Does Jesus sing 'The Song of Ice and Fire'?

For the past few weeks I have been somewhat obsessively listening to the George R.R. Martin fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. These stories are set in a medieval type world of kings and kingdoms, full of intrigue, sensuality and sword-play and with a little of the supernatural thrown in for good measure. I liken them, in some ways to a soap opera with swords. That said, these books are completely absorbing and have developed a huge fan-following, spawned role playing and video games and have been made into an HBO series called Game of Thrones named for the first book.

I think I was in the middle of the third book, A Clash of Kings, when I began to prepare for a bible study on Matthew 5:38-48, which begins, “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, do not resist and evildoer.” Jesus goes on to list several examples: turning the other cheek, giving the shirt off your back and going the extra mile. This is a text I love and love to teach, ever since reading Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers and his interpretation of these texts as a radical exposing of evil through non-violent resistance.

The two things I was immersed in could not have been more in opposition in their approach to the world and the response to one's enemy. Jesus refers to the lex talionis, that famous law, found several places in the Hebrew Bible that espouses that the punishment should match the crime. Leviticus 24:19, for example says, “Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered.” The philosophy of the Lanaster family, a prominent 'house' in the Martin's novels, is summed up by what seems to be their family motto, “a Lanaster always pays his debts." 'Paying debts' falls firmly into the lex talionis mode of justice. These words are usually quoted when referring to one wronged or harmed in some way and understood to mean that the perpetrator of harm against a Lanaster should expect and equal punishment in return: death for death.

The Song of Ice and Fire surely sees no end of death upon death upon death. I learned the lesson of not getting attached to any one character because heads will literally roll (or be mounted on spikes, mauled by wolfs, dipped in tar, scalded with hot oil or crowned with molted gold, etc.) Jesus, however, rejects lex talionis, opting against paying the debt of violence with further violence. He goes on to say that God considers all persons equally. The noble family does not inherently have more 'right' to justice. One person is not better than another. God "makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

In some ways, in spite of the perpetual violence, Martin takes a kind of ‘God eye view’ of his world. We hear the story from the point of view of many different characters and in many voices. Tough little Arya goes to sleep each night reciting the names of the people what she wants to see dead for the unjust and violent treatment of her or her family, but in other chapter we learn of the injustices done some of these same people that cause them to act out of their own fear and lust for vengeance. By hearing the story from each point of view, it becomes evident that no one is wholly and purely good nor evil.

In spite of the multi-faceted view of the world and it’s inhabitants, the world created by Martin remains (at least by book 5) a ‘storm of swords.’ When I read books like this that perpetuate the notion that war and the sword will bring the only true justice I continue to harbor that unrealistic hope that the characters will somehow find redemption in love rather than brutality. In fiction, however, at least in fantasy fiction where there is no non-violent love embodied in Christ, and no grace-filled God who welcomes all with equal compassion, there is no real motivation for rejecting violence. Lex talionis is all there is. In real life, I am motivated to repay love for evil, not because it will ‘work’ (although creative non-violence can be an effective tool) but because I am a disciple of Christ who has nothing to fear from violence and death.

The Song of Ice and Fire is really entertaining fantasy series and I will jump on the next book in the series when it is released next month. I don’t take my life lessons from it but I will continue to enjoy the way it has made me think about my own dedication to non-violence and be glad that my own life is not a fantasy.

Worshiping at Grace and Peace Church

For the past few months Joe and I have been trying to go more regularly to Grace and Peace Mennonite Church in Hongdae in Seoul. It’s an hour commute by subway, we always seem to drag our feet getting there and we’re always late. But without fail, the commute is worth it.

Since we always arrive late, we always arrive during the singing. This past Sunday one of the song was to the tune of ‘God Save the King’ but some of the lyrics were as follows (there is usually a translation printed in English):

…He makes wars rage no more
sword, spear, the tools of war
we shall not fear…

It choked me up. In the several times that I have worshipped with other Mennonites in a language that is unfamiliar to me, it is sentiments like these that speak most powerfully to me. I am so profoundly grateful and humbled by my God who works and moves and is petitioned for peace by Christians all over the world in many tongues and traditions.

Themes of peace are powerfully woven into the worship of this congregation. Here in the music, and later on during the time of prayer, when we learned more about the village in Jeju island that is resisting the construction of a naval base on it’s shores. Grace and Peace will send envoys to stand with the villages in solidarity and protest. When we pray together, regardless of the language, I know that all of these voices are being raised in a petition for peace and justice, and I experience the feeling of joy in belonging to the ‘people of God’s peace.’

That same feeling of gratitude and belonging infuses my experience of Communion. As pastor Nam says the words of institution in Korean, I can whisper a translation of both words and ritual to Naomi, not because I understand but because I know. The knowing and participating in this community ritual is awesome. I find myself hungry for it, eager to get to this part of worship as soon as we walk through the door. Grace and Peace celebrates every Sunday and with all comers. It is a celebration to which all are welcome: children, guests, seekers, foreigners like me.

I think it is no coincidence that it is these two parts of this worshiping community, the commitment to peace and celebrating the Lord’s Supper, which touch me so deeply. Among so many other thematic threads, peacemaking and non-violence is woven into the celebration of Communion, and following and remembering the non-violent Christ is at the heart of my faith and that of the Anabaptist Community. Alan and Eleanor Kreider with Paula Widjaja, remind us in their book A Culture of Peace, that the Lord’s Supper forms us a people of equality, non-violence and reconciliation. At God’s table we are all equals, sharing the memory of Jesus, who’s life and death were the example of non-violence love. We come confessing our wrongs and making right our relationships with each other and our God. The early Anabaptist recognized this and celebrated the Lord’s supper as often as they gathered for worship.

I am grateful that I have been able to participate in this community. In a few weeks I will post more about Grace and Peace along with some pictures of me preaching there July 10. Thanks be to God!

Jesus at the sauna

John 13:1-15
Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no share with me." Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" Jesus said to him, "One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you." For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, "Not all of you are clean."

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.

Someone asked me recently, after I’d written my last post, how it is that my life lines up with the liturgical calendar. I replied that really, it’s probably more likely that in my awareness of what is happening in the liturgical calendar, that I notice when things happen in my life that are relevant to that. Something like that happened today.

One of the things that I love (and I mean LOVE) about Korea is the public bath or tchimchilbang.  Not only can you can sit and soak in the various tubs, shower, scrub and sit in the different temperatures of sauna in the women’s (or men’s) only area. You can also, in the common area, wearing gender assigned pink or blue shorts and t-shirts provided by the sauna, eat at the restaurant, work out on the weight equipment or cardio machines, watch tv, go online, sit in a massage chair, get your nails done or any other variety or personal services.  And more.

It is an awesome place to relax and so much better than my cramped shower room at home. I try to go at least once a week. I never feel self conscious about my body or about being naked; after you go once you realize that bodies – even Asian women’s bodies which are sexually idealized by western media – come in all shapes and sizes. But I do feel a little conscious of being a very pink and western woman in the otherwise all Korean setting. This is never more true that when I bring Naomi. Who also loves getting naked and wastes no time stripping, jumping in the tubs and playing, often with joyful noise – in the water, hopping from pool to pool, slipping and splashing and otherwise drawing (completely obliviously) as much attention to her noisy, adorable pink and blond self as possible.

So…when I go on my own I try to blend in, keep to myself, take advantage of not having to watch like a hawk a child who has no qualms about slurping the draining water off the floor (I know…so gross). Today was no exception. After a very satisfactory run and 20 or so minutes spent in the hot water, I found a stool and shower in a corner and started my scrub.* It’s pretty common for women to come together and when one can’t get her own back, her friend will scrub for her and then vice versa. It’s definitely preferable to trying to scrub your own, and when I’ve gone with my friend Rora and it works out nicely. No awkward stretching, no missing the area right in the center where you just can’t quite reach.

This morning I was doing the awkward stretching and reaching but in spite of that was quite happy with the scrub experience. I was thinking, in my corner, that I was inconspicuous, but I was surprised in my ablutions when a young women approached me and gestured to me an offer to scrub my back. Almost before I could indicate an assent she’d begun the best back scrub I have ever had and at the end poured the cool water from the basin in front of me over my back to clean all the suds and dead skin off the freshly scrubbed area.

I thanked her as fully as I could with my small vocabulary, then I gestured to return the favor. She refused. As I was about finished, I did a final shower rinse, collected my various soaps, hair products and scrubbers, wrapped up my hair and went out to change. And as I got dressed and brushed my hair and packed up my belongings, I could think only of Jesus. Specifically of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

Maundy Thursday was yesterday and I didn’t do anything to mark the date. I didn’t even remember it until my encounter today. Yet Jesus managed to take the form of a Korean woman offering to scrub my back as a reminder of the day. Like him, she refused to let me wash her. She made a pure act of service to someone whom perhaps she saw as a stumbling and struggling foreigner, or perhaps was just a simple thing she’d have done for anyone. In any case, I came away with new and grateful skin and a new and grateful heart. Thanks be to God!

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* In the Korean spa, there are four or five pools in the center of a large, stone tiled room. All around the room, in addition to a few stand-up showers surrounded by stations, are low shower stations along a marble shelf about a foot off the ground. Each shower station has a detachable shower head, a mirror and usually a plastic basin or two and a short plastic stool that nicely forms to one’s butt. Women go to the sauna several times a month to soak and scrub every inch of their bodies with small abrasive mitts. The cutest is when moms bring small babies. The last time I went there was a family with the absolutely fattest and happiest baby ever with her mom and older sister. That splashing baby totally made my week.

Resurrection is Gradual - a note for the SMC newsletter

This year, as you might expect, Lent held none of the same ritual celebrations that it often holds for me. The week of Ash Wednesday I was sent a very nice facebook message from Jeanne Rempel noting my absence from the Ash Wednesday service that, for the past five years, we have planned together. I missed her, and that service, too. I would never have thought that I would miss it – another evening commitment among so many. I even missed cleaning my fire-place and burning the previous year’s palms as I’ve done the past few years. Those events have been a marker for me. And then I missed the regular way in which worship calls our attention to the Lenten journey. This past Sunday, I longed for the palm (or bamboo) procession, the joy of the hosanna hymns and the turning with Jesus toward the passion and the cross.

This year, my Lenten experience has been all about the waiting for and coming of spring. It has been agonizing. Spring comes too early in Seattle for Easter and the year’s first blooms to coincide. Here in Korea, where is was genuinely, bone-chillingly cold during the winter, I ached for spring, for sunshine, for warmth on my skin. I kept hearing about how beautiful spring in Korea is, but all around through March and into April, spring seemed to have no intention of showing itself. Every morning, when I walked Naomi to school I would examine the branches of the hedge outside our building. Was that a hint of a shoot breaking through the grey thicket? Never. And when, finally, some tiny buds began to appear, again every day I would look for signs of them opening into leaves or blossoms. The magnolias seemed to take months, the cherry blossoms weeks upon weeks. I have never waited with such eagerness for the blossoming of spring, even in the Canadian winters of my childhood and youth.

By now the magnolias and the cherry blossoms are both beginning to shower their petals on the sidewalks, but there are still azaleas to wait for. And the grass and trees have yet to really come into true green. There is more to wait for, but this year, for me Easter comes slowly, achingly, joyfully and - most remarkably - very, very gradually.

The last time an article of mine appeared in the SMC newsletter, I said that I was ‘on the upward trajectory.’ Indeed it continues to be so. And that too has been and is a gradual but undoubtedly satisfactory journey. I have been quilting and sewing everything I take a notion to make (and to have the time and space to engage in this creative endeavor is something and cannot be more grateful for), reading for pleasure and challenge, (most recently Rob Bell’s Love Wins which I strongly recommend) and most recently re-engaging my pastorly/teacherly mind through leading a bi-monthly Bible study at our English worship service and teaching a class on Anabaptist worship to a small group of young adults exploring Anabaptism for the first time. This last is at the Korea Anabaptist Center.

New life hardly ever happens all at once. There is a moment when the baby is born, when the shoot bursts through the ground, when the flower petals break from the bud. But life has been working all along. This is surely the case for me: God of Life, Creating Spirit, Risen Christ, working in me all through the waiting and longing of Lent.

This Easter I hope to spend celebrating resurrection – each gradual moment of it – with fellow Mennonites at Grace and Peace Mennonite Church. We will sing, and pray, share Communion and communion, and I will give thanks. I miss you all and look forward to seeing you all again. Peace of the risen Christ to you this Easter.

Quilts are made to use

I finished this labor of love and am pleased that Naomi really likes it. She called out to me the second night tucked in under it, "Thank you for making this for me, mommy." Some people treat quilts like precious jewels, which I guess they are, but I'm of the opinion that they are meant to be used. So I hope she uses it till it wears out. And then I'll have the pleasure of making her another one and maybe by that time she'll be old enough that we can do it together.

Here are a few pictures.

God is a boy...

As we were getting ready to leave for preschool this morning, Naomi said to me, “I don’t like God because he’s a boy.” Yikes!

I did not show my dismay, however. I just replied, “God isn’t a boy or a girl. And God is both a boy and a girl. God is everything at once.”

To this Naomi replied, “What’s God’s name?” As if, knowing God’s name would be proof.

“God,” I said. “But God has many names. People know God as Comforter, Yahweh, even ‘Rock’” Saying the first things that came to mind.

“And Cloud?”

“Yeah, and God is sometimes a cloud.” Then, as we were putting on her shoes I asked her if, after school, she’d like to look with me for some of the names for God in the Bible, to which she nodded and that was that.

But, that is not that. How has the daughter of a feminist pastor already learned that God is gendered. And that she can’t like God because God is not her gender? Naomi is at this stage in her development, figuring out what it means to be a girl, and what it means to be a boy. She sometimes also says that she does like daddy because he’s a boy. Or she only likes me because we’re girls. So I don’t really think that the God’s purported gender would ultimately inhibit her loving God, but that’s not the point, of course, is it?

I have not been doing my job. Even with those books about God having different names and God being everywhere and my un-gendered talk about God, Naomi still knew that God was a ‘boy’ because that’s the language that everyone else uses. But, as anyone who’s given any though the question of a gendered God knows, language makes the naming of God tricky because our personal pronouns just don’t cut it.

To me this question challenges me at a particularly relevant time. I’m beginning to prepare a study on the Lord’s Prayer for our small English congregation. The Lord’s Prayer, which begins “Our Father in heaven.” We say it every Sunday, so I decided we should be thinking about it’s contents. And now, thanks to Naomi I’m thinking about how, with my Korean friends, I will address that very first line. It’s how Jesus instructed us to pray, so what does it say about who God is, gendered and otherwise?

I suspect that it might be a little radical for me to suggest that God might be anything other than benign abeoji. In Korean, as in English the word used is the more formal ‘father’. Yet Jesus invites his disciples to begin addressing God as appa, in Hebrew abba, something more akin to ‘daddy’. For Jesus’ disciples this meant an invitation into the arms of an intimate God. A God whose new community is like a family. But now for many using calling God ‘father’ or even ‘Daddy’ is not comforting but a stumbling block.

When I was a camp counselor at camp Valaqua, north of Calgary in Alberta, I butted heads several times over the differing theology I had from another (male) counselor, his being much more conservative than mine. But I was surprised to find that when it came to naming God, he readily accepted mothering imagery. As we talked about it, I discovered that because his relationship with an abusive and neglectful father, he had great difficulty thinking about or praying to a Father in Heaven.

The United Church of Canada congregations that I am familiar with in Winnipeg pray, “Our Father and Mother in heaven.” This is a little messy and confusing but at least acknowledges the complication of gendering God. I think when I address this prayer on Sunday I will talk about the multiple ways that we are invited into an intimate relationship with the Creator of heaven and earth. I believe that is what Jesus wanted for his disciples then and now.

Once again I am grateful to Naomi for helping me to think about who God is. In this case, she has also reminded me to help others think about who God is…Creator, Adonai, Yahweh, Sustainer, Spirit, Cloud, Light Rock…The list, of course, goes on. Thanks be to She.

God looks like a cloud

Most of the time, engaging Naomi in conversation about God or Jesus seems pointless; engaging her in anything that is not directly about her seems pointless. But Naomi and I had a conversation the last week about God, begun at her initiation. Although it may have been prompted by the fact that often before bed I encourage her to think back over the day and think of things that she is thankful for or that made her happy, and things that made her upset or angry. And then we (I) offer those to God. Most of the time, it is hard to pin her down even to this task.

On this bed-time occasion as we were settling in for story time, she said, with no prompting, “We can’t love God because we can’t see him.” (I did not teach her male pronouns!) Nor could God love us, because God can’t see us. I told her that God is everywhere, whether we see God or not. I reminded her of a little board book we used to read about God being everywhere we look. I also wondered to her, “What do you think God would look like if you could see God?” Her answer was immediate: “Like a big cloud.”

I was a little taken aback by her answer because we’ve never in my memory talked about this imagery for God before, and I’m not sure where she came up with it. I was also a little startled because I had just been reading the week’s lectionary text (Matt 17:1-9), the transfiguration, in which God does indeed appear in a cloud and speak words of affirmation and love about Jesus. Reading this text what struck me most was the tenderness with which God spoke of Jesus, “my son, the Beloved.” And then, how tenderly Jesus speaks with his disciples, touching them and saying, ‘it’s okay, don’t be afraid.’ Because of course they were scared out of their wits. They had no idea that God looked like a cloud, or spoke from a cloud.

Naomi asked me in our conversation if God could call on the phone or on the computer like we do with grandma and grandpa (I had said it would be nice if we could see and hear God – it would make life a whole lot clearer). The disciples had no similar expectation of direct communication from the Divine. Yet here they were overwhelmed by a vision of the revered prophets and surround by a cloud of the Almighty.

So Jesus' response to them was somewhat like mine might be to my daughter, who needs a lot of forewarning when something new happens and doesn’t take easily to change or surprises – even good ones, even when it’s part of routine. The sudden appearance of prophets from the past and God speaking from a cloud was quite a surprise and not exactly a routine occurrence in the life of the disciples. It’s a wonder that the disciples didn’t break down in screams and sobs or just plain run away the way Naomi might.

Jesus offers tenderness and instruction and boundaries. He encourages. He is not frustrated by their confusion or lack of understanding. If only my parenting were so. And thanks be to my Heavenly Parent, for being present, comforting and understanding even in my fear and confusion and misplaced intentions.