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no easy way out

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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7
no easy way out

I’m taking a break from miracles this week and posting, instead, the manuscript of the sermon I preached Sunday at North Haven Congregational Church in North Haven Connecticut. I hope you find something here that speaks to you.

“No Easy Way Out”
Genesis 21:8-21, Matthew 10:24-39

We have sparrows in our barn.

Behind our house is an old barn that we have worked hard to fix up. I use it as a writing space, and we also use it for social events when the weather cooperates. Last night we hosted a hymn sing. As we were setting yesterday afternoon, Ginger, my wife, called me over to see the sparrow’s nest she had found on an empty bookshelf, tucked into an old Red Sox hat. There were eggs in it. This year, instead of having to worry about who was going to find her nest outside, our little sparrow tucked it away on an empty shelf in a mostly empty barn. Life must have felt safer.

Little does she know we could sweep it all away in one motion. Safe, it seems, doesn’t last for long. I looked at that little nest—so much effort put into creating a place where her eggs could hatch, her new little ones grow to build nests of their own—and I thought of Jesus’ words in our passage for this morning:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from God. . . . So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Hagar, the one at the center of our first reading, was a sparrow—a person perceived to have little human value. She was enslaved woman owned by Abraham and Sarah, as much as Sarah could own anything, being property herself. Some versions translate the word as servant or concubine, but Hagar had no choices of her own in her life. She was enslaved. She was forced to have a son with Abraham without her consent because Sarah thought she couldn’t have children and the custom of the day said Hagar’s son would be Abraham’s legal heir. Then Sarah got pregnant and became jealous of Hagar and her son, Ishmael. She told Abraham to banish them to the desert—to send them out to die. The wandered around, finding nothing to eat or drink, until finally Hagar left her son to die under a bush and walked away, trying to get out of earshot of the boy’s crying—and that is where God found them.

Many years ago, Scott Peck wrote a book called The Road Less Traveled. The subtitle was, “A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth.” It’s a good book. It helped me. One of the things that helped me most was his opening sentence:

Life is difficult.

He was not saying something new. To say life is difficult is to state the obvious. Hagar knew it. The little sparrow in our barn knows it. Both our biblical passages for this morning speak to the truth of those three words: life is difficult. Then Peck goes on to say,

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Once again, he is not saying something new. He is saying something important. Something true that bears repeating. When we face difficulty in our lives—tragedy, grief, sorrow, hardship (our list could go on)—we are not facing something other than life. Let us say it again: life is difficult because it’s life.

There’s an oddly humorous moment in Hagar’s story. She, as we said, had come to the place where she had abandoned her son because she couldn’t watch his suffering, and an angel showed up and says, “What troubles you, Hagar?”

I picture her turning around and saying, “Are you kidding me? What troubles me?”

The angel goes on, “Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.”

God has heard the voice of the boy right where he is. You can’t bear to hear it anymore, but God hears the boy. In your difficulty. In your pain. Do not be afraid. The story was not over.

Jesus’ words about in Mark’s gospel point to another side of the same truth: life is difficult, sometimes, because of the choices we make. You have probably heard a parent say to their teenager as he or she leaves the house, “Make good decisions.” Our poor choices can make life harder, but that is not what Jesus was talking about.

Our good choices–our right choices—can make life difficult. On purpose. We make choices we know are going to cost us. I think about Rosa Parks refusing to get up from her seat on the bus. Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison because he was committed to freedom for everyone in South Africa. Those are big picture examples. Our lives are filled with moments—small intersections—where we can choose to put someone else before our safety or our comfort. A spouse, a friend, a stranger.

Jesus told those who were listening that following him was a difficult choice: lose your life to find it, he said. He wasn’t trying to be witty or poetic. The call of God on our lives is to choose to make it more difficult for the sake of others.

I get the impression that, somehow, Hagar was not as surprised by her difficulty as those around Jesus were. Perhaps Jesus was spelling it out because he could tell those around him thought they were signing up to be a part of an inside circle: the chosen ones. Jesus was quick to say choosing to live a life centered in God was not the way to the top, or even to easy street. It was a choice to engage life, to complicate our relationships, to choose to make picky details matter, to make our comfort something we don’t satisfy first. To not allow fear to be our primary value.

Sometimes, being blessed by God feels like a backhanded compliment. We are chosen to live through the pain, to let God make something out of all the broken pieces, which, of course, means we have to be broken first. It does not mean God is the one doing the breaking.

Recently, I’ve been up close to two extreme difficulties. One friend took her seventeen year-old son to have his wisdom teeth removed. He had an allergic reaction to the anesthetic that left him brain dead within a week. His funeral was this past week. Another friend just found out she has ovarian cancer. She had no symptoms. She went to her doctor on a hunch, for which we are grateful, but she still has cancer. I’m sure you have stories to tell as well.

God didn’t choose them to suffer. God didn’t cause the allergic reaction or the cancer. God didn’t engineer circumstances so Hagar and Ishmael would end up desperate in the middle of the desert to prove a point. When the biblical accounts say they were chosen by God doesn’t mean they got the same deal as Sarah and Abraham and Isaac. Chosen doesn’t mean privileged, or even protected. it means intended.

Remember, Jesus never says anything about God catching the falling sparrows. He says God knows when they fall. God knows. God is there. It’s in Jesus’ name, Emmanuel: God With Us. And even when the angel came to tell Joseph what to name the boy, he began with words we have heard twice this morning already: do not be afraid.

We are all chosen by God. We are intended–created–for God to incarnate through us, if you will, and that activity will be disturbing, both for us and for the world around us. The point of being chosen or intended or called is not to be on the inside track or to come to power or to get to take the easy way out. There is no easy way out. Life, remember, is difficult. And remember also that God is with us. Paul said it this way ;

Can anything separate us from the love of Christ? Can trouble, pain or persecution? Can lack of clothes and food, danger to life and limb, the threat of force of arms? , , , I have become absolutely convinced that neither death nor life, neither messenger of Heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God’s whole world has any power to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. (Rom. 8:35, 38-9 Phillips)

Whatever our circumstances, and leaning into a love that will not let us go, let us choose to make life more difficult: to be the ones who call attention not to ourselves but to those who cannot speak up; to call attention to relationships, both personal and systemic, that are dehumanizing and destructive; to become agents–disturbers, agitators–for compassionate change; and to carry one another’s pain willingly.

Life is difficult. Do not be afraid. Thanks be to God.

Peace,
Milton

miracle monday: surely we are not blind . . .

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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6
miracle monday: surely we are not blind . . .

I know. It’s Tuesday. Suffice it to say there has been a lot going on.

I’m still looking at sight and the way Jesus healed blind people. Bruce Corley was one of my New Testament professors in seminary. I loved his classes. He began our discussion of Jesus’ miracles by saying we should read them as “parables in event,” which meant we had to learn to look at the context within which they happened. The reason Jesus told parables was someone asked a question or made a statement and then he would look at them for a couple of minutes and say, “A certain man had two sons . . . .” The miracles happen in like fashion. The events or conversations before the miracles set the stage. After Jesus healed the blind man in John 9, those around him asked, “Surely we are not blind, are we?”

Jesus answered, “Say it with me: we are blind people.” (my paraphrase)

Look at Mark 10. The religious leaders tried to get him caught up in a theological trap around questions of divorce. Jesus refused to bite. In the meantime, a bunch of little kids came running up and the adults tried to shoo them away. Once again, Jesus responded differently, welcoming the children with open arms and talking about the last being first. Then the one we know as the rich young ruler showed up looking for validation for his philanthropic lifestyle and Jesus told him discipleship would cost him everything. Later on, Jesus and the disciples hit the road to Jericho and he tried to tell them about his impending death, but that mostly lead to a discussion of which one he liked best. In all three situations, the folks around Jesus couldn’t see what was going on. Then he restored sight to a blind man. Like Corley said, a parable in event. A chance for new eyes. No one, it seemed, could see what really mattered.

I’ve become aware that I have quit listening to the news almost completely. I peruse the New York Times online and see some of the articles friends post on Facebook, but I have turned off NPR in the car, for the most part, and I long since gave up on anything passing for news on television. I have discovered I am no less informed because most of what fills the airways is not news, if that word means “new information.” It is opinion, it is repetition, it is white noise, but it is mostly not news. And when there is news, it is offered selectively. We know, for instance about tragedies in London or any US city, but our vision is hardly ever directed toward car bombs in Baghdad or Kabul or Mosul or anywhere nonwhite.

Our government and our media do not ask us to see clearly. They keep offering distractions—shiny objects, early morning tweets, incendiary analyses—as the normal view from here, but there is nothing to see that matters. We are left to see life as a whirlwind of activity and chaos that is out of control. We are told to look at life and be afraid. Very, very afraid.

We are blind people. Jesus, have mercy on us.

When someone asked about divorce, Jesus talked about commitment. When someone said the children were a nuisance, Jesus laughed at the hopeful abandon of the little ones and said we should be more like them. When the rich young man wanted to focus on his generosity, Jesus offered a look at even greater sacrifice. When the disciples jockeyed for position, Jesus invited them to his magnificent defeat. When we allow our field of vision to be filled with images fed to us by those who are driven by power and greed and who understand the more they keep us divided and frightened the less we will ever be able to see our common humanity, we are hopeless, lonely beggars each left to fend for themselves. I can’t afford to see you; it’s all about me. That kind of frightened self-focus may get you elected president, but it will not let you see how God’s love is at work in our world, even in the midst of all the pain and sorrow.

We are blind people. Jesus, have mercy on us.

Let us see a bigger picture. Let us remember we are not the primary characters in this drama called life, and by we I mean Americans. We are not the most important nation on the planet. Look—no other country feels compelled to shout, “We’re Number One” at every opportunity. We are not indispensable to human history. We have done some amazing things. We have also done some horrible things. We have not been on the human stage for even half a millennium. We are flash in the pan of history. We are the squeaky wheel of the present age, always expecting to get the grease. Look—we are one nation among all the others. Our lives are not more important than theirs. Our deaths are not more important than theirs.

We are blind people. Jesus, have mercy on us.

Let us see a smaller picture. Let us notice one another as more than extras in our movie. I have challenged myself to not have my phone out when I am walking in Manhattan. I have learned my way around pretty well—at least in my little section of town—so I try to walk with my head up rather than my eyes down in my phone. Yesterday I saw four people, two women and two men, trying to get at least that many suitcases through a small door that led to walk up apartments. It looked it was a mother and father who had come to visit their children. The door had a spring on it so it would slam shut as soon as someone entered. All of them were crammed into the entryway. I happened to be looking up. I stopped and took the outside door handle and just held the door open. “You look like you could use some help,” I said. The young man smiled. The old woman, too. They got inside with all their bags and I let the door close. It was not my movie, but I got credit as “Man Holding Door” because I wasn’t staring into a screen. Would that I were awake enough to show up for all the parts offered me.

Not everyone who yells, “Look here” actually wants you to see something that matters. We are being blinded by an onslaught of fear mongering. Say it with me: we are blind people.

Jesus, have mercy on us.

Peace,
Milton

miracle monday: doctor, my eyes . . .

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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8
miracle monday: doctor, my eyes . . .

One of the things I keep coming back to as I read through the miracle stories of Jesus is how little we know beyond the moment of healing. We rarely know names or back stories. We are not told what things were like a week, or a year, or a lifetime later. What we get is, “I once was blind, but now I see,” yet that is not a full account. Life, and healing, it seems, are far more complicated. Listen to Mark’s telling of Jesus’ encounter with Bartimaeus.

They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way. (Mark 10:46-52)

Enough about Bartimaeus. I want to talk about me.

Last Thursday was the second of my cataract surgeries. I thought I knew the drill since I had done it the week before, but I was wrong. The second week, though predictable in procedure, was more difficult in recovery. More uncomfortable. And, since they had to put me all the way under with the anesthesia, a little harder to shake since I had two full does within a week of each other. I have had a harder time feeling like myself and it caught me by surprise. I expected to breeze through, as I had done the week before. When I said something to the recovery nurse, she answered, “That’s the way it is for almost everyone.”

“Now you tell me,” I thought to myself. I still wonder why no one thought to tell me ahead of time.

Though everything I said about seeing new details is true—the leaves in the trees and the colors—It turns out that healing, at least when it comes to cataracts, is not that simple. I’m sure (I hope . . .) I am in a transitional stage, much like the blind man from last week (“I see people walking around like trees”), but I don’t know for sure. I think that is why Jesus’ response to Bartimaeus catches my eye: your faith has made you well.

Because of the surgery my vision has been reversed. I went from being severely nearsighted and unable to see much of anything faraway to being able to see faraway but not able to see much of anything close up without reading glasses. My eyes, at least for the short term, are much more light sensitive, so I have to wear sunglasses—not my usual practice, which means I spend my time trying to keep up with two pairs of spectacles, swapping them back and forth. I can tell the cataracts are gone. My vision has improved, and the process of healing is, as I said at first, complicated.

What the surgery did was change the rules. I once had cataracts, but now I don’t. That’s huge. I am grateful to see the tree tops, to stare at the full moon without all sorts of shadows and rings. And I knew how to live by the old rules. I had learned how to fly with those broken wings, if you will. Now, in one sense, it feels as though they are broken in all new places. I am struggling with the disorientation my healing has wrought.

I am shaking my head as I re-read that last sentence. Let me try again.

I was frustrated as hell with looking through waterfalls. I didn’t think twice about saying yes to the surgery. I cried out like the blind men, “Have mercy on me, Doc.” Now I see that for my faith to make me well I must choose to embrace my new reality, to walk the new road that has come into view—a road not (yet) traveled. A road I do not know. Let me change metaphors: for my faith to make me well, I must choose to rearrange the furniture of my life so I no longer know my way around in the dark.

Or the light, for that matter.

I am learning that I am at the beginning of a process. The surgery is over; the healing is not. What will be is not here yet. For now, I can’t pick up anything over ten pounds. I can’t pick up the pups when I come into the house. The dogs do not understand my break with daily tradition. I can’t garden. I can’t is an operative phrase. I have to be mindful of how I pack my bags at the grocery store. I have to remember to put in drops three times a day. I have to juggle my readers and my shades. I also have to wait to see how well I will be able to see.

My current frustration is not the final word, but it is the word for now. I must wait to learn not only how to play by the new rules, but also what those rules will be. Healing, for me, is not an overnight sensation, nor an immediate solution. It is a profound change. A new start. A reorientation. Dare I say it? A new way of seeing.

I remember the old way of seeing. That is what sent me to the doctor, asking for help. And he helped, only to have me open my eyes and spend at least part of the time wishing for the eyes I had learned to live with.

In Stages of Faith, James Fowler talks about conversion as taking in new information, circling to figure out what it means, and then charting a new path. That’s me: I’m circling. I love that I can see the leaves in the top of tree on the corner of the Green from my window seat in the coffee shop even as I struggle to see the words on the page without reaching for my glasses. Both things are new. For now, I am stumbling along in the light, trying to figure out what life looks like from here.

“Your faith has made you well.” My experience over the last couple of weeks makes me wonder about the verb tense in the translation. Perhaps we do better to read, “Your faith will make you well.” After this moment of change, of transformation, of conversion, the healing will happen if you trust the process and hang in there.

It took me eight years to feel like I had learned to live through and with (and several other prepositions) my depression. Ginger’s faith had probably more to do with my feeling well than mine, quite frankly. I have a dear friend who celebrated twenty-two years of sobriety about a month ago. And it took him twenty-two years to get to that day. His faith has made him well, and continues to do so on into year twenty-three.

That’s what I can see from here.

Peace,
Milton

miracle monday: more aware of the air

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3
miracle monday: more aware of the air

Last Monday night, as I finished my post, I did what I have done every other week—looked over the list of Jesus’ miracles that I found on someone’s website and picked one for the following week so I could think about it. What caught my attention was now many blind people Jesus healed. Eight or nine, depending on whether you think Mark’s story about Jesus healing a blind man as he entered Jericho and Luke telling almost the same story but saying Jesus was leaving Jericho are both talking about the same blind man.

Either Tuesday or Wednesday I realized I had chosen to think about Jesus healing blind people on a Monday that would lie between my two cataract repair surgeries—one last Thursday, the other coming up later this week. They did my left eye first because it was the worst. Almost immediately after coming out of the surgery center I could see better, even while wearing the sink strainer they used for an eye patch. It was also on Tuesday morning I found that John Berger, one of my favorite writers, had a small book called Cataract, which I promptly ordered and it arrived on Friday. He begins,

Cataract from Greek, kataraktes, meaning waterfall or portcullis, an obstruction that descends from above. Portcullis in front of left eye removed. On the right eye the cataract remains. (8)

Even he was tracking me.

Mark tells the story of a blind man who was brought to Jesus in the town of Bethsaida. (Mark 8:22-30). As with all of Mark’s gospel, the encounter between the two men happens in the middle of everything, in the context of interruptions, at least from Jesus’ standpoint. The Voice translation tells the story this way:

When they came into Bethsaida, a group brought a blind man to Jesus, and they begged Him to touch the man and heal him. So Jesus guided the man out of the village, away from the crowd; and He spat on the man’s eyes and touched them.

Jesus: What do you see?
Blind Man (opening his eyes): I see people, but they look like trees—walking trees.
Jesus touched his eyes again; and when the man looked up, he could see everything clearly.
Jesus sent him away to his house.
Jesus (to the healed man): Don’t go into town yet. [And don’t tell anybody in town what happened here.]

As far as I can tell, this was Jesus’ only two-step miracle. The guy comes up, Jesus spits on his eyes (there might have been a more delicate way to do that), and then asks what he sees. And the man says, “People are walking around like trees walking around.”

John tells a story about a blind man that begins with the disciples asking who had sinned that the poor man had been born blind. They wanted to know the back story—or, I should say, they assumed they did; they just wanted to know who to blame. Other than that, we don’t know much about who any of these people were before Jesus healed them. When the man in Bethsaida said people looked like walking trees, I guessed he must have been able to see at some point. How else would he have known to make the analogy? He once had seen, and then he was blind. Perhaps there was an accident. Or he had a disease.

Jesus listened and then touched his eyes, rather than spit again. Mark says the man “looked intently and his sight was restored.” (NRSV) It was a brand new day.

John Berger says the cataract surgery not only improves the detail we can see, but also how we see color and how we see distance. Life has more space.

I become more aware of the air, the space, between things, because that space is full of light like a tumbler can be full of water. With cataracts, wherever you are, you are in a certain sense indoors. (22)

Friday morning I sat in my window seat at The Marketplace, my home office on many days, and looked across the street at the hundred year-old oak that towers over the corner of the Guilford Green. I could see leaves on the top of the tree. Individual. Green. Leaves. And the clouds behind them seemed to go on forever. I have worn glasses since I was ten. I have seen poorly—even with lenses—for a long, long, time. I did know to expect I would ever have a morning when I could see the leaves at the top of the tree, when I could let my eyes take in the deep blue sky.

I’ve told everyone who will listen. I have no idea how the man could have kept quiet as Jesus asked. Even if he went straight home, he would have seen what it looked like to be there, he would have been able to look in his wife’s eyes, to see his children smile. He had a chance to see, if you will, where he belonged. Berger, once more,

The removal of cataracts is comparable with the removal of a particular form of forgetfulness. Your eyes begin to re-remember first times. And it is in this sense that what they experience after the intervention resembles a kind of visual renaissance. (44)

Renaissance. Born again. I can see clearly now. Well, I will be able to after Thursday.

Peace,
Milton
Next week: Some other blind folks . . .

miracle monday: thanks a lot

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3
miracle monday: thanks a lot

When I look back and try to remember the first time I heard certain Bible stories, I realize how many of them were told to me as if they were fables—stories with a point. There seemed to always be someone in the story to emulate and someone who showed what happened if you didn’t play by God’s rules. The story of the ten lepers is one I remember from way back. Here is the way Luke tells it in his gospel:

On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

–(Luke 17:11-19, NRSV)

The moralistic interpretation is obvious, or so it seemed when they told us the story: the one who came back to say thanks is the good guy; don’t be an ingrate like most people. I’m not sure the story is quite that simple.

Jesus was walking the border between Galilee and Samaria when he was approached by ten lepers, who knew a thing or two about being outcast. The border was as close as they could get. To anyone. When they called out to Jesus, he didn’t make a big statement about healing or say anything other than, “Go show yourselves to the priest.” The priest was the one who could declare them healed, that would let them back into society. Since people thought erroneously, that leprosy was contagious, a word from the priest was the only thing that would let them back in. Nine of the ten followed Jesus’ instructions for healing.

One came back to say thanks. A Samaritan. The border of leprosy was not the only one he had trouble crossing. I wonder how the Jewish priests would have responded to his request to be declared clean and able to rejoin society. When they all had leprosy, the other nine had not minded hanging out with him. What about now? When it came to belonging, he was still going to be without a lunch table in any Galilean high school, yet he was thankful to be healed, so he came back to tell Jesus since that would be a more meaningful exchange of words than anything the priest might have to say.

In one of our trips through Louisiana, Ginger and I stopped at the Hansen’s Disease Center in Carville. Hansen’s Disease is the modern name for leprosy. She had visited there with a semester missions assignment between college and seminary. We were there in the early nineties, just before it closed. I remember how quiet and sacred the space felt. The buildings and the grounds felt as though they held the stories of those who had been sequestered there with deep reverence. The gravestones in the cemetery had only patient numbers on them. No one had ever come to say, “Go show yourselves to the priest.” Along the way, a treatment was found that allows the one hundred and twenty five people a year that still contract it in our country to get help, but the folks who lived and died at Carville knew little of that. They lived trapped and forgotten lives.

Maybe the man came back to say thanks because, for a moment, he didn’t feel trapped or forgotten. For a moment, he felt whole. Human. Himself. Noticed. Even loved.

Luke says Jesus turned him into an object lesson for a moment: “Did only the foreigner come back to say thanks,” he said in his crowd-on-the-hillside voice. Then he looked down and changed his tone, speaking directly to the man: “Get up. Your faith has made you well.”

The words are interesting because he had already been healed of his leprosy. The other nine didn’t get to the synagogue only to find Jesus had played a cruel joke because they never said thank you. Hardly anyone Jesus healed ever said thank you. Some went walking and leaping and praising God, but not many say thanks. So what in the man was healed by his faith?

Early in their marriage, my brother and sister-in-law lived in Akron, Ohio. My brother’s barber was a man who had come from Lebanon as a refugee back when Lebanon was much like Syria is today. He and his family literally had to flee the country with only the clothes they were wearing, leaving behind a successful business, a home, their lives. In Akron, he had found work as a barber. My brother said any time he saw the man and said, “How are you today?” the man answered, “Grateful.”

His faith had made him well.

This weekend, Ginger and drove up to Boston to see our former foster daughter. She is Paraguayan by birth. While we were there, she wanted us to watch a documentary on the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra in Ascension, Paraguay. It is what it sounds like—an orchestra made up of kids who live around the garbage dump. One man teaches them to play and conducts the orchestra. Another man makes instruments out of oil cans and other things he finds in the garbage. The wife of the man who makes the instruments was interviewed. When asked about her life, she spoke of their house, the pigs and chickens they had, and her husband, who no longer had to work at the dump to find recyclable materials to sell. Then she said, “I don’t think my life could be any better.”

Her faith had made her well.

The nine who went into town as they were told did nothing wrong. Yet I have to wonder if they equated their healing with things being “made right.” It was about damn time they got to join society like everyone else. They had been wronged by leprosy. They deserved their place in society. Think of all of the years they had lost. I don’t know that I would have felt any differently. As I said, they did nothing wrong.

Being healed of leprosy was a big deal, and the man who came back to say thanks understood it was not the whole deal. He didn’t deserve the healing anymore than he deserved the disease. He was still stuck on the outskirts of a border town. Most of his life was not going to be changed, and what was changed by Jesus mattered enough to say thank you. Like the barber, he was grateful. Like the woman on the edge of the garbage dump, it was as good as it was going to get.

The more I think about this story, the more I keep thinking of Nelson Mandela getting out of prison after twenty-seven years and choosing not to retaliate. He chose to be grateful. His faith had made him well.

I wish thankfulness were more contagious.

Peace,
Milton

Next week: Jesus and blind people.

miracle monday: learning to read

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3
miracle monday: learning to read

I didn’t write last week because I was listening.

Ginger and I spent the week in San Antonio at the Festival of Homiletics, or Preacher Geek Camp, as Ginger likes to call it. The week was inspiring, challenging, and invigorating. I came back with both my mind and my heart feeling stretched.

Before I left, I had jotted a couple of notes about the story of Jesus’ encounter with the man at the pool in John 5:1-9. The passage is short, so I’ve included it:

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. (NRSV)

Most of the time, what I see first when I get to this story is Jesus’ question: “Do you want to get well?” It has always intrigued me. In the darkest days of my depression, it haunted me. But even before we went to Preacher Camp, I was beginning to see something different. The man at the pool was not alone in both his impairment and his desperation. The pool was surrounded with invalids waiting for the waters to be stirred so one person—one person—could be healed. My guess is more than one new person arrived daily, so the odds never improved. Going to the pool to be healed was akin to using the Powerball as your retirement plan. It was hopeless from the start. But it was The Way Things Worked in those days, the Palestinian Health Plan. Those with means could go to a doctor; those without means could wait by the water.

Wednesday afternoon, Ginger and I got to sit and listen to Otis Moss III for two hours. One of the two was a workshop on “Reading from the Underside of the Gospel.” He started off talking about spirituals and the double entendres they held for those enslaved people working for freedom. When they sang of crossing Jordan, they sang both of heaven and also of those who would cross the Ohio River in the dark of night.

“We need to remember the language of scripture is the language of the oppressed,” he said. “It is filled with double entendres just like the spirituals, saying things to those who were listening that could not be said out loud in front of the oppressors.”

When I came back to find the man still at the pool, I began to see the man as one of those who was perennially beaten down by the system, even though he was doing all he could to play along. He was never going to get to the water first, but what else could he have done? He had been trapped in his hopeless cycle for thirty-eight years when Jesus showed up asking questions.

“Do you want to get well?”

The man doesn’t answer the question; instead, he begins to explain his hopelessness.

Jesus says, “Pick up your mat and walk.”

The man didn’t ask to be healed. He didn’t confess faith in Jesus, the way the woman who reached out to touch Jesus had done. He was a victim of the system—alone, unable to get to the water when it was stirred. He had become used to his predicament of despair, even as he stayed to keep trying to get to the water. When Jesus told him to get up, he wasn’t making demands or discounting the man; he was humanizing him. Listen to the words of Raj Nadella, a theologian whom I found as I went looking for other voices on this passage:

The story in John 5 exposes how social and economic systems–in Jesus’ time as well as ours—that purportedly assist the needy often keep them in perpetual poverty. Even as income and wealth disparities increased rapidly in the last thirty years and the structures that accentuate such inequality have been strengthened, there has been a perpetuation of myths that potentially weaken attempts to address those problematic structures. One such myth is that if one worked hard and long, she or he would make it and that economic mobility is an option for everyone. The myth of the American dream continues to ensure that millions of underprivileged Americans unquestioningly invest significant time and energy into an economic system that rarely serves their interests.

There is insufficient moral embarrassment, on the part of the wealthy and the powerful, about the fact that many people who work hard can rarely make ends meet. Perhaps we–those without access as well as those with–have gotten so accustomed to our current economic realities that we have lost the capacity to envision alternative realities.

In encouraging the man to pick up his mat and walk, Jesus empowers him to move past his unquestioning faith in the system. The story suggests that if one wants to become whole, a healthy dose of doubt about the system might be in order. In picking up his mat and walking away from the pool, the man symbolically critiques the system that called itself “the house of mercy” but was solely lacking in that respect.

Nadella then closed with these thoughts:

The man’s actions–and those of Jesus–highlight the inherent structural problems in the system, and they pose some pertinent questions: Is it possible to become whole within the system? What does it mean to turn one’s back on oppressive economic structures without completely excusing oneself from the larger community? What might it look like?

I know. It’s not as cozy a reading of the encounter when we start talking about economic systems, but John was doing more than telling a sympathetic story when he wrote this one down. As Otis Moss said, this is the literature of oppressed people, of those being crushed, even killed, by the system. Get your stuff and let’s go, says Jesus. The System will not have the last word.

It gives me pause: if Jesus were here, I wonder if he would ask, “Do you want to learn how to read?”

Peace,
Milton

Next week: The Ten Lepers

miracle monday: pardon my interruption

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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6
miracle monday: pardon my interruption

Mark 5:21-43; Luke 8:40-56; Matthew 9:18-26

From time to time, my father’s words come floating back to the surface unexpectedly. Each time I feel more grateful that it happened. This week, as I thought about the story of these two people who came separately to Jesus, but whose stories are intertwined, I could hear my dad talking about how most of Jesus’ ministry happened in the context of interruptions. Nothing was scheduled. Regardless of which gospel account you read, the chapter before and the one after are chocked full of relentless need. What Jesus mostly did was pay attention.

On this particular day, two people found him almost simultaneously. First, Jarius, identified as a leader in the synagogue, pushed through to talk to Jesus because his daughter was dying. Mark says, “He begged repeatedly.” It doesn’t appear he was making a power move or demanding, but he was a man of privilege, used to being able to push through the crowd and talk to whomever he needed to talk to to get things done. Jesus went with him. There is no recorded dialogue; Jesus just went. As they were walking, a woman in the crowd who was hemorrhaging dared only to reach out and touch Jesus. She didn’t have the position or confidence to speak up, so she just tagged him and caught the hem of his cloak. Jesus stopped and asked who had touched him.

This is one of my favorite parts because I can imagine the tone of the disciples’ response: “In the middle of this crowd, you want to know who touched you?” I even hear sarcastic laughter. But Jesus didn’t move, as I am sure was true of most of the people pressed in around him. Sheepishly, the woman revealed herself, and Jesus comforted and assured her. But the time she took used up what was left of the girl’s life because by the time the scene had played out, Jarius’ servants had come to say it was too late. But Jesus kept going to the house, leaned down, and took the girl’s hand and said, “Talitha koum”—“Get up, little girl.” She awoke and they had dinner.

Once again, there are more paths to take than I have time to follow, and they all lead to great places, but as long as I have heard this story I have been fascinated by Jesus’ encounter with the woman who touched him. She touched him and Jesus stopped. It’s the second part of that sentence that set things in motion.

We moved back from Africa to America for good in December of 1972—the middle of my junior year in high school. In early 1973, my father became pastor of Westbury Baptist Church. I finished high school and went on to Baylor. During the fall of my junior year, my dad became the president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, a position he held for almost three years. I was in Houston for Christmas when he sat down at the dinner table with a letter in his hand and a sort of broken look on his face. The letter was from someone who had approached him at the annual meeting the previous November. The author told my father he had tried to approach him because he needed help.

“I was not someone you knew, or someone who could do anything for you, but I needed help,” he wrote. “I introduced myself and started to tell my story, but then someone whom you did know, or who could do more for you than I could came up and you turned to them and never turned back to me. After a while, I left.” The person went on to say that his intent was not to make Dad feel bad, but to make him aware that the next time he was in a crowd he should look for those who could do nothing for him because they were the ones who needed help.

My walk from Grand Central Station up Madison Avenue from 42nd to 34th Street means I walk past several homeless people on the days I go into New York. Most of them sit silently with a small cardboard sign. A couple of them have sleeping bags. I would like to tell you I stop every morning, or that I know their names, but I don’t. Most mornings, I am paying attention to the crossing signal more than I am looking to see who is around me. I have to get to work. Last week, I was not in a hurry. I was sitting in Grand Central waiting for Ginger to come in so we could have Date Night. I was reading and sipping on a bottle of water when a man interrupted and said, “I’m sorry to bother you. Would you be willing to spare some change so I could get some food?”

“How about I buy you some dinner instead?” I said.

He agreed and asked for something for the Indian Food kiosk nearby. His name was Donald and he got Chicken Korma and a bunch of rice, no vegetables, and a Coke. He thanked me and I went back to my table and thought about the people I pass on the street. Donald got to eat because I had time to be interrupted.

Jesus stopped because he said he felt power go out of him. His point is well taken: if we start stopping, it’s going to cost us something. We can’t touch one another without consequence. Then again, we can’t walk by each other without a price either.

I’m going to have to rethink my walk to work.

Peace,
Milton

Next week: the man at the pool.

miracle monday: an unhistoric act

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5
miracle monday: an unhistoric act

I have had an interesting journey—actually, three—with this miracle over the past days.

The first, I suppose, is the expected, or at least obvious, one: what exactly happened? Here’s a story told in all four gospels(Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:12-17, John 6:1-14), making it somewhat unusual for just that, and, though they offer different details, they are in agreement that they were in the middle of nowhere, the crowd was hungry, and this little boy had five loaves and two fish, so they took it and fed everyone—with leftovers.

There’s something about this story that makes us want to explain it. How did the food multiply, exactly? Maybe lots of people had food but weren’t in the mood to share until the kid broke open his basket. Maybe, somehow, the food just kept coming. We are built, it seems, to look for explanations, and we live in a world that offers few and mostly asks us to come to terms with mystery. I have been reading Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, and one of the sentences he quotes is from John Donne that says, in part:

Thou art a direct God, a literal God . . . Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God, too . . . . (142)

God is God, and yet any sentences we write to expand on that point must move into metaphor because that is all we have to try and articulate the one who so far outruns our vocabulary. When the disciples lived the lunch that turned into a banquet, they weren’t making theological statements as they passed the baskets. They were serving bread and fish. Later—after Jesus walked on the water and healed people and spoke in parables and died and rose again, and after whatever else happened to the disciples for forty or fifty years that followed—the gospel writers took those memories, re-membered them and wrote them down.

The context of the story—what came before and after the miracle—sent me on my second journey. Both Matthew and Mark share the same sequence of events. First, Jesus went back to Nazareth only to find that no one there was particularly impressed with their hometown kid. Mark says, “Jesus was amazed at their unbelief.” (6:6) Jesus left town.

The second event they mention, along with Luke, is Herod’s execution of John the Baptist. John, of course, was Jesus’ cousin, baptizer, and perhaps even mentor. Matthew says, “Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.” (14:13) That’s when the crowds kept following and we get to the miracle. Jesus was hit with two big losses. The people he had grown up with rejected him and the one who officially started his ministry—ordained him, if you will—was killed. Whatever we make of what happens next, it is a grief story.

I kept thinking about what it must have been like for Jesus to be in such personal pain and yet unable to get away from the demands of his life. The people just kept coming. Life kept going on. I remember a friend telling of going to a mall soon after her father died and wanting to scream in the middle of the place because everyone else was going about life as if nothing had happened. I wondered if Jesus felt like that. And I really thought this was going to be the journey of the week: coming to a deeper understanding that Jesus’ life, much like ours, was a catalog of losses.

But it was another quote from Stanley Fish that sent me on the journey I found most intriguing. He was talking about great last sentences to books and quoted George Eliot’s ending to Middlemarch:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is vastly dependent on unhistoric acts, and, that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the humber who lived faithfully a hidden life, and most in unvisited tombs. (129)

When I finished reading the sentence, all I could think about was the boy.

The whole event was unplanned. Jesus, nor the disciples, had scheduled a rally. As we noted earlier, they were trying to get away. Jesus wanted to be alone with his grief and his friends, but the crowd kept coming, following him around the edge of the lake and out into the wilderness, without much regard for even their own personal well-being, much less Jesus’ need for space. Who knows how the little boy got caught up in it all. Maybe he was with his family. Maybe he was skipping school and so he was lucky enough to have his lunch with him.

No one wrote down his name, what he looked like, how old he was, or any significant detail beyond the fact that he had bread and fish. Once lunch was over, we never hear about the boy again. There is no, as Paul Harvey used to say, rest of the story. He was there. He had food. The disciples took it and shared it. There is no particular mention that he even got to meet Jesus. Though it was a miracle, it was also just lunch. When it was over, everyone, including Jesus and the disciples, went on with their lives. It was an unhistoric act.

And it mattered. His action was, as Eliot said, “incalculably diffusive.” What a great phrase. The words and deeds we calculate for maximum effect are rarely as diffusive as the small moments when we speak heart to heart, human to human, mystery to mystery, looking past the literalness of a cause-and-effect world and into the deep, abiding metaphor that is our God, whose name is Love, and in whose image we are created.

If we are inclined to believe that the good in the world is not growing, perhaps it is because we have lost sight of our unhistoric significance, our ability to make tiny motions that reverberate, if not across continents, then across the barriers that keep us from one another. Whatever hungry crowds we stand in tomorrow, or the next day, may we have the courage and compassion simply to offer what we have and who we are, unhistorically.

Peace,
Milton

Next week: The woman with a hemorrhage and Jarius’ daughter.

miracle monday: all in the family

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4
miracle monday: all in the family

John 2:1-12
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples; and they remained there a few days. (NRSV)

I can’t help myself.

Every time I have sat down to think about the wedding at Cana, all I can hear is Emmylou Harris singing Chuck Berry:

it was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well,
you could see Pierre did truly love that mademoiselle—
and now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell,
“c’est la vie,” say the old folks, “it go to show you never can tell.”

This miracle is traditionally taken to be the first one because it shows up so quickly in John’s gospel. However it is that Jesus ended up at the celebration, it’s the story John chooses to tell pretty much right out of the box. We already know that John was a bit of a poet with his introduction (“In the beginning was the Word . . .”), but before he gets to the end of Chapter One, Jesus is has moved out of metaphor and into real life. He talks with some Pharisees, is baptized by John, calls some of his disciples, and then heads to Galilee. By the end of Chapter One, John has said, “the next day,” three times. He starts Chapter Two with, “On the third day . . . ,” which lets us know our poet is not necessarily marking time like everyone else.

The miracle itself feels like an act of insignificant extravagance: no one was healed, no one was saved, no one was changed, he didn’t talk to anyone but his mother and the servants, we never hear that the bride and groom even knew there was a problem; other than the disciples, no one appears to have even noticed.

What I notice is the heart of this story is between Jesus and his mother. The bride and the groom were gleefully unaware. The wedding steward wasn’t looking for a sign—only a solution. Mary, it seems, was trying to help a friend, though it’s not clear why she was on the inside of the problem. For some reason, she took it on. Mary finds Jesus to tell him they had run out of wine.

His response brings me to one of my biggest questions in scripture: how in the world did Jesus get away with saying, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”? Seriously? I have played the scene in my mind, and have yet to find a manner in which those words could be delivered without serious repercussions. Mary lets him have his say and then turns to the servants and says, “Do whatever he tells you,” and goes back to dinner.

And Jesus steps up.

Any time we read scripture, I suppose, we read ourselves into the story. When I read this story, I remember an interchange with my mother from many years ago, which may be why the dynamic between Jesus and Mary jumps out at me. My parents were living in Waco—in a town where I had never lived with them, in a house where I had never lived. As a Third Culture Kid, even the houses we had lived in together didn’t feel like home. Ginger and I were living in Boston at the time—in a house I had inhabited longer than anywhere else, and in a home we had built together. I don’t remember why I was in Waco.

On three different occasions, my mother said, “It’s good to have you home.”

Each time I responded, “I’m glad to be in your house.”

As many times as I have replayed the scene in my mind, I don’t remember trying to be adversarial. My tone was not contentious. If anything, I was searching—or at least I can see that now. I was glad to see her, to be with her and Dad, but I wasn’t home. The distance from the event has given me room to try and imagine what it felt like to be on the receiving end of my words. She spent a good share of her life moving around, as well. She and Dad had worked hard to make homes for my brother and I, and then for themselves in Houston and Waco after Miller and I moved on. Our family script—this part written mostly by my father—was that we left home after college and made home for ourselves. Looking back, I see all of us were trying to figure out what home meant, even as we were working out what it meant to be family. And we came up with different answers.

After she and I played the same scene three or four times, she said, “Every time I say, ‘It’s good to have you home,’ you said, ‘It’s good to be in your house.’”

“That’s because this isn’t my home,” I said. “I never lived in this house with you. I only lived in this town in college. It doesn’t feel like home to me.”

“But home,” she said, “is where your mother is.”

“Mom,” I answered, “you haven’t always believed that. When you were my age, you set sail to spend your life ten thousand miles away from your mother. You taught Miller and I to go where God called us. You are my family, but this is not my home.”

She didn’t say anything else and we went on with our time together. Two days later, as I prepared to leave, she hugged me, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “It was good to have you home.”

I answered, “It was good to be here.”

The gospels don’t offer a great deal of information about the relationship between Jesus and Mary. We know of her sense of calling in being his mother—“Let it be . . .”—and that she was with him as he died. John notices that the two of them, along with the rest of the family and the disciples, spent some time together after the wedding. Maybe they talked about what happened. Maybe not. Either way, as Jesus got ready to leave, I can hear Mary saying, “It was good to have you home.”

Peace,
Milton

Next Monday: Loaves and Fishes

on the verge of the miracles

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4
on the verge of the miracles

When I look back over the life of this blog, it seems I grow silent in Eastertide. Part of the reason, I am sure, is the recoil from keeping my Lenten Journal and writing straight for forty-something days and nights. I don’t know all the reasons, or that they are the same from year to year. This year, my Lenten writings were not as regular and I have been thinking about some sort of plan or project I could dig into that would give me somewhat of a writing schedule. As I was waking up in the shower a few mornings ago, it struck me: Miracle Mondays.

I am going to write about the miracles of Jesus recorded in the Gospels.

I don’t want to read them the way too many high school English teachers make their students read poetry (“Be gone, J. Evans Pritchard!”),  parsing every syllable and looking between the seams of each sentence to see what was really being said. I know there are things to be unpacked in poems—and in miracle stories—but that’s not how a poem grabs you by the heart. First, you just read it. I just want the stories to talk to me, to see if I can see the forest and the trees. Of course, the details are worth noting, along with where the stories fall in the context of the rest of what was going on with Jesus. Details are what make a story good; I just don’t want to over-analyze.

I’m also going to do my best to not feel compelled to make a theological point, or necessarily have a point at all. I want to see what the stories have to say. For now.

I plan to take the stories at face value. If it says Jesus healed the person or calmed the storm, I’m to willingly suspend my disbelief and swing out on my trapeze of trust and see what (who?) catches me. I’m not going to try and explain things, or convince anyone of anything. I’m just looking for the story, the “Once upon a time, Jesus . . . .”

One of my New Testament professors in seminary described the miracles as “parables in event,” which is to say there is more going on than Jesus healing some random person. The Gospel writers weren’t writing a travelogue, or recording minutes of their gatherings. The stories are invitations to question, to engage, to see what we might see. A parable is not an allegory, nor a fable. There’s not a lesson that is necessarily apparent, or even there at all. For me, Jesus’ parables are this-is-how-life-is stories, or this-is-how-God-is, yet, when the parable is over there are often more options than before the story was told. Sounds like fun to me.

There are thirty-five or thirty-six miracles recorded in the Gospels. I don’t know that I will write on everyone. I’m just going to jump in every week and write about what I see. I may group them, or compare them, or write about one more than once. I don’t have a particular sequence. About all I can say is I am going to write about the wedding at Cana first, when Jesus turned the water into wine.

I’ll see you next Monday. I hope you will both read along and talk back.

Peace,
Milton

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