Love Poured Out

This past Sunday we gathered for worship only a few hours after the horrific shooting in a club in Orlando, some present hearing about it for the first time as it was acknowledged and grieved from the pulpit. We worshiped that morning with that story ringing in our ears and hearts and with the story of a woman who comes to Jesus with oil for anointing and, in with tears and her ointment, anoints Jesus feet as a blessing and offering. Luke tells us that she was a ‘sinner’ and that “she stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment.” (Luke 7:38)

This woman has some things in common with the victims of the Orlando shooting. Beautiful child of God. Outsider, maligned, judged. She brings a beautiful gift. Jesus could have looked askance at her show of emotion and asked his host to take her away. Instead he welcomes her gift and her tenderness as an offering. He accepts her anointing.

Pastor Megan has talked about anointing as an outpouring of love. Placing the oil with our fingers on the body of another we tenderly become a conduit for God’s blessing. Feeling the gentle touch of another and the smooth oil on our foreheads is a physical reminder of the real and healing presence of God’s Spirit. In offering and receiving anointing, both Jesus and the woman receive a gift – he of tender care and hospitality, she of acceptance, love and welcome.

Anoint us, God. Pour out your tears and your ointment on our tender hearts. Pour out your salve of healing on our Queer kindred. Forgive us for our complicity and bless your beautifully made LGBTQ+ children with safety and protection, a freedom from fear. Anoint us all with love.
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A few of our children who were present welcomed anointing in worship. I am always so grateful when children know that that they are a welcome part of our community blessings and rituals. But anointing doesn’t only have to happen at church. You can offer anointing at home too! Essential oils are widely available and on their own or added to olive oil, anoint along with prayer can be a way to physically offer comfort and presence in times of stress, anxiety, or sickness. And children – all of us, really – can feel empowered to also offer anointing to others in the household, either with words or without.

I hope that our children (and all of us, really) know and show that we are a community where all are welcome in our blessing and worship, in the same way the Jesus welcomed an unwelcome woman. In a few weeks we will be able to publicly offer our hospitality and welcome as we meet parade marchers at the end of the Pride Parade with cookies and cold drinks. We will gather after worship at First United Methodist church and all are welcome to be a part of the welcome party (and from what I understand it really is a party). May we gather across generations so that we all may understand that (in the words of Lin Manuel Miranda) love is love is love is love. And we are all anointed.

The Good Centurion

This blog's title is 'What's Not in the Sermon' but every once in awhile a sermon so consumes me that there's not much left that's not in it.  That was kind of the case this week...

This is Memorial Day Weekend.  And as a gift, the Lectionary gave us a story about a centurion so that we might remember a soldier.  Luke 10:1-7.  A recap: After a discourse, Jesus went to Capernaum, where a centurion who had heard about him sent messengers – Jewish leaders – to ask him to come and heal a particularly highly valued slave.  Jesus commends the centurion for his great faith and the slave is healed.

My big struggle with this story and my immediate reaction to is has been, over and over: Jesus, why are you saying that a Centurion – occupier, soldier, holder of power – is good?  You praise this man? Basically, WTF, Jesus??  I really got bogged down in this incredulity and disbelief this week.  It is a good thing that Jesus can handle my skepticism and righteous (or maybe self-righteous would be more accurate) anger because I’ve been growling at him in my head – and sometimes to other people – all week.  I am not often an external processor, but I can think of at least 4 settings in the past 10 days in which I complained about Jesus and about this story in particular.

Here are some of the things we know: the relationship between the Centurion and the Jewish people is a complicated one.  Yes, role and title are military.  He is a ranking officer.  And yes, he has a lot of power.  He openly and explicitly describes the way his command is immediately obeyed both by the soldiers and the slaves under him.  Yes, he is the occupier, a foreigner and who commands not only people but wealth and means.  Under his rule, the synagogue of Capernaum was built.

It is something of a complicated relationship, that of the centurion and the leaders which he commissions to Jesus.  Or even between the occupier and those under occupation.  This man is, if we take the story at face value, a friend to the Jews in Capernaum.  At the very least he is benevolent.  He has invested in their community by building their place of worship, the synagogue.  But in the custom of the time, there is a patron/client dynamic going on here.  He makes a good investment to keep the Jewish population happy and grateful.  Benevolent or not he is the one with the power and the Jewish leaders are beholden to him.  They may be truly appreciative and they may feel that they are obligated because of his position and theirs to praise him and commend him to Jesus.  “They appeal to him earnestly,” (NRSV) “’He is worthy of having you do this for him.’”  Perhaps their feelings are a little of both.

The man himself never ends up meeting Jesus face to face, because again messengers intercept Jesus, this time with the message, “Don’t come.”  And with the audacity (in my mind) to compare himself to Jesus.  In his understanding of being a man under authority of another and through that authority also in command himself.  He is a man with a rank, and this is his framework for thinking of Jesus – someone who commands authority over (over demons, over illness, over nature) because he is under the authority of another (God).

A few weeks ago I spent a meal in a restaurant staring at the back of a shirt in the booth opposite me that read, superimposed over a weathered American flag, “Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you.  Jesus Christ & the veteran.”  And even now, as a pacifist Christian deeply steeped in the understanding that Jesus Christ’s death was one of non-violent love, that unmasked of the myth of redemptive violence, I cannot even tell you how wrong I think this is.  In that judgment I thought I knew all there was to know about the dude wearing that shirt – and none of it was good.  But I need to get over it.  Because the man who is wearing that shirt – the veteran (presumably) who was wearing that shirt – is a man who has great faith and whom Jesus loves.  There is no healing in my judgment.

The Centurion whose slave Jesus healed is a man who has great faith whom Jesus reaches out to in love and compassion.  If Jesus were writing a report card, and one of the subjects is ‘faith’, this guy gets an A+.  And A+ in worthiness, even if his self-evaluation in that regard is and F.

What I think of the centurion doesn’t matter.  Whatever else the Centurion is, or has done, or believes does not matter to Jesus.  The man had faith that a somewhat out-there Jewish rabbi had the power given to him by the God of Israel to heal a man in his household.  And to heal the slave without even being present, because the rabbi Jesus was under the power of God and was able to use that authority for healing.  Even at a distance.  Even though he hasn’t met him.

He hasn’t met him but he has heard of him.  And he has heard about Jesus ‘sayings’.  Immediately before this story, Jesus has given a sermon.  In Matthew it’s called the Sermon on the Mount and that version is a little more famous.  In Luke it’s called the Sermon on the Plain.  Let me give you some highlights (I bet you know them):

Love your enemies.

Do to others what you would have them do to you.

Do not judge.

Whew.  Jesus nails it every time.  He certainly puts me in my place and marks me with a big ‘J’.  Judgy McJudgerson over here.  He finishes off this sermon with this, “I will show what someone is like who…hears my words and acts on them.  That one is like a man building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock.

When he heard about Jesus, the centurion acted on what he heard.  He heard a sermon about loving his enemy, the centurion is counting on Jesus doing exactly as he says and loving the one who is his purported enemy.  Indeed, without even a word.  Without a question or challenge, Jesus hears the summons and goes with the messengers on the way to the centurion’s house.  Luke’s story is all about the Gospel being for all people, not just for the insider.

I spoke a covenant in community with you all as follower of Jesus in Seattle Mennonite Church, a community of radical hospitality, an open table and unconditional welcome so I better check myself.  I was challenged by my spouse when we were in conversation about this story the other night, “Look at it this way.  If a soldier came to you for help, would you turn that person away?”

Well, of course I wouldn’t.  No!  Shame on me!  Jesus is not going to make this man jump through hoops and recite the correct creed.  It is an appeal for help.  And not even on his own behalf but of a slave.  In fact, our congregation, in partnering with Valor Housing have to some extent already made the same claim as Jesus.  Soldiers are beloved members of God’s kingdom.  We have faith that housing folks will offer opportunity to find healing from the trauma of homelessness.

I am tempted, as perhaps we humans are, to categorize: good/bad; right/wrong.  I like to think I have an open mind, but in this area, I categorized.  I recently heard from someone in this congregation not long ago how hard it is to get along with other Christians and how resentful they can feel toward people who are supposedly the same and yet who have profoundly different understanding of what being Christian means. I decided I knew what that man in the t-shirt was like.  I decided I knew what that centurion was like.

I have been listening to a podcast called Shmanners recently.  It’s present by a husband and wife team (Travis and Teresa McElroy) who tackle issues of etiquette by category based on their listeners’ questions. They begin with the history and move on to current conventions and expectations in N. American society. The most recent was about apologies.  So they talked about how and when to apologize, but what they seemed to come back to was how to get along with those with whom you disagree and emphasized: you don’t have to agree (and you don’t have to apologize for not agreeing) but basically don’t be a jerk and apologize when anything you’ve said is hurtful or mean-spirited.

So I think I owe the centurion an apology.  Even if he’s not here to hear it.  Officer, I am sorry.  I am sorry that I made assumptions about you based on your position.  I am sorry I judged your faithfulness in Jesus based on my bias.  I am truly grateful that Jesus intervened with healing in your life and the life of your servant.  I pray that your faith in Jesus will only grow and that each of us can be open to new understandings of what that faith means.

And you know what, I owe an apology to the anonymous veteran in the restaurant.  I am sorry.  I don’t know anything about you, or the experiences you’ve had or the authority that you’ve been under and the situations that you have been in.  And I am sorry that I judged you based on a t-shirt.  I am sorry that I made assumptions about you out of small-mindedness. I commend your faith.  And I pray that each of us can seek Jesus’ healing and the path of life.

Safwat Marzouk, an Egyptian American professor at AMBS approaches this near-encounter between Jesus and the Centurion as an intercultural/ecumenical encounter. Like Travis and Teresa of the Shmanners podcast he says, writing in Christian Century,“Tolerance should not depend on denying one’s own faith”.  He also suggests coming with ‘open…hands, hearts and minds to receive the gift of the other for who the other is, finding way to serve one another and with one another.”

Well, you all may be better people than me.  I suspect that is the case.  But may God bless us all with open hands, hearts and minds.  May our faith in Jesus also be great and may we seek to follow.

Wisdom's Blessing

I have been dwelling with the call of Wisdom this week, as she raises her voice from Proverbs, calling to all humanity. God's Holy Wisdom in Biblical tradition is personified as a woman standing at the city gate and calling with longing for all humanity to embrace her. The Inclusive Bible reads in chapter 8, "Doesn't Wisdom call? Doesn't Understanding raise her voice?" and "I was God's delight day after day, rejoicing at being in God's presence continually, rejoicing in the whole world and delighting in humankind."

The Wisdom of God delights in us! I was inspired to write this blessing:

Mary Cassat

May you hear the voice of Wisdom.
And like a child who
     hears the call of her mother,
     and comes with eagerness
     as to a celebration,
May you run to her,
     where she waits
     with open arms
     to catch you up
     and lend you the warmth
     of her knowing.

Amen.

(Folks are welcome to use this in their own contexts, but please attribute authorship. Thanks!) 

You Can't Wear God...Unless You Can

"You can't wear God."

Lauren Winner's book, titled Wearing God, was dismissed out of hand by the nine-year-old in the back seat, where the book had been languishing for several months.  (I started it after hearing a presentation about faith and fashion by Clara Berg, child of my congregation and now the Collections Specialist for Costumes and Textiles at Seattle's MOHAI).  I had tossed the book back there after reading the chapter 'Clothing' and 'Laboring Woman' - the two metaphors I was most interested in and connected to my experience.

The idea that God is ready-to-wear should be no more surprising than God being our rock and foundation,* or the light for my path** or, for that matter, laboring woman.*** As it turns out metaphor is all we have for God, who is only knowable through human experience and language.  This is tricky for humans (perhaps especially young humans) who like nice concrete handles on which to hang ideas.  We want to know exactly who and where God is.  We like certainty to be tacked to the wall like a family photo so we can look at it and be reminded: ‘Oh that’s nice, there's my spouse, whom I love and who loves me and who is now at work just as I am at work and we'll see each other later.’  But God will not be tacked.  Metaphor is what connects God to our experience and helps us to understand and get a glimpse - even if it's a small one - of God's nature and being.  It helps us place God.

The nine-year-old should not have been surprised either, having recently learned about metaphors in third grade.  She knows that metaphors are not a thing themselves but are a comparison that describe an aspect of the thing.  In fact, she came up with God being like a cloud (to be fair: a simile, not a metaphor) when she was four!  We have read books and had conversations about God's many names.  At the point of the declaration, we had the conversation again.  I guess we all need reminders.

We need reminders that we can wear God, who is comforts us like an old sweater.  And we can dwell in God, who is our home.  And we can turn our faces to the warmth of God, who is our sun.  God the washing machine agitates us and starts us fresh. We experience and know God in a multitude of ways, many of which are in the Bible.  And because we are human and God is God, we can each determine the best metaphor for our own experience of God, in whose image (whatever that is) we are created.  What is yours?

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* “My God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold” Psalm 18:2

** “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path” Psalm 119:105

*** God: “For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept myself still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant.” Isaiah 42:14

Taking Pentecost Home

Dwell with the Word
Re-read the story of Pentecost (here it is in The Message) from the Bible or your favorite Bible storybook. A mighty wind and flames on heads and talking in languages. It's kind of a crazy story.

Goldfishflames

If Goldfish are a part of your daily snacking life, you could use them as a starting place for the story. I've noticed that when you turn the goldfish on it's tail it looks a lot like a flame. It could go something like this (if you don't want to sound like an awkward church robot, use your own words):

"Look at this! When you turn the goldfish this way it looks like a flame. That reminds me of the story of Pentecost. After Jesus had gone to heaven to be with God, his friends and followers were all together wondering what to do next. All of a sudden a huge wind blew. Then it was like each of them had a flame on the top of their heads (this would be a perfect time to put the gold fish on top of a small doll). 

They started talking in many languages about all that Jesus had done and about God's love. There were people from all over the world in Jerusalem at that time and even though they didn't speak the same language they could all understand the stories and they were amazed. There were thousands of people who decided to follow Jesus that day. That was the way the church began."

Let them Eat Cake

Pentecost is considered the birthday of the church. Have a Happy Birthday Church cake or make Holy Spirit cupcakes. You can even make flames from mini marshmallows and colored sugar. You don't have to know how to do fancy piping with frosting.

Wear the Spirit

Make clothes that will remind you of the Holy Spirit. Using flame-colored Sharpies, try easy tie-die on white socks or t-shirts. Simple instructions here. I actually tried this one (my socks on the left) and it was really fun.  I will enjoy wearing these and remembering that I walk in the power of the Spirit.

Ring of Fire

Spin your own fiery art with yellow and red paint, a piece of paper cut to size and a salad spinner. These instructions suggest autumn leaf shapes, but you could totally cut these into flame shapes and thread them onto a string or thread for display.

Spirit Walk 

This is a version of a prayer walk. Go for a walk and notice 'signs of the Spirit' around you. Since it's Spring there are lots of signs of new life around. You might also bring a camera, a notebook or vessel to collect things to put in a place that will remind you of God's Spirit all around you.

Marked with Love

John 13:34-35 is the lectionary text this week, but since we're doing a series on Acts, I won't get a chance to expand on this very valuable analogy.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

If this short teaching from Jesus could be summed up in an image it would be the basin and towel with which he had just washed his disciples’ feet.  He had stooped and taken their feet in his hands,  cleaned the dust and dirt of the day from them and with care dried them.  And then he had instructed them to go and do likewise.  They are to make themselves known as followers by acts of humble service and loving care.

It is by a love like this – humble, willing to serve, possibility even willing to die – that should set the disciples of Jesus apart and make them visibly marked as his followers.

As the parent of an 8-year-old I have become very familiar with marks that set individuals apart.  I’m talking about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the image on the flank of everypony in Equestria: the cutie mark. Each pony is marked with an image that represents their special gift. Often the gift and the cutiemark that it represents are way each pony serves their community.  The pony who’s marked with butterflies loves and cares for animals and nature.  The pony marked with apples farms and feeds the town. 

Cute though the marks – and the message – may be, the series’ emphasis on relationships, welcoming strangers, second chances, making friends out of enemies and discovering the way each one can contribute to the strength of the community has been a great seed for conversation about those things.  There has been much speculation in my household about what each of us might have as a cutie mark if we were ponies.  What one image sums up each of our special combinations of gifts and interests in a tattoo-like mark?

As Jesus’ disciples we know that we do each have gifts which we have been given by God.  These are the things we’re good and the things we love.  The things that work together with the gifts of others to build community and show God’s love to the world.

The love by which Jesus loved his disciples and the world is a powerful love.  We are charged with bearing that love in our lives now.  Jesus passes his very love onto us and we are branded.  And the way we put that mark on display is through the humility, service, care, compassion and non-violent acts of just peace.  Whatever each of our particular ‘cutie marks’ might be we are all marked and can be identified as Jesus’ disciples by his love.

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Finally, because the internet, these. 

  

  

Mother to the Lost: a Monologue

Seattle Mennonite Church

Luke 15:11-32

Let me tell you about my family.  I am married and I have two sons.  I love my sons.  I love my husband.  Yet my loving them does not make them love each other well, and loving them only deepens the grief when they are estranged or conflicted.

When he came of age, my younger son came to my husband and made a demand, “Give me my half of my inheritance.”  To hear it, I was aghast.  I was aggrieved.  I could barely believe it.  I did not think that we had raised a son to offer such disrespect and I questioned: Had we been too permissive?  Had he always felt such entitlement?  Where had I gone wrong? 

Maybe you already understand this: he essentially was saying to his father, to me, to his community, ‘I wish you were dead.  You’re nothing to me.’ What kind of a son treats his parents like that?  I was angry!  At my son and at my husband.  Because what does my husband do?  He gives in.  He talks to the neighbors to negotiate selling off land.  He liquidates some of our holdings.  He auctions livestock.  He hands over fully half (half!!) of our family’s livelihood to the boy!  He was a boy!  Foolish and vain and ungrateful.  And ignorant and naïve.

I heard the neighbors.  I knew the gossip.  The whole village thought we were irresponsible, undisciplined parents.  I was implicated in my crazy husband’s actions too.  They thought our whole family was crazy, and who wouldn’t?  Any sane father would refuse!  Would say, ‘Young man, your responsibility is here.  Your responsibility is to get married, have a family, to care for your mother and for me in our old age.  We didn’t raise you so you could leave us.  Shape up! Go back to work.’  As the head of the household he certainly would have had the right.

But he let him go.  So I had to let him go too.  We all did.  My boy had declared us dead, but when he left, it was as if he was the one who had died.  To not hear from him, to not know where he was or how he was faring.  There was nothing I could do. He could have been dead for all we knew.

Just like when someone dies, there was a hole.  I grieved.  And somehow life kept going, find a new normal.

Ever the responsible, my elder son just kept his head down, diligent as always.  It was a burden on him.  Now all the responsibility would be his but he was resolute.  A hard worker.  He’s a perfectionist - with himself and with everyone else.   Classic older child, really.  He never gives himself a break, never takes a day off.  My husband would never have thought to suggest it.  Life had found a new normal but it was a sort of half-life.  

I think the village saw this too.  We may have been irresponsible and crazy, but my son was the one who had abandoned us.  They saw the way our he cut us off and I knew they had the qetsatsah[i] all planned.  If he would ever show his face in the village again, the jar would be broken, the burned corn would be spilled, his name would be proclaimed and he would be ritually broken off from the community.  No better than a Gentile.  I have to admit, I was angry with him for leaving us but I was also grieved.  And I would be heartbroken were such a thing to happen.

It was hunger that put him back on the road to us. I knew there had been famine not so very far from us. And sure enough that’s where the young man went.  Lost it all.  Every last penny.  I don’t know who saw him first, but my husband got wind of it and I have never seen anything like it.  He was out like a shot – arms pumping, legs flying, kicking up dust.  No way for a grown man to act, the patriarch, the master of the house.  He was making a fool of himself.  I was glad to see the boy too.  I could barely breathe, in fact.  But the man was making himself ridiculous.  Again.

I’m sure that kid had his speech rehearsed.  He was always a big of a schemer: “I have sinned before heaven and before you…”  A hungry belly will do that.  But before he could get it all out, it was all robes and ring and sandals and fatted calf.  Musicians and dancing and feast.  Before he could speak the word to his speech but before anyone could organize the qetsatsah.  That boy may have spent everything and learned nothing, he may have been brought low and gone hungry, but he was not cut off.  I’ll give my husband this: he thought fast.  He looked like an idiot giving up all that property to a son that as good as proclaimed us dead.  And he looked like an idiot to prevent that son from being made as dead himself.  He brought the boy back.

I’m not sure my elder boy was so happy about that, though.  In fact, I know he wasn’t.  I mean, how does it make him look, after all.  He doesn’t like looking foolish.  But it all happened so fast no one had even gone to the field to get him so he arrived in the thick of it.  And like it or not, it was his responsibility to go in, to honor his father’s decision, to join his father as host.  He didn’t like it when his brother disrespected his dad but now what did he think he was doing?  Pouting and raging outside when his father and brother were inside. 

And again, my husband, paying no mind to his duty and position, leaves the party to beg and plead.  And he got an earful: “This son of yours spent all your money on whores!”  He almost spat it.  And I mean…where did he get that idea?? None of us know where the money actually went.  He hadn’t even talked to his brother yet – not that he acknowledged that they were even related.  His father is trying to bring him around. 

And here we all are.  Three lost boys – well, men – one lost and then found but maybe still lost to any understanding of what he really did to us and what this welcome back really means.  One lost in his anger and resentment, refusing to come in, to accept restoration for himself as well as his brother. One lost to any semblance of dignity and decorum and authority of position but wanting more than anything for both his boys to be restored.  Willing to let all that go.

But I love them.  God help me, I will always love them.  They are my sons.  He is my husband. And I pray: God, in your mercy, restore what is lost.  Restore them to you and to each other.  May not my love but yours reconcile.  In your mercy may a way be made where it seems as if there is no way.  In your mercy, God, may my sons and my husband find a place at the table and feast together.

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[i] Thanks to Barbara Brown Taylor’s essay,  “The Parable of the Dysfunctional Family” for introducing me to this notion of qetsatsah