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tomatode

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
9

the lie that is
the conformity
of the supermarket
is unearthed
in my garden;
the tomatoes here
have names:
lemon boy,
early girl,
cherokee purple,
green zebra,
roma, sun sweet –

and shapes,
and colors,
and tastes –
oh, the deliciousness
that bursts
with my bite
as I stand
in the dirt
by the vines;
I can’t even wait
until I’m back
in the kitchen.

their talents
and uses
are as varied
as their tastes:
sauced, sliced,
sandwiched,
saladed;
summer’s gift
from spring’s
planting –
and enough
to share.

Peace,
Milton

god’s restaurant

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
13

When I got to work yesterday, Chef said he wanted me to work garde manger, which is the salad and dessert station, since I knew the fish station well. Over the next week or two, I will learn the remaining stations – grill, appetizer, and pizza – so I can move and cook wherever he needs me. Garde manger is an assembling, rather than a cooking, station. The first key is good preparation. There are lots of bins that need to be stocked with dressings, condiments, fruit, vegetables, and lettuces so each salad or dessert can be put together elegantly and expeditiously. Our salads are:

  • Caesar (chopped romaine, Caesar dressing, homemade garlic-Romano-herb croutons, shaved parmesan cheese);
  • Spinach (baby spinach leaves, julienned red pears, crumbled Great Hill bleu cheese, candied walnuts, warm bacon vinaigrette);
  • Mixed Greens (mesclun mix, sliced cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, sherry mustard vinaigrette, and beet curls);
  • Wonton salad (mesclun mix, pine nuts, feta cheese, julienned granny smith apples, and artichoke vinaigrette in a fried wonton bowl).

Our homemade desserts are crème brulee, peach cobbler, flourless chocolate torte, warm chocolate peanut butter bombe, and mango cheesecake. Each of them is garnished with fresh fruit and berries.

The way the kitchen is set up, the salad and pizza stations are enclosed by a bar in the middle of the restaurant, so I got to see people as they came in to the dining room. Some were dressed nicely, others looked as though they had been out running errands or knocking over liquor stores and got hungry all of a sudden. There were couples, some small groups, and one woman who was eating by herself. When it comes right down to it, we’ll serve anyone who walks in to eat. We’re a restaurant; that’s what we do.

One of my favorite songs is Paul Simon’s “America,” which tells the story of two people traveling together. At one point, the lyric talks about a game they are playing:

Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces.
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy.
I said “Be careful his bowtie is really a camera.”

As I looked out over the dining room last night, I couldn’t help but play the game myself, imagining the conversation between the older couple that sat on the same side of the table together, or the younger couple who sat next to them, facing each other so that all I could see was the man’s face. The first couple looked much happier. There was a table of four women who were animated in their conversation and the six-top that came in around seven and clinked their glasses through two rounds of drinks before they even opened their menus. All of them, I’m sure, drove past other restaurants to come to our place. All of them, I’m assuming, have stuff in their refrigerators at home.

What brought them to our place to eat on a Tuesday night?

Before I went to work yesterday, I had a chance to read this post by Simon in which he talks about a sermon he preached entitled “A Maitre d’ in the House of God,” which may be one of the best sermon titles ever. He also includes this quote from his new book, God Next Door:

[I]f the only language of place and locality that we use in reference to the church is that of world, nation or society, we’re in danger of missing the most primary implication of the Incarnation …It is the localness of the Incarnation that makes this profound act of God so confronting and so comprehensively saving. So, too, the church. Should the church fail to grasp its most immediate relationship to place, it may well fail to be the presence of God in a much broader context.

This morning, Ginger handed me a package from Barbara in Brooklyn (thank you, Barbara!) that contained a copy of Take This Bread by Sara Miles. She begins her story this way:

One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans – except that up to that moment I’d led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.

Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I’d scorned and work I’d never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all but actual food – indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I’d been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.

Both Simon and Sara are talking about church as a place where people feed and are fed: God’s Restaurant, to use Simon’s metaphor.

The [parable of the Great Banquet] in Luke’s gospel paints a radical and challenging picture of God’s kingdom. It’s a confronting picture for the church. It is certainly not comfortable, predictable, or safe. To be engaged in God’s restaurant is a potentially life changing and life challenging call.

It is God who makes up the guest list. We have no say in who is invited and who isn’t. The seating arrangements and dress requirements have nothing to do with us. Should the master wish to change from sit-down silver service to cafeteria-style buffet, that’s his call. We should be conscious of the ease with which we can become like those who made their excuses, those who had pre-determined what the host could do and could not do, who the host could invite, and what the seating arrangements would be.

Simon’s words reminded me of the way Ginger recounted a conversation in her sermon last Sunday:

Our friends, parents of three of our godchildren, live in an affluent white suburb of Nashville. I’ve spoken of them before and the measures they take to keep their children connected with a broader world outside of their very comfortable white life.

Yesterday we go to see them for a last minute surprise visit and a narrow window for conversation. During our hour together, we struggled with their church dilemma. They are caught because they want to be in their neighborhood church and appreciate the way their soon-to-be teenage daughter is accepted there, and yet what they hear in worship are subtle, fear-based messages about terrorists, homosexuals, abortion clinics, race, and economics. Questions about living out an intentional faith-filled life are not asked.

In the midst of their struggle, their twelve year old inquired, “Are we expecting too much of a church for it to be multiethnic and inclusive?”

On the dust jacket of Sara Miles’ book it says, “A lesbian left-wing journalist who covered revolutions around the world, Miles was not the kind of woman expected to see suddenly praising Jesus.” That sentence says at least as much about the church as it does about Miles and her friends. The painful reality in my goddaughter’s question is many local churches answer that question in the affirmative. We think it is too much to ask because we can’t be comfortable and challenged at the same time. We don’t trust that love casts out fear, even though God tells us that over and over and over again. In the face of that reality, Simon and Sara give me hope that fear will not triumph over faith when it comes to feeding Jesus to the world, one neighborhood at a time.

It’s God’s restaurant. Dinner is served.

Peace,
Milton

finding a new rhythm

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
0

I’m on my way out the door to work and wanted to take a moment to say I haven’t written because I’m adjusting to regular work shifts and trying to carve out writing time between work and the rest of life. I’ll figure it out soon. For today, I leave you with lyrics to Patty Griffin’s wonderful song, “Making Pies,” about someone who worked at the Table Talk Pie Company in Worcester, Massachusetts. The video was put together by someone other than Patty.

It’s not far
I can walk
Down the block
To TableTalk
Close my eyes
Make the pies all day

Plastic cap
on my hair
I used to mind
Now I don’t care
I used to mind
Now I don’t care
Cause I’m Gray

Did I show you this picture of my nephew
Taken at his big birthday surprise
At my sister’s house last Sunday
This is Monday and we’re making pies
I’m making pies
Making pies
Pies

Thursday nights
I go and type
Down at the church
With Father Mike
It gets me out
And he ain’t hard to like
At all

Jesus stares at me
In my chair
With his big blue eyes
And his honey brown hair
And he’s looking at me
Way up there
On the wall

Did I show you this picture of my sweetheart
Taken of us before the war
Of the Greek and his Italian girl
One Sunday at the shore

We tied our ribbons to the fire escape
They were taken by the birds
Who flew home to the country
As the bombs rained on the world

5am
Here I am
Walking the block
To TableTalk
You could cry or die
Or just make pies all day
I’m making pies
Making pies
Making pies
Making pies


Peace,
Milton

simple man

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
7

Wednesday night was a good night for me at the restaurant.

Three weeks into the job and the learning curve is beginning to flatten a bit: I’ve learned the fish station well and have begun to pick up on the appetizer and garde manger stations. (Garde manger is the station that assembles the salads and desserts.) When I get to work, I am able to see what prep work I need to do without having to ask too many questions, which leaves me time to ask other questions of Chef, relating to how he organizes the kitchen, manages food costs, and creates the menus. Two things have impressed me most: one is how little waste there is in what we do and the second is the elegant simplicity of his dishes. The point is to let you taste the ingredients, not to cover them up with sauces and spices to show off.

Weeknights, there are four of us on the line: one at the grill (usually Chef), one at the fish station, one doing garde manger and pizza, and one on appetizers. Gianni, of pasta recipe fame, works appetizers. He is only 19 and came to the US from Italy about two years ago. His English is good and his accent is thick and musical. He has an affable spirit and he loves music – mostly classic rock. Occasionally, he asks me for a ride home, which he did on Wednesday. When we got in the car, he said,

“You like the classical music?”

“Sure,” I said. “I don’t know much about it, but I like it.”

“I found this CD used. For a dollar.” (I wish I could type the way he says, “dollar.”) “It’s OK to play it?”

“Sure,” I said again.

“It’s the Messiah (which he pronounced mess-see-ya) — by Handel. Do you know it?”

“That’s one I know,” I answered.

“It’s beautiful. And I found it for only a dollar,” he said again, since a bargain is a big deal on a line cook’s salary, I’m sure. He put the CD in the player and asked me to punch down to the ninth track. “Hallelujah Chorus,” he said, smiling. “It’s very beautiful.”

Wednesday was one of those New England summer days that make you remember why you live in New England. The air was dry, the breeze was cool, and the temperature barely got about seventy degrees. Driving home that night, we had the windows down and wound our way through Plymouth and Kingston under a starlit sky and an almost full moon. Since it was going on eleven o’clock, the streets were mostly empty and the towns were quiet. All we could hear was the quiet hum of the engine, the tires on the road, and the breeze as it carried the voices past our ears and out into the night:

and he shall reign forever and ever . . .

I couldn’t help but sing along. Between church and school choirs, I know the tenor part pretty well. When Ginger served the church in Winchester, the tradition was to invite members of the congregation to join the choir at the end of the service on Easter Sunday to sing the Hallelujah Chorus together. My schedule kept me from singing with the choir regularly, but I never missed an Easter opportunity. I sang quietly as Gianni and I rode along, not wanting to frighten him or to interfere with his experience with the music. We didn’t talk much; he listened and I sang softly.

When we got to his house, I pushed the eject button and he put his CD back in its jewel box. He thanked me for the ride and I told him I’d see him on Friday. He lives in a small house at the end of a gravel road tucked in a part of Kingston I didn’t even know was there. Every time I’ve dropped him off, the house has been dark and I’ve seen no one. I know nothing of what home feels like to him, other than listening to him talk in Italian to tell someone he had a ride – at least, that’s what I think he’s saying.

Since the Sox game was already over, I was hard pressed to think of what would follow Handel. I turned down the radio and followed the road out of Kingston into Duxbury and on to Marshfield. The engine, the tires, and the breeze continued their accompaniment, even though the choir had stopped singing.

The first time I saw Gianni make his pasta dish, I asked him if he wanted to add some mushrooms and he shook his head.

“You know Leenard Skeenard?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I, too, am a simple man.” He smiled.

Since the moon comes up as much in the south as it does in the east during the summer time, my next to last turn towards home set the yellow orb at the end of the street as if it were my destination. Just before I drove off into space, I made my final left and turned into the driveway. The light off the porch spilled out into the yard and I could see the silhouettes of the daylilies and hydrangeas that encircle our small lawn. The Schnauzers wagged and woofed as I came through the gate.

Life’s a lot like our menu: best left simple, where the flavors come through.

Hallelujah.

Peace,
Milton

empty chair

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8

Christine posted this wonderful picture a couple of days ago with an invitation to respond. Here’s where the picture took me.


empty chair

what is
the difference
between
open space
and emptiness?
vacancy
and opportunity?
barrenness
and belief?

in one of
my favorite stories,
Ian had a chair
in the shape
of a hand
an open hand
a tender hand
God’s hand
to hold him

I drive by
furniture stores
yard sales
sometimes
hoping to see
any chair
that might
offer me
the same invitation

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There’s a new recipe.

that’ll leave a mark

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8

On the same Saturday morning, while I was out running errands, I learned of two endings: the Weekly World News is ceasing publication and Annie Dillard is not going to write anymore.

For those of you who may not frequent supermarkets, the Weekly World News is the tabloid of tabloids, leaving behind celebrity gossip for tales of the apocalypse, Elvis sightings, and miracle cures. Where else could you learn that Moses wandered in the wilderness for forty years because he lost the map? Once it’s gone, who will tell us beavers have OCD? Or give us pictures like this?


As I’ve stood in checkout lines over the years, I’ve wondered who bought the paper. (OK, I bought a couple of them for youth group gags.) I don’t think I ever saw someone put one in his or her cart, but the paper was there week after week, billing itself as “the world’s only reliable newspaper.”

Who will we rely on now?

Scott Simon played his interview with Annie Dillard (which she notes was recorded some time ago) since she has a new novel, The Maytrees. Dillard’s writings have spoken to me over and over again through the years, her thoughtful and often audacious take on the world challenging both my faith and intellect. These passages from Holy the Firm are good examples.

If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness . . . The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

The creation is not a study, roughed-in sketch; it is supremely, meticulously created, created abundantly, extravagantly, and in fine… Even on the perfectly ordinary and clearly visible level, creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparently uncalled for. The lone ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so unthinkably, violently radical, that surely it ought to have been enough, more than enough. But look what happens. You open the door and all heaven and hell break loose.

I’d never heard her voice before. She sounded harsh and crusty, like the rocky New England shoreline on which she lives. The last section of the interview caught me by surprise:

“So, do you write everyday?” Simon asked.

“I do when I’m working.”

“So you’ll take some time off?”

“I’m tempted now to take the rest of my life off.”

“You don’t have another book working at the moment? You don’t want to?” He spoke with tenderness. She did not.

“This one just about killed me. It took ten years. And you write and you write and you write and you throw it away and you throw it away and you throw it away,” she said laughing. “And in those ten years I probably could have done something more useful, although I’ve always wanted nothing more than to add to the literature.”

“I just wondered – not to turn myself into a career counselor . . .” They both laughed.

“I’m not being totally truthful with you. I can’t write anymore. My fingers can no longer type, they can no longer write by hand; I don’t know how I’d be as a chisel. But the fact is that was the great story – The Maytrees was the great story — and I’ll never get another story that good. People want people to keep doing what they want. People want to change and grow.”

“You want to do something different?”

“I want to change and grow.”

Ginger preached on the Lord’s Prayer (Luke’s version) this morning, informing us she was going to look at the spirit of the prayer in its totality rather than going phrase by phrase. At one point, she quoted the African proverb, “When you pray, move your feet,” and then read the prayer again:

Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, as we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.

In a world where thousands upon thousands die of hunger everyday, how do we pray, “Give us our daily bread?” Who is “us”? Who am I praying to be fed? How are our feet moving to feed “us”? In a world in which violence is the primary currency, how do we pray, “Your kingdom come?” How willing are we to wage peace?

“We’re all going to leave a mark,” she said.

What came to my mind first was someone crashing into something and the other person saying, “Ouch! That’s going to leave a mark.” What kind of mark will we leave?
It could be a wound, or a scar; we could be doing damage. It could be a mark like a child writing with a Sharpie on the living room wall, an unappreciated creative expression. It could be marks of growth moving up the doorjamb of existence. It could be a handprint on the hearts of those we have loved.

Two of Dillard’s statements have haunted me since yesterday:

“And in those ten years I probably could have done something more useful, although I’ve always wanted nothing more than to add to the literature.”

“I want to change and grow.”

I felt sad when I heard her say she could no longer write. What she wanted out of life was to add to the literature, which she can no longer do. Her words have fed me and now I know there will not be any more of them. Yet she is resolved rather than resigned. She wrote “the great story” and now is ready to see what the days ahead can hold, even if she can no longer write or even travel.

I struggle with her stance because, I think, I have yet to find my great story. It’s taken me half a century to figure out my best creative medium; I’m just now starting to draw on the wall. I, too, want to change and grow. And I trust, as one created in the image of the Creator who marked up the universe with uncalled for extravagances and intimacies, that there are great stories still to tell.

Peace,
Milton

signature moves

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
12

Every so often, when I sign my name,
the person behind the counter says,
“That’s quite a signature,”
as though I’ve done nothing but scribble.
“No one else can imitate it,”
is always my answer,
“that’s what makes it my signature.”

My morning movements are as much
a signature as my recognizable scratch,
my hands moving from muscle
memory to trim the strawberries
and stand them up to slice, then
splaying them out like pages, and
surrounding them with the blueberries

I picked myself the other day;
they taste like the neighborhood.
The fruit sits on a plate we’ve had
as long as we’ve been married,
when I first began to work on a
new signature because my name
changed along with yours,
as we wrote something new together.

And then there’s your coffee:
mostly-milk-one-Splenda-put-it-in-
the-microwave-for-one-minute-thirty-five-
seconds-before-topping-it-off.
My hands move with the same confidence
I show when I sign my name.
This is who I am.

This is who we are.
I can’t think of one without the other.
The daily mixture of fresh and
familiar, what is known scratched
on the surface of this new day,
held together by a hyphen,
my favorite piece of punctuation.

Peace,
Milton

this can’t wait

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

I’m not in the habit of posting more than once a day, but I can’t keep today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac to myself. The poet is Eleanor Lerman. She rocks.

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.
Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.
So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

In the “Literary and Historical Notes,” also from The Almanac, this note apropos of trains:

It was on this day in 1814 that a man named George Stephenson made the first successful demonstration of the steam locomotive, an invention that would fuel the Industrial Revolution and dramatically affect the settlement of North America.

Stephenson had never had any formal schooling, but he taught himself how steam engines worked by taking them apart when they broke down, and eventually he learned how to build them from scratch. He made his first successful demonstration of the new invention on this day in 1814. His engine pulled eight loaded wagons of 30 tons about four miles an hour up a hill.

By the 1830s, trains were already traveling 60 miles an hour. When the first transcontinental railway lines were completed in the 1870s, a cross-country journey that had taken several months suddenly took only seven days. The railroads shrank distances and increased the speed of life, while fueling America’s economic expansion and industrialization.

Thanks to Garrison, Eleanor, and George.

And the starfish.

Peace,
Milton

taking a train to church

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
10

One of the things I love about the connections created by blooging is the chance to take part in, or at least listen in on, conversations I might otherwise miss. And, once again, it also means there is more to learn. One of the words I read a lot, in relation to conversations on the church, is emergent, which, I confess, I’m still trying to understand. Since moving out of Southern Baptist life and into the United Church of Christ over fifteen years ago, I’ve lost track of much of what was being discussed in evangelical life mostly because I was so discouraged by watching Baptists beating up on themselves and so encouraged by the new home I found in the UCC that I just didn’t listen. Writing this blog and reading others has reconnected me to some of that conversation as well as finding out about some of the others taking place in and between other denominations.

And I keep hearing the word emergent, alongside of words like organic and evolutionary. I resonate with the desire to see the church be vibrant, essential, and effective in our world and I struggle, some, with what I read as I try to understand. In all the talk about emergent I have listened to, one of the things I hear underneath (whether it’s being said or not) is that churches like mine don’t measure up somehow because we aren’t “emerging.” I feel a little bit like Jefe in this exchange with El Guapo, his leader, from the movie Three Amigos:

JEFE: I have put many beautiful piñatas in the storeroom, each of them filled with little surprises.

EL GUAPO: Many pinatas?

JEFE: Oh, yes, many.

EL GUAPO: Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?

JEFE: A what?

EL GUAPO: A plethora.

JEFE: Oh, yes, you have a plethora.

EL GUAPO: Jefe, what is a “plethora”?

JEFE: Why?

EL GUAPO: You told me I have a plethora and I just would like to know if you know what a plethora is. I would not like to think that a person would tell someone he has a plethora and find out that that person has no idea what it means to have a plethora.

JEFE: Forgive me, El Guapo.

As I was Bloglining this morning, I came across this quote on Randy’s blog (where he was quoting this guy who was reviewing a book by this guy):

If the people who built the railroads in the United States were actually interested in transporting people, they would now own the airlines.

What I hear when I read those words is the railroads are antiques at best and useless at worst. If I translate the metaphor to apply to the church, which it was intended to do, I go to a railroad church that doesn’t get it and has lived out it’s usefulness. We need to learn how to fly if we expect God to do anything in and with us. While we’re looking out the windows of the train, faith is flying overhead.

If we’re going to talk about organic churches, I go to one. My little church began as a neighborhood church in 1735, breaking off from the First Church of Plymouth, Massachusetts (as in First Church, Pilgrims, you get the idea) because they wanted to worship closer to home. From it’s birth it was a community church and it has remained true to that vision. It’s never been a big church, but the community has never been big either. We’re too comfortable being a community church and have a hard time when we talk about growing, and we are church in the truest sense. Maybe the fact that the Northeast is one of the few areas in this country where the trains still play an important role in our transportation is not for nothing.

The problem with the train-plane analogy for me is I don’t think the church has to choose to be one or the other. If you were to drop our church into the middle of Boston or any other big city, we would neither survive nor minister effectively because we would not be an organic expression of faith in those places, just as an edgy, postmodern, urban fellowship would not draw a crowd in our little town for very long. Both expressions of faith and community, along with a plethora of others, are needed if we are going to give voice to the many dimensions of God’s love and grace. I can’t ride the train from here to Singapore and I would be stupid to try and fly the fifteen miles from my house to Quincy. To borrow from another Steve Martin movie, perhaps we would do well to think of planes, trains, and automobiles.

The first place I read the word emerging in relation to the church was in Marcus Borg’s wonderful book, The Heart of Christianity, where he talked about the church in North America having both an existing paradigm and an emerging paradigm. He was clear to say from the beginning that he was not trying to create a dichotomy as much as describe these two genuine expressions of faith as it gets lived out in the church existing alongside of each other. Though his take on the emerging paradigm is not the same as the current emergent movement, his point is still valid. It’s hard to build a community of faith when the founding vision is “at least we’re not those guys.”

One of the other blog conversations I listen in on centers around eating locally grown food as much as possible. One new word I’ve learned is locivore, as in one who eats locally. I wonder if it, too, might be helpful as an ecclesiological metaphor. One thing I do hear in the emergent emphasis on an organic church. For all that can come out of worldwide connections, the power of the church to live out its faith happens locally. The creative paradox of our calling is we will change the world by meeting the needs in front of our face.

I’ll give you a specific example. I think our church would be transformed if we did two small things: moved all our committee meetings to one night of the month and allowed people to serve on only one committee. Those changes would mean we would either involve more people and/or let go of the stuff that no one feels called to do, and create time when we could get together for discipleship and fellowship. Right now, we get together for worship and committee meetings; there’s no time for anything else. If we created the space and time to be together, we would change ourselves, deepen our commitment to Christ and to one another, and have room to dream about how we can reach out to love our community and our world. It would be an organic and evolutionary move.

Would that make us emergent?

Peace,
Milton

the rest of the story

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

There’s always something new to learn.

As many times as I’ve either heard or read the parable of The Good Samaritan and the story of Jesus’ visit with Mary and Martha, I’d never thought about the two being connected until Ginger mentioned it in her sermon last Sunday. Both are stories about people stopping along the way and, I suppose, about people who don’t stop.

The parable has always been the easier story for me to take because I can more easily put myself in the role of the guy who stops. I’ve always been attracted to the people at the edges, the ones who feel left out; they are the ones I gravitated to as a youth minister, as a teacher, and in just about any other situation. But Jesus’ visit to the sisters is more problematic. When our house fills up with company, I’m the one in the kitchen while most folks are on the couch talking. I’m not necessarily alone in the kitchen, but I’m working hard to make sure everyone is fed. And I love it. I like swirling around making sure bowls stay filled, food is served hot, and people don’t go away hungry. When I do stop to talk, I always have one ear listening for the timer so I don’t burn whatever is coming out next.

I’m also not much of a meditator. (Is that a word?) If I sit quiet and still for twenty minutes, I fall asleep. I’m thoughtful and reflective, intentional and focused, but I’m not particularly quiet. I think if Jesus stopped by here, I’d be most likely to say, “Come talk to me in the kitchen while I finish the crab dip.” (That’s Ginger’s favorite; I figure he’d like it, too.) So the way I read Jesus’ admonition to Martha is less about her doing and more about her complaining that Mary was just sitting around. Martha doesn’t sound particularly joyful in her hospitality, I must say, in the same way that the religious leaders in the parable were so consumed with duty or privilege that they couldn’t afford to be compassionate. It wasn’t on the schedule.

Garrison Keillor is hitting home runs over at The Writer’s Almanac this week. Today’s poem was by one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye, whom I’ve quoted before. It sounds like something Jesus might have quoted right alongside of his words in Luke 10.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

I looked back at the two stories in Luke and noticed that both are somewhat unfinished. We never hear from the lawyer after Jesus says, “Go and do likewise”; we never hear what Martha says or does after Jesus tells her, “Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

At Vacation Bible Camp, Ginger was taking prayer requests from the kids one day when one girl asked that we pray for homeless children. Ginger agreed and talked about how some children live on the streets or in cars. Another little girl said, “People live in their cars?” She was incredulous, so Ginger talked about it some more with the hope that the seed planted in our prayer time would grow kindness in her heart. Certainly, the lawyer original question was intended to be more quiz than conversation. What I hope is he realized he was the guy in the ditch who needed a neighbor as much as anyone. Naomi is right: kindness grows out of sorrow.

My image of how the day was going for Martha when Jesus arrived is she had to improvise. I don’t think they were expecting him, since I don’t imagine he was on a specific itinerary. Based on the tone of her comment about her sister, I also imagine whatever she was preparing to feed Jesus wasn’t going well. Maybe she burned the pita bread or the hummus was runny. Maybe she cut her finger or burned her arm pulling something out of the oven. Maybe she was pissed because she was the only one who knew she was having a hard day. Maybe Jesus was saying, “Why are you taking your stuff out on your sister?” Martha had not yet been able to see, as Naomi says, “the size of the cloth” of kindness.

Jesus counted Mary, Martha, and Lazarus as friends, so I have to believe the conversation didn’t end at the height of the tension where Luke stopped his story. Jesus touched a raw sibling nerve with his words; there was more to be said.

I tried writing a couple of endings and everything I came up with felt forced or trite. What I see as I write is I have a lot at stake in Martha finding some redemption. I know her well; I need for her to come off better than she does. No, it’s not so much about how she appears as needing her to find some healing in the story because I think Jesus’ words must have hurt. She was trying hard and came up short. Somehow, I think that feeling was not unfamiliar to her. Whatever happened, I know Jesus was kind and found a way to say she was the one he was looking for and he needed her to stop just long enough to understand.

Peace,
Milton

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