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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