation. The notion of dominion, in particular, has proven particularly irksome in our fallible hands.

We have interpreted the Genesis instruction that we “subdue” the earth to mean that we can bend it to our wills and whims (Genesis 1:29). We have not always paid homage to God’s creations; we have often humiliated them.

Environmentalists have long and loudly bemoaned the manipulation of that verse. We have exercised our dominion by mining our lands for resources, bleeding them until they collapse, exhausted and anemic. The notion of “dominion” has felled forests and hills. It has enabled us to taint and otherwise alter our oceans and fresh waters in the name of progress. The idea of dominion over animal life, similarly, has led to willfully taken liberties which are hard to excuse.

And yet our readings this week highlight a further area of abuse: they align creation to God’s goodness, align existing in the Divine image to the spreading of the gospel truth. To be an evangelist, in the Gospel sense, means to spread God’s good news; this extends to the gift of creation, to the beauty in all formed by heaven’s hands, and to awe over those gifts and blessings. In the 8th Psalm, the psalmist, with wonder, says “when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:4-5)

The offering of “dominion” to humankind was not the passing of a baton: God did not make us rulers over the earth, nor was true control over it relinquished. We were made, as many have suggested, its stewards. We are its tenants and the beneficiaries of its grandeur. We have the dominion, the power and the room to love it; we do not have the right to reduce it. The Psalm thus winds out of our consciousness this week not focusing on us, but on the whole of creation as a testament: “O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:9)

To love God, we must honor what God made. The good news, and the challenge, is that this extends to ourselves. We were blessed with self-dominion: the grace of awareness, the ability to form a conscience guided by holiness, informed by wonder.
It extends, further, to one another. The gift of Christ was a reminder that we can live in radical community—that love can become a method by which we bind to one another, by which we strengthen and affirm our ties to the Holy. Paul enjoins “agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you” (2 Corinthians 13:11). Where we are conscientious, where we invite the Spirit and welcome grace, there is God. There our “dominion” comes to fullest fruition.

Alongside environmental injustices, therefore, we have to reckon the injustices which we visit upon one another. Environmentalists and animal activists have long denounced what we’ve done to the natural world in the name of dominion; our need to control and subdue one another has proven similarly disastrous. We raise ourselves unnaturally high and then forget to take care of our neighbors.

From Syria, we hear news of hundreds of innocents falling beneath a callous government which seeks to punish the population for breeding dissidents. Our president is pressed to declare war on Libya, where injustices against our neighbors are also rampant. The so-called “Arab Spring” is so colored by atrocities against mankind that the vibrant evocations of the name come to seem inappropriate. Life has become less, not more, verdant for so many who offended those in power simply by asking that their dignity be honored.

Here at home, we hurt each other, too. We restrict programs which aide those in need with arbitrary and humiliating new requirements, often in the name of respecting the limitations of our budget. We demonize our neighbors to the South, absurdly turning “immigrant” into a slanderous term, forgetting that we, ourselves, are a nation of immigrants. We allow fear to make us cruel.

Our women are subject to violence. There exist serious gaps in legal systems which could prevent it, but find themselves ill-equipped to actually do so. In all of this: we fail to respect the implications of the “dominion” which we were formed to exercise.

In our reading from Matthew, Jesus sends the disciples out to spread word of the Holy. He proclaims total authority in heaven and on Earth, and simultaneously enables them to proclaim this. As a grace. As a gift. As a continuation of creation.

“I am with you always, till the end of the age,” Jesus proclaims (Matthew 28:20). This serves as a clarification of the first chapter of Genesis: God, resting from the work of creating, gives human beings dominion not in God’s stead, but so they may understand, from a blessed perspective, the goodness of the gift. God stands them up before all created under heaven and declares, “this was for you.” God is with us always, until the end of the age.

To dishonor what God formed disgraces the gift of radical Divine love. When we are careless with the Earth, with its living creatures and with one another, we effectively forget these humbling and wonderful verses. We are careless with the Word when we are careless with creation.

We cannot claim, with integrity, to belong to God without also respecting the godly—a spectrum which encompasses all of creation. The gift begins and ends with us.

In Memory of

Readings: Acts 2:1-21, Numbers 11:24-30, Psalm 104:24-34,1 Corinthians 12:3b-13, John 20:19-23

Conceptually, the Holy Spirit is enigmatic. Not until we discuss the specifics of the Spirit at work do we begin to understand the Pentecost: we less can explain Holy Spirit than we can the Spirit manifest.

We’ve all known people through whom we know God is at work. Acts of extraordinary generosity expose them, or instances of everyday and awesome kindness. There are those from whom the Spirit shines.

Paul said, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). God will work through some by making them prophets, through others by gifting with them with the ability to impart faith, or knowledge, or healing (1 Corinthians 12:6-10). Where the truth of the Holy shines most brilliantly through, there are the Spirit filled—those chosen by God to be as angels to us during our time here on Earth.

I was fortunate enough to see the Spirit at work through my friend Shannon, who had the ability to increase the faith and awe of others just by being who she was. I’ll always think of her presence in my life as a grace.

I met Shannon in college. My roommates and I sent an e-mail through the church listserv seeking a new housemate, and Shannon was our fortunate find. We loved her instantly. She was bubbly and kind, and when she spoke about God, her words were filled with a grace that humbled. Her days were infused with faith. She wanted to make the world better.

Shannon had a habit of forcing me to be a better Christian. During Lent, I got up early to make 8 a.m. Mass with her, driven mostly by the agreement we’d made to both go. She encouraged me to attend evening rosaries. We talked about God and the future of the Church, and Shannon’s insights were unflinchingly optimistic.

Inside of the pews, and outside of the church, her face tended to be incandescent: she was lit by her prayerfulness and her hope. I couldn’t always summon up faithful feelings beyond my cynicism, but it was as if Shannon didn’t know doubt.

None of this is meant to suggest she was superhuman. My friend also had an uncanny sense of humor, and probably made mistakes of which I am not aware. What I know is that, even when I disagreed with her, I couldn’t lose respect for her: her positions and opinions were never selfishly derived, which lent her, in all situations, moral credibility that couldn’t be pierced.

After college, Shannon became a mother, and began passing her verve for life onto her little girl. We stopped seeing each other daily, but I kept track of her as her days progressed. She continued work with Pure Fashion shows, which she’d always told me encouraged women to be cute and fashionable while still commanding the respect they were due as human beings. She reentered school. She welcomed a second beautiful, and beloved, baby into the world. She fell in love.

I’ll never doubt that the Holy Spirit was at work in my friend Shannon. By example, she encouraged me to be a better Christian and a more hopeful human being. She was the beacon of joy to counter doubt I felt in my spiritual life; she was the certitude that cancelled out confusion. Heaven was at work in Shannon. God was at home amongst us in her.

It is easy for us to spot the Spirit at work in such people and impossible to make sense of it when that light is snuffed out. Certainly the world is rife with God’s creatures, but we don’t often meet such shining examples of his work; losing one is a blow equal to the feeling of having God hide the Divine countenance from our sight (Psalm 104). If we come to know God through the works of the Spirit, how do we make sense of the loss of the Spirit-filled?

My friend Shannon was murdered this weekend. Her two babies lost a wonderful mother, and her friends and loved ones a source of great joy, love and spiritual sustenance. Nothing can be said to make sense of this. There is no positive spin; there is no appealing to fate; there is only the void. This world that she lit feels her loss.

In our grief we feel only her absence. It’s my hope, though, that someday her children will be blessed with stories of the beautiful life which Shannon led: of the work which she did, of the goodness she embodied, of her loving generosity, and of the gifts she worked diligently to give them. It’s my hope that they, too, will come to see that the Spirit was at work in Shannon, and that they’ll know that for a brief time, they were blessed by having her as a mother.

God was at work in my friend. I pray that God will continue to be.

Full of Grace

Readings: 1 Samuel 2:1-10, Psalm 113, Romans 12:9-16, Luke 1:39-57

Mary, the mother of God, is upheld as a paragon of virtue. Across denominations, Christians ask for her prayers, honor her sacrifice, and encourage her emulation. We are asked to be like her, and yet the task seems impossible. A mother whose virtue risked malignment from her own community, she raised the child she was blessed with only to watch him die a horrible death for others.

She stands with the other women in our readings as one to whom we are less comfortable relating than we are awing in. Renderings of her often do not ask us to meet her eyes: she stares down benignly, or clasps the boy Jesus in her arms, or cradles the crucified son; she calmly gazes at her bleeding heart.

It is easy to understand why some have worried that the adoration of Mary moves toward deification; such virtue seems to transcend our humanity. In her shoes, would we not be resentful? Would we rage against God, refusing to hand our children over, refusing to stand demurely by while others presume things of us which cannot be borne out?

And yet Mary discusses her pregnancy with Elizabeth, herself carrying John the Baptist, as a blessing. She bravely walks into a future we might call unhappy, fully willing to be the mother of the boy Jesus, destined to die on our behalf.

She calls this a blessing, not a curse. In general selfishness, I sometimes think I could not do the same. I am sometimes happy not to have to meet her eyes, when the blessings I crave would bring happiness without the later dismay.

The women in our readings for the week all bring the parameters of “blessed” into such perspective. Their names, and the names of their children, are among the most evoked in human history. Yet for all of their notoriety, they far from had it easy.

In the second chapter of 1 Samuel, we encounter Hannah at a complicated moment in her life. After coming through the grief of being apparently barren, and having God answer her prayers by blessing her with a son, Hannah is compelled to fulfill her promise to God by delivering her son to the priest Eli, his own life now dedicated to priestly service.

Hannah loved Samuel dearly; he was the fulfillment of her most cherished hopes. Even his name evokes the fact that Hannah appealed to God for him. And still she’s hardly able to know her son before she must give him up.

Quite conceivably, Hannah could be prompted to grieve, or even to “forget” her promise, clinging to her son. The sacrifice she had promised to make seems of the sort that can overwhelm. And yet our passage is a prayer of thanksgiving, empty of mourning or regret.

Hannah does not rage against God for giving and then taking away. Instead, she exalts God. Though undoubtedly heart-rent, she expounds upon the gifts of heaven.

She rejoices that heartbreak can be reversed—that the hungry are eventually sated by God, that through the Divine, the barren bear children and the poor are brought to honor (1 Samuel 2:5, 8).

Hannah’s prayer concentrates on the fluidity of our situations. What pains us most is blessedly finite, thanks to God; if the unjust exist in comfort and enjoy apparent ease, Hannah knows that that, too, can be reversed.

Hannah is thus able to dedicate her most beloved son to God as she promised; her awe soothes the pain of separation, her gratitude outweighs the coming loneliness.

The prayer of the second chapter of 1 Samuel compels us to transcend our angst over moments of tribulation, as well as our doubt; it insists on lifting up news of God’s greatness, even in times when we’d rather concentrate on the ways in which we are tried.

From Hannah’s story we move into Romans 12, which also insists that all be steadfast in faith, regardless of transitory conditions. We are enjoined to love with sincerity, to trust in God without wavering and to be sympathetic to one another, in recognition of God’s equal love for each of us.

Romans doesn’t promise continual sunshine or otherwise perfect days. In fact, it takes troubled times for granted: weeping, suffering and persecution are all anticipated. To be loved by God is not to escape hardship; loving God isn’t fed by the evasion of difficulties.

In the first chapter of Luke, we meet both Elizabeth and Mary during their respective pregnancies. Mary is weathering slight scandal as she visits her aunt; though betrothed, her pregnancy had raised eyebrows.

Nor had Elizabeth, married for many years and perpetually childless, been expected to be a mother. Her pregnancy recalls Hannah’s: she, too, had thought herself barren; she, too, experienced late motherhood as a blessing.

She, too, would ultimately be asked to dedicate her son’s life to God. Mary, too, would have to relinquish her beloved son to God’s ultimate cause. Motherhood required much of these women.

Yet Mary says “my soul magnifies YHWH, and my heart rejoices in God my savior” (Luke 1:46-47).  Her impulse is to praise God, not to snipe over coming hardships. She regards her child as a fulfillment, and as part of God’s great history of reversing misfortune: God has shown strength, has fed the hungry, has made Israel great.

Hannah, Mary and Elizabeth become the mothers of our faith. Their children each furthered God’s work on Earth, each made great sacrifices to bring the words and goodness of the Divine to fruition.

The humility and grace of the women who gave them life stand as examples for us. From those to whom much is given, so much is required: God’s conditionless love empowers us to love selflessly and without condition. There is a mystery to this which we cannot always unravel.

Understandably, we often stand uncomfortably before figures like Hannah, Elizabeth, and Mary. The great challenge of our faith, however, is that it compels us to join in on their prayers, to confront the possibility of giving praise when the reverse seems more natural. Loving God, in thanks for God’s love, purifies us of our worst impulses; it removes the sting of our pains. Or it can.

Our scriptures assure us that it will.

Tried as Silver is Tried

Readings: Acts 17:22-31, Psalm 66:8-20, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21

At the dawn of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine observed “these are the times that try men’s souls.” Then, the relative calm of provincial colonial life had transformed into tumult. Peace people had taken for granted seemed fragile and happenstance.


Paine’s neighbors were “tried as silver is tried,” the fires of circumstance laid upon them until they were reduced to their “elements”; reconstruction took time, strife and considerable introspection (Psalm 66:10).

Such people are never ultimately alone; they stand in history with all of those who have been shaken, faced with tribulations, and asked, despite this, to come out whole.

This week, that burden falls heavily on our neighbors in Joplin, Missouri, where devastating tornadoes destroyed most of the town. The images we receive from the tragedies are horrific, and are too infrequently interrupted by stories of heroism or rescue. So many were lost. There is so little sense to it.

In the face of such circumstances, “faith” can come to seem a superfluous or unhelpful term. Faith didn’t prevent the disaster. Faith can’t provide those in need with food, or shelter, nor can it return loved ones who were senselessly lost. It seems callous for us to demand that faith live in Joplin today.

Such times are times which do try our souls. It seems almost easier to put the God-talk aside and get down to the basics: to place our hope in FEMA or groups dedicated to disaster relief, to direct our tithing to the Red Cross instead of the collection plate.

That impulse cannot, and should not, be undercut. That we want to help our neighbors is good. It is, in fact, an imperative of the gospels. We simply should reject the notion that we have to push God aside to do so.

One of the photos which came across the wire from a CNN reporter was of a church in Joplin which was destroyed by a tornado. Its walls are gone; its pews and appurtenances are rubble. All that remains erect is a cross, which stands brazenly against the devastated backdrop.

The image is compelling. It provokes us in multiple ways, evoking both our passage in Acts, which insists that God lives in no one place, and the John excerpt, which says that, even when we feel orphaned, Christ is coming out toward us.

Even when it appears that God has left, God approaches. Even when we feel terribly alone, God’s love stands with us.

Such assurances are hard to internalize in these times which try our souls. That’s okay. We shouldn’t denigrate ourselves for being unable to scream the gospel truths out at times when our throats have been worn raw from expressions of grief and need. Burdens are laid on our backs; we go through fire and water (Psalm 66:11-12). We don’t see the promised “spacious space” beyond this in the midst of our suffering; it may be so distant that we lack conviction in its deliverance.

We don’t need to be sure that relief is coming to enable it to come: “God has not removed God’s steadfast love from us” (Psalm 66:20).

Our expectations of love lead us to believe that it means freedom from pain. This is not always the case. If we expect that of God’s love, we wind up disappointed: this very fallible, beautiful world which God gifted to us is laden with waiting pains. It also has such boundless promise. Dark days see dawns, even when they seem to stretch on interminably. We know this, even if we, permissibly, forget it in the darkness.

God made this world and all that is in it, Acts tells us (Acts 17:24). That decision on the part of the divine isn’t aided or purified by our impassioned recognition of it: it is and always has been the case. It is a gift not deepened by our praise, not intensified by our shrines; Acts assures us that God does not need our supplications to feel justified to be gracious.

God knows that there are days in which we will “grope to find him [sic],” despite the nearness of Heaven to all of us. We sometimes cannot see beyond our troubled times. Groping is permitted; fumbling is allowed.

Loving God and doing good are meant to be mutually inclusive acts for people of faith, though they occur, practically, with varying pronunciation of their parts. In these troubled times, doing good can be the beacon; it can be what makes our communities strong.

Those of us left standing after the skies cleared over Joplin can do godly work without being sanctimonious. We can donate our time and our care, can send money and good wishes; we can be shoulders and support for those left in sudden need. We can mourn the senselessness of the events and hope for, and work toward, a more promising tomorrow. We can surge toward recovery. We can do this without ostensibly proclaiming God; doing it alone makes use of the gifts of Heaven.

God still stands in the midst of this; the promised “Advocate” is present when we opt to answer our inward compulsions to do well by one another (John 14:16-20). Our confidence is shaken but our abilities remain strong; if we make use of the best within us to help one another, conviction will follow in time.

A Way Free of Maps

Readings: Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14

Christianity is not for those without a sense of adventure.


There are people who would like to believe that Christianity offers blueprints to predictable lives. If we behave in specific ways and keep our heads down, we can know, with certainty, precisely what our rewards will be. We can know, for sure, where it is we’ll end up. Streets of gold and choirs of angels fill our heads; we fall into believing that it all is imminent.

Christianity isn’t the first religion to prompt such hopes. To some degree, believers have always sought a soft place to fall. They’ve craved the exchange of deeds done for rewards reaped.

We name what’s around the bend heaven; we call it the kingdom on earth. We think that the eschaton, the end times, the so called “judgment day,” will bring it about.

Jesus warned that we’d know neither the time nor the place; his return would come like a “thief in the night.” This cautionary note is one that many have chosen to disregard, so his return has been predicted on particular dates: two in the eighteen forties; one in the seventeenth century; scores more dates proclaimed. May 21, 2011 now makes the list.

Yet those who have marked their calendars have wound up disappointed. They have discovered what our readings this week remind us: what Christ initiated was unique and remains uncharted. It is not for the faint of heart.

Acts relates the story of the martyrdom of Stephen. The early Christian was a paragon of the religion’s virtues. Had careful practice been a guarantee of lived reward, he may have expected greater fortunes than he experienced. Instead, he delivered word of God’s grandeur to a crowd, and found them so unready to hear the message that they stoned him (Acts 7:58).

The story is not meant to be read morbidly, or as a warning. We are not meant to reject Stephen’s deeds, or see them as misplaced. What Stephen’s story teaches us is that expectations are easily disappointed.

1 Peter also focuses on the precipitous nature of hasty expectations. In its case, Jesus is the figure who defies expectations—“the stone which the builders rejected became the cornerstone,” the letter says. The letter interprets the crucifixion as the world’s rejection of Jesus, but says that, despite them, he is most precious in God’s eyes (1 Peter 2:4).

Jesus’s story becomes one of reversals: messianic expectations are not met, yet he calls himself the messiah; those not popularly valued become, through him, most beloved in God’s eyes (1 Peter 2:10).

The gospel reading rounds out the mystery of these stories, when Christ informs the disciples that the path to the kingdom is not one he can chart for them. He can only tell them that he is the way; he cannot draw them a map. They seem to want one: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" they ask. (John 14:5)

His assurance is that we don’t need to anticipate the destination if we understand that he’s pointed us in the right direction. No maps or road signs; we don’t know when we’ll get there or what the destination is like. What we do know is that Jesus’ precepts are a step. Trusting in his word will prove more beneficial than an exhaustive account of the hows, and the wheres.

Assurances that Jesus will return on specific dates—May 21, 2011—should strike us as suspicious. They package the destination in a glossy, mystery-free manner; they suggest that the conclusion of the story, the end to which Christ is the way, is at hand. But they also forget the enigmatic nature of the scriptures.

They minimize the importance of Jesus as the way; they consider, primarily, end rewards.

Christians opt to begin down a path that presumes little about the destination, beyond that it will surprise. They throw maps out the window; they accept that they need only be guided by Jesus’ imperatives, which center around love. The journey, beyond that, is an adventure without burdens; it’s one that we can trust in and relish. We cannot anticipate the intricacies of the end; yet that’s the beauty, and not the burden, of God’s gifts.

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Shepherd of Sheep

Readings: Acts 2:42-47, Psalm 23, 1 Peter 2:19-25, John 10:1-10

There is a midrash which relates the story of two rabbis walking through the countryside. One of these, as the day progressed, continually pointed to plots of land to comment, “That farm was mine once, but I sold it to devote myself to the study of Torah.” Or “That orchard.” By nightfall it had become apparent that this rabbi had once been very rich, but now retained none of his earthly holdings.


The second rabbi, realizing this, began to weep. His companion asked him why. “What about your security, your later years?” the crying rabbi wondered.

But the first rabbi scoffed. “I sold what it took six days to create and attained what took forty days and forty nights to reveal,” he said.

We don’t have much admiration for ascetics any longer. The mark of one’s earthly success does tend to exist somewhere in the realm of possessions. We share the concerned rabbi’s discomfort, falling into panic or despair when it occurs to us that we may not have enough.

Yet the gospel imperative has always been to be like the second rabbi: unconcerned with things worldly, absorbed in communion with revelation and in righteous living. We know that possessions are transient; we believe that what God gave and continues to give, in the instance of the Messiah, in the visitations of the Holy Spirit, is eternal and of limitless value.

Our readings this week return us to the idea of righteous living, and pull no punches in doing so. The passage from Acts is one bound to cause controversy in our sensitive days: it relates the story of the early Christian community, and reveals an economic plan of the sort that would certainly make many of our fellow citizens tremble. After all, the news that “all who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need” sounds suspiciously like voluntary distribution of wealth (Acts 2:44-45).

Would the early Christians find dissidents among the most vocal protestors of our day, perhaps facing comparisons to those whose names have been reviled in Tiananmen Square? Or, a better question: would they have cared? The need-based-distribution in Acts reflects a core set of values: things do not matter, and while bodily needs must be addressed, our ultimate aim is God. They relinquished their possessions to follow the risen Christ because they recognized that life had more to offer than the attainment of stuff.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” declares the 23rd psalm. Its images are pastoral and its faith is in a God who ultimately provides. We deceive ourselves if we believe that still waters and green pastures are things we must chase after—as if eternal comfort can be bought at the rough price of an escape vacation to lush and verdant locales. Such places, the first rabbi reminds us, took six days for God to create; but the revelation of God’s word, the divine plan for our salvation, took 40 nights on Sinai, and an incarnation, to attain.

The first jubilant weeks of Easter are over, and we must descend from our high to the work of living as Christians again. Christianity is a system which we cannot cheat: when we promise to share, but withhold, God sees it, as is colorfully illustrated by Acts’ story of the couple who retains some of their property following a lie and to disastrous ends. God knows. There is no sneaking in; there in no holding off on relying on God, no basking in plentiful comforts of which God remains unaware.

Jesus speaks metaphorically of himself in John 10:1: “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit.” He asserts that he is the gate, and that the sheepfold consists of God’s people. A trespasser, he assures us, will be recognized. And so his way demands that we openly meet our best potentials, though such tasks rarely sound fun and hardly promise to be easy. And yet their reward is green pastures; their result is loving community; the image they project is of a happy and fulfilled people of God.

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Love and Dignity

Readings: Acts 2:14a, 36-41, Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35

A whispered suggestion came to the disciples, a rumor that Jesus had risen from the dead.


They would not believe it. “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel,” they said, and the tense was weighted with regret (Luke 24:21).

The disciples were in a pitiful state. They had shadowed Jesus faithfully throughout his ministry, fueled by anticipation: that he would fulfill the messianic prophecies, that he would turn the world on its ear.

Instead, he died.

On the third day after, they received Mary’s news of his rising. And yet they stood about, looking sad (Luke 24:17). These were not days in which people thwarted death, they thought; these were days in which people betrayed one another, and in which the innocent were crucified.

So they said to the risen Christ when he met them on the road.

Were they a foolish generation, or nondescriptly human? How are we to respond to them, standing oblivious before God?

Jesus revealed himself by layers once he was resurrected. He first directed the disciples’ attention to their own arrogance: “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” (Luke 24:25)

He next spoke to them in familiar ways, interpreting scripture as they walked together down the road, their rabbi, their teacher. And still they did not see.

It was not until he sat down with them and broke bread—“do this in remembrance of me!,” he had said—that their sight finally unclouded.

We can choose to dismiss them absurd; that interpretation is available. How could they not recognize him? But it’s probably more fruitful to work toward seeing--to do what we can to understand what is before our own eyes.

Our generation is foolish, too. We are haughty about what we think we know: we are speedy to moralize and quick to condemn.

Sometimes, we are right. We are very aware of some evils. We are quick to call them out. Terrorist actions, despots, third world poverty and inequalities: we see their flaws quite clearly.

But we also tend to treat evil as a virus to which we are immune. Such promises were never made: to love Jesus is not to become a redoubtable being.

We learn this from the disciples, as they grapple with the aftermath of the crucifixion. It is apparent in their confusion, just as it becomes apparent in our own: what we’ve signified as wrong in the behavior of others, we sometimes forget to remain free from ourselves.

Do we cheer in the streets when we hear news of a death? Do we gather at national sites and raise our voices to thank God for such “blessings”? Do we do this and still expect to remain credible in our faith?

We were disgusted to see footage of people celebrating abroad when the towers fell ten years ago. We sat steeped in our grief, counting our losses neighbor by neighbor, mourning those thousands of intrusions upon human dignity.

We became enraged with the perpetrators. We did not understand how anyone could celebrate the violent end of a human life. We still do not understand.

We know why we called the instigators “enemies”—they reviled the selfless love which is the vitality of our value system, which is the foremost imperative of Christ. We knew what their behavior should have been. Despite this detour, this unexpected “triumph for justice,” I’m sure we know what ours should be now.

We cannot allow our judgment to be clouded, even when we linger in our sadness on unanticipated roadsides. We must be better than the impulses which arise when we are grieved or provoked.

Easter is not just a gift, it is a charge. It is a call to exemplify “genuine mutual love, lov[ing] one another deeply from the heart” (1 Peter 1:22). We are asked to run the full gamut of our purest emotions in these days: to go from grief to celebration, to be brought lowly by Jesus’s death and then be raised to inestimable heights by his resurrection.

God so loved the world that Christ became human. The best of our potentialities were realized in Jesus. He was dignity, personified. Because there are always some among us who do not honor that, he was put to death on a cross. And because perfect dignity cannot be destroyed, God gave him new life.

We do not honor God by celebrating violent death. We cast our lot with the Romans of the Easter tale when we do so. There is little heroic about publicly rejoicing over cruelties visited upon our enemies.

Equivocation over the value of human life always begins this way: we find someone unlovable, someone who has displayed a penchant for evil, and we destroy them. We show no mercy, because they did not show any. We stand triumphant over the results.

Yet “one” is always a starting point. We forgive ourselves for not mourning a person who we’ve declared unmournable. But if we don’t recognize the horror and desperation—the inhumanity—of such choices, we begin down a path which does not lead to good, and which certainly avoids godliness.

We can look toward the risen Christ, or lose ourselves in the yawning abyss. Love characterizes one; dispassion and indifference, the other. The whole of scripture has preferenced love. If we linger too long in its opposite, we risk obscuring God’s grace.

There is nothing to celebrate this week which does not have its center in the example of Jesus. We have not stunted evil by killing someone for whom it was a tool; we may even have flirted with it by making a show of his death. There was no “victory for human dignity”; “human dignity” is a hollow concept if we do not allow that it exists in us all.

Even when we deny it in ourselves. Despite our best efforts at its obfuscation. No matter how caustic and relentless the attacks upon it. It is the light we should adjust our eyes to see; it is the truth that Jesus tried, again, to bring to our attention during that stroll down a Jerusalem road.


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Here I Am

Readings: Acts 2:14a, 22-32, Psalm 16, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:19-31

What was different about the risen Christ?


We can infer from the gospels that there was something unfamiliar in his appearance. Last week, Mary Magdalene met him outside of his tomb and mistook him for a gardener. Not until he spoke did she recognize him, and then came the joy of being unexpectedly reunited.

This week we recall his encounter with the disciples, who similarly do not seem to know him at first. He greets them, but not until he offers a sign—the wounds of crucifixion—does the light of recognition dawn on them.

Jesus walks about in anonymity. A resurrected messiah, we know, would have been wild news—people would have wanted to see him. Certainly the crowds would have exceeded those he drew before, even when performing miracles. But the risen Christ is obscure.

Even Thomas, an apostle, does not believe the news. His brethren assure him, in their excitement, that they have seen Jesus, that he has been among them again; but Thomas scoffs, saying, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe" (John 20:25).

This seems a gruesome request. But then, Thomas has been asked to wrestle with an unprecedented idea: that death might be reversed.

Jesus is understanding; he responds to Thomas’s insistence upon tactile proof. Put your hand in my side, if you must; he says. It’s me. And Thomas knows him.

There’s something different about the risen Jesus. Those who walked with him before do not know him until he declares himself. They do not doubt him once he is revealed; but they are hapless until the anonymity is peeled back.

This seems, to me, to be such a powerful injunction to be kind to those who walk among us. It is disquieting that the apostles saw him without seeing him; if they, who had known him in life, were so sightless before him in his new life, how are we, who see him only in the gospels, to recognize him?

Jesus said, “What you do to the least of those among you, you do to me.” He suggested he could be sought in the meek, in those brought low by their circumstances, in the hungry and in the searching. In the eyes which we often avoid meeting, there he is. In the lonely corners we do not visit, he waits.

I read a story this week about a young girl who was taunted and physically abused in public because of her appearance. This young twenties person was shifting between genders, and something about that piqued her torturers; they decided to assault her. To teach her a lesson? To put her “in her place”? Such acts defy reason. We are so illogically prompted to be cruel to one another.

The mystery of Easter is this: Jesus was crucified. Jesus is risen. Jesus walks the world again. We do not see him when we look for the man who healed, who walked on water, who fed the masses and defied Roman authority; that figure has departed us forever.

But what about those from whom we shrink? In the teenager reviled by their peers for daring to be who they are internally compelled to be: can’t we look for Christ there? In the face of the girl who was beaten, do we sense a glimmer of recognition?

The lesson of this season is that God does not abandon us to our fallible flesh. The world, post-resurrection, is a dress rehearsal, is an unset stage awaiting the last revelation. What we do in this moment has bearing on that; we have to ready our eyes to see.

Through our faith, we anticipate clear sight: “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy” (1 Peter 1:8). By acts of loving kindness to those we encounter, we attest our belief.

Hands which need to feel torn flesh belong to those who have not yet seen. Hands which reach out to greet those who seem, at first, just strangers, trust in the resurrection. We give our love to others knowing that it will someday come back to us, that Christ will someday from them say, “Here I am.”

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"I have seen the Lord!"

Readings: Jeremiah 31:1-6, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, Colossians 3:1-4, John 20:1-18, Matthew 28:1-10

Some two millennia ago, Mary of Magdala took a Sunday morning stroll to the tomb of her rabbi, the man they’d called “messiah”.


She walked through the streets of Jerusalem before the sun rose, John tells us, to get there. Maybe grief had jarred her from her sleep; maybe she’d never managed to capture sleep at all. The gospels don’t offer many details. We only know that she was suffering from the loss of him, as were all the disciples.

Perhaps she wanted to pay her respects. Perhaps she wanted to sit outside the tomb and question God: Why? Whatever her aim, she found that the bleak calm of the pre-dawn was shattered when she discovered that the stone which was used to seal the tomb had been rolled back.

The Gospel of John suggests that she ran to the disciples to beg their advice and supervision before proceeding. Other gospels present the moment differently: she and a companion are met by an angel alone, without the male disciples intervening. Whatever the case, Mary found herself before the open and empty tomb, and the whys? in her head were forced to morph.

It is Mary who is first privy to the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection. The gospels, again, present the miracle with variations: in John, she encounters the risen Jesus but does not recognize him; in Matthew, an angel announces his resurrection and fills her with fear.

And then she experiences the first post-resurrection dawn: Jesus speaks her name, and she knows. Or: Jesus stops her flight, greets her, and she knows. Light enters earth once again.

This is the wonder of Easter. On the Friday of Jesus’ death, the hopes of all the apostles seemed hopelessly disappointed. Messiahs were not supposed to die; they were supposed to radically, politically and noticeably transform the earth. Yet he left in his wake a still tumultuous Rome, a world still plagued by persecutions and injustices, and followers who were, quite frankly, stumped.

And yet the deed had been done; Christ, the anointed one, had initiated a period of new life, a new kingdom of God. Mary of Magdala was the first to be gifted with a viewing of it that Sunday morning; each Easter subsequent, our eyes have searched for it, too. We wake up and wait for God to call our names. We hold our breaths, anticipating Jesus’ coming in glory.

How far are we beyond Rome? Our kingdoms still disappoint us. This Easter morning, peace will elude so many people. As war rages on in Libya, as shots continue to ring out in the direction of Syrian and Yemenis protestors, peace will seem a distant prospect. Japan will still be struggling to recover from a devastating earthquake and nuclear leaks. Egyptian women will still be wondering how it is that they, though they thought they’d secured their freedom by participating, frequently at the fore, in this year’s protests, have once again been relegated to second class citizens. Our gulf will still be polluted and the people who depend on it will remain out of work. Cubans will have traded dictators. Tibet will still not be free.

The earth will spin to face the sun on Sunday, and light will fall across the regions slowly, and so many will not know it as peace-filled dawn. So many will not see immediate evidence of the kingdom of God.

And yet, the mystery for us is, each year in succession: he has risen. Indeed, Christ has risen. Death was defied. Something new began.

We are promised peace in God’s kingdom, and are still waiting for clarification on how that will come. Two thousand years have taught us, as three days taught the disciples, that there will be nothing conventional or predictable about God’s ultimate gift. We do not get peace here because he died; we are charged to work for it because of his precepts. Our wars and troubles are, to the degree which we create them, our responsibility; our souls are his.

We come to church together on Easter to celebrate Jesus’ new life. We come anticipating new life in Jesus. We gather in the pews because a new light has dawned. We wait for the risen God to call our names. We trust that he will.


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Let Us Rejoice

Readings: Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29, Matthew 21:1-11

I’ve done some meditation lately around the prodigal son. His story is an interesting one: blessed with an abundance of wealth, he foregoes prudence and elects to gallivant about, indulging every whim and, promptly, depleting his gifts. He winds up destitute, alone, and far from home.


This parable of Jesus’s has always been a source of hope to me. The prodigal assesses his situation and elects to return home. He cannot possibly do so with much expectation; in fact, when he arrives at his father’s house, he begs even a lowly position. But his father, overjoyed to see him again, embraces him, draws him in, and throws a banquet in his honor.

My door is always open, I have imagined Jesus saying. Though we exhaust years resisting God’s love and generosity, it remains always available to us, if we but ask. Home in God is, indeed, a radical kind of home.

It strikes me this week how different Jesus’ return to his own earthly home was. By the time he returns to Jerusalem, he and the apostles have been all around Israel, they witnessing his great acts, he performing miracles and teaching. His fame precedes him into the city. He may have had every reason to expect a grand reception. And, indeed, he initially receives one; the gospel tells us that the crowd spread their cloaks on the road before him, made his path laden with palm branches, and exalted him as he rode in. These reverent acts seem much deserved; unlike the prodigal, he has not embarrassed his father’s household. Rather, he has made its name great.

And yet, for Jesus there is no fatted calf. There is no banquet. There is no happily ever after. Shortly after his arrival in the city, he is betrayed and murdered. The results of that have reverberated through our theology down through the ages.

One could claim that my distress over considering these stories side by side arises only because I’ve misunderstood them. The moral of the parable of the prodigal son is not that we deserve to be welcomed home no matter our transgressions; it is rather a story that praises the son’s eventual humility, the father’s boundless generosity and which cautions against the brother’s jealousy. Obviously, Jesus’ story is neither a painful lesson that, no matter how boundless our virtues, we are not guaranteed an easy go; his story, theologians have taught us, relates more to incarnation, atonement, and grace.

All of this is true. But beyond these truths are internalized readings; and, in connection to the approaching holidays, I can’t help but think about how both stories have much to say about the fragile nature of returning home.

We are, obviously, expected to be more like the father of the prodigal than we are to be like the Roman community which demanded the homecoming Jesus’ crucifixion. The scriptures enjoin us to maintain an open door, as well as an open heart. Jesus’ spirit is a generous one; he operates in a mode of grace. If we wish to call ourselves Christ-like, so too must we be generous, and channels for grace.

But these stories also have something to say about what we expect from one another. To enter a former home, or the home of another, cloaked in deference belies our equal dignity as co-humans; it inhibits hospitality for all involved, which does damage that requires correcting. If we are invited in to another’s space, it seems best to enter with an open spirit, relegating to back burners questions of whether we have earned such hospitality. Love, under heaven, is something that perhaps none of us have earned, but which the story of Jesus tells us we all deserve.

And yet the other side of this is that temperance is still required. To bustle back home with an inflated sense of self, expecting to have our path marked by flower petals and bordered by grateful hosts, is as irresponsible as instantaneous deference. It leaves us vulnerable to volatile situations which humility might illuminate; it, too is a barrier to hospitality. Learning this lesson does not imply blaming Christ for his fate; the gospels tell us that Jesus’s knowledge transcended our own, and so he did not enter Jerusalem, or any situation, unaware of impending situations. We receive Jesus’ grace but not his foresight. What he could anticipate, we cannot.

What both of these stories lack, and which makes homecoming, in theory, so worthwhile, is mutual trust. The prodigal, because he has not earned a warm reception, does not trust his father to give it; the Roman community, though Jesus has proven himself worthy of a hearty welcome, refuses to trust in his goodness enough to get it. While the prodigal son has the fortunate surprise of being granted unearned and conditionless love, Jesus falls victim to Rome’s suspicion. Their stories are extremes; but they also highlight the dangers of refusing intimate connections with others.

And so I offer an Easter prayer—for all of us, wherever we may find ourselves: may our tables be open, may access to them be freely and lovingly offered. And may our entrance into other circles be easy; may we find others as welcoming as we strive to be. May we exemplify grace. In no way can I imagine more thorough rejoicing; how better to convey our gladness in God.

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You Shall Live

Readings: Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45

It’s like a scene out of H.G. Wells. An army long reduced to dust is reconstituted at the mere utterance of a prophet. From ashes they rise; bone fuses to bone, sinew follows atop, until the former fleshly figure is restored. At the command of a deity, winds rush through them, and again they are animate.


Our wonder redoubles: this is not science fiction, but the vision of a prophet. It is not a vision of what could be if the laws of nature could be subdued or suspended; this is a real look at what God can do, in any here and now.

What Ezekiel speaks of is not possible; it strains credulity. That belief in the word of God alone could reverse the effects of death seems a stretch to us, in a world so used to the horrors of death that news of it becomes almost banal. God raises the dead? Fine. Then where is the hand of the Divine upon communities in Haiti, in Japan, in Libya?

Did God not make promises through Ezekiel that God’s yet to make good on? Did Ezekiel not channel the Divine’s words: “‘and you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act,’ says the LORD”? We wait to see it; we are impatient.

But perhaps we look forward to the wrong miracle. In Ezekiel, the vision is of the world’s graves opening at once, and of all humankind marching forth animate once more, revitalized by God. And that would be a sight, indeed. Yet the miracle foreseen is not of the many called forth; the miracle anticipated is God’s undoing of what we thought to be final, and irreversible. The unspoken awe in Ezekiel is of a God who can, out of the bleakest conditions, draw forth perfect life.

“You’ll know that I am God,” the Divine says in Ezekiel. Not when whole armies of our forbearers literally march forward into Israel, but when death, which still strikes us as the most final and irreversible of human conditions, is, despite expectations, reversed.

In John, this death is literal: Jesus raises Lazarus from the grave. Lazarus shakes of his shroud and returns to his daily activities. The ground doesn’t shake beneath the footfalls of all Israel’s deceased. Only one man is brought forth. One. Neither is he crowned in glory or given a place of prominence; he simply returns to the life he lived before.

Yet for his family, and for those who witness the miracle, this is all that is needed. Jesus reverses their despair; he fills their hearts with hope. God can repair anything; God can transform what is dire into what is grand, and instantaneously.

We want a sign; we want to know God’s greatness as Lazarus did, as Ezekiel expected to. Perhaps we yearn for the restitution of those cut bitterly down: we pray for God to take away the realities of war, and of natural disasters. Or maybe we want the gospel’s miracle: we want to keep our one, want just one interjection of God’s hand in our affairs to show us that our prayers are heard.

Who are the Lazarus’s of our world? Before our vision flit innumerable figures who seem caught up in the flow of fate, and on whose behalf we hope for interjection. Who is raised from the world’s worst ‘deaths’? Whose situations are transformed?

My own prayer this week is that Iman al-Obeidi will receive a little Lazarus treatment. Her story already defies what is standard. She’s cried out in Libya, naming and denouncing unspeakable violence visited upon her by a few who manipulated power. Her voice demands morality, and righteousness, and justice, out of an environment which otherwise seems to be, currently, an ethical vacuum.

Her story, amid the turmoil in Libya, might have been quickly hushed up, or led to her own punishment or shaming. Yet she has not been hustled away; she continues to cry out, she continues to fight against her own dehumanization, and she pushes for freedom.

Iman al-Obeidi is in a tug-of-war, caught between distressed and unforgiving social mores, and the dignity and resuscitation she knows she is inherently owed. So far, impossibly, her humanity is winning out: she has not slipped from the world’s sight into darkness, but continues to loudly and visibly appeal on her own behalf.

She has already survived the unspeakable; she persists despite continual indignities visited upon her by public officials. We can extend our empathy in human solidarity: her last days have been a nightmare, and we know that what she’s been through cuts many people off from who they used to be. Such things form gulfs that seem irreparable. Iman has, so far, resisted such ends.

She fights for life. She struggles to regain herself—the Iman she knew before, a home and family from which she is temporarily kept apart, the basic, the everyday. She is warring for the right to be. And I join so many others in praying that she wins.

It looks as though she might. And if she succeeds—if she finds her way home, if she escapes social reduction—we can see God in that. We may count it as an answered prayer. Flesh back on bones, or normalcy back to those who’s boundaries have been trespassed; our prayers ask for the actualization of seeming impossibilities.

Our readings tell us that prayers are heard; they assure us that God can do anything. But they also reveal the confounding nature of miracles, in that what is miraculous is usually unexpected. We cannot dictate how God works in the world. We can only know that God does work in it, and that when the Divine moves, the results are guaranteed to astound.

Heaven has always managed to put Wells, and the best of his colleagues, to shame. We await the next installment of the saga; our breath is baited, our eyes strain to see.

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I once was blind

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

We human beings have not infrequently been certain that we’ve got it all figured out. We find ourselves defining the inscrutable: categorizing things as good and bad, desirable or not, praiseworthy or contemptible. Certain qualities of each are outlined. We stick to those with remarkable alacrity—at least, until we decide to redefine them.


As common as false understandings of our reality are counter stories which contest them. In the seventies, one manifestation was Marlo Thomas’s “Free to Be You and Me” project, which sought to counter dualisms which placed man above woman, rich above poor, et cetera. Against popularly propagated fairy tales which suggested that one’s highest aspirations should be to find a prince and settle down, Thomas offered figures like Atalanta, a princess who wanted to be a scholar, a woman who wanted to be independent. The overarching message of “Free to Be You and Me” was that good is a more complex concept than we have traditionally allowed it to be.

Marlo Thomas’s project was stunning and important. It was conceptually also less than new. Where troublesome dualisms exist, counter-stories crop up to combat them. Examples of this are ancient: while some will always be content to view the world from an either/or perspective, others, perhaps even particularly among the religious, know that reality, like the God behind it, is more complex.

God is great; and yet to say that God is great imposes any number of connotations. By declaring God great, we imbue God with certain expectations, and burden God’s creation similarly. The same is true with much that we uphold as virtuous and desirable; we think we know what to expect of that which we align with grandeur. But as our chapters this week remind us: all things great defy our expectations and have the potential to surprise us in their full revelation, and this is especially true of what is God’s.

1 Samuel deals with kingship. More specifically, it deals with the throne in Judah, with the king in Jerusalem, with the anointed one, or messiah, on Israel’s throne. It recounts the story of the selection of the second king, one often thought of as Israel’s greatest: David himself. But what is interesting about 1 Samuel is that it introduces a David who predates the marvels and highs of his years as the monarch. We do not meet a man of great stature, an imposing or particularly impressive figure; he is not a prince decked out in princely attire. Rather, the David we meet is a mere shepherd. He’s so far from threatening that Saul doesn’t even enter the tale to express concern over maintaining the throne against him.

1 Samuel reduces messianic expectations to their barest form. Israel would later anticipate a great ruler of the late David variety: powerful, of great military prowess, visibly capable of protecting and upholding the nation. But in 1 Samuel God warns that such qualities are, at best, peripheral: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). However opulent David’s kingship became, however innumerable his kingly victories, we sense that his importance was never tied into his impressive position in the world; it was rather something central to his being, some inner inclination, some interior depth only he and God could comprehend. His “successes” as a monarch become almost secondary.

Who was the David who God selected to be anointed? Less the trickster who bested Uriah; less the weapon savvy boy who defeated Goliath. The David God loved did these things, of course; but the David God loved was first and foremost a tender of sheep, a “ruddy [boy], [who] had beautiful eyes, and was handsome” (1 Samuel 16:12). He was simple, good, and unexpected.

If 1 Samuel reminds us not to seek great world figures out in expected places, it also reminds us that those who enjoy blessings in life do not necessarily do so as a reward for implicit virtues. Assuming that happiness and comfort are deserved, and tribulations likewise, has been another misstep in religion. From biblical times through the dissemination of the “Protestant work ethic,” the myth that we reap the rewards and just desserts of our deeds in this life has been a sometimes failing within Christian life.

In John, we find the gospel writer indicting some Pharisees for such mistaken beliefs. Are the blind born blind because they are sinners, and those with sight given sight because they are good? Of course not, Jesus rebuffs. Not only God, but humanity, is more complex than that reduction.

Jesus, on the Sabbath, encounters a man who has been blind all of his life. His neighbors have further afflicted him with suspicion: his blindness is understood as a punishment, either for his own sins or because of his parents’. But Jesus says that his condition cannot be so easily understood: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (John 9:3). Just as we feel inclined to declare his blindness proof of either God’s inscrutability or injustice—what benevolence is implied by a God who does such a thing to an innocent man just to prove a point?—Jesus spits in the dirt, forms mud, rubs it on the man’s eyes and cures him.

Jesus calls himself the light of the world; he is certainly this man’s light (John 9:5). The man goes from being scorned as a certain sinner, to being in perfect control of his senses, and perfectly able to testify on Jesus’s behalf; he becomes, automatically, a figure of importance in his community. “Here is an astonishing thing!” he says, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” (John (9:31-32).

Jesus gives him new life; more than this, because of what he had suffered, the formerly blind man is able to appreciate life and its gifts in a way those around him cannot.

And what of those who could see all along? Jesus reveals that it is they, because they take their blessing for granted, who have actually always been blind. He uses certain Pharisees as an example. They cannot understand why he has healed a man on the Sabbath. They cannot understand why he appears to reject God’s rules. But Jesus says: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind” (John 9:39).

He says this to those who think that the injunction against Sabbath work outweighs the good of healing the afflicted; they ask, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” (John 9:40) But Jesus finds their discomfort with his act proof enough that they are: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘we see,’ your sin remains.” You can see and be sightless; you can blind yourself to God by presuming to claim you’ve comprehended God’s ways. To have power is not proof of God’s favor; to be afflicted and yet trust in God—to maintain that ability to trust in God beyond reason—may be.

These are stories of reversals and divine surprises, and they may well serve as a reminder to us not to get complacent when it comes to understanding God and God’s ways. We should take care to avoid absolutes, to praise what is outwardly impressive as proof of God’s favor, to condemn that which seems different as necessarily bad.

If those who God anoints were found among shepherds and stone smiths, as each of this week’s messianic characters respectively were, than looking for God’s guidance from those who sit on thrones and live in high houses alone must certainly suspect. We must turn our eyes to all. We must believe that God’s beauty does not exclusively shine out from those who have had an easy life. God comes via the humble; God’s voice is on the lips of the meek. When whole communities are condemned as bad or sinful because they have not had it easy, we must understand that participating in that condemnation is not God’s work; refuting it is.

We have to also avoid discourse which equates creature comforts alone with blessings. If when we say our evening prayers, we find ourselves listing material things most among our praises or wants, there may be some convolution at work. Those who Jesus called blind in John had things; what they lacked was the ability to see beyond them to God. The greatest imaginable blessing, it seems, is standing in God’s light. To live life with ease is not proof of God’s love; to face difficulties is not proof of his rejection.

There are those among us who say that God hates some people, or another. We should read their injunctions alongside John, and see what happens when we compare them to those who are willfully blind. We should stand those called “hated” up alongside Jesus, who “breaks rules” by healing on the Sabbath: is the good of his mercy not similar to the good of their love? Aren’t love and mercy at the heart of all “rules”?

There are those who claim that natural disasters are acts of divine judgment. We should similarly read those claims against the ridicule coming from the blind man’s neighbors: was he blind because he sinned? Because his parents did? Can we not assume that greater burdens, then, are as disassociated from our deeds?

Our world is much more inscrutable than we’d like to believe. The Bible underscores this, though there are some among us who would claim that its worldview is simple, and attached to either/ors. Yet so much is still a mystery, and we risk blinding ourselves to the enigmatic divine by reducing all of it to so very little.

The greater task, and the more worthwhile one, is to dare to struggle to see: to locate God in humble places; the observe God’s grace at work where we have not always thought to look for it. Faith, in this way, is not a resting place but a constant search; we need only to adjust our eyes to the road.

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