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lenten journal — jesus laughed

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

Tomorrow is the official beginning of March Madness, or the NCAA Basketball Tournaments for both men and women. In our area basketball matters perhaps as much as anywhere on the planet and the shade of blue you wear to the game is a crucial decision (Duke – dark blue; UNC – light, or Carolina, blue). In a test of allegiances for many, Maundy Thursday services will be taking place just as Duke takes the court against Belmont for their opening round game.

Tournament games are known for their big finishes. I knew an old man in Texas who thought all college basketball games should be two minutes long because everything that mattered happened in the last two minutes. Why bother with the other part? Good question, if only endings matter.

Truth is we live as though beginnings and endings are what matter most. Middles? Not so much. Even our ecclesiastical year turns from the climax of Easter to a liturgical drop off into “ordinary time,” which are the days we mark until we get back to Advent where we can begin again.

Even Holy Week has a middle. The big days are Palm Sunday (big start), Maundy Thursday (Communion), Good Friday (Crucifixion), Holy Saturday (Vigil), and Easter Sunday (Resurrection). But what of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday? What were Jesus and his disciples doing during the middle of the week? We have a couple of incidents and parables, but the gospel writers didn’t have much to say about these three days. Yet to get from the Triumphal Entry to Golgotha and then to the empty tomb, he had to live through Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. He had some ordinary time of his own.

One of the great omissions of the gospels is they give no account of Jesus laughing , or anyone else for that matter. They tell us that Jesus wept, but they never say, “Jesus laughed.” In the core of my being, I know Jesus laughed. Anyone who started the majority of his poems with, “A certain man had two sons . . .” knew how to tell a joke. Listen to the words. The rhythm is no different than, “A guy walks into a bar . . .” Intentionality is not synonymous with humorlessness.

Jesus’ laughter comes to mind because I know how crucial laughter is in times of grief. He knew the events unfolding were the beginning of saying goodbye to his disciples. Because they had identified with him, they were in great pain. They didn’t understand what was unfolding, but they knew things were changing. When I think about the three nondescript days in Holy Week, I imagine Jesus and his closest friends recounting memories, laughing, and crying. Seriously – all it would take would be a retelling of some of Peter’s exploits and the whole Upper Room would be in stitches.

This particular day was not an eventful one for me. I had to take inventory at the restaurant at Duke and do a couple of other things. I went by the other restaurant where one of the guys was talking to Chef about a difficult decision she had to make about one of her employees that we all knew. She said to him, “I’m feeling a little less guilty about it today.”

In a stroke of quick wit and friendship, he peered over his glasses and said, “You just took Kubler-Ross’ stages and banged right through ‘em last night, huh?”

And we laughed – and I saw how it helped her, even if just for a moment.

In my mind’s eye (my heart’s eye, too), Nameless Wednesday was not wasted, even though it was not recorded. I can picture Jesus and the disciples coming to the end of the day grateful for the ordinary day together. Maybe that’s how it happened. Maybe I just need some ordinary time of my own.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: tell me a story

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

When we lived in New England, one of the staples in my day was listening to a show called The Connection, a call-in show hosted by a man named Dick Gordon who had a marvelous way of drawing people into conversation and making connections for those who both talked and listened. One morning, he was no longer on the radio. WBUR made some (bad) choices based on the bottom lined and killed their best show. And I wondered what happened to Dick Gordon.

Soon after we moved to Durham, I was in the car listening to WUNC, our local and excellent NPR station, and heard a familiar voice say, “I’m Dick Gordon and this is The Story.” I had no idea he had come to prepare a place for me, or at least to help me feel more, well, connected to my new town. His new show is not a call-in, but an interview with a single person, usually, simply because he feels they have a story worth telling. Some of them are sensational, some quite emotional, some humorous, some wrenching, and all of them helping to paint a picture of what it means to be human.

Today, as I was driving to work, I came in on the story of Peter Turnley, a man who has been a photojournalist for a quarter of a century, and he was telling the story of his experiences as the first non-Soviet journalist allowed to see and record the aftermath of the Spitak earthquake in Armenia in 1988, when it was still part of the USSR. He talked about several things, but the enduring part of the story that was still very fresh to him as he told it, was one particular encounter (What follows is what I remember from listening and quotes from Turnley’s website):

I will never forget the man in Armenia in 1988 who had only the day before lost his wife, children, and his home, all casualties of a massive earthquake in which 35,000 people lost their lives. As I drove with my twin brother David in a Russian taxi in this devastated region, we stopped to pick up an elderly man who was hitchhiking. He sat in the back with me. I was so tired after days and days of work with little rest I was falling asleep and then I realized he was motioning to put my head in his lap and sleep. I put my head down and listened, first, as he recounted to the driver that he had lost everything and then, as I drifted off, he began to stoke my head and sing softly and beautifully in Armenian. (Turnley paused, his voice full of emotion.) I think he just wanted to be connected to life.

When we arrived at his village, Sptiak, he directed the driver tot he spot where his house had once stood; all that remained was a pile of rubble. He fell to the ground sobbing and pounding the earth for minutes. He then rose to thank us for the lift. We told him how sorry we were and that we had to go, but wanted to know if we could be of any help. The temperature was below zero Celcius, and the only things the man had were the clothes on his back. Still, he was determined to stay near the ruins of his home for a while longer. As we got ready to leave, he hugged us both for a long time and then offered me the wool scarf from around his neck. I declined politely. I’ll never forget that gesture.

Turnley was beginning to tell how that encounter had changed his life and the way he thought about his profession when I had to get out of the car and go to my job, so I didn’t get to hear the punchline, but I walked through the old stone buildings on the Duke campus a little changed myself.

Somewhere along the way today, I started thinking about this story, from Matthew 26:

While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table. When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. “Why this waste?” they asked. “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.”

Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

How ever cosmic the epic is, whether the aftermath of an earthquake or the road to the Cross and the Resurrection, the best stories gets told in the one on one encounters in the midst of the struggle and grief, where we fight to find our connection to life in things like lullabies and physical touch. One of the things I loved about Turnley’s story is he never talked about the pictures he took or how he photographed the man as he wept and wailed in front of the wreckage of his home. In fact, in the segment I heard, he never mentioned his camera. He just told the story of how he was changed by what the man did.

One afternoon in Marshfield, I got to speak to Dick Gordon. I called in because his guest was Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of Zambia. In October of 1964, the British colony of Northern Rhodesia became the free nation of Zambia, and Kaunda was our president. I say “our” because I was there. We went to City Stadium early on the evening of October 23 and watched all kinds of dances and exhibitions. A little before midnight, the band played “God Save the Queen” and we watched the Union Jack come down for the last time. At the stroke of midnight, the Zambian flag was raised and we all sang our national anthem together (we had been practicing in school):

Stand and sing of Zambia proud and free
Land of work and joy in unity
Victors in the struggle for the right
We’ve one freedom’s fight
All one strong and free

A year or two later, at Christmas, my cub scout troop went to carol at State House, the presidential residence. President Kaunda answered the door as we began to sing and, after we had finished, invited us in for tea and biscuits (cookies, to you Americans). While we sat in the big living room munching away and trying not to spill anything, he said, “You have sung of our Savior’s birth; now I will sing to you of my faith.” He sat down at the piano and sang and played “Psalm 23.” That moment indelibly shaped my life in Africa and, on that afternoon in Marshfield, I finally got the chance to say thank you.

I started listening to a story today of what happens when people connect and went from Durham to Armenia to Palestine to Zambia to Marshfield and back home. “I love to tell the story,” goes the old hymn, “for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.”

May those appetites never be satisfied.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: be angry and sin not

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

I went to work today with great expectations.

Sunday night I had fun at work. About three weeks ago, we began trying a new thing on Sunday nights because they are usually very slow. We now do a “Sunday Night Special” that I serve from a buffet in the dining room: one meat entrée, one vegetarian entrée, each with vegetable and sides (last night was either chicken and cheese or sweet potato, mushroom, onion, and spinach enchiladas with red beans and rice and salad) for ten dollars. We’ve had a few more people each week and several who are return customers, not the least of which is a group of football players that come to eat. They were the last table, so after I served them, I spent some time talking to them and even learning their names. I left work feeling encouraged and exhilarated.

Today was going to be the day I broke out new menu items (pecan crusted monkfish with bleu cheese polenta and sweet corn sauce and spicy orange hummus, to name a couple). I had worked hard on getting things ready and was looking forward to a great evening. Then I walked in the kitchen to find out the person at our catering shop who does our ordering had failed to order any of my proteins. I was without my meat, fish, or chicken and had to scramble to pull things out of the freezer and make the best of what was available. I was livid. As Ginger will attest, I don’t do well when people don’t do their jobs well.

My friend John also knows this to be true. In a moment a number of years ago (and one I’m not proud of) we were in New Orleans one Sunday afternoon and John had to leave to get back to his church in Mississippi. When we got to the parking garage, the guy who had parked John’s car had failed to put the keys on the appropriate hook and had gone home because his shift had ended while we were eating. The woman behind the counter informed us that the guy must have taken the keys home with him, but didn’t seem to feel any sense of urgency in sorting things out beyond that point. I let my frustration get the best of me and said, “Let me get this straight: this guy’s job is park the car and hang the key on the hook. How could he forget to do half of his job?” When she did nothing to move our situation along, I picked up the phone and said, “Why don’t we call him to bring the keys back?”

I don’t remember exactly how the keys came back. I do know John got his car and the more I reflected on my words and deeds in the moment, the more embarrassed I became. I thought about that Sunday afternoon more than once today, mostly to help me keep some sense of perspective, because I could feel the other little details of the day – Ramon was forty-five minutes late, for instance – inviting me to believe, and even proclaim, that I was the only one doing my job. When I get to the place where I think I’m the only one who isn’t phoning it in or screwing it up, it’s a pretty safe bet I’ve lost my sense of reality.

The first challenge was to make sure my anger was addressed to the right person, and delivered in a way that was not damaging to him or the possibility of a relationship that will allow us to work together in the future. I believe the biblical phrase for all of the above is, “Be angry and sin not.” In the same vein, the second challenge was to make sure my anger didn’t come out sideways on the folks who were working with me tonight, particularly at the servers who take a fairly combative approach to life under the best of circumstances. The third challenge was to do my job well and make a faithful offering of the things over which I do have control.

One of the most intriguing Holy Week scenes to me is Jesus pulling away to pray and taking Peter, James, and John with him and then asking them to stay awake while he went a bit farther to ask God if there was a chance things might turn out differently. He went to pray three times and each time he returned he found the three men fast asleep on the job, failures at meeting his request, and he asked each time,

Couldn’t you stay awake with me for one hour?

No. They couldn’t.

Let me be clear here: I’m not drawing any analogies between my day and that night in Jesus’ life, as if to say Jesus, like me, knew what it felt like to be at the mercy of people not doing what they were expected to do. I thought about the story tonight because I wanted to think more about what I might learn from Jesus’ response to the failure of his friends to meet his one simple request. You see, my general response to that story is to see myself in the disciples. Sleep is my escape. In the depths of my depression, sleep was one of the places I could find some relief. The other was the kitchen. So I look at their inability to stay awake and I can postulate about the exhaustion of their grief getting the best of them. The fear and sorrow were too much. While Jesus prayed for his life, Peter, James, and John found their solace in sleep.

Admitting I’m much more like the dozing disciples than I am like Jesus, in this story or in most any situation gives me a chance to find grace and redemption in the ineptness and inefficiency I encountered today. I don’t know what was behind the missed orders. I do know the guy has a lot of stuff going on in his life that would make it hard for me to concentrate if I were in his shoes. I know the catering crew is diving into the busy season and are anxious about it. I also know missing my monkfish is not the end of the world, regardless of how world-ending it may have seemed twenty minutes before service.

About three verses after Jesus woke the tired three from their slumber, Matthew’s gospel recounts:

Then the men stepped forward, seized Jesus and arrested him. With that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”

Kicking ass and taking names may feel good (no – it does feel good), but it is not the path of life that leads to resurrection and redemption. Be angry and sin not: get it out of your system appropriately, forgive, and move on. I worked hard tonight to not wrap my anger in the violence I so often use as a package. I think I was reasonably successful.

I didn’t find any ears on the floor when I swept at the end of the shift, so I guess I’ve got that going for me.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: breathing lessons

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

When Ginger calls us to worship each Sunday, after the announcements, she says,

Take a deep breath; now let it out.
Breathe in the breath of God;
breathe out the love of God.

As we stood in the spring sunshine this morning, our palm leaves in hand, I could see the faces of people as they inhaled sacred air, many of them closing their eyes, and then exhaled that same holiness after it had passed through their lungs, part of their DNA attached to the love of God they were breathing back into the world. The rhythm of the service was like breathing for me, inhaling a word or idea or song and exhaling a connection (sometimes serious, sometimes humorous) to the Larger Story Being Told. Then we sang as we processed together into the sanctuary,

Ride on, ride on, in majesty!
Hark! all the tribes Hosanna cry;
O Savior meek, pursue Thy road
With palms and scattered garments strowed

And all I could hear was the cranking guitars of Eric Clapton and B. B. King covering John Hiatt’s “Riding with the King.”

Get on a TWA to the promised land.
Everybody clap your hands.
And don’t you just love the way that he sings?
Don’t you know we’re riding with the king?

It’s not the lyric as much as it is the song – and the sense that we are riding with Jesus through this week, moving from celebration to curses, from pain to death to resurrection. And that cranking guitar lick would make for a mean processional next year.

When we moved back from Africa to live in Houston, Texas, I started to Westbury High School in January, a week after everyone else had returned from the winter break. It was the first time I ever started a new school during the year and, of all the different schools I attended (ten in twelve years) it was the hardest transition to make. I signed up for drama class as a way of coping, I suppose. The people on the fringe were (are?) generally more welcoming. One of our first assignments was to lip-sync a song with original choreography. We were assigned the songs. Mine was Grover, from Sesame Street, singing,

Around and around and around and around; over, under, through.

The preposition song came to mind in church this morning as we sang, “Before the Cross of Jesus” as one of our hymns. It is a new(er) text set to the same tune as “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” which also includes a stanza that begins,

Upon the cross of Jesus mine eyes at times can see
The very dying form of One who suffered there for me

Beneath, before, behind, upon, around, within, without, through – together they describe the directions from whence comes the relentless love of God that will not be bound or blocked from getting to us. As the stanza finishes:

And from my stricken heart with tears two wonders I confess;
The wonders of redeeming love and my unworthiness.

We made the transition from Palms to Passion reading Matthew’s account from the Triumphal Entry to Jesus’ arrest. What caught me in the reading were the behind the scenes people that made the story happen.

Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, tell him that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away. (21:2,3)

“Go into the city to a certain man and tell him, ‘The Teacher says: My appointed time is near. I am going to celebrate the Passover with my disciples at your house.’” (26:18)

Either Jesus had messianic minions or he knew people – well – that we know little or nothing about. When I was a kid, I thought Jesus had a way of casting spells on people, as though when the disciples said the right words the guy just gave up the donkey and then regained consciousness later and wondered what happened to his animal. The truth is there were fringe people who helped Jesus follow his calling, encouraging him, providing for him, befriending him beyond the disciples we know by name. Whether it’s the Passion narrative or our life stories, lots of folks are never listed in the credits but were in the right place at pivotal moments, exhaling the love of God that we might breathe in hope beyond our understanding of the circumstances at hand.

Ramon, my line cook/dishwasher at the restaurant is one of those folks. He works hard, does good work, and goes unnoticed by most of the folks who eat his food. This afternoon, he was an hour late for work. When he came into the kitchen, I told him I was beginning to get concerned about him.

“I was at church,” he said. “I had to save my life.”

Ginger closed her sermon with a prayer offered by Yousif Al-saka, an elder in the Presbyterian Church in Baghdad:

We beseech You, we humble ourselves for the name of our Savior Jesus Christ, to send your Holy Spirit to shade the land of Iraq,
so that peace may prevail in its dwellings, and the acts of violence, kidnapping and persecution may cease;
so that the displaced may return to their homes, the churches may reopen their gates without fear from shells and explosion;
so that smiles may be seen again on the faces of children that have been stolen from them here in this difficult time;
so that the elderly may lean back on their chairs in comfort and tranquility saying farewell to their children when leaving for school or work without anxiety or fear;
so that mothers think only of happy, prosperous, and peaceful futures for their daughters and sons.

O Lord, have pity on us, we Iraqis. Let the light of your face shine on us, bless us, strengthen our belief, and bestow patience upon us.

And then we sang:

What wondrous love is this?
Oh my soul, oh my soul.
What wondrous love is this? Oh my soul.

Breathe in the breath of God; breathe out the love of God.

Indeed. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: palm sunday eve

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

on the road home the miles feel
faster than those on the road
out of town – my body responds
from muscle memory, my mind
working like a pace car,knowing
what to feel with each passing
billboard, how long to wait,
how to titrate the anticipation.
familiar roads are shorter roads

the road from here to resurrection
is mapped in my mind (and my
heart), from palms to parables,
crowds to cross. I know the days,
the steps, the words, the mileposts.
my feet are covered with the
dust from the feet of disciples
who walked this way when the
road was not so well marked

and Holy Week had not yet
become so hurried or harried.
I don’t want to get to Easter
because the road is familiar,
or the liturgy expected. I want
to be stricken and surprised,
lost and found, broken and
spilled out; I want to find my
old footprints and know

this is not the same old road.

Peace,
Milton

the green room

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I walked the neighborhood
tonight to The Green Room,
our neighborhood bar,
“serving Durham since Prohibition”
in a small square building
whose green walls are as infused
with smoke as it is with stories.
Beer and basketball were my menu
tonight, as others shot pool and
played table shuffleboard,
each of us speaking to the other
as we crisscrossed the room
like billard balls on green felt.
Michael, the owner, sock hat
pulled over his head, smiled and
worked the room to create
another night that would sink
into the plaster and hold
the place together.
Six rules are posted at the register:

we don’t serve drunks;
use common sense;
respect others;
take care of the equipment;
no drinks on the tables;
don’t talk with your mouth full.

I kept the rules, watched
the game, and helped the
young bartender practice
the art of conversartion.
Then I finished my beer and
walked the block back home.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: peace and palms

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

Two unconnected things crossed my path today and I’ve been sitting here for the last half hour thinking about how they are connected. The first came my way through Jimmy, who served as a conduit to connect me to another guy talking about the fiftieth anniversary of graphic designer Gerald Holtom’s creation of the Peace Symbol, which was initially prepared for a protest against nuclear arms in 1958 in England. The story goes on to explain how Holtom came up with the design: he overlaid two letters of the semaphore alphabet, N and D, to stand for nuclear disarmament, and then put a circle around them. In writing to a friend about it later he said,

I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle around it.

Out of his despair came one of the most enduring symbols of my lifetime.

A couple of years ago, I learned about Improv Everywhere, a group who likes to “create scenes,” as they say by getting people together (agents, as they call themselves) and doing something out of the ordinary to make people break out of their regular routines. Their latest mission is called “Food Court Musical.”

Whether it’s the peace movement or an improvisational flash mob, the questions are: How do you get people to look up from their Big Macs and notice what is going on around them. How do you push through the despair of the world’s situation or the complacency of people to find a way to move them? How do you keep from falling back into despair when they clap and continue shopping or put the symbol on a t-shirt and go on about their day?

At least, those are my questions.

Jesus had his own improvisational flash mob on what we call Palm Sunday, with people waving palm fronds and shouting, “Hosanna,” as he came into town. By the end of the very same week, the title of “King of the Jews” had taken a nasty, ironic turn even as many of the same folks waving palm leaves had taken to hurling insults and clamoring for his execution, making it seem as if despair had the upper hand, which it had.

Over the years, Palm Sunday has bothered me because I feel as though we wave the branches and sing, “Hosanna,” emulating the very crowd that turned on Jesus – and I’m not always sure we’re aware of the irony in our actions. Something in the juxtaposition of semaphore and singing in the food court made me wonder if I’m missing the deeper meaning by describing what I see as a well intentioned miss of the point. Perhaps that, on the last Sunday in Lent, all we know to do is wave palm branches like they did for Jesus speaks to the despair and disquietude of coming to terms with Jesus’ death. News this week of another incident of clergy abuse by someone I knew long ago, along with word that my sister-in-law’s sister-in-law found out she has pancreatic cancer days before her husband is to be deployed to Iraq, to the murder of a student at UNC who was apparently killed randomly as a part of a gang initiation, not to mention the larger crises around the world, and my arms sag like the semaphore signaler, palm fronds drooping downward in despair. How can I keep saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace?

A little over twenty years ago, Reagan bombed Libya in retaliation for the deaths of two American soldiers. A few years later, I was reading Hauerwas and Willimon’s Resident Aliens, in which Willimon describes a conversation in one of the dorms (here at Duke) about how the church should have responded to our nation’s answering violence with violence. Willimon said something like, “The Christian response would have been for five thousand Christians to have flown to Libya as soon as Reagan started threatening to bomb so he couldn’t have bombed without hurting one of them.” Then Willimon showed his despair by saying, “There was a time when the church could have done that, but church today is incapable of such a gesture.”

Everybody shout, “Hosanna.”

I understand his point and I don’t want to let myself completely buy into his cynicism. Part of what Palm Sunday tells us is the church has been broken and flawed from the start. We’ve always been a conflicted and confused people. We, the body of Christ, have a hard time thinking beyond ourselves: our needs, our dreams, our fears. If the story of Easter depended on us, it would have ended on Friday, with the disciples sitting in the Upper Room talking about what might have been. But we are not the last word.

As our arms tire and our fronds fall to our sides, hope begins to take root in our despair and grace seeps into the cracks in our resolve and the contradictions of our collective conscience. We are not the last word.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve signed my letters and most anything else the way I sign each post on this blog: Peace, Milton. It is more than platitude to me. I know peace is scarce in our world, as much now as most any time in my life, which is only about a year longer than the peace sign has existed. If I truly ache for peace, then I have to move beyond the violence of words that criticize the church without offering something beyond the despair. Waging peace is not a solitary act. I do my best peacemaking when I am willing to see myself as one of those who waves palm branches with both commitment and contradiction, because I want Jesus’ entry into our lives to really change things – to really change us. I, too, am one of the broken and despairing ones, yearning for hope.

Aren’t we all.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: questions and answers

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Since this is spring break at Duke, the campus restaurant has been closed and I’ve been working back at the restaurant where I started so I could earn my paycheck and also let Chef take her kids to Disney. I’ve loved being back over there. I like the menu (it’s fun to cook), but mostly I enjoy the sense of community. The kitchen is small and filled with cooks, whereas my kitchen at Duke is large and relatively unpopulated. There are a few new faces since I last worked there, one of which is Drew who is an awesome cook and a great guy. He and I got to know each other a little better tonight. He’s originally from North Carolina (from the county where Mayberry is, he said), went to culinary school in New York City and worked there for four or five years, and then came back to Carolina because, he said, “I felt like I was missing something.” He stirkes me as a pretty even-keeled person who doesn’t let much get to him.

Tonight, as the dinner service began to slow down, one of the servers asked him if he had ever been in the military.

“Why do you ask?” he replied in a somewhat suspicious tone, which surprised me.

“I don’t know. You just look like someone who might have been in the military, so I thought I’d ask,” the server answered.

“No,” said Drew, and the server went on about his business.

About ten minutes later, the server came back to pick up another order and Drew said, “Hey. I was in the military. I didn’t tell you before because I wasn’t sure what you were getting at with your question.”

“Nothing,” said the other guy. “I just wondered.” The conversation ended there, so Drew never shared what caused his hesitancy.

I know I’m a week ahead, but one of the most poignant scenes for me in the gospel story is Peter standing in the courtyard as Jesus was being tried by Caiaphas and the others. Of all the disciples, Peter is the most captivating for me because of his impulsiveness – sort of faith run amok. My friend Burt has always talked about Peter being the Barney Fife of the New Testament, Jesus, of course, being Andy.

When we tell the story about Peter’s denials, I think we move too quickly past the fact that he followed Jesus after they arrested him and was dangerously close to the room where he was being questioned and humiliated. I’m not sure Peter realized the danger of where he was until the questions started: “You were with him, weren’t you?”

“No,” he answered, perhaps, like Drew, unsure of what was behind the question.

They asked again, and he denied his connection with Jesus a second time.

When they said, “We can tell by your accent that you come from Mayberry,” he exploded, claiming to not even know Jesus. And then he ran out and wept. Jesus was dead before Peter got to straighten the whole thing out. I can’t imagine anyone more grateful for the Resurrection than he.

In a nation so deeply divided over the war, perhaps Drew had reason to be question-shy about his military past, afraid he might step on a landmine in our little kitchen by thinking it was OK to come clean. In our public lives, we have the option of telling or not telling about our past. I don’t know that everyone at the restaurant knows I’m ordained, or that I was a high school English teacher for a decade; I know most of them don’t know I play guitar or love to sing, or that I write this blog. I’m not trying to be secretive; that stuff just hasn’t come up yet with these new acquaintances and colleagues.

Peter wept, not because he had been less than forthright with a bunch of strangers, but because he had betrayed his friend and the one he trusted with his life – his Messiah. He had stumbled when it was time to stand and be counted.

One of my other favorite gospel stories is Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. After their transforming conversation, she runs back into town – a town that wanted little or nothing to do with her – saying, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done.” Though the gospel writers don’t generally get high marks for effectively conveying tone, I’ve always heard a sense a comfort in what she said, which has always been a bit puzzling. For most of us, the prospect of someone – a stranger – telling us everything we’ve ever done would not necessarily be good news, but her words are good news, to me, because of words I hear her say when I read the story that were never written down: “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done and still loves me.”

In a little bit, I’ll turn off this computer and the rest of the house lights and lay down beside someone who has incarnated that kind of love for me. The suspicion sown by strangers may cause us to hedge our bets and measure our steps and our answers, but love casts out fear and suspicion. I know someone who pretty much knows everything I’ve ever done and still loves me with abandon.

For each of the times Peter denied his Lord, Jesus asked, “Simon, do you love me?” and gave him the chance to repaint the picture, ultimately telling him to turn his pain into compassion: “Feed my sheep.” The Samaritan woman went to the very people who treated her like crap to give them a chance at finding grace and forgiveness. As many times as Barney was the laughing stock of Mayberry, Andy kept believing in him.

And then they headed over to Thelma Lou’s to watch a little TV.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: family matters

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I broke my promise, or at least my practice.

I missed writing the last two days, even though my commitment was to write everyday during Lent. The combination of the move, trying to get the phone company to get wifi hooked up at our new home, work, and sheer exhaustion conspired to the point that I chose to sleep rather than write. It was a semi-conscious choice (because I was semi-conscious when I made it), but a choice nonetheless. Therefore, this season, I will also learn something about forgiveness. The point of my writing practice during Lent over the years has been to give me a sense of focus in working to intentionally live these days and to give me a sense of connection, which is why I write publicly. Missing two days doesn’t change either of those things, in the larger picture. Easter will still come.

The best part of the last two days was sharing it with our nephew, Tim, who came to visit. He is sophomore at Wheaton College, outside of Chicago, a wonderful musician, and all around great guy. He and some of his friends were coming to North Carolina to hang out and do some hiking and he took time away from them to come see us when he realized he was going to be close by. As far as I’m concerned, his visit was an incredible gift.

Because our families have never lived close to each other, Ginger and I have not gotten to be around Tim and his older brother Ben very much over the years. We have a good connection with them, but we haven’t been around each other to really get to know one another. Having him for a couple of days (he got to spend the first night with us in our new home) gave us time to relax and talk and move beyond the what-have-you-been-up-to-and-what-is-your-major kind of conversation. Tim and I also had a chance to spend a couple of hours, our two MacBooks connected by fire wire, swapping music files and sharing our favorites. I came away with about forty new CDs worth of tunes and came pretty close to doing the same for him.

Age is a funny thing. I’m about thirty years older than he is and yet that distance wasn’t part of the mix this weekend. I didn’t have to try and be twenty, neither did I feel compelled to take the I-remember-what-it-was-like-to-be- your-age approach. We laughed and talked and listened as ourselves talking to one another. There are things he knows about I want to learn and, I suppose, the reverse is also true. I knew him when he was a kid. It’s much more fun to let him grow up.

I was talking to someone the other day who is about eighty and preparing for surgery. She likes her doctor and she said, “You know how old he is? He’s forty-two,” in a tone that made it sound as if he was going to have to wash the sand from the sandbox off of his hands before he started operating. I wanted to say, “When you were forty-two, you didn’t think of yourself as a kid or as inexperienced. Why not think of him that way as well?” That doctor has probably spent half of his four decades honing his craft. He’s not a novice. She’s missing the chance to see him by keeping him a kid.

I think that’s part of the reason Jesus didn’t hang around Nazareth much. When he went back they kept saying things like, “Isn’t that the carpenter’s kid?” and “Hasn’t he turned into a handsome lad?” and “What are you going to do with your life?” He took his disciples and his miracles and went elsewhere.

I think we all want to feel as though we get credit for who we are, no matter the age. I know I think that’s true for everyone (though I’m pretty sure it’s not, at least at the intensity with which I feel it) because the lesson I internalized early in life was that love was earned, which means I’ve spent a lot of years trying to be enough to deserve to be loved. Staying a kid – or being treated as though you’re still a kid – doesn’t let me be enough. I, like Paul, want credit for putting away childish things.

Like Lazarus coming out of the tomb still bound up by the grave clothes, though I know how deeply and unconditionally I am loved by God and by Ginger (I’ll start with those two), I stumble around still tied up because I don’t know how to loosen and lose all that keeps me from being fully alive and aware that I am so loved.

The working motto of the UCC is, “Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.” The way I hear those words is, “When you come to church, you be you and will be who we are and move on from there.” Last night, I drove Tim down to meet his friends. As I drove back, listening to some of the music we had shared, I prayed when his friends asked how the time was one of the ways he would answer was that he felt like he could be himself and that we were ourselves around him. I wanted him to feel the way my Aunt Pegi made me feel every time I was around her.

Over the years, one of the things I’ve become aware of by watching families around me is that family doesn’t come easy for me, and I think I have a lot to do with why it doesn’t, much of which is connected to the whole love is earned thing. In a song I’ve mentioned before, Cliff Eberhardt’s “The Long Road,” he sings

there are the ones you call family
there are the ones you hold close in your heart
there are the ones who see the danger in you
and don’t understand

The song came around as I drove home last night after meeting Tim’s friends and I was thankful because I had been with him, my family, and it was good. He made me feel loved and understood; I hope I did the same for him.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: big day, few words

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

We moved into the house today for real. For the first time in eight months, we don’t have a Pod in our driveway. The new place is stacked full of boxes and furniture several wonderful folks helped us carry in. In a few minutes, I’m driving up to Greensboro to pick up one of my nephews who called and said he wanted to come hang out for a couple of days during his spring break. And, at the center of local news, the Duke and UNC men’s basketball teams are playing tonight. (The women play tomorrow for the ACC championship.)

I’m happy. I’m hopeful. I’m exhausted. More tomorrow.
Peace,
Milton
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