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have mercy

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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have mercy

Guy Clark has a song that says, “Some days you write the song. Some days the song writes you.” Some days that’s true with sermons as well.

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A crowd gathers for worship in a traditional setting. A preacher preaches a sermon, initially embraced by everyone. But then, at the end, the preacher reminds the crowd that the point of that “Good News” is mercy and compassion; not just for them, but also for foreigners. And suddenly the adoring crowd turns. The preacher gets death threats and flees.(from Eric Folkerth)

Some days, reading the from the gospels is like reading a newspaper.

The scene I just described may sound like Washington DC this week, but it is what happened in the passage we just read from Luke 4, which tells the story of Jesus’ return to Nazareth, his hometown. As we noted last Sunday, the scene is tied to both his baptism and his time in the wilderness where he was tempted. But this was not his first sermon. Luke notes that Jesus returned to the region of Galilee “empowered by the Spirit” and went from town to town preaching and healing and had created quite a following.

Then he came back to the town where he had been brought up, where he had been nurtured. Perhaps the synagogue where he spoke was the same one he had attended as a boy. One of those leading the service handed him the scroll from Isaiah. We don’t know if they had their own version of a lectionary or how the scripture was chosen, but Jesus turned to a particular passage and read:

The Spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of God’s favor.

Then he sat down to talk to them about what he had read, and Luke says those in attendance were fixed on him. He had everyone’s attention. And he said, “Today, you have not only heard the scripture, you have also seen it embodied.”

People were raving about him and were so impressed by his words that they looked at each other and said, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s kid?”

But Jesus wasn’t through. He said, “I know you’re going to tell me to do here what I did in Capernaum, but a prophet is not welcome in their hometown.” And he went on to refer to two stories from the Hebrew Bible that they would have known well—one about Elijah and one about Elisha, both of which involved God’s grace and mercy expanding to include foreigners. The good news he brought was meant for more than the hometown crowd. God’s love knew no boundaries.

And they were enraged because he wasn’t who they expected him to be and they tried to kill him, but Jesus escaped.

If we look back what Luke has said so far, we should not be surprised at who Jesus turned out to be. When Mary was pregnant she sang a song when she visited her cousin Elizabeth, part of which said,

Holy is God’s name. God shows mercy to everyone, from one generation to the next. God has shown strength and has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations. God has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed.

When John began baptizing at the Jordan and people wondered if he was the messiah, he said,

“I baptize you with water, but the one who is more powerful than me is coming. I’m not worthy to loosen the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. The shovel he uses to sift the wheat from the husks is in his hands. He will clean out his threshing area and bring the wheat into his barn. But he will burn the husks with a fire that can’t be put out.”

And then Jesus went from town to town saying he had come to offer mercy, sight, and freedom from oppression, and also to proclaim the year of God’s favor, which was another way of saying the year of Jubilee.

One of the traditions of Hebrew culture was that a Year of Jubilee was supposed to happen when all debts owed to other people were forgiven, all enslaved people were freed, and all land was returned to its original owners. It meant a fresh start for everyone.

Can you imagine what a year of jubilee would feel like? To have all of your debts forgiven? To be freed from exploitive contracts? To get back things that had been lost?

Or maybe we think about what such a year would cost us. Mercy doesn’t come cheap.

When Jesus started talking about extravagant mercy—choosing the disposition to be compassionate and to forgive—the crowd turned on him. To embody compassion in a way that made it available to everyone was too high a price to pay.

I hear the word mercy and I think of a song called “Mercy Now” by Mary Gauthier. The next to the last verse says,

my church and my country could use a little mercy now
as they sink into a poisoned pit it’s going to take forever to climb out
they carry the weight of the faithful who follow them down
I love my church and country, they could use some mercy now

Yes. We could use some mercy now. And as we read these words from Jesus’ first recorded sermon—that set the tone for his entire ministry—we hear again that we are called to be the ones offering mercy to everyone: the people we like and the ones we don’t, those who look like us and those who seem foreign, those we understand and those who confuse or even agitate us, those whom we think belong and those we wish we could exclude.

The word compassion means to suffer together, to carry each other’s pain. Let that definition sink in for a moment: to suffer together, to carry each other’s pain. Too often, our cultural message seems to be “I just want you to hurt like I do.” How then do we live so that we are sharing pain rather than causing it? How do we learn to see the pain around us and then find ways to share the load?

Jesus calls us to see the pain around us and to embody his words with what we say and do:

The Spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of God’s favor.

As we contemplate what it means to be followers of Christ here in Hamden, here in America, I want to end my sermon by inviting us to read those words together as a pledge of our faith—an embodiment of our understanding of who Christ has called us to be in our time and in this place. The words are printed in your order of service. Let us read them together.

The Spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of God’s favor.

Amen.

Peace,
Milton

stocked up

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
stocked up

stocked up

when I looked up
the roots of the word stock
it said “supply for future use;
collective wealth”
and reminded me that
it was four hundred years
before it became a kitchen word

still I think about
the pot simmering all day
filled with a collective wealth
of bones and root vegetables
as common tap water
turns into a supply of
sustenance and flavor

that awaits the call
of a collective hunger
when the pot simmers again
this time a richer boil of
comfort and conversation
another collective wealth
to share extravagantly

Peace,
Milton

ice

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3
ice

ice

it has been days since
the temperature has
topped the freezing mark
the snow that fell a few
days ago has crusted into
a crunchy stability

if you have to go out
but ice is not your friend
whether the white ridges
or the translucent layer
disguised as ashphalt
it will take you down

maybe that’s what they had
in mind when they chose it
as the acronym for the force
that knocks down doors
and scours streets scraping
people into oblivion

it chils me to think that
evil appreciates metaphor
freezes me in my tracks to
picture the storm sweeping
through sanctuary cities
with a snow plow’s impunity

the arctic temperature of
hate cannot sustain life
our humanity loses its footing
with such frigid heartlessness
we best heed the forecast
come in from the cold

Peace,
Milton

triptych

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
triptych

I know the Revised Common Lectionary doesn’t point to the story of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness until the first Sunday in Lent, but it seems to have more layers when it is taken in context between Jesus’ baptism and his sermon in Nazareth where they deemed him unrecognizable. I’ll find something else for Lent.

_____________________

The first time I heard the word “Trip Tik” was back in the days when you could go by AAA and they would help you plan your vacation. They printed out a booklet that had maps for the trip broken up in daily segments to make it more manageable.

It was years later before I realized someone at AAA must have been an art aficionado because the name of the guide was a pun on the word triptych— which isn’t spelled like it sounds. It is a word that came out of the eighteenth century to describe a painting on three connected tablets—a visual triology—and has also come to mean something composed or presented in three parts.

As we continue through Luke’s gospel, we are in the middle of a gospel triptych: the accounts of Jesus’ baptism, Jesus’ time in the wilderness where he was tempted, and Jesus’ return to Nazareth are three stories that are deeply connected.

Last week we saw that Jesus went out to be baptized to repent—to mark a change in his life. What happened in the river with John marked the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Then, Luke says, “Jesus returned from the Jordan River full of the Holy Spirit, the life-breath of God, and was led into the wilderness. There he was tempted for forty days by the slanderer.”

It’s an odd sequence of events: Jesus walked the twenty-five miles back to town and then the Spirit led him into the wilderness—that is to say even deeper into the desert—to be tempted, which is a word, like repent, that meant something more layered to Luke (and to Jesus) than it often does to us. The word “tempted” can also be translated as “put to the test” or “put through a trial,” as if to say Jesus went out to wrestle with who he thought he was, rather than temptation being about (if I may use personal examples) how much I think about getting an ice cream cone whenever I shop at Bishop’s Orchards, or how I can hear the Salt and Vinegar potato chips calling me regardless of what food store I’m in.

Suffice it to say, Jesus had more at stake in this text than blowing his calories for the day.

Theologian Ched Myers points out that Jesus was retracing the steps of his ancestors who had wandered in that wilderness for forty years trying to figure out what it meant to be God’s people. Jesus, he says, was “driven by the Spirit deeper into the wilderness where he, like his ancestors [had to] discover what his vocation [meant].”

His baptism had culminated in God proclaiming, “You are my beloved child in whom I find delight.” Now he was alone in the wilderness where God had led him and he was hearing a voice that was not God’s and that began each challenge with, “If you are the Son of God . . . ,” a short phrase packed with self-doubt, calling Jesus to do something to prove himself.

If you are who God says you are . . .

Though Luke begins by saying Jesus was tempted for forty days, when the specific trails come it sounds as though they all happened at the very end of his sojourn. Jesus had fasted for forty days, Luke says, and he was starving. Then the challenge came: “If you are who God says you are, you don’t have to go hungry. You can make all the food you want if you just turn the stones into bread.”

Jesus answered by quoting from the Torah: People need more than bread to live.

The focus then moved to seeing things through the eyes of position and power. If you are who God says you are, pledge allegiance to those who say they have the power and you can have it, too. Worship the empire and you can share in the spoils. Take everything because you can.

Jesus went back to the Torah: We worship only God.

The last of the trials had to do with avoiding suffering by leaning on his position and privilege. If you are who God says you are, then jump off of the pinnacle of the Temple and make the angels catch you.

Jesus quoted one more verse from Deuteronomy: Don’t test God. Actually, it could be translated “don’t tempt God” because it is the same word that is used when the translation says Jesus was tempted.

There is an interesting similarity between the trials Jesus faced and the specific actions John the Baptist gave when people asked him what repentance looked like. John said, if you have two tunics, give one away to someone in need; if you are a tax collector, collect only the legal amount and don’t cheat others for your own gain; and to the soldiers he said, don’t use your power to extort others. They are not exact parallels, but we can here resonant themes of what it means to be a child of God. John was calling people to change their lives and to demonstrate that change in the way they incarnated the love of God in their words and actions. Even though we are in the crosshairs of a winter storm instead of a desert wind, we have to face similar questions:

If we are who God says we are . . .
. . . will we allow our need or our appetites to alter our integrity?
. . . will we give into the seduction of power and influence?
. . . will we take advantage of our position and privilege when it serves us?

The temptations didn’t offer Jesus a whole different life, or even a chance to run away from responsibility. They offered the choice to be content with a different version of himself—a lesser version. Instead of one who would use his miracles to heal and to teach, he could use them for personal gain. Instead of speaking truth to power, he could ally with those in charge to gain power for himself. Instead of facing suffering, he could use his privilege to avoid it and be on easy street.

And these trials were not a one-time occurrence. Jesus stared them down over and over throughout his ministry. The tests he faced in the wilderness were examples of what he faced almost every day: to use who he was and what he could do as a way to make his life more comfortable and powerful.

Over the past couple of years, a quote from a friend has attached itself to this story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness. I learned it when I was going through a time that tested my sense of myself and required me to make some difficult decisions. He quoted wisdom from another friend who said, “We either choose our losses or we lose our choices.”

Let me repeat that: we either choose our losses or we lose our choices.

When we are willing to risk beyond what feels safe or comfortable, we see things in ourselves and in our world that we did not see before. We create possibilities, as Jesus did coming out of the wilderness in this second part of our gospel triptych. From there, he went back to Nazareth, his hometown, which is the biblical story we will tell next week as we see the last panel of the triptych.

In the meantime, let us carry these questions into the days ahead:

If we are who God says we are . . .
. . . will we allow our need or our appetites to alter our integrity?
. . . will we give into the seduction of power and influence?
. . . will we take advantage of our position and privilege when it serves us?

We, like Jesus, choose how we live and relate to those around us. May we choose to live and speak and act as those who know they are beloved children of God created to love and serve one another as we travel this journey of life together. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

dropping our guard

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
dropping our guard

I found some new things (well, new to me) as I read the story of Jesus’ baptism this year. Here’s what I said in my sermon.

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When it comes to Bible stories, particularly the ones we have heard during Advent and Christmas, and now going into the season after Epiphany, we often carry a sense of familiarity, as though we really understand the details of the story. We forget to remember that we don’t really have a grasp of what life was like in first century Palestine. We don’t often think about what people ate, or what their houses were like, what they did for work, or remember that they had to walk to get from place to place.

For the most part, the gospel accounts are not concerned with many of those details. As we have noticed before, they leave out a lot of stuff, from how much time has passed between events to the tone with which things were said.

Keep that in mind as we look at and listen to John the Baptist as he spoke to those who had come to be baptized. First of all, understand that he was at the Jordan River, which was close to the distance of a marathon from Jerusalem. Most everyone who came out to hear him had walked there and would have to walk home. There were no hotels along the river, nor were their restaurants. Yet, Luke says, crowds came. They wanted to hear what he had to say.

And John greeted them by saying, “You children of vipers!” (Probably not the welcome they had hoped for.) Then he told them they needed to repent—to change their hearts and minds—or they would be cut down like a dead tree and used for firewood. (Another comforting image.)

We might expect that they would have been at least taken aback, if not offended by his words; instead, they wanted to know more. (Which might have surprised John.)

They said, “Okay—so what should we do?” Don’t just yell at us–help us understand how to change.

That’s what the word repent meant in those days: to change your heart and mind. We are accustomed to thinking it means to be sorry for what we have done wrong, but it is larger than that, and more hopeful. John wasn’t calling them to simply be remorseful, he was calling them to pay attention to their lives and their relationships, to not allow themselves to simply go through the motions, to take an honest look at their lives and do things differently.

In response to their questions, he gave them practical things to do to help them understand what a changed life looked like: if you have more than you need, share it; don’t cheat others in your business for your own gain; and don’t use your power to your advantage.

All of those changes meant letting go of the way they were used to living, and to make changes that needed to happen; still, another word for change is loss. To change the way we live means to lose our comfort and the way we are used to being in the world.

Not too many chapters away from where we read this morning, Jesus said, “Lose your life to find it,” which is another way of calling us to change.

Now I get to tell you my favorite thing that I learned this week.

Our word lose comes from an old Norse word that meant “to disband an army.”
What it means to lose our lives is to disband our security forces, to let go of what we think we need to be safe so we can find out what it means to be faithful and compassionate.

We get lost in other ways as well. In our hymn “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” we sing of being “lost in wonder, love, and praise,” which means dropping our guard so that we can truly feel the presence of God. We can lose ourselves in a piece of music or a great story. When we are with the ones we love, we lose track of time.

As I offer those images, I don’t want to overly romanticize what it means to lose someone or something. My mother would have been 93 today. She died nine years ago this week. Since her death, my brother and I have both had to learn how to disband the armies we used to distance ourselves from each other and learn how to be family.

To disband our armies, for whatever reason, means to leave ourselves unprotected, which is risky and scary and hopeful all at once. And when we choose to feel vulnerable, love finds us.

The way the gospel writers tell it, Jesus didn’t make the trip out to the Jordan to see his cousin just to put on a show. He came to be baptized. He came to mark a change in his life, to repent. For thirty years he had lived in Nazareth. We don’t know what he was doing, though we could guess he might have worked with Joseph as a carpenter. And then he made a change—he repented—and that started with coming for baptism. He was not the same after that.

Luke doesn’t have all of the details included in the other gospels, but the image he paints is interesting. Look at the phrasing in the verse: “When everyone was being baptized and Jesus also was baptized and was praying, the heavens opened up.” Much like we said when we talked about the scene of Jesus’ birth and new understanding that the Greek word doesn’t mean inn, but means “a guest room,” which meant Jesus was born in the middle of a crowd, his baptism was in the context of a larger community as well.

There in the middle of the swirl of people and water, Jesus (and perhaps everyone else) felt the breath of God and heard a voice say, “You are the child I dearly love; I find delight in you.”

The story with John calling people baby snakes and ends with God saying, “It’s you! I ADORE you!” in response to Jesus’ commitment to change—his repentance—so he could grasp who he (and everyone else) were in God’s eyes.

Jesus walked back from the Jordan as a changed person, as we shall see in the weeks to come as we move through Luke’s gospel. He began to teach and preach and travel in ways he had not done before. When he finally got back to Nazareth, they hardly recognized him because of the strength of his compassion and focus.

As followers of Christ, we are called to repent. We are called to keep taking honest looks at ourselves, even when things seem to be going pretty well. We are called to see where we have become complacent or overly comfortable, where we have allowed our protective forces to camp for too long such that we have lost sight of who we are in God’s eyes. To fully grasp what it means to be wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy of love (“It’s you! I ADORE you!”) means to risk that same kind of love in what we say and do.

With that in mind, I want to ask you a few questions. These are not things you have to answer out loud. Think of them more as a guided meditation. Make sure you are sitting comfortably. Close your eyes if you like. When you hear God’s call to repent, to change your heart and mind, what or who comes into your thoughts? What armies do you need to disband inside yourself so that you can lose yourself in loving God and others? Who do you know who needs to hear that they are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved? What practical things can you do to help them see that love?

As we ponder these things, may we remember that repentance is not a one and done kind of thing. It is a way of life. A way of being. A way of choosing to keep disbanding armies and opening our hearts every chance we get. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

word choice

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
word choice

word choice

another word for change is loss
another word for loss is absence
another word for absence is space
another word for space is distance
another word for distance is apart
another word for apart is away
another word for away is beyond
another word for beyond is without
another word for without is grief
another word for grief is change

Peace,
Milton

tidings

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
tidings

tidings

Christmastide
has ebbed and
the waves of
wonder that

crashed against
the sea walls
of our hearts
are slipping away

trees go down
lights go dim and
it dawns on me
tides don’t stop

they come in
one after another
waves break
just like hearts

one after another
we come and go
oh tidings of
comfort and joy

Peace,
Milton

star struck

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
star struck

The magi show up every January and those of us who step into pulpits are expected to talk about them. Here’s where their journey took me this year.

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The magi are among my favorite characters that show up in the story of Jesus’ birth because we don’t really know who they were. Some translators call them wise ones; others, scholars. The word magi is just a transliteration of a Greek word that can mean magician, sorcerer, astrologer, or a sage from another religion.

They didn’t make it to the manger. A close reading of Matthew’s account implies that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph stayed in Bethlehem for some time—maybe a couple of years.

The magi appear to be trusting souls. First, they followed a star because they trusted it would lead them to someone special. Second, they went to see King Herod because they were looking for a spiritual leader and they thought he would know about it since he was the actual king. Apparently Herod didn’t because he became agitated and angry, so much so that Matthew said everyone in Jerusalem felt the force of his wrath.

Herod pulled himself together and pulled the magi aside to try and get all the details and then asked them to promise to come back and report exactly where they had found the child. When the travelers became aware that the king was not someone who had anyone’s best interest at heart other than his own, they didn’t go back to the palace and home by another way so Herod could not find them.

Sometimes the magi are referred to as kings, but they don’t appear to be people with a lot of political power. They appear to have some financial means to travel across the desert, and the brought expensive gifts, but they didn’t make any claims for themselves other than to tell of the star that had led them.

Herod, on the other hand, guarded his power—except that he wasn’t the real power. He was called Herod the Great, yet he was on the throne in Palestine only because the Romans let him sit there. When he caught wind of the young messiah, he saw Jesus as a threat, not a source of hope and love. Where the magi searched out of wonder, Herod acted out of fear. The sages looked at the child and saw possibilities; Herod saw Jesus as a a problem to be dealt with.

Where our reading stopped this morning makes it seem as though this part of the story ends when the magi slip out of town without Herod knowing. I have heard and preached worthy sermons about the value of knowing when to go home by another way. That’s an important lesson.

But the story continues, and it troubles me a bit. Listen to the next few verses.

When Herod knew the magi had fooled him, he grew very angry. He sent soldiers to kill all the children in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding territory who were two years old and younger, according to the time that he had learned from the magi.

What I have been wrestling with is that these good-hearted, well-meaning sages who came looking for the messiah set terrible things in motion with their inquiry.

Hear me clearly: I am not saying the magi were responsible for the death of the children Herod killed. What I am saying is they did not have control over, nor could they foresee, the consequences of their words and actions. And I have spent a few days wrestling with what we can learn from them as we think about how we choose to live.

The fact is that Herod was a wicked, evil, mean, and nasty man and would have hurt anyone whom he thought threatened his hold on the throne. If the magi had gone back and told him what he wanted to know, he would have done the same thing and gone on a killing spree. They didn’t cause the massacre—and he appeared to have learned about Jesus’ birth from the travelers’ honest and trusting questions.

Let me circle back to where I began: I love the magi. I love their sense of hope and wonder. I love that they were willing to take off across the desert because they saw a star that intrigued them, that spoke to them, even though they had no idea where it was leading them.

What I want to hold in creative tension with that is that the world—then or now—is not that simple. They followed the star and didn’t look at much else. Herod was simplistic in his worldview as well, seeing his power as the only thing that mattered.

As we share in the wonder of the magi, we can also learn from them. When our lives become centered around only one thing, we can lose sight of our place in the world, our connectedness, and the impact and consequences of our choices. Jesus said life was about two things: to love God with all of our being, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, which, when you listen closely, means life is about a whole web of relationships. Time and time again, when people challenged Jesus about things he did because he was going against tradition or breaking a law, he responded by telling his accusers to look around and to look at more than the one drum they were beating.

When we are tempted to reduce what matters to one issue, we need to look around, to see beyond ourselves. And this is where we need each other to be God’s messengers. Much like the angel came and told the magi to go a different direction, we can help each other see the bigger picture, whether that is to look for guidance like the star, or to become aware of consequences we may not see. We need to help each other find other ways to go that remind is life is complicated and wonderful.

We are all inundated by voices claiming that their one issue or angle is the truth with a capital T, that what they have to say is all that matters. Sometimes we can fall into a similar kind of tunnel vision on issues both great and small and lose sight of the relationships that sustain us and the God who calls us to choose those relationships over any single issue. We can’t see everything that’s coming, but we can see how the call of Christ calls us beyond ourselves. Following that call will lead us to live lives of love. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

route map

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
route map

route map

the four-gate airport in New Haven
(travel-sized, my friend Mandy says)
announced new routes to five cities
and it made me wonder how many
new connections I have made lately
or what it means to be an airport

even if it is only metaphorically
a place of connection with lines
arcing across the map to show all
the people who offer landing space
in this beautiful temporary where
we measure distance and approach

the routes are paths of forgiveness
murmurations of friendships that
fill our world map with a picture
of what it means to be a part of
this quilt of curiosity and belonging
everything from sand to stardust

I am holding a picture of the last time
we saw each other and our embrace
as you prepared to board your flight
the hug lets us hold what we wanted
to keep while we are not together
a souvenir of absence and memory

travel and travail share a history
both words are rooted in suffering
until the former took off on a journey
to route to each other is a labor of love
whether I am the host or the guest at
the gate walking toward one I love

Peace,
Milton

epiphany

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
epiphany

epiphany

I’m working on a sermon
about the saddled sages
who were sane enough
to follow stars and
wise enough to ignore
the king’s directions and
find another way home

I used to see a desert sky
as their background
but recent years have
given me the view of
rioters climbing Herod’s
walls as the wise ones
slipped out the back

the smell of violence
didn’t match their gifts
so they trusted hope
rather than promises of
an angry frightened king
set their eyes on star shine
beyond the smoke and hate

I can feel our country
bracing for the anniversary
without another way
home in sight just yet
wise ones feel far and few
and hope is a long journey
made of single steps

whatever happens hope
will outlive the king
we have to keep telling
each other as we face
the journey ahead
the stars are with us
whatever comes

Peace,
Milton

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