don't eat alone

Because I work at the computer store, I have an inordinate number of apps on my iPhone because most every time one of my coworkers tells me of a new app they have discovered, I end up downloading it. One of those is called “IFTTT” (If This, Then That) which allows you set up sequences (recipes, they call them) so you can always have things happen a certain way — if you take a post a picture on Instagram, then it will also put a copy in your Dropbox folder — like a giant game of Mouse Trap. I put the app on my phone last summer and then removed it earlier this year when I realized I don’t use it. As I read Reinhold Niebuhr this morning, I realized I part of it may be I don’t think about life rolling out that way, for the most part.

The books that have found me this Lenten season — both gifts from friends — have been around awhile: first Thurman, and now Justice and Mercy by Reinhold Niebuhr, which was edited after he died by his daughter and published in 1974, though the material comes from the Forties and Fifties. Niebuhr is the one who said, “Justice is what Love looks like in public;” he was also one who worked hard to find a faith that mattered, that was relevant to a nuclear world, to a world that had known the tragedy of two world wars. The pages are filled with his prayers and sermons.

The opening sermon is “The Providence of God” and he makes a distinction between “the instinct of religion” and “the gospel of Christ,” even as he says we find both in scripture. Without offering a quote fest, let me see if I can explain what has captured me in what he said.

“The natural instincts of religion demand that my life be given meaning by a special security against of the insecurities of life,” he says, quoting from a couple of Psalms to show it is natural for us to expect punishment for evil and reward for good. If it should seem those “were not being properly correlated in life; then God will guarantee finally that they will be properly correlated.” He goes on with examples from scripture and history of those who expect God to be on their side (cue Bob Dylan), that believe that judgment will set things right in their favor. “These are natural religious instincts,” he says, “the natural efforts to close prematurely the great structure of life’s meaning.”

Life is not IFTTT. There is more to faith than security and favor. We diminish what it means to follow Christ when we distill the structure of meaning to those two pillars.

For life is not completely at variance with itself. There is reward for goodness in life, and there is punishment for evil, but not absolutely. The same law which punishes the criminal punishes the Savior. And there are three crosses: two for criminals who cannot meet the moral mediocrities of life, and one for the Savior who rises above it. This is life. (18)

I read the sermon before I went to church today where we looked at the temptatio

ns of Jesus. As I thought through the sequence of the Tempter’s offerings — turn the stones to bread, jump and the angels will catch you, play the game and all this can be yours — I saw them as a picture of the very tension Neibuhr describes: Satan offers security, power, favor; Jesus chooses love, grace, mercy. Jesus understood what he had come to do was beyond making sure he felt safe in the Rock of Ages or knew that God was on his side. So he

said, “No.” Over and over. And then came out of the desert to deliver the sermon that was Niebuhr’s inspiration:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)

A little more from Reinhold:

It is not true that God gives special favors, and it is not true that there are simple moral meanings in the processes of history. We cannot speak simply of a moral order which, if defied, would destroy us. . . . The Christian faith believes that within and beyond the tragedies and the contradictions of history we have laid hold upon [God’s] loving heart, the proof of whose love is first impartiality towards all of his children, and secondly a mercy which transcends good and evil. (20)

Christ calls us to expect more out of God than security, attention, or even fairness, because though all three requests have their validity at certain times, we live in a world that is not safe, that is inattentive to most of the suffering of humanity, and is certainly not fair. If those three things are all we expect of God, our religion will fail. But that is not the last word.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore we must be saved by love.

And nothing can separate us from Love.

Peace,
Milton

Because my Lenten practice is to write everyday, I have found that means I must also read. I need to find fellow travelers — generally those who have walked the road ahead of me leaving something of a path to follow. What cooking and theology share in common is there’s not much that is new; we are at our best when we are retelling the old, old story in our own way. The paradox is the new light that breaks forth even as we tell the well-worn stories of our faith.

The book I started reading — or should I say re-reading — is not an old book in the scope of Christian history, but is one of the early books of the modern Civil Rights movement, and one Martin Luther King, Jr. is said to have carried with him most everywhere he went: Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. It was originally published in 1949. My edition, printed in 1996, has a foreword written by Vincent Harding, who has been instrumental in connecting faith and human rights in this country for many, many years and is a truly hopeful and gentle soul.

I began feasting on the book during my lunch hour at the computer store. Hardly a page into his piece, Harding says that Thurman’s book could best be described “as a profound quest for a liberating spirituality, a way of exploring and experiencing those crucial life points where personal and societal transformations are creatively joined.” In the margin beside the paragraph I wrote, “Lent,” because the thought connected me back to what Chuck Campbell said yesterday about the season being “more social, political, structural, and systemic” than giving up something as a statement of personal piety.

For many years now, I have felt the final word in most any theological discussion, or most any worship service for that matter, should be, “So what?” Whether we are talking about the veracity of the miracles or the Sermon on the Mount or whether we should paint the Fellowship Hall blue or green, we do well to ask, “So what?” How will what we are talking about now make a difference later? Or, as Harding put it, what will be our personal and societal transformation? So what?

After lunch today, I talked with a woman who is working on a project to teach high school students about World War One by studying graveyards. She has traveled to three of the main graveyards in Europe and had picture after picture of tombstones and monuments. She had stories to go with the stones. I remembered from my study with Facing History and Ourselves the brutal statistics recording the thousands upon thousands who were killed by machine guns — new technology in that war. In one battle, nearly 20,000 fell in a little over fifteen minutes. And it was to be the War That Would End All Wars. The next thing we knew, the world was engaged in the sequel: The Good War. The two centuries my life will span will be marked as those beholden to what Walter Wink calls “the myth of redemptive violence.” So what?

Even as I refrain from writing more about my own views about faith and violence, I realize anything I say is written from a position of privilege and power. I don’t mean I have access to the rooms and meetings where decisions are made. In fact, when it comes to influencing anyone on a governmental level, I feel quite helpless because I don’t have enough money to get anyone’s attention. Nevertheless, when I think about the title of Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited, I realize I don’t think of myself as one of the disinherited or marginalized. I realized that even more as I began reading because he was writing, not to me, but to those for whom the book was named — those who live with their backs against the wall — and concluding, even as he began,

To those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity has been sterile and of little avail. (11)

How do we connect the personal transformation we seek in this season with the corporate transformation we so desperately need? When I look at how I am living out these days, what is my answer when I ask, “So what?”

I wish it were an easier answer than I have been able to find. But Harding and Thurman are good voices in my ear. Harding finished his preface by pointing out that what Thurman wrote in 1949 focused primarily on the needs of African-Americans as representatives of the disinherited in this country has a wider application a half century later.

Latinos, Native Americans, Southeast Asians, and many women and gay and lesbian people are only the most obvious additions to Thurman’s community of the wall. For the pressures of the post industrialist capitalist world order have pushed many other people against a great variety of unfamiliar and unexpected walls (and glass ceilings), and we are all hounded by the inner demons of fear, hypocrisy, and hatred. . . . Shall we gather at the wall?

This week, I found out one of the folks I used to cook with here in Durham was taken in by INS for questioning. Turns out it was a case of mistaken identity. He was not the one they were looking for, but, as long as they already had him in custody they decided to check his papers. He has been in this country almost ten years, has been gainfully employed all of that time, and he is undocumented. So they are preparing to deport him without much of a conversation with anyone, including his employer who is will ing to stand up for him. I’m committed to writing everyday as my spiritual practice during Lent. So what?

Peace,
Milton

My friend David Gentiles knew how to make gumbo. His mama taught him how to do it and he used her recipe. I never had a chance to let him teach me how to do it before he died, but on more than one occasion I would call him from Boston and say, “I tried to make the roux, but I burned it.” And he would laugh, not to make fun of me, but a laugh that came out of the deep joy of his existence, out of the heart of our friendship, a laugh that let me know my failure was by no means the last word.

Even with his comforting chuckles, I haven’t attempted a gumbo in years. Until last night. I make lunch for the local UCC clergy gathering the first Thursday of every month and the proximity to Mardi Gras put me in a gumbo state of mind, along with reading Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio, which has helped me to rethink how I look at certain things when it comes to cooking. So I pulled a couple of cookbooks off the shelf, both of which had been given to me by Cherry, another Cajun friend, and figured out what I wanted to do and then I prepared to make the roux. According to the cloud of witnesses gathered round, what I needed was

1 cup of flour
1 cup of vegetable oil
1 cast iron skillet or dutch oven
time

I put the skillet on the stove and set it on medium heat. I measured the flour and poured it in a bowl, added the oil and whisked them into a slurry.Then I poured the mixture into the skillet and began to stir. As it cooked, I worked on other things. I diced celery, onions, and peppers; I sliced the chicken and the andouille; I gathered spices; and, about every three or four minutes, I stirred the roux. The oil began to cook into the flour so the two were not so easily separated. And then the color began to change from light beige to a deeper tan, finally ending up almost looking like molten chocolate — without being burned, which is what the recipe said a good roux would do. And it took forty-five minutes.

What the roux needed most was time.

Perhaps I should say, what the roux needed most was for me to take time: to watch, to listen, to stir rather than rush to see how fast I could get on to the next step, to get past the preparation and get the soup going. Beyond even the flour and oil, the most essential element to the whole thing was time. Perhaps I will learn it won’t always take forty-five minutes, but there ain’t no shortcut. It takes time.

As we ate the gumbo for lunch today, we listened to Chuck Campbell, preaching professor at Duke, who had come to talk to us about preaching through the upcoming season. He was enthusiastic and engaged, and I could tell he had taken time to let the texts simmer in both head and heart. I came away with several things on which to ponder, but what I want to mention here is his sense that we have lost the communal nature of Lent, the corporate sense of what the season means. We each have our list of what we are giving up, but there is more to these forty days than saying no to chocolate or caffeine. Lent, he said, is “more social, political, structural, and systemic”: our faith is about challenging the “principalities and powers,” about interrupting institutional injustice with Love. Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” In the hungering dark of these days, we are to remember, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It bends towards love.

And it takes time. Not the kind of it-will-happen-someday time, where we go on about our lives and leave the work to someone else, but pay-attention-so-the-roux-doesn’t-burn kind of time, where we keep stirring things up, where we keep the heat on, where we call injustice by name, where we love without fear.

Last Sunday I preached at our church. The passage was the Transfiguration. I was captured by Jesus’ words to Peter, James, and John after they fell to the ground in fear when they heard God’s voice from the clouds: “Do not be afraid. Get up.” David Lose points out the Greek here is the same as the angel’s words to the women when they come to the Tomb after Jesus’ resurrection: “Do not be afraid. He is risen.” Jesus was saying the same thing: be raised up. Be alive, not afraid.

Fear is the common currency of American culture. Almost every voice that speaks from amongst the institutions that populate our existence, the call is to be afraid, to be very afraid. Our Lenten journey offers us the chance to take the time to remember they are lying to us. Fear is not the bedrock of our existence. Fear is not what motivates us. Fear is not what is most natural. Much like Jesus stared down the temptations in his forty days, we have time, if we will take it, to let the Spirit stir in our hearts and remember the heart of humanity is not found in an institution, nor even in an individual: life, love, faith are all team sports. We are in this together not to build fortresses or monuments, but to, well, be together.

And while we’re together, we might as well eat. I’ll make gumbo.

Peace
Milton

my job tonight was
to mix the ashes
and the oil making
from the charred remains
a paste of penitence

the sacred soot stared
from the bottom of
the plate as I poured
olive oil from home
and began to stir

the ashes stuck to
me like skin like they
knew me turning the
lines across my palm
into an ancient

map of heart I looked
as though I had been
digging in the dirt
even now my nails
are outlined by an

ashy shadow a
call to dig a grave
to plant a new bulb
in the same motion
a farmer of faith

Peace,
Milton