don't eat alone

Anger has never come easy for me. My father grew up in an angry household, for reasons that would take several posts to explain. His take away from those days was to decide the family he helped to create would not live that way. He didn’t yell or lose his temper, and neither did my mother. What I learned—not necessarily what they were trying to teach—was we were not supposed to get angry. There was something wrong with it. So I socked it away and kept it to myself. As I dealt with the stories of Jesus over those years, his cleansing of the Temple and cursing the fig tree have been problematic because I felt like his was angry—visibly and tangibly so. Didn’t he know the rules about getting mad?

I read the accounts now and I see to say he was mad, or even angry, lacks in appropriate vocabulary. I need a better word. When I turn to the written accounts, the gospels are sparse and lacking for detail. All four tell of the cleansing, but not in the same way. I charted it out.

Matthew 21: triumphal entry, cleansing, healing
Mark 11: triumphal entry, cursing of fig tree, cleansing
Luke 19: triumphal entry, cleansing, teaching
John 2: wedding, cleansing (with whips), musings

The Monday before Jesus died (or whatever day of the week Jesus knew it to be), Jesus entered the Temple and turned over the tables on the moneychangers. The only gospel that gives much detail at all is John, who also places the event early in Jesus’s ministry, rather than during the days before his crucifixion. None of the gospel writers says a word about anger, they just describe the scene. We can certainly infer it, with the turned tables, scattered change, and escaping doves—John even puts a whip in his hand—but Jesus’s feelings are not named. We can say he was feeling compassion for the oppressed, or frustration with the system, or that he was hoping to incite a riot or a revolution, but we have to read that into the story.

Jesus had been going to the Temple for years. Why this year? I know, in terms of the gospel timeline, it was all building to the Big Finish. Was it a sudden impulse, or a planned response? Had he been thinking about it for years and decided he had finally had enough? Did he see someone get swindled one time to many? Had the ride into town heightened his sensibilities?

The Passover rituals that were a part of Jesus’s life were nothing new. I wonder how long it was after the Temple was built that the money changers started showing up. You can see how it would happen. People need to make sacrifices, or make donations to beggars, and they get to the Temple after a long trip without change, so someone sets up a change booth and, of course, charges a small fee for the transaction. The next Passover, they have doves and other animals so people who come from a long way off don’t have to travel with them—at a price, of course, and the prices always went up during Passover. Once those transactions became ensconced in the institutional memory (do you think that free range dove seller will be there again this year?) it was hard to change. Then Jesus started turning tables.
There’s a certain snowball effect to the life of any institution. They have a way of hanging on to things, of taking an exception or a margin note and incorporating it into the main agenda. Much of the energy of those who belong is used up perpetuating the institution rather than furthering the dream for which it was created. Maybe Passover had become as much about the transactions in the Court of the Gentiles than it was about telling the story of their deliverance from Egypt. I can hear my father saying if Jesus had come to the church instead of the Temple, he would have started by disbanding all committees rather than turing over tables.

Now I hear Tracy Chapman singing in my head:

don’t you know you better run run run . . .
yes, finally the tables are starting to turn
talkin’ bout a revolution

But it’s the opening lines of the song that get me:

don’t you know
talking about a revolution sounds
like a whisper . . .

In our world of giant churches and media exposure, we think the big play is what matters, the grand gesture, the spectacular event. Yet when I think of both Jesus’s entry into the city on what we call Palm Sunday and his table turning on Monday, I can’t help think they were probably small events in the scope of things—a big deal to his followers, but nothing that brought Jerusalem to a standstill. What started as a whisper turned into a resounding chord of love around the world, but it started as a whisper. Elijah heard God in the silence—the still, small voice. Jesus rode in alone on a borrowed donkey. It was no parade. And the next day he turned over a couple of tables in the Temple.

Yes. Like a whisper.

Peace,
Milton

I sang in church this morning.

One of the folks I have met since moving to Guilford is a guy named Geoff and he and I sang “The Touch of the Master’s Hand” in worship. Most people know the song because of Wayne Watson, but I had the privilege of learning it while I was in college from John Kramp, the guy who wrote the melody and adapted the lyric from an old poem. The song tells the story of an old violin that is destined to be auctioned off for next to nothing until an old man picks it up and plays it, and the price shoots up—all because of the touch of the master’s hand, even as God’s touch on our lives can change everything.

I learned the song forty years ago.

We rehearsed early, so I had time to walk across the town green to get a cup of coffee and read for a bit. I was looking back through old notes on my phone (since I didn’t have a book with me) and found a quote I had jotted down soon after my mother went into hospice care. When she first made the choice, she was actually feeling pretty good, but we all knew things could not be made right. Though she had peace about her decision, it was still quite emotional. Her primary care physician, who had walked with her through most everything, came by to see her. She explained her thought process, her prayer process, and her decision, and he said, “You have made a decision of courage and hope and not of despair.”

I looked across the green and I could see a few people making preparations for the ecumenical gathering to bless the palms before we went to our separate worship services, and I wondered—again—about Jesus’s courageous decision to enter Jerusalem, knowing most everyone didn’t get it. I thought of Phillipians 2:5-6.

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped. (NASB)

I love Paul’s wording that Jesus didn’t see equality with God as something to be grasped—something to be held on to at all costs. He knew that choosing to ride into Jerusalem would change things. And he instigated the change because that was what his whole life was about. To hang on for dear life would have been an act of despair. “Faith,” says the writer of Hebrews, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (11:1) His ride was a call to courage.

The next thing I read was this word from Eric Folkreth, the pastor at Northaven UMC in Dallas.

The original Palm Sunday crowd was full of all the beautiful misfits that had been drawn to Jesus for years . . . the poor, “tax collectors,” “prostitutes,” a perfect storm of outsiders that very predictably caused the religious authorities to be squirm.

And yet, in a culture obsessed with “gotcha” games of “guilt by association,” Jesus still calls us to seek out the beautiful misfits of our world…to not worry about how that looks to the authorities . . . and to form that most beautiful band of misfits into “the church.”

The coffee shop where I was sitting was filling up with people who were settling into a quiet Sunday morning with family and friends. The green was filling up with folks carrying palm fronds and preparing for worship. I moved to the celebration as the Episcopalians processed out of their church in a straight line behind their priest and their church banner, everyone staying on the sidewalk. The Congregationalists spilled out of our church and on to the green with a randomness that spoke in living metaphor. The Catholics walked as a group, but not in formation. We even had a live donkey, who stood beside me munching on straw. I know it has come to be called the Triumphal Entry, but looking at the unassuming animal next to me, I wondered if Jesus’s ride looked more like a homemade neighborhood parade than a procession of pomp and pageantry. His choice to come to town was a hopeful one, not a triumphant one. His was not a statement of conquest, but of solidarity. To have acted in power would have been to act in despair.

We finished our short service and then made our way to our different houses of worship. When I got inside, I had a few minutes and I was struck with this thought. The current campaign rhetoric to “make America great again” is cynical despairing, not because it doesn’t look to the future, but because it doesn’t come to terms with the present. I know we have serious problems, and I also know we are the most diverse and inclusive as we have ever been as a nation. More people have a voice in the conversation than ever before. Again, there is much work to be done, but we live in a courageous time. We live in a hopeful time, should we choose to make the choice to see as such and live into the substance of things hoped for as we deal with issues of justice and inclusivity. Jesus could have come to town looking for a fight. Instead, he created space for all those who had chosen him over despair to celebrate. Yes, we have tough days ahead as we mark Holy Week, and let us remember our journey with Jesus goes through the cross, not to it.

We are making a choice of courage and hope, not of despair.

Peace,
Milton

the road from here to resurrection
is mapped in my mind (and my heart),
from palms to parables, crowds to
cross. I know the days, the steps,
the words, the mileposts.
my feet are covered with the dust
from the feet of disciples
who walked this way when the road was
not so well marked and Holy Week
had not been scheduled.
I won’t get to Easter because
the road is familiar, or the
liturgy expected. I need
more than a map or a memory
to roll away the stone.

Peace,
Milton

Here’s what today looked like:

It was a good day. A joyful day. A memory.

I am grateful.

Peace,
Milton

I started a new Wendell Berry essay this morning, knowing I didn’t really have the energy to read the whole thing, and he still got me with his opening paragraphs:

A sentence of my own, written thirteen years ago, has stayed in my mind. In it, I was speaking of the connection between my work on the small hill farm where I live and my work as a poet: “This place has become the form of my work, in discipline, in the same way a sonnet has been the form and discipline of the work of other poets: if it does not fit it’s not true.”

This connection between the two kinds of work and between my work and this place has seemed to me both interesting and problematical. And my old statement of it is far too simple. I wrote the sentence because I felt it to be true. I still feel that it is, and think so too, but I can no longer feel it or think it so simply. (106)

It was the last sentence in particular—that he could no longer think or feel it so simply. I understand. But the word hooked me. Simple. What a wonderfully layered word. We use the word as though life, or whatever is easily reduced, and yet the simple truth is full of nuance and character.

Simple. I read the word and hear the melody of the old Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts.”

tis a gift to be simple tis a gift to be free
tis a gift to come down where we ought to be
and when we find ourselves in the place just right,
twill be in the valley of love and delight

I went searching for more on the song and learned learned was actually a dance—the Shaker version of “Uptown Funk,” if you will. (Jedediah, get the horse.) Later in the morning, I turned to Marilynne Robinson and an essay called “Cosmology”—which was not simple— where she speaks to some of the prevailing contemporary cultural views of who we are as human beings, responding in particular to a book called The New Atheists (which I have not read).

The exclusion of a religious understanding of being has been simultaneous with a radical narrowing of the field of reality that we think of as pertaining to us. This seems on its fact not to have been inevitable. We are right where we have always been in time, in the cosmos, experiencing mind, which may well be an especially subtle and fluent quantum phenomenon. Our sense of what is at stake in any individual life has contracted as well, another consequence that seems less than inevitable. We have not escaped, nor have we in any sense diminished , the mystery of our existence. We have only rejected any language that would seem to acknowledge it. (187-88)

In one of Madeleine L’Engle’s books (that I can’t reference right now) she talks about how our vocabulary shrinks during wartime. When we are in the middle of conflict, or when we are captured by fear, we begin to lose words, and, as a result, lose part of our humanity. But in A Stone for a Pillow, she described what she learned while traveling in Egypt.

Those old Egyptians also worshipped the baboon because every morning, when the sun rose, the baboons all clapped their hands for joy, applauding the reappearance of the sun. What a lovely picture, the baboons all clapping their hands and shouting for joy as the sun rose! So it seemed to the Egyptians that the baboons must have had something to do with the rising of the sun, and that their applause helped to bring the sun back up into the sky. (169-70)

After laying out all the words I found in my morning meandering, I suppose I should explain the simple connection between them. Sunday morning as I sat down in the sanctuary, I looked over the order of service and saw the choral introit was a setting of the prophet Micah’s question and answers:

What does the Lord require of you?
To do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.

Simple enough. Yet the simple truth is full of nuance, and layered with challenge and complexity. To do justice means to act and speak against those actions and forces that dehumanize others. It means working to right wrongs that have no direct effect on me. To love kindness means to remember, as the saying goes, that everyone is fighting a great battle, but not with us. It means to do more than the minimum daily requirement. It means to do more than live reciprocally. To walk humbly means to remember there is a God and it is not me. I am wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. I am not, however, God’s favorite.

We are on the cusp of some difficult days in our country. The political discussion is reducing the vocabulary to the language of violence, conquest, and conflict. Even these are pretty good days to be an American, we are being fed a steady diet of ideas that would have us believe scarcity and security should be the words we settle for. There is not enough. Be afraid. We are under attack. Fight back. Get what’s yours. Kick everyone else out.

No. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly. Incarnate the simple truth that there is enough to go around by sharing, by risking. Incarnate the simple truth that noting can separate us from love by reaching out to someone not like you. Stand out under the stars, or on a beach, or in the middle of your back yard and act like a baboon, connected and caught up in the mystery that is larger than all of humanity. As Isaiah wrote,

 For you will go out in joy, be led home in peace.
        And as you go the land itself will break out in cheers;
    The mountains and the hills will erupt in song,
        and the trees of the field will clap their hands.
    Prickly thorns and nasty briers will give way
        to luxurious shade trees, sweet and good.
    And they’ll remind you of the Eternal One
        and how God can be trusted absolutely and forever.
                          (55:12-13, The Voice)

Simple.

Peace,
Milton

The summer between my junior and senior years at Baylor, I lived in Waco, even though I didn’t need to go to summer school, because I had a weekend pastorate at Pecan Grove Baptist Church, which sat on FM 107 between Oglesby and Mound. The church paid me enough to make my rent and do what I needed to do, so I played golf everyday with a group of guys who all agreed to take an early class and we spent our Texas summer afternoons walking the James Connally Municipal Golf Course.

I shot the best golf of my life during that summer because I was able to do something I never got to repeat: play the same course, day after day. Walking the same holes over and over again gave me reference points, which allowed me to learn from my game and make changes and improvements. I even broke eighty once or twice. I didn’t make any drastic changes as much as I paid attention, and walked the same road again and again.

Today after church I spoke to our Adult Forum, as they call it here, to basically tell my story. We are eleven days past our four month anniversary of arriving in Guilford and this was a chance for folks to get to know me a little better. To tell the story of my life is to talk a great deal about moving. As my brother Miller says, when someone asks where I’m from I have to answer with a paragraph, not a sentence. Instead of one course for my life, if you will, I have several places that feel like home. I feel connected to Africa—Zambia and Kenya, in particular—because that’s where I grew up. I feel connections to Baylor because of the friendships I made there, many of which remain vibrant, even though I don’t get there much. Fort Worth is home in its own way because of the youth group at University Baptist Church. Ginger and I call Boston our hometown because it’s where we grew up together. Durham has my heart because of the quality of friendship I have there. And now Guilford feels like the right place to be. I like it here. I feel good about being here, about staying here.

Yet it’s only been four months.

To feel welcomed can happen quickly; to belong takes time. To connect can feel immediate; to become friends takes months and years. You have to walk the course over and over, live through some stuff together, create rituals together. It can be rushed any more than they can make a fifteen year old whiskey in a week or two.

As I stand on the front end of our life here, I am overcome with gratitude for the home towns that still hold me, for the rituals and remembrances that surprise me from day to day and remind me of the tenacious tethers that keep holding on to me across miles and years—a song, a movie, a meal, a story, a cookie recipe—and those bonds are what give me hope to reach out again here, to start over, to take the time to belong here in Guilford as well.

And it does take time.

Peace,
Milton