don't eat alone

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

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

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

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

I’ve got more thoughts running through my head than I can get organized into anything coherent tonight and so I offer this wonderful poem I found today at The Writer’s Almanac. The poet is Lynn Powell.

Acceptance Speech

The radio’s replaying last night’s winners
and the gratitude of the glamorous,
everyone thanking everybody for making everything
so possible, until I want to shush
the faucet, dry my hands, join in right here
at the cluttered podium of the sink, and thank

my mother for teaching me the true meaning of okra,
my children for putting back the growl in hunger,
my husband, primo uomo of dinner, for not
begrudging me this starring role—

without all of them, I know this soup
would not be here tonight.

And let me just add that I could not
have made it without the marrow bone, that blood—
brother to the broth, and the tomatoes
who opened up their hearts, and the self-effacing limas,
the blonde sorority of corn, the cayenne
and oregano who dashed in
in the nick of time.

Special thanks, as always, to the salt—
you know who you are—and to the knife,
who revealed the ripe beneath the rind,
the clean truth underneath the dirty peel.

—I hope I’ve not forgotten anyone—
oh, yes, to the celery and the parsnip,
those bit players only there to swell the scene,
let me just say: sometimes I know exactly how you feel.

But not tonight, not when it’s all
coming to something and the heat is on and
I’m basking in another round
of blue applause.

Peace,
Milton

Back in the early nineties, the town of Waxahachie, Texas almost became famous for something other than the fact that my grandmother lives there. It was to have been the home of the Superconducting Super Collider, a fifty-four mile underground oval where super charged protons would be sent around in opposite directions and then collided when they made the circle, offering scientists to the chance to see what particles came out of the collision.

I have no idea what I’m taking about, but I did find this explanation from a guy who worked on the project (which was scrapped in 1993):

Imagine two rings of metal pipes, eighty-seven kilometers (fifty four miles) in circumference, running through a concrete tunnel several meters below ground. The pipes themselves, separated vertically by seventy centimeters (about two feet), are only a few centimeters in diameter. They are under high vacuum and encased in powerful electromagnets held at an ultra low temperature.

Inside the two pipes, narrow beams of protons whirl around the tunnel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. The particles in these beams have been accelerated to an energy of twenty trillion electron volts. This is a huge energy for a single particle to carry: particles emitted by radioactive minerals reach energies less than one millionth as great.

At a few special points around the ring, in cavernous underground experimental halls, the beams are made to intersect. Although most of the protons simply pass by each other, there are so many protons in the beams that head on collisions occur a hundred million times every second. In each collision, energy of motion is turned to enormous heat in a tiny fireball.

From within this minute cataclysm, a shower of sub-nuclear particles among them, perhaps, a new and exotic one speeds fleetingly outwards. Sophisticated electronic detectors catch these evanescent particles, recording their speeds, directions, and types; and physicists around the world analyze these records for clues to the innermost nature of matter and the forces that hold it together.

Ginger and I went to the funeral of the spouse of a friend who lives in a nearby town. The last time we had been in that room was for their wedding two summers ago. Ann and Becky (not their real names) had been together for years and had two children, Massachusetts’ validation of equal marriage allowed them to become legally what they already were practically and spiritually. Last summer, Ann found out she had a rare form of cancer. This summer, she died.

Becky, the pastor of the church where the service was held and one of Ginger’s friends and colleagues, started the service with what she called “The Opening Act,” a sing-a-long with the choir and her playing guitar. And we sang,

will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by

“That’s a question,” I thought to myself — and then I thought of the Super Collider and what new things we see when things collide at the speed of life and leave us reeling in the wake of the explosion. I didn’t know Ann well, but the more I listened to her friends and family talk about her, the more I wish I had. We would have liked each other. She was a cook, a lover of food, a voracious reader, a teacher in both her character and her vocation, and one committed to hospitality. The four hundred or so people who packed the little church sang and talked and laughed and cried and told story after story. The altar was decorated with particles of the various aspects of her life. On most every wall were pictures of her with her kids, with Becky, with friends, at church. She was smiling in all of them. One of the things people talked about over and over was Ann’s determination to find meaning in her cancer. She wrote, she read, she talked, she prayed, and did everything she could think of also looking for “for clues to the innermost nature of matter and the forces that hold it together.”

And we sang and talked and prayed and laughed and cried trying to make meaning of her death. We left the church and stopped at a Dunkin Donuts so we could debrief and shift gears before I had to go to work and Ginger had to come home to finish working on her sermon. As we relived the service, I said, “As I watched us join together in the ritual of remembering, the phrase that kept running through my head was ‘hopeful futility.’” She nodded and we talked awhile longer.

Ann left behind a twelve-year old daughter and a nine-year old son. “Mama Ann,” as they called her, will not be there as they grow up no matter how many pictures are on the walls and how many stories Becky tells. Ann won’t be baking any more cakes or be there to be the catalyst for church dinners. She is gone. Dead. Therein lies the futility – a powerful word, but not the final one.

Hope inhabits the stories and the pictures, the joyful singing as tears ran down faces, the incarnational collision of grief and grace that creates possibilities for what “eye has not seen and ear has not heard.” Ann is with God. One day, we will be, too. Therein lies the hope. We will be with God. That’s the second half of the verse:

will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by
there’s a better home a-waiting
in the sky, Lord, in the sky.

I kept thinking about the question in the song as I cooked tonight, and began to hear it asking God if the circle would be repaired, or healed, on day: will it be un-broken? Will we realize how connected we are to God and to one another? Will we see what God can create out of the particles left from the collision of existence? The image that comes to mind is all of humanity sitting in a circle with God. There might even be a campfire. (Ohh – S’mores, too.)

My faith matters to me, mostly, because of what it means to me as I live these days. If Heaven were the only reason for believing, I don’t think I would make the choice. Today, as we sang of “being there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun,” which sort of freaked me out as a kid, I realized I like the circle image better than the calendar. We all came from God and we are all going back to God. When the circle is unbroken, when it is complete, who knows what new possibilities will spring forth.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — I’ve posted the Chicken Marsala recipe.

I worked on the line at the restaurant for the first time last night, my previous days there having been spent proving my prowess as a prep cook. It was a good night to learn: busy enough to let me see most everything on the menu, slow enough to not put me “in the weeds,” as we say. I had a chance to see Chef at work, both in the way he ran the line and in the way he puts food together. The special last night was a pan-seared lobster stuffed halibut served with a mushroom-stuffed potato pancake, beurre blanc, and an artichoke and tomato salad. Here are some of the things I learned about Chef working with him last night:

• he likes the sauce to go on the plate first, underneath the food;
• he moves and works deliberately and intentionally;
• he has a girlfriend who is also a chef;
• he doesn’t like a lot of noise on the line (it’s an open kitchen);
• he is generous and kind with his employees;
• he’s a good teacher and looks for teaching moments;
• he doesn’t waste time or food;
• he loosens up as you get to know him;
• he likes things to be clean;
• he keeps up with everything in the kitchen;
• he doesn’t ask as many questions as I do;
• he has regard for everyone in the kitchen;
• he pursues excellence quietly and diligently;
• he’s a big Sox fan;
• and I’m not sure he knows what to do with my exuberance.

Part of working on a kitchen line is remembering you are incarnating someone else’s vision for the food. What I bring of myself is my passion, my expertise, and – when asked – my imagination, but my job is to create what Chef has envisioned, to make his plates look and taste good. I could see him watching me just as I was watching him, paying attention to how well I learned and remembered as he showed me how to put each dish together, as he explained what mattered most to him in the way the kitchen ran, and as he noticed how I completed the more mundane tasks I was given or I knew had to be done (there are always tomatoes to dice). When the night was over, we both knew each other a little better.

Since my life is shifting back to the Restaurant Standard Time, Ginger and I began our morning with Breakfast Theater, since it’s the best time to watch a movie together. Today’s feature was 10 Items or Less, starring Morgan Freeman and Paz Vega. It’s a small independent film about “him” (Morgan Freeman) doing research for a part in a small independent film by going to Archie’s Ranch Market, a rundown grocery store in a poor part of Los Angeles. Paz Vega is Scarlet, the checker in the “10 Items or Less” line. The movie happens all in the same day and is as light and charming as it is thought provoking. What Freeman sees as research for a role, Scarlet lives as real life: what she sees as a job interview, he calls an audition. But Freeman is more than a thoughtless voyeur. He studies everyone he sees, from the file clerk to the guys at the car wash, trying to learn from the way they practice their crafts and embody their roles.

“Did you know,” he says to the file clerk, “you deal with each folder for exactly two and a half seconds? That’s amazing.”

I don’t think the file clerk had ever thought of himself as amazing, particularly for going through stacks of file folders. He didn’t know he was telling his story.

The relationship between Freeman and Scarlet is not romantic, and yet the movie explores the romance in two people taking time for each other, even if that time is part of one day. “We live, we work, we’ll never see each other again,” they say as they part ways, both changed by what the other saw in the details.

Even after one evening, I’m a different cook in this restaurant than I have been in other kitchens. The Inn was fueled by chaos, even on its best days, and I learned who I needed to be there to not only survive but to produce. My new Chef works hard to create a humane and humanizing environment, without chaos, and invites me to realize both what a kitchen can be and that this is the kind of kitchen I was looking for all along, though I had never seen one.

The joy Freeman took in watching people act their parts in life was helpful to me. Watch folks for a little while and you start to learn their story, or at least begin to get an idea of what questions to ask. I stopped at our local grocery store to get a salad for lunch. The woman at the counter is there most every time I go in and she is always smiling and engaging the customers in a way uncharacteristic to New England, though her accent makes it clear she’s from here. When I finish typing, I’m off to the gym where the woman who sits behind the counter seems rarely happy. Her age and accent are not much different from her counterpart at the sandwich counter, yet their takes on life appear at opposite poles, at least in the way they tell their stories at work.

I’m at the beginning of a new chapter in my story and already I feel my character growing and changing in my new environment: stuff to learn means room to grow; new faces mean new opportunities.

I love a good story.

Peace,
Milton

My father-in-law is in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s disease. He and my mother-in-law left yesterday after an extended stay with us.

Reuben

Leah knew she was unloved
until she held the boy,
her firstborn,
and she named him Reuben:
“See, a son,” it means;
a love carrier —
“Because God has seen
my misery.”

The Reuben I know is a twin,
next to last in family line
a love carrier, too —
the hardest working man,
his blue eyes smiling
like a sunrise.
His labor, however, is not his legacy,
but the brilliant light I saw
in her eyes

and so I asked to be family.
He has loved me
like a son,
even when he didn’t understand
why I was cooking
or my earrings.
His faith stands as tall
as his shoulders;
love as deep.

He’s fading like an old photograph
left in the sun too long
I can still see him
the spark in his eyes that once
shone indelible now a dim
blip from a beacon
in an ocean of loneliness;
we haven’t enough
line to throw . . .

Whatever happy endings are,
they are not this.
This is wrong.
This is wrong. This is wrong.
Being right about that
changes nothing.
When he sits and stares into air,
looking for everything,
my heart hurts.

Reuben has lived a life of love.
We, the Loved, are a living
altar of humanity,
called and collected to remember
all he has forgotten,
all he has given.
I wish that felt like enough
but it isn’t enough.
It just isn’t.

Peace,
Milton

I took my trip on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho today, as did many of you who are in churches that follow the lectionary, and listened again to the parable we have come to call The Good Samaritan. Many of Jesus’ parables have gotten misnamed over the years — the three in Luke 15 for example: The Lost Sheep should be The Good Shepherd, The Lost Coin should be The Persistent Housewife, and The Prodigal Son should be The Loving Father. I think, however, that we labeled this one pretty well because the Samaritan is the one who drives the point home.

When the lawyer quoted The Law back to Jesus – love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself – and then asked who his neighbor was, he was expecting a theological discussion, not a call to incarnational living. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus called us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us. In this parable, he changes his vocabulary from enemies to neighbors: love your neighbors as you love yourself – oh, and by neighbor he meant anyone that’s not us.

That’s a tougher road to take than the Jericho Road ever was.

One of the best sermons I remember on this parable focused on the guy who was beaten up, though I can’t remember who preached it. The preacher said, “Everyone thinks the Samaritan is the Christ figure in the story. I think they’re wrong. Jesus is in the ditch.” Everyone is my neighbor because Christ is in all of them. Ginger made the point this morning by recalling the closing scene of the trial in A Time to Kill. Jake Brigance is a lawyer defending a black man who is on trial for murdering the white man who raped his nine-year-old girl. The jury is all white. Jake struggled the whole trial with how to get people to see something other than race. He has a breakthrough in his closing argument:

I want to tell you a story. I’m going to ask you all to close your eyes while I tell you the story. I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to yourselves. Go ahead. Close your eyes, please. This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon. I want you to picture this little girl. Suddenly a truck races up. Two men jump out and grab her. They drag her into a nearby field and they tie her up and they rip her clothes from her body. Now they climb on. First one, then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure with a vicious thrust in a fog of drunken breath and sweat. And when they’re done, after they’ve killed her tiny womb, murdered any chance for her to have children, to have life beyond her own, they decide to use her for target practice. They start throwing full beer cans at her. They throw them so hard that it tears the flesh all the way to her bones. Then they urinate on her. Now comes the hanging. They have a rope. They tie a noose. Imagine the noose going tight around her neck and with a sudden blinding jerk she’s pulled into the air and her feet and legs go kicking. They don’t find the ground. The hanging branch isn’t strong enough. It snaps and she falls back to the earth. So they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck and drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge. Pitch her over the edge. And she drops some thirty feet down to the creek bottom below. Can you see her? Her raped, beaten, broken body soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood, left to die. Can you see her? I want you to picture that little girl. Now imagine she’s white.

Several of the jurors visibly flinched. They saw a little girl they knew and loved and that changed them. Love and pain are the common denominators of our humanity. Such is the profound power of the Incarnation. No enemies, only neighbors.

The parable is even more difficult to live because it pulls us to both compassion and justice. When we see the images of the victims of the genocide in Darfur, or any one of the civil wars going on around the globe, the call to do whatever we need to do to save them is crystal clear, even if our resolve to figure out how to live that calling is still muddled. But the racial tension between the Jews and the Samaritans adds another layer. What if it were Osama in the ditch? Is it still Jesus, too? How can we be at war with our neighbors in Iraq and Afghanistan? How can I stop to help someone when I know they want to kill or hurt me because they think I represent my government? Am I really supposed to stop to help heal someone who stands for things I’m against?

This neighbor business is messy, difficult stuff. I have a hard enough time with my actual neighbor who sits and his porch and yells at the driver of the ice cream truck to turn off the music. If only Jesus had met him, I’m sure the parable would have had at least another paragraph of exceptions.

Our foster daughter drove out from Boston with her girlfriend to have dinner with my in-laws before they go back to Alabama tomorrow. When she got in my car to go to dinner, she said, “I’ve got a CD you’ve got to hear” and put in James Morrison’s Undiscovered. He’s a young British singer who has both soul and substance. Here are the lyrics to the title tune:

I look at you, you bite your tongue
I don’t know why or where I’m coming from
And in my head I’m close to you
We’re in the rain still searching for the sun

You think that I wanna run and hide
I’ll keep it all locked up inside
I just want you to find me
I’m not lost, I’m not lost, Just undiscovered
We’re never alone we’re all the same as each other
You see the look that’s on my face
You might think I’m out of place
I’m not lost, no, no, just undiscovered

Well the time it takes to know someone
It all can change before you know its gone
So close your eyes and feel the way
I’m with you now believe there’s nothing wrong

You think that I wanna run and hide
I’ll keep it all locked up inside
I just want you to find me
I’m not lost, I’m not lost, Just undiscovered
We’re never alone we’re all the same as each other
You see the look that’s on my face you might think I’m out of place
I’m not lost, no, no, just undiscovered

I love that: I’m not lost; I’m undiscovered. Though they seem worlds apart, my own need to be discovered in the ditch is not really so far from my seeing Jesus in the ditch whether I’m looking at a transient or a terrorist. We are called to discover one another, or perhaps to discover the Jesus in one another.

No enemies, only neighbors.

Peace,
Milton

Since I had to work yesterday, I didn’t get to go to our Friday Farmers’ Market in Marshfield, so I set out today to find a couple of farm stands and buy vegetables and fruit for the week ahead. As I was driving down Route 123, I saw a sign that said, “Blueberries Next Right,” so I turned in the dirt driveway, parked my car, and walked up to where two people were sitting at a table covered with large cans. I had landed at Tree-Berry Farm and it was pick your own blueberries.

“What do I do?” I asked.

“Take a bucket, follow the signs, and then bring it back when you’re done picking and we’ll tell you what you owe.”

I learned I was picking highbush blueberries (I assume there must be a lowbush variety). There were rows and rows of bushes and about twenty of us out picking. I think I was the only one who wasn’t with a family. I filled my bucket about three-quarters full and went back to the table. He put the bucket on the scale and said, “You’ve got about two pounds. That will be four dollars and eighty cents.”

I didn’t tell him about the seven berries I ate in the field — the freshest I have ever had, but I did let him keep the change from a five.

From there, I drove a little farther into Scituate and found a farm stand without a name, but with some great native strawberries, summer squash, and zucchini. I picked up a quart of the berries and an arm load of squash.

“Nine sixty,” said the woman at the register as the man standing next to her bagged the squash.

It wa then I realized the other five I thought I had in my pocket had been spent at the store this morning when I made a quick dash to buy syrup for our waffles. I only had five ones in my pocket.

“I’ll have to put the berries back,” I said. “I don’t have as much money as I thought.”

“Oh, no,” said the man. “Take the berries with you. You’ll be back and you can bring the money then.”

I thanked them and drove home to fix lunch for my father-in-law and water my own garden. The tomatoes are still green but getting bigger, the chard is going strong, and I got one squash of my own this week and made squash croquettes.

There’s no great point here other than man, I had fun.

Peace,
Milton