Last week as Ginger and I walked around the Guilford Green, I noticed the flag was at half mast. I wondered out loud who it was for, in part because I had not paid attention to the news for a day or two, but also because the recent spate of shootings gave me pause to think it could be for quite a number of folks. Turns out that day it was to mark the life of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe who was assassinated.
When we got back home, I spent some time researching the tradition of lowering our flags as a sign of mourning and respect. The tradition goes back a little over four hundred years, as best anyone can tell, when the captain of the British ship Heart’s Ease died on a journey to Canada. When the ship returned to London, it was flying its flag at half-mast to honor the departed captain.
The flag was flown exactly one flag’s width lower than its customary position to make room for the “invisible flag of death.”
Over the last four centuries, the rules and traditions around flying the flag at half mast (or half staff, as it is sometimes called) have taken different shapes from country to country. For instance, Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 7 of the United States Code outlines strict guidelines for how long the flag is flown at half-staff following the deaths of various members of the government.
I found one website that lists all the half mast alerts across the country. Some are for nationwide remembrances and some are more local. I learned that last week in Connecticut, our flag was lowered to honor the life of Sandy Hook Fire Chief William Halstead who died in the line of duty.
Just reading the name Sandy Hook made my heart ache for that community because they live with such grief. Today I also read about those who died because of extreme heat, about raging fires in Europe and in the western US, along with the continued horror of all that is happening in Ukraine, in Somalia, in Sudan–the list is unending, and we haven’t even begun to talk about the ground level grief we carry that never makes the news.
The truth is there has never been a day when we did not need to make room for the invisible flag of death. We live half mast lives, lives acquainted with grief, no matter what we say we can see by the dawn’s early light.
Everything hurts, Our hearts shadowed and strange, Minds made muddied and mute. We carry tragedy, terrifying and true. And yet none of it is new; We knew it as home, As horror, As heritage. Even our children Cannot be children, Cannot be.
Everything hurts. It’s a hard time to be alive, And even harder to stay that way. We’re burdened to live out these days, While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.
This alarm is how we know We must be altered — That we must differ or die, That we must triumph or try. Thus while hate cannot be terminated, It can be transformed Into a love that lets us live.
May we not just grieve, but give: May we not just ache, but act; May our signed right to bear arms Never blind our sight from shared harm; May we choose our children over chaos. May another innocent never be lost.
Maybe everything hurts, Our hearts shadowed & strange. But only when everything hurts May everything change.
It is a hard time to be alive. We don’t need to qualify that statement to decide if it is the hardest; let us just take it as it is: it is a hard time to be alive. Gorman is right: we are both burdened and blessed to be here.
Let us raise the invisible flag of death and claim it as our own, not as a sign of invasion or occupation, but as a banner of our humanity, our courage, our compassion, our sadness, and even our hope. Whatever flag flies below it is colored by conflicting allegiances. We will not find our unity there. But to see see the invisible flag is to know our days are numbered.
A friend from Texas called yesterday and asked how I was and I said I was hot, and then I said I knew the irony of statement talking to him since the high yesterday in Guilford was only three degrees warmer than the low in Houston.
A heat wave in New England is three days in a row with a high above 90. Two weeks ago I was at a youth camp outside of Little Rock and the temperature was 100 with a heat index of 114 because of the humidity on top of the heat. For more than three days. People there call it summer.
One thing we in Connecticut do share with Arkansas is we have had a few weeks without significant rainfall. I don’t know what the official length of a dry spell has to be, but people began using the word drought around here. And it has been dry. The vegetable garden is suffering. I watered almost everyday last week trying to help things along and, as i did, I thought about the articles I have seen about the epic drought our west.The pictures of what is left of Lead Mead are shocking.
My garden buddy Tom and I were talking about all of these things over the weekend as we worked to keep our garden growing. We were harvesting garlic, which I did for the first time last year. I didn’t know how long garlic took to grow before that. We planted the cloves in early November. They rest through the winter, produce garlic scapes in the spring (which are edible), and then the single cloves each offer a full bulb of goodness in mid-July. We will dry them out and they will last us until the spring–well, they can last that long. I’ll use them up before then. I mean, we only harvested sixty bulbs.
But knowing how long it takes for them to mature, I marvel at the abundance of garlic in the grocery store. It takes a lot of time and land and who knows what to keep those piles of bulbs in the produces sections of our stores. Since we are cut off from the knowledge of what all it takes, we don’t contemplate whether we can actually afford the luxury.
And that brings me back to water.
I live in a state with an abundance of water: rivers, ponds, lakes, ocean. Yet, even here, we talk about drought. As we stood in the garden, Tom pulled out his phone and pulled up an article written by Tiokasin Ghosthorse, a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation and an activist.
“Sit down and read this,” Tom said. “It will only take a few minutes.”
So I sat down on the makeshift benches we made, next to the cucumber vines and the volunteer sunflowers and read.
Mni is a Lakota word for Water and goes beyond any translatable word in the English language. The fragmenting of Mni into simple English nouns would provide a rough translation and lose most of the word’s true meaning and essential idea of “Water as a Being.” So I will attempt to explain Mni in a way that might make some sense in English. . . .
Water is the time and space understood by Mother Earth as she holds the womb of all creation within her: oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, creeks, streams, rains, floods, waves, humidity, wetness, dampness, hurricanes, tornadoes, rainbows, and the teardrops of babies.
“Water as a Being” creates with the sun, moon, stars, winds, earth, fire, and the life of all living beings sentient or that which is thought of as non-sentient. The Lakota have always known the connection of Mni and have encoded the living meanings of things seen and unseen by the delicate and fragile human eye.
I like to say, “Water is a cup of the stars. When you put that cup of Water to your mouth and drink, you are drinking a cup of the stars. You see the glimmering lights and reflections of the sun on the waters of the earth.”
As Tom and I continued our conversation in the garden, he said, “Water is not a resource; it’s a being–like we are human beings.”
I flashed back to my recent exit interview when I said, “I have finally learned that when you say ‘human resources’ you don’t mean resources for humans but humans as raw materials for production.”
The interviewer winced but didn’t correct me.
I am not a resource to be used up, nor are you. We, too, are stardust. And, if you remember from middle school science class (I think that’s where I learned it) we are about sixty percent water. Our blood is ninety percent water.
We are not here to simply be used up. Neither is the water around us. Ghosthorse says,
Water is the time and space understood by Mother Earth as she holds the womb of all creation within her: oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, creeks, streams, rains, floods, waves, humidity, wetness, dampness, hurricanes, tornadoes, rainbows, and the teardrops of babies.
We, too, are water. We are a cup of stars.
I can’t write that without returning to the new images coming from the James Webb Space Telescope, giving us a chance to see more of the universe that holds us. Even with our
Stephan’s Quintet
expanding technology, we are only seeing a small part of what we belong to. Among the things we have to learn from what we can see is that we are connected, bonded, related to all of it. Yea re not something other than creation, we are a part of it. We are here to belong and to care, not to consume and exhaust.
That lesson is not new. And we have yet to learn it.
Ghosthorse closes his essay with these words:
I ask permission before I drink water. Water gives me the language and responsibility to carry the message of life. Water is not a noun, but a loving, moving, growing, cleansing, and powerful living being. So I drink this cup of stars called Water while thinking, speaking, and wanting all things to live fully, rather than purely exist within the lonely world where too many of us have found ourselves—an anthropocentric world that has disconnected us from the Being of Water and caused us to take so much for granted.
In spite of the weather forecast, it rained yesterday. A good, soft, enduring rain that added up to about three-quarters of an inch. The thirty gallon trash cans we have lined up along the back of the barn to catch the water coming off the roof filled up over halfway. The sunflowers seemed to stand taller this morning. Everything glowed with gratitude, even in our New England heat wave, all of us having drunk our cup of stars.
I got up early this morning, thanks to our middle Schnauzer Lila, made the coffee and sat down to write my Morning Pages for the first time in two months. It felt good.
For those who are not familiar with them, Morning Pages are a practice I learned from The Artist’s Way by Julie Cameron. Her instructions are to get up and write three pages first thing in the morning. It doesn’t matter what you write. Just write.
I first read the book and started the pages in 2001 as I began to come to terms with my depression. To say they have saved my life is not an exaggeration. I would love to say I have written every morning over the last twenty-one years, but there have a been several gaps along the way, such that my opening sentence this morning was
It’s Monday morning and I’m back to my morning pages for the first time in a while (how many times have I written that sentence?).
The parentheses in my journal brought back a memory of editing Denial Is My Spiritual Practice and Other Failures of Faith by Rachel Hackenberg and Martha Spong–still one of my favorite projects. Both women are good writers and thinkers. I had just finished Joe Moran’s First You Write a Sentence, where he raises a red flag about the way parentheses break the flow of good writing and I took them out wherever I could find them. During one editorial round, Rachel left a comment asking, “May I have just this one?”
When I commented to authors about parentheses (I wasn’t just picking on Martha and Rachel) my rationale was that they broke the flow of the text for the reader. They were a distraction. But maybe that is not always a bad thing. Sometimes the flow needs to be broken, interrupted, both in books and in life.
Since I grew up going to school in Africa, I was first introduced to parentheses by their English name: brackets, a word that has an architectural root as a means of support or even protection. The Greek word from which parentheses grew means “a putting in beside.” The sense is that what is in the brackets could be left out and everything else would make sense, but it belongs as well; things are better with it there–or at least better understood.
Sometimes the flow needs to be broken by a related thought that syncopates what is going on in the regular rhythm of things. That statement offers grace when I think about the gaps in my rituals of life as parentheses (no Morning Pages since May 19) rather than failures or weaknesses. I have not stopped thinking or feeling or being or living, I just haven’t bracketed the time to write and life has flowed on. My Morning Pages parentheses reminded me the flow needs to be broken, much life the brackets of my blog posts give me time to breathe, to reflect, to connect, to digest at least some of what is flowing by and through and around me.
I spent some time this morning chasing parenthetical rabbits set loose by a search for “a parenthetical life.” One of the best bunnies was an article by Christopher Benfrey called “Pain and Parentheses,” which was published in The New York Review in 2014. He mentions “the most famous parenthesis in postwar literature,” which comes from Nabokov (and also provides the title for one of Billy Collins’ books of poetry:
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory.
And then Belfry says,
I found myself wondering how many other parentheses like this there were: windows in a wall of verse or prose that suddenly opened on an expanse of personal pain. Masquerading as mere asides, they might hold more punch than parentheses are usually expected to hold, more even than the surrounding sentences, and have all the more impact for their disguise as throwaways. Were such parentheses common, I wondered, and if so, why?
The answer to the first question would appear to be yes.
He goes on to weave together bracketed remarks by Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. In the middle of it all he asks,
But is it possible to imagine a life without such parentheses—not a life of unrelieved happiness, whatever that might be, but rather a life in which suffering and loss are part of our ordinary existence, not bracketed off from it, not, as we say, “compartmentalized,” but part of our mentality, momentary squalls in the ordinary weather of our shifting and evanescent moods?
His question sends me back to Rachel and Martha’s book. They wrote alternating chapters, each one telling a story of pain that was not bracketed off from existence, but was taken to be the stuff life is made of, the stuff we have to live through and live with. I have my own book that points to grief as one of life’s primary colors.
Our early understanding of the pandemic was to see it as parenthetical and it has become the heart of our global narrative over the past two years. A decade or two from now we may read these years as an insertion that has a beginning and an end, much like we look back on wars and catastrophes, but here in the middle of it all how are we to know or to feel that this is something other than real life?
nothingness in store cry not-all end in that place you were there before
Someone called aprina.14 commented,
overall a pretty solid construction. The second line though feels a bit displaced. Like it doesn’t quite fit in, meter and meaning a year ago
and Heaney replied,
I thought a bit more about this. You’re probably too young to know the painter Bob Ross. He would have a slip of the hand and then turn a mistake into an important part of his art. He called them happy little accidents. As I thought about this haiku and your feedback (to which I agree), I thought to myself that middle line represents my life. On either side is the nothingness before death that knew no beginning and the nothingness after death that knows no end. I think that I quite agree with you about that second line…the line that between the parentheses of nothingness representing my life, it does not quite fit in. And I sure don’t know the meaning.
and added,
I agree. I forced this 5-7-5 haiku a bit. I’m going to revisit the message from a different place. Thanks for your feedback.
I started to close by saying I am a couple of weeks away on closing the parentheses on the job that allowed me the honor of being Martha and Rachel’s editor, but the six years I spent there are not something that can be left out of my story. One of the meaningful things about editing is the space to take things out and then, sometimes, put them back. Perhaps in the stories of our lives the brackets can come and go; we can use them when we need them to break the flow, to draw attention, to offer a respite, or raise a question. Then, when the time is right, we take them out and let the words fall into the flow.
I preached again this morning, moving into the last few weeks of my bridge pastorate at the church in Westbrook. The passage today was Jesus’ first encounter with Mary and Martha, one that most people know as a story that juxtaposes the doers and the contemplatives. I kept looking for a way into the story that got behind the comparison and found some help in articles here and here.
That’s the thing about a good story: there is always more to find.
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Thursday evening Ginger and I took a walk around the Guilford Green after dinner, as we often do. As we passed the church, which is next door to our house, Ginger said, “The shutters on the CE building are white and the shutters on the sanctuary are black. I’ve never noticed that.”
Neither had I. We have lived next door to the church and walked by it every day for almost seven years and had never seen the white shutters because the black ones that hang on the more predominant white building were what caught our attention. One little detail changed what we saw.
I had a similar experience with our scripture passage for today.
It’s a story I know well—or thought I did, much like I thought I knew what our church building looked like, but three details stood out to me in ways I had not seen before. The first is the preposition in the opening sentence: they—as in, “Now as they went on their way. . .” We have to go back to the beginning of the chapter to figure out who “they” are. Luke 10 begins with Jesus sending out seventy-two disciples in pairs “to every town and place where he himself intended to go,” giving us some indication that Jesus knew he was not long for this world. They came back full of stories to tell and Jesus was elated.
As all of that was going on, a lawyer asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” and Jesus answered with a question: “What do you read in the law?” The lawyer said, “You shall 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.” When Jesus told him he had his answer, the man asked, “Who is my neighbor?” which led to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which ends with Jesus asking another question: Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer said, “The one who showed him mercy,” and Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”
Then THEY went on their way—the lawyer, the seventy-two travelers—and Jesus went into the village where Martha welcomed him. Not them. Him. Jesus was by himself—or might have been. Martha wasn’t cooking for a crowd. We are not told if they already knew each other, but it feels like a reasonable assumption. Jesus entered the house and Mary was there, which brings me to the second detail: Mary sat at his feet.
The phrase is more metaphor than description. It means she took the posture of a student—a disciple. She wanted to soak up whatever Jesus had to say, to talk about important things, to learn and to grow. The detail is crucial because women in Jesus’ time were not allowed to touch the scriptures, much less study them. Jesus was widening the circle.
Meanwhile, Martha was “distracted by her many tasks,” and that brings me to the third detail. The word that is translated as “tasks” or “work” is the Greek word diakonia, from which we get our word deacon. It means works of service, or ministry. Theologian Karen Gonzalez says,
The work that Martha is doing is probably not housework but the work of that a deacon of her worshipping community might have done–this work might include hospitality but is not limited to that duty alone.
Martha, too, was acting like a disciple. All three of them—Jesus, Martha, and Mary—were focusing on ministry.
Mary and Martha are mentioned three times in the gospels. This is the first, when the home is identified as Martha’s and Mary is mentioned second. In John 11, we also learn of their brother Lazarus, who died, and Jesus went to their village. Mary stayed home when Jesus got there and Martha went out to meet him and then went back to get Mary. In John 12, Jesus was in their home again, this time identified as Lazarus’ house, and while Martha fixed dinner for the crowd and Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with perfume.
If the point was for Martha to stop her work and act like Mary, she never got the point and Jesus did not appear to see the need to belabor it. If Martha’s point was for Mary to pick up the slack, she didn’t appear to get the message either. Maybe neither of those things was the point.
Jesus challenged Martha to stop comparing her ministry with that of her sister.
I have to listen hard to that statement because hospitality is what I love. I love to cook elaborate meals and serve lots of people, part of which means I have to get up from the table in the middle of good conversations and work on the next course. I have had to learn that sometimes real hospitality can happen when I open a package of Cabot Cheddar and a sleeve of Ritz crackers and do my best to not miss a word.
Then again, I get Mary because I can spend the day reading theology books or talking big cosmic ideas when there is housework and clean up that needs to be done. I have stacks of t-shirts that need to be put away and weeds that need to be pulled who will all attest to that fact.
Some moments call for the ministry of presence and some call for the ministry of action. Again, this is not a story about comparison. Jesus was not picking a favorite. This is a story about grace.
Jesus said, “Martha, Martha”—I love that he called her name twice; it carries such affection—“you are worried and distracted by many things.” I think that is a sentence where we can all find ourselves. We are worried and distracted by many things, and in the middle of all of that worry it is easy to think if only other people would pick up the slack things would be easier. I get that. I feel that way sometimes.
Do you know what I mean?
You know: If people would just look at the world the way we do and do the things we wish they would do the way we want them done, this world would be a better place. Right?
However, none of us has been appointed Organizer of the World—though we all volunteer for the job from time to time, just like Martha. And, just like her, we can’t pull that off with the people in our own house, much less all across the planet.
Here’s the thing: Martha saw Jesus and welcomed him into her home without expecting him to do anything but be there, yet she struggled to welcome Mary, her sister, in the same way. That’s why Jesus called her out. He wasn’t telling her to quit doing what she was doing. He was asking her to welcome Mary as well. To give Mary grace.
We, like most congregations, talk a lot about how we can be more welcoming, which most often means how we can attract new people. Perhaps we begin by welcoming one another to come in and find the grace and the space to listen to God and feel at home with ourselves and with one another. No one is made more valuable to God because of what they do or how much they do, why then should we put those stipulations on one another? We are not the Body of Christ because we have earned our way in; we are all a part of the God’s incarnation of love in the world because of who we are, not because of how we compare to everyone else.
May God give us the grace to see beyond our expectations of one another and choose the better part of belonging—relishing one another’s gifts and making room for all of us to belong, just as we are. Amen.
Strawberry shortcake has been a Fourth of July tradition at our house for a long time. The recipe comes from my great grandmother–my father’s grandmother–who died not long after I was born. When my mother asked my father what recipes he wanted to make sure she knew how to make, he said, “Ma’s strawberry shortcake.” My mother went to his grandmother to ask for the recipe and all she offered was a list of ingredients and instructions like, “Add two glugs of oil.” (You turn the bottle over and let it “plug” twice.”
When we lived in Kenya, our house was around the corner from a strawberry farmer and we had shortcakes fairly regularly during harvest time. Mom made them so large that they were the meal, not the dessert. And she always brought the mixing bowl of leftover whipped cream to the table.
One night, my mother, my brother, and I were finishing dinner (Dad was out of town), Miller was slopping the spoon in the whipped cream when he looked across the table and caught my mother’s gaze.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, and as she finished speaking a dollop of whipped cream hit her right between the eyes. Nobody moved. She didn’t say a word, and she didn’t wipe the whipped cream off of her face as it slid down her nose and chin. She picked up her spoon, reached in the bowl for a scoop and threw it back at my brother. Then we started laughing–and we had about five minutes of the best whipped cream food fight ever known.
I love this recipe.
Over the years, I have adapted what was handed down to me. I put fresh basil in the shortcakes (they’re sweet biscuits, really), add a little cinnamon to the whipped cream, throw some blueberries in, and macerate the berries in sugar, lemon juice, and a little balsamic vinegar.
And I still bring the extra whipped cream to the table–unless my brother is in town.
strawberry shortcake
Start with the berries. But first, put your mixing bowl and whisk from your stand mixer in the refrigerator until you are ready to make the whipped cream.
1 pound strawberries, trimmed and sliced
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Macerating means softening the berries with liquid, and the process is simple, though the word makes it sound far more violent than it deserves. Start here and let the berries rest for about thirty minutes to create a lovely syrup.
Next, the shortcakes.
2 cups all-purpose flour (280 grams)
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup chopped basil
1/2 cup (one stick) cold butter, cubed (this takes the place of the glugs of oil)
3/4 cup milk
Preheat oven to 425°.
Combine the dry ingredients and then cut in the butter until the mixture looks like small pebbles. Add the milk and mix (by hand or with a wooden spoon) until if forms a dough. Don’t overmix. Dump the dough out on a lightly floured surface and roll to a rectangle about a half–inch thick. Cut into eight pieces and place on a parchment lined baking sheet. Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until tops are browned.
And now, the whipped cream.
1 pint heavy whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup confectioner’s sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
I don’t make the whipped cream until I am ready to serve the shortcakes. When you are ready, take your mixing bowl and whisk out of the refrigerator and add the ingredients. Take plastic wrap and cover the top of the mixing bowl so you don’t inadvertently redecorate your kitchen. Turn the mixer on high and let it whip until the cream looks the way you like it.
To serve, cut the shortcake in half. Put a small dollop of whipped cream on the plate; put the bottom of the shortcake on top of the whipped cream and then add berries and more cream. Invert the top of the shortcake so the cut side is up and press it into the whipped cream and then add another layer of berries and cream. Take the leftover whipped cream to the table.
Since I am headed to youth camp with Wilshire Baptist Church this week, we had our shortcake on Saturday. It won’t be the last time this summer.
I have been away from much of the media in my life for a few weeks, much of it related to dealing with changes in my life that have taken a toll on me mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Posting my sermon this week is a way of saying to you and to myself that I want to be more present here. Thanks for sticking with me. The text is Galatians 5:1, 13-25.
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When I work on my sermon each week, I try to start early.
To give Zoe some time to think about music selections, I select the scripture passage far ahead of time, usually from the Revised Common Lectionary—or at least I try to. On Monday, I look up the passage and read through it and begin to jot down ideas. I read commentaries, other sermons, and then begin the chase the theological rabbits that show up until things begin to come together. If all works well, I hope to have some sort of draft by Thursday or Friday because sermons, like fruit, need some time to ripen.
That didn’t happen this week because the events of the week overwhelmed me and kept changing what I saw in our passage for today. Three things—one public and two more personal to me—kept me grappling with what to say. So here it goes.
The first verse of our passage is puzzling to me because it is so circular: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” It feels a little like the kid who came into class after the bell had rung and the teacher asked, “Why are you late?” The kid answered, “Because I’m not on time.”
What does it mean that we have been set free in Christ for freedom?
And what do we mean by freedom anyway?
Another translation reads, “It is to freedom that you have been called, my brothers [and sisters]. Only be careful that freedom does not become mere opportunity for your lower nature.
Paul then goes on to say freedom is not a license to self-indulgence. To be free does not mean we have the right to do what we want regardless of the consequences or the effect on others. Freedom in Christ is being free to love our neighbor as ourselves. And then he warns, “If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.”
I said I had three things that affected what I wanted to say this morning.
The first is that I am leaving my job this week. Thursday is my last day at my job as an editor—a job I have dearly loved. Because I am sixty-five, the verb they use to describe what is happening in that I am retiring, but that is not the whole story.
I did plan to retire from this job, but not for several more years. A change in leadership about a year and a half ago made it apparent that I was not included in the long-range plans for the company—not just me, but a number of my colleagues who have worked there a long time. As I have struggled, a friend said to me, “We either choose our losses or we lose our choices.” I chose to resign rather than stay in a situation that fosters anger, strife, and resentment in my heart.
When I can get beyond my stuff, I can see that my boss is help captive by her woundedness and her ambition. I think she is more miserable than I am. I can’t always get to that place of compassion, but when I do I better understand the kind of freedom Paul describes as the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
I don’t mean that I am just letting this all roll off. I have my exit interview this week and I will speak frankly about the damage that has been done because it needs to be called out. I do mean that I am working hard to want something other than vengeance. I don’t want to respond to her relational violence with violence of my own. I want to be free of it. I don’t want to be remembered for my retaliation. I want to be remembered for my relationships. I don’t want to be consumed by my situation.
That brings me to the second thing—the public thing.
We live in a country where many appear to think that freedom means the right to devour one another. We have seen that again this week. The Supreme Court said it is unlawful to put limits on where people can carry weapons but it is lawful to put restrictions on the choices a woman makes about her healthcare and her body. Emotions run high on both issues, I know. I feel deep sadness and anger that the several of the justices framed their decisions in the context of faith, as though forcing pregnancy and taking away a woman’s right to make choices about her life and her body was the “Christian” thing to do.
Wielding power to make others do what we want them to do is not loving one another as we love ourselves; how can that be the Christian thing to do?
In the contrast Paul sets up in the passage he makes a list of what he calls the works of the flesh. When we read the list, it is easy to focus on the more salacious stuff, but in the middle of it all he mentions “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy.”
Then he says, “By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.”
The way we can change the world by living out our faith is not by plotting to gain political power so we can enforce our idea of morality. We change the world by loving our neighbor as ourselves, by choosing to let the Spirit free us from our fears and woundedness and arrogance to be able to live compassionately—to share the pain and grief of those around us rather than adding to it.
Where he listed the works of the flesh, he talks about the fruit of the Spirit. The word translated as fruit carries the connotation of what we give birth to in our lives: what comes into existence as a result of our way of being in the world—and that brings me to my third thing.
Yesterday Ginger and I participated in a memorial service for our dear friend, Eloise Parks. She and Ginger met their first week of seminary thirty-seven years ago and shared a lifetime together. Eloise died eight months ago. The service yesterday was at Pilgrim Church in Duxbury, Massachusetts where she served as Associate Pastor ten years ago. They reached out to Ginger to say they wanted to do something to mark the impact she had on their lives. We spent a little over an hour yesterday telling stories, singing hymns she loved, and giving thanks for what she gave birth to in our lives. Ten years later, the love they felt from her and for her is vibrant and fresh.
If our words and actions do not foster relationships and do not breed compassion and kindness then we are not free: we are not living as Christ calls us to live. If we are not choosing relationship over doctrine, over partisan allegiance, over fear, over ambition, over self-importance, over however you want to fill in the blank, we are not free: we are not living lives that give birth to love.
“Love your neighbor as you love yourself” is not a requirement; it’s an invitation. In a world that is addicted to divisions and dissentions, we are invited to be free to love.
As Paul said, “Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.” And we might add let us not become divided, attacking one another; let us not become self-righteous, imposing our wills on one another; let us not become defensive, projecting our fears on one another.
My siblings in Christ, let us love one another, offering love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Amen.
I preached last Sunday at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, a church with which I have a long and meaningful connection, so my sermon is personal for me and for them. Even so, sometimes something that speaks to the particular also has a wider reach. Thanks to their awesome AV team, I have video as well.
My text was John 13:34-35: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
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For the first time in many years, I have preached weekly through the seasons of Lent and Eastertide. I have been a bridge pastor for a church a couple of towns up from ours on the Connecticut shoreline. We, like you, have followed the lectionary, and the timeline of the stories held together pretty well, telling stories of Jesus’ ministry, then his trial and death, then his resurrection, and then his appearances to those whom he loved and who loved him. But the last couple of weeks, the passages in the lectionary have jumped back to before the resurrection. Our text today takes us back to the night before his death, the night when both Judas and Peter betrayed Jesus, the night when he ate with his disciples and washed their feet.
When we gather for services on the night we have come to call Maundy Thursday–which is Latin for “Mandate or Commandment Thursday”–we can tap into the solemn nature of the service and the rich significance of our rituals, but what we can’t reproduce is the uncertainty of what it felt like to be in that upper room, with little more than an ominous sense that life as they had known it was over. For me it carries the same kind of power as Holy Saturday, the day between Jesus’ death and resurrection, when those who had walked with him had no real sense that Sunday would come.
I learned a term from the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, an Episcopal priest and Hebrew Bible Scholar at Brite Divinity School: Holy Saturday Christian. In a “pastoral letter” she wrote to her students after they had dealt with particularly violent biblical texts in one of her classes she wrote,
I am a Holy Saturday preacher. I wake in the aftermath— if I have slept—to the knowledge that the Beloved is still dead. And I take comfort in the God who is and has said I AM with you. And I rail and scream and curse at God knowing God hears and is there with me to hear. And I try to sleep one more night to see if it will be easier the next day.
And that is where the sermon ends. It is still too soon to talk about resurrection. But God-with-us sits in her chair grieving with us. Waiting with us, walking with us as we make our way through and make sense of our grief.
Maybe that is why we are going back in the story. Even in the shadow of the resurrection, we still have to make sense of our grief. Jesus’ words indicate that grief, like life and faith, is a team sport. Here I am this morning, second in line to fill a pulpit left vacant by one who loved you and talked to you and walked with you for a long time. Christ is risen. Christ is risen, indeed.
And the grief just keeps on coming.
Jesus was speaking to that reality when he said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
God gave the first ten commandments to the Hebrew people to help them learn how to live in the wilderness. In the upper room, Jesus offered his commandment to help his loved ones learn how to live in their own uncharted territory. But what makes it new? Isn’t loving one another singing the same old song?
As Ginger and I both worked on sermons this week, she came across an observation that what was new was Jesus called the disciples beyond loving our neighbors as ourselves and said, “Love one another: the people right here in the group. Be known for how you love each other. “Love one another as I have loved you,” he said, which begs what feels like a rather obvious question: how did Jesus love?
The first person that comes to mind when I think of how Jesus loved is Zacchaeus because the way Jesus loved him was to say, “Come down because I am going to your house for dinner.” Jesus let Zacchaeus be the host. Jesus was going to let him offer what he had.
Several years ago, I was at Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville, and learned that the way they began their services was to allow anyone in the congregation to offer whatever they wanted in the ten minutes that preceded the beginning of worship. The Sunday I was there, one of the men who was experiencing homelessness and came to the breakfast they offered each week had signed up to sing. Both his voice and his guitar were beaten up, and he sang with all his heart—and it was not good. The room was hushed and attentive. When he finished, there was a chorus of amens. “We had to learn to give up being perfect,” the pastor said.
The second thing I think about is how many people were changed by what seemed to be incidental contact with Jesus. Most of his ministry took place in the context of interruptions: people who stopped him, or called out to him, or just reached out to touch him because they knew he would listen.
Before the pandemic, I rode the train from Guilford, Connecticut, where Ginger and I live to New York City one day a week for in-person meetings. I work as an editor, so I was working remotely before the pandemic since I read for a living. On my walk from Grand Central Station to my office, I always stopped at a little stainless-steel trailer at the corner of Madison Ave and E. 35th Street to get a cinnamon raisin bagel.
From March 2020 until April 5 of this year, I didn’t go to New York. My first day back, I wondered if the cart would be there—and it was. When I stepped up to the window, the man in the cart smiled and said, “Cinnamon raisin bagel!”
He remembered me. To say I felt loved is not an overstatement.
But beyond that, I started to realize that I had bought bagels from him for a couple of years and had never stopped to learn about him. The next time, I said, “May I ask you name?”
“Caesar,” he said. “Tell me yours.”
A couple of days later, I asked about his cart and he told me more of his story. I had always assumed he was a poor guy at the mercy of someone who owned a bunch of carts and that he was probably overworked and underpaid. Turns out Caesar owns his cart and has been on that corner for seventeen years. And he bought if from a man who sold bagels and coffee from it for thirty years before that. “It’s good,” he said, “I have about 40,000 customers a year.” And he remembered me.
I have been changed by my incidental contact with Caesar, or perhaps I should say choosing to make the incidental intentional is what has opened my heart a bit more.
Another thing that comes to mind about the way that Jesus loved was that for him love was an end unto itself. Jesus was not recruiting to staff an organization or setting best practices for greater effectiveness; he was not trying to bump up the membership numbers for the annual report, or make sure there were enough giving units to meet the budget.
He loved those around him just because they were wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.
When Paul wrote about love, he said
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
Jesus said, “Love like that.” Choose relationship over doctrine; choose relationship over history; choose relationship over anxiety about the future, over uncertainty, over legacy, over comfort. Love one another like it’s what matters most.
When I started preparing for today, the biggest challenge was to not make the sermon about me because of how I feel about you. I have family connections to Wilshire. My grandmother was on staff here. Bruce McIver officiated at my parents’ wedding, just as George did at mine. The first retreat I did for Wilshire was for Neal Jeffries in 1982, as best I can remember, and I think this summer may be my twentieth camp. I tell people that Wilshire feels like my home church even though I have never been a member—I’ve rarely been inside the building for that matter.
I feel like I belong because one summer long ago a seventh-grade boy who had just lost his father let Ginger and I comfort him. I feel like I belong because I can’t hear the song “I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles” without seeing your faces. I feel like I belong because of Darren and what our friendship means to my life. I feel like I belong because of Collin and Ellen and Tyler and Anne and Marilu and Mindy . . . and I could spend the rest of the day naming names and telling stories because you have loved me like Jesus: you made me belong.
Keep doing that. Keep making room, keep growing and changing, keep taking care of each other; keep singing the same old song that never gets old. We are not going to last forever; Wilshire is not going to last forever; may our legacy be that we loved each other with all our beings. Amen.
The reading for today is one of my favorite passages: Jesus cooking breakfast for Peter and the others who had been fishing all night. For all the times I have read and written about these verses, I saw new things, thanks to a conversation with Ginger. I hope you find some new things, too.
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When it comes to how Peter, James, and John ended up with Jesus, it all goes back to a day when they had just finished fishing and were preparing their nets for the next time out and Jesus stopped and said, “Follow me and I will teach you how to catch people.” One of the ways to read the gospels, then, might be to look at all of Jesus’. words and actions as lessons towards that end. Jesus didn’t come to establish a religion, or overthrow a government, or even create some sort of movement. He walked through the towns and villages eating with people, talking with people, listening to people, feeding them, and healing them.
Then he said, “Love everyone as I have loved you.”
How much the disciples truly grasped what Jesus was trying to say appears to be a little hit and miss. Over and over, Jesus said and did things to show that love–God’s love–is what catches people, and it is over flowingly abundant. “Look at the lilies,” he said. “They don’t worry about tomorrow. They are content to bloom today–and they only bloom three weeks a year. Be like the lilies.” When Peter asked how to feed the thousands on the hillside, Jesus took a sack lunch and showed them there was more than enough to go around. He told parables about fathers who embraced lost sons and banquets where everyone could eat. All the words and deeds pointed to the truth that the way to catch people is to let them know they were wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved–and nothing could change that.
There was enough love to go around. More than enough.
One moment they sounded like they had a sense of the extravagant love of God that included everyone, and then the next they were back to asking who among them was the most important. At times they seemed to grasp that the way God was going to change the world was through people who loved each other, and then their fear–fear of that love wasn’t enough–got the best of them. Though none of the gospel writers ever notes it, I imagine he must have shaken his head a lot.
This final scene in John’s gospel finds Peter, James, and John back in their boat; this time, Thomas and Nathaniel were with them. They had seen Jesus twice, but still nothing felt secure. They didn’t know what was going on. Peter was still carrying the guilt of his denial of even knowing Jesus. They didn’t know what to do, so they went back to what they knew: they went fishing. All night long. And they didn’t catch a thing.
They were still on the water at daybreak when Jesus called out to them. Our translation says, “Children, have you caught anything?” but the Greek word means something closer to, “Hey, boys, any luck?”
The nets were as empty as their hopes.
Jesus told them to try the right side of the boat and they pulled up almost more fish than they could handle. John says someone even counted: they caught one hundred and fifty three fish.
I have always been puzzled by that detail. They didn’t realize it was Jesus on the shore when he called out, and then Peter figured it out when they pulled the nets in, and then everyone rushed to shore to see Jesus, and somehow in all the commotion and excitement, they took time to count their catch?
Why does John want us to know about the one hundred and fifty three fish?
(Hold that thought.)
When they came ashore, Jesus told them to bring some fish, but breakfast was already cooking. Somehow, he had fish of his own. Whatever they brought from the boat was extra–sort of like the leftovers from the feeding of the five thousand. They ate together and then Jesus began asking Peter questions–well, one question three times:
Simon, do you love me?
After each time Peter said, “Yes,” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep,” or “Feed people.” Take care of them. Make sure everyone knows there is enough love to go around.
The metaphors of catching fish and feeding people were laying in the nets right in front of them. They were surrounded the fish they had just caught before being called to breakfast. In a time when there was no refrigeration or cold storage, a net full of fish meant they needed to get to market to make sure their catch got to the people who needed food. There was more than enough for today, but the fish wouldn’t keep. They needed to be eaten today and then they would go catch some more. Even the biggest catches don’t last forever, but what matters is people can eat right now.
If you want to catch people, feed them.
We can hear the word catch a couple of ways. You can catch a fish with a net or a hook, but we also use the word to say things like, “I’ll catch you if you fall.” Jesus was talking about the way you help someone, not how you hook them.
When Peter denied even knowing Jesus to the point of swearing about it, he went into free fall. When he heard the rooster crow, he wept. He had charged into the courtyard thinking he could do something, but his fear got the best of him. At breakfast on the beach, Jesus caught him. He kept Peter from falling deeper into despair and shame. On that beach, in front of his friends, Jesus gave Peter the chance to say out loud that he loved Jesus. He caught him.
Perhaps that image is so powerful to me because it reminds me of my favorite passage from the novel Catcher in the Rye. (I taught high school English, so I have read it far too many times.) Holden Caulfield, who is a troubled teenager and not particularly likeable, has a tender moment as he talks with his sister Phoebe about what he wants to do with his life, and it all swings on a line from a Robert Burns poem that has stuck with him: “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye.” But Phoebe tells him he’s got the line wrong. The line was “if a body see a body comin’ through the rye,” not catch a body.
“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,’” Holden said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around–nobody big, I mean–except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff–I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”
Holden may have mis-remembered what Robert Burns wrote, but he seems to understand what Jesus was saying to Peter—and to us. The third and final time Jesus asked Peter if he loved him, Peter felt hurt. “Lord, you know I love you,” he said. Jesus’ words to feed others feels like he was saying, “You know what it feels like to mess up so badly you don’t think there is enough love to bring you back. But there is. I caught you. Your betrayal of me is not the last word. This is: I love you and you love me. Now go catch others who are falling and feed them full of love.”
