Day 13: DISCOMFORT

2 Peter 3: 11-13 Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, 12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? 13 But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

Peter’s got a problem with run-on sentences (or, perhaps it’s the translators of the NRSV that can’t find a good place for a period. The CEB is better.).

What sort of persons ought you to be?

That’s the question here, but it’s buried under all this apocalyptic roughage.

Since all these things are to be dissolved…

…the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved…

…the elements will melt with fire…

…hastening the coming Day of God…

What sort of people should you be in the midst of all this dissolution and destruction?

If you’re waiting on a new heaven and a new earth, places where righteousness will be at home, what kind of people should you be?

Does the current apocalyptic state of things excuse unholy behavior?

According to Peter, it does not.

Does the current apocalyptic dissolution make expediency or compromise any more acceptable?

According to Peter, it does not.

Does the fact that the earth is currently melting and the heavens are set ablaze give us license to set aside our commitments and our covenants?

According to Peter, it does not.

I think that tectonic shifts in the way we perceive reality can either clarify who we are or muddle it up. We can either become more of who we are or less.

When we are thrust into grief or anger or lament, we get to choose how to channel it. I have known people who choose to channel their grief into compassion, and I have known people who choose to channel their grief into antagonism. Openness or bitterness. Each is within reach.

According to Peter, even if the world is burning, we are called to be a certain kind of people – holy, godly, faithful, upholding the covenants we’ve made with god and with each other. Even if the world is dissolving. Even if the heavens are on fire.

So. I wonder: if the world is on fire, what covenants should I uphold? Am I stuck in some commitments that I wouldn’t make at the end of the world? Are there others that I would wish I had entered into? What kind of people ought we to be, in the face of everything on heaven and earth dissolving?

Day 12: AT(ONE)MENT

2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.

Thursday is sermon-writing day, and I am all written out. So, instead of my words today, here are some of Mary Karr’s:

Disgraceland

Day 11: OUTRAGE

Matthew 12:34 You brood of vipers! How can you speak good things, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.

Again, we get Jesus railing against the church leaders. Pulling no punches, he calls out their hypocrisy again: you brood of vipers!

Here is a thing that happened this year:

At our denomination’s Annual Conference, church leadership proposed that any minister who officiated at a marriage ceremony for two people of the same gender be immediately defrocked, no questions asked, no room for any possibility of the action being the result of a discernment of personal conscience, a prayerful and intentional pastoral act done in consultation with a couple, a congregation, scripture or a particular call from God (you know, that divine entity who scripture reports to be overly fond of calling unlikely people to unlikely tasks, almost always outside the bounds of accepted religious practice and polity? No, of course that isn’t possible. It’s not like our ENTIRE tradition was birthed when eight young people did that exact thing, out of that exact kind of call from that exact kind of God…).

At the very same time, perhaps just a few months before – church leadership failed to take appropriate steps to remove from privilege, power and position leaders who had – by their own admission – broken ethical covenants, ordination vows and dozens of bonds of relational and professional trust.

If that is not hypocrisy, I do not know what is.

To propose a punitive consequence and mandatory minimum for anyone who dares to cross a greatly disputed line in the sand while at the very same time struggling and failing to hold someone accountable for breaking unanimously agreed upon covenants.

Hypocrisy.

Brood of vipers. “How can you speak good things,” Jesus asks, “when you are evil?”

This has outraged me. I have been raging for months. Both situations have been mitigated: the query is in committee and not (yet) polity. The covenant breakers have been removed and leadership has transitioned.

But I am still raging.

We don’t get this angry about things that don’t matter to us.

The church matters to me – it is and has been the most formative context of my life. I am church-shaped. The problem is that church-shaped doesn’t necessarily mean God-shaped. It doesn’t necessarily mean Spirit-shaped. It doesn’t necessarily mean Jesus-shaped.

And that sucks.

Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Better stretch my little church-shaped heart into something more resembling Jesus-shape.

 

Day 10: RESTLESS

Isaiah 41:17

When the poor and needy seek water,

    and there is none,

    and their tongue is parched with thirst,

I the Lord will answer them,

    I the God of Israel will not forsake them.

There is unexpired milk in my refrigerator, right this minute. There is clean laundry in the closet and freshly changed sheets are on the bed. My freezer is full of leftovers, and just-baked bread is cooling on the kitchen counter.

It is December 6 and my Christmas shopping is basically finished, I have a real tree, lugged home on foot from the local non-profit Christmas pop-up, and my single lady photo cards are sitting on my desk, waiting to be addressed and sent out.

I have written every day for ten days straight. I woke up in the same place, took the dog for a walk, made the coffee, sat down and prayed, and I wrote. For ten days in a row.

I am hosting a Christmas get-together next week. I am thisclose to reaching my stretch reading goal for the year. I know some of my neighbors, I have weekly commitments, and I am involved in the community.

Every single one of those things – every one – has been pretty out of reach for the last decade or so. I spent a third to a half of my life on the road, making unexpired milk and community involvement really hard to keep up with, not to mention a reliable daily routine.

I am restless – I think it is part of who I am, always curious about the next place or the next idea. My parents tell me that I was restless like this even in elementary school, longing for something else, something bigger, something more challenging.

“Our hearts are restless ’til they rest in you.” That’s an oft-quoted line from Augustine’s confessions, and I suspect that his larger idea about the ways that we channel our passions into false desires – trying to quench our longing souls with unsatisfactory things meant only to quench smaller appetites – is related to the restlessness.

Augustine also said that people “…go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean and the circuits of the stars, yet they pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”

What if the restlessness is just one more distraction from the hard work of reflective discipleship?

What if the restlessness that drives me to jump on a plane or in a car whenever I feel bored,

the restlessness that compels me to pick up my phone and check Facebook and Twitter during any lapse of stimuli longer than three seconds,

the restlessness that approves of my mental checking out during a conversation with some long-winded friend or congregant,

the restlessness that assures me that there is always something better than this moment, this reality, this embodied experience right here and right now…

What if this restlessness is and has always been my addiction of choice?

What if this restlessness is pure avoidance of myself, reality, clear-eyed observation of the way things are and the way I am?

I do appreciate the fresh baked bread, the scent of pine branches, the not-sour milk. I appreciate the stability and the routine that being in one place is affording. I appreciate it all, and I am also cringing at the reflection it is engendering. I am in one place, there is nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. I have to be here, now.

I am breathing, slowly and deeply, catching up with myself after all those years of trying to outrun her.

Day 9: VIOLATION

Isaiah 24:5 The earth lies polluted

    under its inhabitants;

for they have transgressed laws,

    violated the statutes,

    broken the everlasting covenant.

Tonight, at a training for new volunteers working with recent refugees, the coordinator reminded us that vulnerability is not the same as weakness. Vulnerability has to do with being on the underside of a power dynamic – the person without information or language or resource in relationship with another person or community that does have all that. Vulnerability is not weakness.

Without vulnerability, no one gets to learn. Without vulnerability, growth is really hard. That position – being the one without – makes us vulnerable. But being without can make us curious. Being without can make us creative. Being without (information or money or certainty or community) can make us strong.

I confess that I get confused about the relationship of vulnerability and violation. Vulnerability, I assume, will leave me open to being violated. So, instead, I pretend to be the one WITH. If I already have everything I could possibly need, then no one can ever hurt me. But being with can make me anxious. Being with can make me boring. Being with can make me weak.

It feels like this year has stripped a lot of my protective shield away. I moved to a new place, became a solo pastor, lost my mentor, got caught in an institutional shake-up, and ended several important relationships. The election results jolted me, and I only realized weeks later that the jolting felt like a continuation of this peeling away of protective layer after protective layer.

I am feeling particularly vulnerable, these days, and I am trying to lean into that instead of running from it. I am trying to remind myself that vulnerability is not weakness, that vulnerability does not invite violation, that vulnerability is, in fact, a way toward strength. I am trying to be curious and creative and honest. Here: this writing is one of those tries.

Day 8: …OR WHATEVER

Matthew 3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

I am 8 books away from reaching my (arbitrary and self-imposed) 2016 reading goal. One of the best books I read all year was The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, by Joanna Cannon. It’s her first novel, set in England in 1976. A woman in the neighborhood has gone missing, and two young girls decide to become amateur detectives to figure out where she might be. In the course of their investigations, they learn a lot of hidden secrets about their neighbors: marital difficulties, hidden traumas, old crimes and forgotten punishments, long-buried grief and some twinkling joy in the midst of it all.

The neighborhood is quick to judge and even quicker to ostracize, and the whole community is divided along arbitrary lines of good and evil, assumptions about who is which and which is where. The girls go to church and hear the passage from Matthew 25: “But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. Before him all the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”

 

The girls are troubled by the reading, and one turns to the other: “But I don’t understand…How does God know which people are goats and which people are sheep?”

The second girl answers: “I think that’s the trouble. It’s not always that easy to tell the difference.”

The apocalyptic Advent texts are chock full of judgment. Goats get sent to the eternal fires of punishment, the chaff gets burnt with unquenchable fire. Those who decide against God are in for an awful, burning eternity – that much is clear.

What is less than clear is which of us end up being goats and which of us end up being sheep. Jesus is quick to pair the promises of divine judgment with warnings that human judgment is worthless: no one knows the day or the hour of my coming, he says, and: do not condemn, lest you yourselves be condemned.

I am fascinated by people and by people’s stories. I am curious about how people get to be who they are, why people do things the way they do, how people ignore parts of themselves or parts of others in order to make the world align with their own narrative of reality.

And the more I learn about people, the less sure I am about who belongs at Jesus’ left hand and who belongs at his right, the less certain I am that I will fall into the ‘wheat’ category and that those Others will fall into the ‘chaff.’

Jesus is clear that there is some nasty cosmic consequence for life lived out of sync with God’s purposes here on earth. But Jesus is also clear that it is not my job and it is not my place to assume anything cosmic about anyone.

So: God of judgment, God of discernment, God who knows goats from sheep and wheat from chaff, God who sees cosmic realities because you created them, God who understands the depths of each heart and each mind, grant me gentleness with each of your children. Fill me with curiosity instead of condemnation. Help me to ask questions instead of making assumptions.

Day 7: FOR PETE’S SAKE

John 1:21 And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.”

John the Baptist is a wild and unruly character. He’s wandering out in the wilderness, eating bugs and honey, yelling about preparing the way for the coming Lord. He’s an essential character in the story of Jesus’ birth, an essential character in the story of God’s incarnation. And he was also a regular guy. John the gospel writer introduces him: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the Light…he himself was not the Light, but he came to testify to the Light.”

I forget, over and over, that God rarely chooses the rich and famous to become key players in his Kingdom. Jesus was born to an unwed teenage girl and an everyday craftsman – Joe the Carpenter. Eunuchs, prisoners, tax-collectors, soldiers, fishermen, divorcees, widows, and orphans get swept up into Jesus’ story.

I forget, over and over, to pay attention to the places and the people where no spotlight shines. I forget that God’s greatest work gets done not in the limelight but in the forgotten cracks and crevices of the world. I get so caught up in headline news and (less-than)presidential Twitter feeds that I forget to track the storylines down here in my neighborhood, in the underside places of Empire, in communities living quietly and generously and out of sight. I forget, and for that, I need forgiveness.

Who are you? They asked John, when he came preaching and baptizing and testifying. You aren’t Elijah, right? And you aren’t the Messiah, right? Then what right do YOU have to be here witnessing in this way?

And John, a man sent from God, replied with an ancient line from the prophet Isaiah: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘make straight the way of the Lord!’”

When I forget that God so often shows up in the quiet, forgotten, bottom side of Empire, I also forget that I, too, am called to be a voice crying out in the wilderness, that I, too, am a woman sent by God as a witness to testify to the Light. I forget that I am called this way. Maybe you do, too. Here’s a reminder:

Day #6: YEARN

Psalm 72:4 May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.

The psalmist is not calling on God to defend the cause of the poor, deliver the needy and crush oppressors. The psalmist is calling on God to embolden the KING to do these things.

I find that absurd.

The Israelites have a fraught relationship with political power. They want to live as God’s people, but they also beg until they have no voice left for God to give them an earthly king. 1 Samuel 8 says that the people literally begged for a king so that they “could be like other nations.” Because, obviously, what you want when God has boldly claimed you as God’s Own People is some human figurehead to fill the gap, right?

The King thing went badly, then not so badly, then badly again. It ended up being a mixed bag, God’s people demanding a human sovereign, to this day. Certainly any human King would struggle mightily to carry such weight of power and responsibility and use it exclusively to defend the poor, deliver the needy and crush the oppressor. That would get especially tricky when the King realized that he himself WAS the oppressor.

I’ve started watching the Netflix drama The Crown recently, and I just finished the episode where the new Queen gets anointed at her coronation.

There’s solid biblical precedence for anointing leaders. Priests and kings got anointed with oil to signify their ascent to power. In this period drama episode, the disaffected uncle of the new Queen describes the process: oil, scepter, orb, shrouded in mystery. Take a very normal, unassuming, plain young woman, he says, add all this pomp and circumstance and magic and you end up with…a goddess.

My tradition also practices anointing, but in a decidedly different way. We do not anoint people in order to create goddesses. We don’t anoint people when they get ordained, we don’t anoint people to give them divine status. We follow the apostle James’ instructions to use the oil to anoint the sick, the despairing, and those in need of forgiveness. There’s no archbishop of Canterbury necessary to do the anointing – anyone can anoint anyone else, with whatever kind of oil they can find.

The mystery is not in the ceremony or in the role or the person performing it. The mystery does not require a canopy or curtain to shield the act from view. The mystery of anointing, the mystery of power, is that these very, very simple elements – skin, oil, community – can become vehicles for divine power. There is no monarch, but there is God’s sovereign power.

So, I find the psalmist’s prayer absurd. What King, having been invested with power, privilege, near-unmitigated ability to do as he wished, would find it in himself to make the poor and the oppressed his priority? After all that ceremony and gold-plated pomp, how could a leader choose to spend time, real time, with poor people?

No. Better to begin and end with the simple, unassuming acts of blessing: hands, oil, humble prayer. Better to let go of privilege and wealth and walk toward those places that Jesus did – not the temples, not the high courts, but the highways and the hidden corners, the wells, the hills, the women, the shepherds, the lepers, the eunuchs.

We are like the Israelites, longing for a human King, dissatisfied with being the people of God and God alone. And we got what we asked for. So, I suppose, in the absurdity of our day and this hour, we can pray with the Psalmist:

Give the king your justice, O God,

    and your righteousness to a king’s son.

May he judge your people with righteousness,

    and your poor with justice.

May the mountains yield prosperity for the people,

    and the hills, in righteousness.

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,

    give deliverance to the needy,

    and crush the oppressor.

I will pray, yes. But I will also keep anointing people who are far cries from royalty, people who are the poor and the needy and the oppressed, and I will ask for them to anoint me, too. I will also keep attempting to put my trust in God and in these simple, unassuming, unadorned acts of human connection and mysterious divinity.

Day 5: STAINED

Isaiah 4:4 …once the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning.

Jerusalem was the holy city. The holiest city, where the temple was, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept – the Ten Commandments, enshrined in a tabernacle in a temple, where God showed up most intensely, most intimately, where only priests of the highest order could gain admittance.

Over and over again in scripture, Jerusalem gets soiled, dirtied, derided. Its inhabitants have failed to live up to the task of being citizens of the holy city. Even Jesus mourns the loss of Jerusalem’s holy status: “you who kill the prophets,” he says, “and stone those sent to you. How I long to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks.”

That’s just after Jesus has reamed out the scribes and the pharisees, the religious leaders, for being massive hypocrites: “…you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!” In Matthew 23, he goes on and on and on, calling the church leaders hypocrites no fewer than seven times.

Being a church leader is not such a great role to find one’s self in during these apocalyptic Advent days. We are the scribes, the pharisees, the blind guides and hypocrites. We are the residents of Jerusalem who have killed the prophets and stoned those sent to us. We are the ones Jesus is calling out for straining gnats and swallowing camels.

It is so deeply tempting to point my finger at particular church leaders – famous ones and not-so-famous ones – and point out all the ways they focused every bit of their time and energy on straining out the gnats, failing to look over their shoulder to notice the camel doing some massively destructive dances right behind them.

There are plenty of places to put the blame. But I am working hard to focus on my own repentance and my own responsibility.

So: I am sorry for all the times I prioritized appearances and peace-keeping over justice and mercy and faith. I am sorry that, for so long, I refused to see the injustices running rampant in my own church – congregation and denomination. I am sorry that I sacrificed honesty and the possibility of restoration for the sake of conflict avoidance and whatever the current spectre of ‘unity’ was at the moment. I am sorry for speaking in mealy-mouthed ways to avoid upsetting some portion of some demographic. I am sorry for protecting a reputation instead of a person. I am sorry for my hypocrisy, sorry for all the ways that I have been and continue to be a whitewashed tomb, a blind guide, a strainer of gnats and a contributor to the bloodstains that are soiling our holy places.

Day 4: SHUT. UP.

Matthew 24:31 And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

Two women in my church started a monthly prayer gathering. One morning each month, we gather, drink coffee, catch up, sit down, light a candle and pray together.

That’s it. No frills, no fuss. No production. Just people praying together.

I had no idea until I started joining these women that this kind of gathered quiet prayer time was the thing that would touch some of the deepest longings of my heart.

Most of a pastor’s job description requires volume: preaching, teaching, praying for someone in need. Today, I wrote emails, drafted a report, talked to the church’s new next-door neighbor about property concerns, sent invitations, talked about our prayer plans over lunch, and coordinated a conference call. My voice gets used all. The. Time.

Sometimes, I forget how much I also need to shut the heck up and listen. Not just listening to other people – I am decent at that, usually. But to shut up and listen for God. To be silent. To give my own voice a rest and pay attention to the other Voice for a while, to let it shape my heart and my words.

I saw the movie Moana today, the Disney-est of Disney movies. She’s a young girl destined to be chief of her people, and even though her father demands that she stay on their island and keep her people safely there, an ecological crisis, her wandering spirit, and the voice of the ocean lodged deep in her being call her away, beyond the barrier reef, into deeper waters, danger and destiny.

I’ll take issue a bit with the guiding inner voice concept (I’m finishing Drew Hart’s book on racism in the church, and his advice that those of us at the top of the racialized hierarchy really have to learn to go AGAINST our intuition more often than not), but the larger concept is not all that bad.

Being patient, being silent, opening our ears to a voice other than our own, seems like a really good idea these days.

I am grateful, today, for my congregation that calls me into prayer. And I am grateful for God’s voice that is always there, the drumbeat beneath my consciousness, the constant rhythm carrying all of us. If only I can convince myself to shut up more often.