Empire and Agency

What we see depends on where we stand.  

One of my first and longest lasting lessons from Divinity School was on the importance of social location.  I can't tell you how many assignments we began by naming who we are: I am white, female, lesbian.  I am well-educated and middle class.  I have upward mobility.  And using language I never learned in Divinity School, I am Empire. 

You could see it as simple identity politics: limited individual or group perspectives primarily about self-interest.  OR, you could see it as recognizing agency, or lack thereof.  

For instance, I have never once in my life thought to specially ask for a bag at the grocery store.  If I only have one item, I might not even take the receipt.  Then one day in a discussion group, one of my African American friends said it's a lesson she's had to teach her kids: always get a bag, always ask for a receipt.  Otherwise you'll likely get stopped for shoplifting.  I forgot about it, until one day in a West Nashville Walmart, it happened.  Two black women, about my age were asked for their receipt by a checker next to the automatic sliding doors.  When I reached for my receipt after them, the older white woman said, "Oh I don't need to see yours, but with some people you never know."  

As a white, educated, middle class person in the United States of America, I have never known powerlessness.  In fact, as a white, educated, middle class person I am the epitome of the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world.  I am this country that spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined.  This country claims power over life and death over much of the world.  It's not too radical to name our leadership in global oppression and violence: empire at its finest.  

And so I've never known what it's like to not have power, until Good Friday. 

I was kneeling, my red hands pressed against the cold pillars of the federal building when I heard a click to my left.  My companion in risk and witness had been placed in handcuffs, and my own hands started shaking.  The officer came to me next, taking first my left hand and then my right, behind my back.  Click.  Click.  Stand up please.  Come over here.   

A few tears rolled out then, and I realized for the first time in my life what it is like to have no agency, to be completely at the mercy of powers outside of oneself.  I could no longer say, "Just kidding.  I didn't mean it."  I could not walk away.  I could not wipe my own tears or brush my windblown hair away from my face.  We were led up to a hallway on the fifth floor, and then one by one we were searched.  "Do you have any weapons or anything sharp in your pockets?"  No.  The female officer put on gloves before she touched me.  Then she unzipped my jacket and ran her hands up and down my legs and inside my shoes.  She reached into my jeans pocket and took my cell phone, keys, and wallet, tossing it all into a plastic bag.

This is what it feels like to oppose a system: swallowed into something that makes you invisible.  

Within two hours I had it all back: plastic bag full of my personal items, wrists and hands only slightly worse for the wear.  Within a day my shoulders were no longer sore from the way my arms rested pulled back in handcuffs.  Within the month I'll likely have paid my fine to the federal government and be restored in all my glory as a white, middle class, educated American citizen.  

I want to say I was bearing witness to an alternative that doesn't succumb to those platitudes we tell ourselves because of our agency:

• The federal government does good things too, funding social services and providing for the public good.
• We can't do anything to change the system, so might as well not try.  
• Life is short.  Why make it harder than it already is?

I want to say I was following this radical, political Jesus. I want to say we proclaimed the truth that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection even now tell the story of shalom, of transforming and reconciling love stronger than powers of violence, apathy, and death itself. 

Ultimately I wonder how I might be changed.  Certainly somehow, for because of those three hours on Good Friday, I'm not standing in the same place anymore.  

Good Friday, 2011

We were about fifty, gathered at the Federal Building in downtown Seattle yesterday at noon, gathered to participate in worship and witness in a most public place.  Weldon, Wes, and Sue have led this service for years, proclaiming the Passion story from the Gospel of John, here in the shadow of Empire.  It seems innocuous as a structure and yet the building represents power, domination, and violence – these forces wrapped into the history and current practices of the United States of America. 

It was my great privilege to celebrate communion and remember the story yesterday, and to play a role in leading the worship.  We read the scripture in five acts, each part followed by sharing prayers, stories, names of those affected by persecution and those opposing violence in our neighborhoods and around the world. 

It was then my great privilege to participate in an extended liturgical act with nine others.  A bloodlike substance was poured over our hands, and as we sang, we moved toward the building finally placing our red hands on its cold walls.  This building is the modern day equivalent of the Roman governor’s local headquarters where Jesus was held, questioned, and abused, and so our action was reminder and remembrance. 

But it was more than that too: it was a witness, a call to pay attention, to notice the blood that is on our own hands as citizens of and participants in this Empire of domination.  It was an indictment of our government’s policies of ongoing persecution, military funding and spending, economic and social violence.  It was an action of recognition: our own abilities to oppose these systems are so small and limited.  It was then as much as anything, an action of hope, that even in spite of us, God still is doing something, persuading the universe toward shalom. 

We were arrested, booked, issued violation notices, and released in the span of about two hours.  Likely I will write more, add some layers to the story, but this is all I can muster for now. 

Closets and Caves

April 10, 2011
Seattle Mennonite Church
Fifth Sunday in Lent
John 11.1-45

You may not know this, but our church has some pretty great hiding places.  I only know this because I’ve had the great privilege of spending the night here for a youth lock-in.  These overnight festivities inevitably involve the mysteriously fun game of sardines.  One or two youth get a few minutes to hide somewhere, anywhere in the dark church building, and then the rest of us go and find them.  When you find them, you hide with them, until one by one the searchers disappear into the dark.  (As a side note, you younger kids, be thinking about best hiding places for when you get to youth group, and yes, bathrooms are off limits.)

Now sometimes the best hiding places don’t seem like the best, for instance when Nate hid under the very chairs you are sitting on and none of us could find him except by accident.  When it came my turn to hide, Sara and I decided to try out the worship closet.  For those not oriented to our church, the worship closet is through that door right there, and if you haven’t peeked in, I highly recommend it.  It is a wealth of treasures that transform our sanctuary for any season of the church year.  Anyway, Sara and I hid there and before long David found us but no one else.  It wasn’t until others started calling us: where are you?  come out! that we emerged.  Who knew the closet could be such a good hiding place?

I suppose most of us have also found ourselves in the closet at one time or another: playing hide and go seek; seeking a place of safe darkness where we can show our most vulnerable emotions.  We keep our clothes in the closet and the old luggage that we only use once a year is shoved way in the back.  Those of us from the Midwest know it’s a relatively safe place to go during a tornado too, interior walls, no windows.  Most of us know the closet.

I myself know it well.  I was in the closet until I was twenty-one, which really isn’t all that long for a gay person.  But it was long enough to know that closets aren’t always cozy or safe.

Our Lenten journey began four and a half weeks ago with those first steps out into the wilderness, tracing the footsteps of our example and friend, Jesus of Nazareth.  We ask much of ourselves this season as we meditate on temptation, doubt, and struggle.  We have been richly blessed by stories of thirst and recovery, of blindness and sight.  But we have been stretched as we look into our own weaknesses, as we attend to the burdens we each carry.

Today we go even further into fear, mourning, isolation, separation, alienation.  Today’s Lenten stories take us to death itself.

Our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel brings us to the middle of a valley full of bones.  There were masses of bones, heaps of bones lying scattered about the valley.  And as if dead, bare bones weren’t enough, the prophet tells us these bones were dry.  The image sends shivers up and down our spines.  It was a place of isolation and barrenness.  The air was stale with the smell of death.

And then the Gospel drama from John we travel with Jesus to Bethany to a tomb – a cave actually the text says, a cave with a stone laid upon it.  It was the grave of Lazarus, dead before his time, dead already for four days.

Burial didn’t involve embalming in first century Israel.  Instead the body was covered with perfume and wrapped from head to toe.  This was pleasant enough for the first little bit, but by day four, the smell of decomposition was stronger than the smell of perfume.  What’s more, the mention of four days underscores the finality of death.  It was popular Jewish belief that the soul hovered around the body in the grave for three days after death, hoping to reenter the body.  But after the third day the soul leaves for good.  The unpleasant smell in the air was not only decay; it was the sickly finality of absence.  Lazarus’ cave on the fourth day was a place of ultimate despair and grief.

Our scripture readings for today don’t mention any closets.  But then again, our lives today don’t mention many valleys full of bones or caves covered with stones.  Closets or caves, they are just the same – places of isolation and pain and death.

When I was in divinity school, every fall during GLBT history month, one of our student groups hosted what we called “Coming Out Stories.”  One evening in October we would gather with food and drink to celebrate our stories of those first steps we took from secrecy and hiddenness to life.

I remember one year Ryan shared his story.  That night he was on parent duty because his wife was busy, so he brought his son along and was holding this precious two-year-old in his arms as he began talking.

The year before he had been back home in California over the summer and his family conversation turned to politics and religion.  I don’t remember what it was exactly, but they shared ideas about the sinfulness and perversion of homosexuality.  The talk became increasingly uncomfortable for Ryan.  But he sat in silence.  It would be risky to say anything there, to stir up conflict in the family.  Easier to just disagree privately, he thought, and let the moment pass.

Our closets and our caves are powerful places.  Sometimes it’s about us.  We are afraid of what other people will think of us if we reveal our truest self.  We are wounded and every impulse tells us to protect those places of vulnerability.  Close ourselves off.

Sometimes it’s about the abuses of other people.  We have been told so often that we are not good enough or normal enough or beautiful enough that those words become life commandments which bind us.  And sometimes it’s about systems of domination and distortion, empires that ties us in the closet – religion that says you have to be this way or that way if you want to be loved.  We may not even be conscious that these powerful grave clothes tie us up.  We mistakenly think they are keeping us safe and so we protect them.  Until one day we hear a muffled voice from outside our closets and our caves.  From our death-dealing darkness we hear again the life-giving words of Jesus as he stands facing the cave:  “Lazarus, come out!”  Lazarus, come out.

Ryan was ready to let the conversation with his family go, but then he remembered his young son and the spirit moving inside prompted him to finally say something: “I do not want my son to grow up thinking it is okay to talk this way.  We have many gay and lesbian friends, and I want my son to know that God celebrates their stories and their relationships, and if my son is gay, I do not want him ever to feel condemned to death.”

Seattle Mennonite Church, you have a coming out story of your own, a story that stretched years through long congregational meetings, disagreements, persistent community, engaged and prophetic voices of youth, discipline and discomfort from the wider Mennonite church.  Not long ago you declared this statement of welcome as a body of people: We desire that all who enter here may be received as Christ. We celebrate and affirm the image of God in persons of every age, gender, race, ability, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, and strive to find common ground on which to build relationship with our neighbors near and far. We publicly affirm that LGBT** persons are welcome to participate in the full life and ministry of our church, including membership, baptism, marriage, leadership, and pastoral ministry.


Today we can confidently celebrate together this hospitality and welcome of Christ, which offers freedom to those who enter.  But our work together is not done.  The work of coming out has to be done over and over and over again.

There is risk in responding to Jesus’ call, risk especially for GLBT people who may be victims of violence or ostracism.  The timing for coming out is not always now.  But when the timing is right, when Jesus calls, when it is time to take the risk and step forward we know that we, like Lazarus meet Jesus on the other side.

This is Good News, my friends, not only for gay and lesbian people but for anyone bound by secrecy or fear or other death-dealing powers.  This is news we must live and share, that Jesus gives life not just to Lazarus but to us, not just once but again and again and again.

Every year at the Coming Out Stories celebration, after a couple of people share, the stories start flowing.  The stories are about overcoming for some of us what was nearly unimaginable fear and doubt.  We celebrate the speaking of truth and giving of life, even in the face of opposition.  We celebrate who we are and whose we are.

And with each celebration, each coming out, with each affirmation of life, is a small resurrection.  Friends, Jesus calls us out of our closets and our caves.  May we but have the courage to respond.

Into the Wilderness

March 13, 2011
Seattle Mennonite Church
First Sunday in Lent
Matthew 4.1-11

This morning’s gospel lesson begins: “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil…”  In the first three chapters of Matthew, Jesus has been conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.  He has been visited by wise men from the East and then fled to Egypt with his parents.  It hasn’t been a dull life.  A few years pass before he is baptized by John the Baptist in the river Jordan, anointed the Son of God… and now we can get started.  But to be led with Jesus to the desert, you can’t simply begin here in Matthew.  To know where you are, you have to know where you come from.

So our New Testament story for today doesn’t begin with Mathew chapter 4, verse 1.  It doesn’t even begin with those other stories in Matthew.

This gospel belonged to a mixed first century community, some of whom who grew up with Jewish stories and Jewish customs.  They believed that their Christian community of both Jews and Gentiles was a continuation of the people of God, another chapter in a story that began long ago – long ago, before time started flowing, long ago in that poetic, prelapsarian paradise.  There was Adam and there was Eve and one day in the garden there came the serpent, clothed in temptation.

You were confronted there with Adam and Eve, confronted by something that promised to make you different, another person besides the you God created you to be: smarter, prettier, stronger, wealthier, younger, skinnier, less human.

The trick is that we fell for it, there in paradise.  The tempter said, “For God knows that when you eat of the fruit your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  The tempter’s taunting voice echoes today – you will be less like yourself and more like who you think you should be, smarter, prettier, stronger, wealthier, skinnier, less human.  And so they picked and ate.  No doubt when its first fresh drops of juice landed on their tongues it was tasty, but the aftertaste, oh the aftertaste.

We didn’t become more like God that day, not by a long shot.  If anything we became less – we saw our own ugliness, our tendency to blame others for our mistakes, our capacity for shame, guilt, and alienation.  The world began spinning, subject to the centrifugal force that propels us away from each other and away from ourselves into fragmented reality.  Out of the garden we fell, angels blocking the gates, thrust into a wilderness ruled by systemic forces of oppression and injustice and personal forces of insecurity and despair.

And that is where the story began, Eden, temptation, wilderness.

It’s no surprise that Matthew picks it up again, this wilderness.  In telling powerful truths about the human condition it was part of his story as it is part of ours.  So we arrive back at Matthew chapter four verse one.  “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”  There’s no Eden any more – we lost that back in Genesis chapter three and so the gospel finds us here.

“He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.”

These forty days of Lent that we just began recall Jesus’ fast in the wilderness.  Think what that would be like – alone with your thoughts for forty days.  Every mistake, every deficiency recalled, humanity stripped the core, bare, naked.  Those times you missed the mark coming up in your spirit again and again through the incessant rumblings of hunger.

Most of us run from this kind of confrontation with ourselves and our own limits.  The spiritual journey into the wilderness flies in the face of those formational American myths:

• you can do anything you put your mind to
• be all you can be
• just do it
• bigger is better

Success, security, achievement, and the pursuit of happiness mask the exposed humanity we encounter out here.  Oh to look deep into our addictions, to slow down and face who we really are – it’s tempting to avoid such a wilderness, to resist the Lenten journey.  It’s easier not to live down our fears, not to sit in mortality, or ponder that haunting line: Seattle Mennonite Church, you were created from dust and to dust you will return.

Jesus could have resisted the wilderness confrontation too.  He could have turned around, headed out of the wilderness and walked right back to Nazareth away from temptation. Temptation is a powerful part of the human condition,  after all, overlapping desire and satisfaction, pleasure and need, sacrifice and ease isolation … as we constantly seek something outside of ourselves to soothe the loneliness and find fulfillment.  It’s no coincidence that many of us pray every day the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation…”  The testing, pushing our very beings to the limits.  Who wants to go there?

But we know the story.  Instead of turning around, our Jesus stands right in the middle of it, dialoging with the devil.  For each temptation he has a response:

• Stones to bread?  I don’t think so, for God sustains us as much as any food.
• Jump down from the heights into the arms of angels?  I don’t think so, for God’s realm is beyond testing.
• Worship the devil in exchange for the power of the greatest king?  I don’t think so, for I worship the Lord God whose isn’t about power and dominion.

Our temptations may be the same or they may be different.  They may come through evil personified, a modern day devil on the shoulder or maybe they come through systems of domination that seem benign as we participate out of habit each day.  We are tempted to bypass suffering, to win the approval of others, to justify our mistakes by blaming others or fulfill our own longings without regard for the consequences.  We are tempted by individualism, self-sufficiency, wealth, popular culture.

We are tempted to put something besides God at the center of our lives.  To flee from that wilderness confrontation, and head the other way.

And sometimes we do hightail it out of the wilderness.  We take one look at Jesus on that journey to the cross and run the other way.

And sometimes by the grace of God we don’t.

The tempter was wrong back in Eden, you see, when he said you’ll become more like God and less like yourself.  The devil was wrong in the gospel when he says that bread or power can make you whole.

Saint Augustine famously wrote: “Our hearts are restless until they find our rest in thee.”  I think this is what Jesus knew there in the wilderness – that nothing can replace God at the center of our lives.  Maybe it was easier for him with that whole incarnation thing – he was God put on flesh, after all.  But maybe it wasn’t – he was human too.

Head into the wilderness and miraculously, through no effort of our own, we begin to become more human, sharing with Jesus the hunger and weakness, our pain and his mixing together.  Despite all appearances to the contrary, this is extraordinarily Good News, my friends.

No you are not defined by your addiction or your temptation or that mistake you made last year or yesterday.  No you don’t have to take on the world or fix it either.

The truth is to become more yourself is to become closer to God and to become closer to God is to become more yourself.  The authentic spiritual life is rooted in who we are as human beings, temptations and all.  Created in God’s image, the truth is, you are already worthy.  You are already enough.  You are already loved.

Thanks be to God.

Bodies to Earth

all go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again

-ecclesiastes 3.20 

The liturgical season of Lent begins in a short two weeks.  There are many reasons why this Lent in particular promises meaning and growth.  Uncertainty is ahead and it has begun to creep into my present, with my interim pastor position ending in August and our place Seattle possibly ending too.  None of this is good or bad but it calls us to a trust beyond what has been required so far in this life.  So we enter Lent, the forty days of fasting and prayer, almsgiving and introspection, wondering and wandering,  journeying toward the cross.  

Wendell Berry often writes of limits and of knowing our place.  It is tempting, especially these days, to wrest control from the universe - to find our own solutions, to plan our own paths.  We leave the dinner table to google an answer to a question, leaving our common place for instant, fleeting gratification.  For many of us, we can neither change nor know our own future much less change or know our whole world.  For all of our living, truly we move from ashes to ashes and dust to dust.  In becoming human we are set in time and place, boundaried into an existence that we have not chosen.  So was Jesus.  In our limits and knowing our place, we keep good company.  

Lent invites us to relationship with finitude and the profound spirituality that comes knowing our bodies belong to the earth and are always returning home.  

 

The resting place of my great grandparents, Fred and Hannah (Harms) Klaassen, whose bodies are part of my own.  Grace Hill Mennonite Church cemetery in rural Whitewater, Kansas

To Accompany Shadows

I learned in divinity school that homiletics (def. the art of preaching) is much more than standing up to speak about a biblical text.  It has to do with capturing your own voice and fitting it into oral language and a structure that moves in a particular way.  For Anna Carter Florence, preaching is testimony; for Lenora Tubbs Tisdale it is local theology and folk art; for the great Fred Craddock, it's inductive and story-driven; for my teacher, John McClure (also great), the preacher often plays the role of host.  Sermons are moments that happen in steps and moves that conform to the oral/aural nature of of the event and which aren't that difficult to understand but are difficult to execute well in both form and content.  I don't share this to scare any lay folk away from preaching.  I firmly believe anyone can preach and should preach, and that congregations are enriched by a variety of voices and perspectives (bless you, Seattle Mennonite, for the way you share the role).  I write this, rather, to share a small glimpse into my training and into my expectations for my own preaching, which have the most need for improvement in form and structure.  It is hopeful to think about how I might improve over a lifetime of sermon-giving, especially if the opportunities for preaching and pulpit (lectern) supply ever increase.  That's one life path, anyway. 

With that, here's my latest homiletic composition, written for the listener more than the reader. 

"To Accompany Shadows"
March 28, 2010 (Palm Sunday), Seattle Mennonite Church.  

It is good to be with you today, for today we follow Jesus.  There he is on the dusty road into Jerusalem while palm branches wave in celebration of his triumphal entry.  Peering past the people all around we see him riding a colt, and we cannot help but sing out, “Jesus is coming, Hosanna.  Jesus is coming, Hosanna.”  Standing there, we are mesmerized by this man, this man who has freed the captives, carried good news to the poor, forgiven debts, and proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor.  There he is, a servant king, for the robes and garments he walks upon are not fine silks and linens.  They are worn thin and dusty, like we who have gathered to cheer him on. 

Later, we can almost taste the meal, for there he is, at the table, breaking bread just like us.  We know instinctively that it will be his last meal.  And we wonder, is that fear in his eyes? that shadow that we see flickering as he gives thanks for the food and drink and takes a bite.

We imagine touching him as we approach Jesus from a distance toward a garden on the Mount of Olives.  We long to touch him, to reach out and offer comfort.  He has been praying, we can see, from his fervent posture, and he stumbles as he stands up to greet his adversaries.  His presence is soft and gentle, and holds a bottomless sorrow that follows him as he is marched to trial. 

We can smell the fear that floats through the air, underneath the boasting of the men who strike him.  It grows with each beating, with each insult.  They didn’t need to blindfold him.  They didn’t need to hit him so hard.  It smells ugly, like decay. 

The tension in the air builds unbearably, and we feel it as it elevates.  First as Jesus is questioned.  Then as he is handed over.  And then as the cross is assembled.  And then as Jesus breathes his last. 

The silence in the air becomes so loud that we can hear it. 

The story of Christ’s passion sometimes surprises us Sunday church people.  There’s not always time to make it to a Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, or Holy Saturday service, and so it’s tempting to skip directly from the processionals of Palm Sunday to “Up From the Grave He Arose” and the empty tomb.  We are Easter people, after all, and with the Resurrection so soon upon us, Jesus’ journey to the cross becomes a dim shadow of an afterthought, lost between the Easter basket, the pastel colored eggs, and honey baked ham waiting to be carved. 

And yet, here it is today, the cross thrust into our consciousness.  Today’s worship has ushered us from loud hosannas and enthusiastic praise to the breaking of bread to the shadows of betrayal, denial, temptation, and mockery.  Here is where our holy scripture has brought us.  Sitting here in the valley of the shadow of death.  We have followed Jesus to this place; our feet too are dusty from this journey, and we wonder, what are we doing here? 

The great American poet Robert Frost reminds us there is more than one road…

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, 

And sorry I could not travel both 

And be one traveler, long I stood 

And looked down one as far as I could 

To where it bent in the undergrowth…

Robert Frost’s poem reminds us that there’s another road, a happier road, the one we might have taken had we not decided to walk into the story of Jesus Christ this morning.  I suspect you can still get back to that other road if you wish.  Turn left and wade through the bushes, and after a time you will see it. 

By all accounts, it’s more familiar, paved with progress, paved with pursuits of life, liberty, and happiness.  It’s so well lit that you see no shadows.  The road signs say, American Dream, twelve miles.  Along the way, the visitors centers provide us with self-help literature: how to be your best self now!  Then ten habits of success!  How to lost ten pounds in ten days!  The cell phone signal is good here, which assures us that we can always be plugged in.  We never actually have to present in the place where we are, because we can always send a text message or check our email or log in to facebook. 

This road smells clean.  It is regularly swept and dusted and sterilized.  It feels comfortable, painless.  As we travel this road, all of our needs are met, and no sacrifice is required. 

Toward the beginning of Lent, I was visiting with some folks about the Lenten season.  We discussed the tradition of sacrifice, the way many Christians intentionally give up something, fasting to make room for Christ, taking time for introspection and to deepen spiritual practices.  A question was raised: “Why should we give something up?  Why in the world should we deprive ourselves of what we’ve worked so hard to earn?” 

The pursuit of happiness tells us to follow our own desires.  The pursuit of happiness would have us march down the road of comfort, barely pausing to notice then injustices to our left and right.  Always swerving to avoid conflict and confrontation.  Obeying ourselves alone.  When we see those shadows of betrayal and denial, those gray places of violence and abandonment, we turn away, back to the pursuit of happiness.  This is how it often goes, isn’t it?

And yet, and yet if we tiptoe back to the other road, the dusty, shadowy one, we see a faint map, worn with creases, stained with tears.  Philippians chapter two: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, emptying,      kenosis in Greek,       taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness,      human likeness with its sadness, betrayal, injustice.      And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.” 

The path to the cross is one of struggle.  It is a difficult way in a culture of convenience.  It doesn’t match the progressive spirit of our age.  But ever so much more than the way of happiness, the journey of the cross shows us how to live.  Pay attention to the world around you, and you will see it too.

This, my friends, is what it means to be human.  To struggle.  To lose your way.  To wonder what you are doing here.  To see ugliness.  To doubt.  To lose faith.  To lose hope.  This is the way of the cross.  Self-emptying, obedience, the dusty shadows of human life. 

Caleb was his name.  He was an infant, the child of two young parents.  He was a younger brother and a grandson, and the recipient of baby gifts.  He was happy and alive and breathing one minute, and then he was not.  She found him rolled over against the wall, without breath one January afternoon.  They life-flighted him to the nearest children’s hospital and thought he was improving after a sleepless night and faint signs of brain activity.  But by the next day he was gone, to be taken off life support as soon as the rest of the family arrived.  In the family room on the fifth floor – neonatal intensive care – the three survivors grieved.  The older brother played spider man.  The mother moved in and out, up and down.  And the father spoke between sobs, “I know he’s in a better place.  I know he’s in heaven.  I just have to let him go.”  He sat helplessly, in the shadow of death. 

You too have a story like this, a memory of the shadowy cross-like place between life and death.  You could share it too, it’s just I who happen to be speaking today, giving my own testimony to what I’ve seen and heard.  Perhaps you walk in that shadow place now, your journey in the footsteps of our emptied out Jesus Christ. Perhaps you, like me, have stories so fresh they are not yet fitting to tell.  Yet we hold them anyway in life.

Perhaps you have forgotten this place or blocked it out, obscured by the pursuit of happiness.  Truly I would not blame you, for it is a scary thing, to accompany shadows. That is why these stories are necessary.

Her name is Donna, but some call her Grandma.  She is well into her eighties by now, her skin wrinkled with age and wisdom.  Her hands the author of countless pies and at least one Raggedy Ann doll for each granddaughter.  Two years ago, she was diagnosed with cancer and given three years to live.  It’s harder to stand now, more difficult to get up out of bed or a chair.  Now life is more about medicines and blood transfusions than baking and sewing.  Even in her eighties, even with a life well lived, it’s scary to feel the cycles of life swirl around, there in the shadow of death. 

Her name is Jenni, Jenni spelled with an “I” and not a “Y.”  She is one of the strongest people I have ever known.  Before I knew her, her dad died, and so when her mom was diagnosed with cancer when she was twenty, she knew how to handle it.  She kept going to school, kept playing basketball, kept working and working and working at life, because life didn’t always come easy to her.  Her mom died in the middle of the basketball season, December right around Christmas.  We took a bus down to the funeral to see her weep with her head in her hands, an orphan at twenty-one.  There, feeling alone, in the shadow of death.  Why do I tell these stories?  How else could one share of the cross, except through story?  What else can I hope to do but show you whose road we follow, whose footsteps we walk in when we accompany shadows.

Jesus was his name.  An itinerant preacher, a rule-breaker, a devout Jew, a prophet.  His life is the stuff of legend and faith, and his death is no different.  The powers that be could not stand the challenge he presented as he walked directly into the shadows of betrayal, denial, mockery, conflict, and violence.  His life was lived in and out of these shadows, which he approached sometimes boldly and sometimes with hesitation.  But he always approached them, following his purpose, following his God.  Today we call him Christ and follow him as our Lord down dusty and sometimes uncertain paths.  Then he stood in agony and submission, there in Jerusalem, in the shadow of death.

Wo/andering in the Desert

I spent twenty years of my life intimately tuned to the liturgy of the academic calendar - the rhythm and rest of lengthy breaks interspersed between semesters that flowed from introductions and syllabus to final exam.  Progress in academic liturgy is measured in assignments completed and grades assigned.  The tools are books, pencils, words, and lately, computers.  The art, or music, or poetry comes in originality and articulation.   Often times I miss this rhythm, at least the graduate school version of beginning to end, unbearable intensity to crash.  The parameters are clear, and the center is well-defined by either teacher or topic, regardless of the pedagogy.  This liturgy is lush and abundant and measurable.  

And then there is the liturgy of the church.

It comes to me in a new way this year.  It's not woven in between academic priorities.  This year Christmas had no affiliation with finals and relief and rest.  This year Lent isn't leading to a three and a half day weekend with Maundy Thursday and Easter at its bookends, and ordinary time will be mostly ordinary, not mostly summer break.

I suppose it beats no liturgy at all, but the adjustment is difficult and the boundaries are unclear.  Here, in the liturgical year, I don't know how to measure success.  There are parishioners and parents to please but no professor to affirm my good work through the lens of expertise, and the job description hardly translates into an assignment.  Instead, it requires much more flexibility, a much looser time line, and increasingly  lowered (though I shouldn't call them that) expectations that flatten to encompass the astonishing breadth of the body.

There's part of me that has no use for this liturgy.  I want to flee back to what is known and what comforts me.  There, in that comfortable state of heightened anxiety due to exams, papers, challenging, elevating discourse, and the cerebral realm of infinite ideas.  Part of me prefers that familiar pressure to the unfamiliar lack thereof.

Then last night I talked to my friend, a Disciples of Christ minister back in Tennessee.  I told her some of these things and other things about my life - my great struggle with the UCC and with church; the desire to at least hold open the possibility of a career in pastoral ministry but the unwillingness to commit to here long enough to go through the two-plus year long ordination process required for such a thing; the way I miss the Mennonite church; the questions about home and place and how they will shape my lifetime.  I spare the specifics, partly because this is such a public space, though these things come out freely in phone conversations and coffee dates.

Amy must have sensed something of the deep loss and lost-ness that I'm drenched in, and as we closed the conversation, she blessed me with a new sense of my new old liturgy.  She somehow, with words and years long friendship all the way back to Missouri, invited me to attend to my desert.

Lent.
Forty days.
Jesus in the desert.
Israelites in the desert.
Wondering. 
And wandering. 

There it was, unveiled before me this season of life.  It may not be good or filled with joy and purpose - wandering rarely is, but it is true and real, an older story than me, and it's good company I keep here.  What more could I ask?