Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Lovin on Advent

I love Advent. Love Love Love it.  I love the color of the "darkest sky before the dawn,"  I love the anticipation and the honesty, the willingness to say, "Look at this world, God!  We really need you! Could you please come?" And the waiting. I love the active, eager, honest waiting for the light of the world.  Yum.

However.

I DO NOT love shopping.
I hate shopping. And I ESPECIALLY hate shopping in Advent. It corrupts my Advent.  Muddies it with florescent brightness. Shopping spoils my waiting - because the good waiting, the dark and quiet and hopeful and prayerful and yearning waiting-  is ruined by the noisy, pushy, honking, piped-in-carols, counting-down-shopping-days waiting of "Holiday Season."


I worked at Pottery Barn for a holiday season, people, I've seen it from both sides.  And it is not pretty.  Normally fine people, perfectly pleasant people, become snippy, rude, pushy and greedy. (And I'm including myself in this). The smell of consumption clings to our clothes and our hair, the commercials screaming deals assault us and the never-ending checklist hovers over our waking hours.  And buried behind all this mess is the poignant call of Advent to settle into the deep. To get in touch with our need. To wait for God.

(And, let's just be clear, here, I am not going to be the person who can skip gifts and just donate to charity.  I enjoy the gift-giving and won't not do it.  I love Christmas. Almost as much as I love Advent.  Almost).

Well, I've had enough.

Today I read about someone who completes all their Christmas shopping and wrapping BY THANKSGIVING.  Done.  Then they spend all of December enjoying time with their family.  Ignoring the sales and the pressure and the crowds.  And I almost wept out loud.

That's it. I'm doing it.
I'm reclaiming Advent.

Every year I get swept into the madness, and feel overwhelmed and guilty and tired and sad and rushed.
Not this year.
I am in charge of my time and money - I am the steward of the gifts given to me to share! (Look into the mirror and say it with me!)  My time is more valuable than I treat it sometimes.  When the dust settles, I can remember what's important.  It just gets stirred up and confused sometimes.
So.  I'm doing things differently this year.  I'm doing my Christmas shopping now.

I'm hoping that shopping now - when the stores have already been displaying Christmas things for a month, I might add, but before the real drama of the consumer season begins - will help me keep some perspective:
That Christmas is really about presence, not presents,
that connecting with people is how we connect with God,
that the whole point of all of it is celebrating that God comes to share life with humanity, and we are called to share life with one another,
that the whole world belongs to God and not just the people I personally love.
That all of Advent is for sitting in the grey twilight of reality, holding life's treasures and pain gently, tenderly, openly - and not trampling all over them with tinsel and cheer.

36 shopping days until Thanksgiving.  (38 until Advent!)
I'm getting it done.
So I can sink into the wait.

Advent, sweet Advent, here I come.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Sarah's Story


At LNPC we're in a series, telling the old stories of our faith in many different ways. Today, we had a visit from Sarah, played by local performance artist, Julie Kurtz.  And Sarah shared her story with us firsthand...



The promise wasn’t to me. It was to Abram. He was to be “the father of many” – Abraham.  Clearly I was not part of that.  I was the mother to none.

The strangers said I would have a son. Me.  They didn’t say he would. They said I would. 
Of course I laughed.

What did they know of my womanhood? My time was past.  Besides, my womb had been closed my whole life. My arms were never to hold a little one, my breasts long past the days when they awaited a purpose, ripe and ready.  My body had always been an empty, aching vessel - once agile, but now deflated, comfortably worn and finished.  I had accepted my fate.  I always did. Even in the days when there was still some hope. The days when we would wander, always at the word of God – get up and go here, pack up and move there. 

And in some places, Abram, the spineless coward, would pass me off as his sister, and I would comply.  Because I love him. Because I trust him. Because I don’t want anything to happen to him.  He always was a worrier. 
And his God kept intervening.  Punishing the men who would take me as their own, driving them mad in one way or another until they would demand to know from Abram the truth and he would have to tell them I was really his wife and they would return me to him and we’d be on our way.  You should have seen the pandemonium it caused when I was taken into the Pharoah’s house!  Oh the misery on that household that would not let up until Abram and I were restored to one another!  Because I belong to Abram, and Abraham belongs to God.
Of course, It never occurred to us to just trust this God who had sent him there in the first place and be who we were without taking matters into our own hands, but then, that was never our strong suit.

Back in the day, before this all began, before the promise that turned everything upside down and sent us packing, blowing across deserts like tumbleweed from one place to the next, we were so young and strong and sure of ourselves. We could make each other laugh, and oh, the schemes we’d concoct!  We’ve always been a great pair, a clever pair. Life was comfortable and we were in it TOGETHER.  Abram & Sarai, everyone would say.  Oh that Abram & Sarai… Did you see Abram & Sarai…? like it was one word.  We could finish each other’s sentences. It sometimes felt like we shared the same brain.

Then the damned promise.  That uprooted us and gave us a mission, a calling. Or, him anyway.  And the hope, the driven terrible hope that lived in his eyes and grew between us like a tangled weed.  Father of nations!  Offspring like the stars! 
I could not conceive.  My body stubbornly refused to fulfill his God’s promise, to agree to the arrangement they’d come up with.  And it’s not like Abram could keep quiet about it, either.  Oh, the fretting that man did!  Every year added to my age was anguish; I was standing in the way of what he was meant to be, what God was supposed to do.  The barricade to fulfillment was me, my useless flesh, my barren self.

But every time he despaired and nearly gave up, something would happen to him out there in his God moment and he’d come back all fired up about the promise again.  Believing again.  Do you have any idea the pressure that puts on a woman?  I knew it wouldn’t happen.  While my sisters had all raised children, and their children had grown, married and conceived, I remained empty, yearning and ashamed. 
How was I to live in this belief of his?  This faith of his that pulled him somewhere I couldn’t follow?  I was not the one hearing these promises.  And I knew I could never be the one to fulfill them.  At least not in myself.  I was a liability, an obstacle.  And we’ve always trusted one another, through thick and thin, across more miles than could be counted, through more adventures and disasters and struggles and celebrations than I could ever describe, we’ve been Abram&Sarai.  Even with his damn obsession and the drive of this promise I didn’t understand, we’ve always been there for each other, sacrificed for each other, or at least been willing to take a hit for the other. 
So I made up my mind.  I would not stand in the way of this promise any longer. There was something I could do to help fulfill it. So I gave him Hagar, my slave.  Hagar, with her young, strong body, full and firm, latent with potential; a warm, ready place for a baby to grow. 

Oh, if I could take back that moment.
Oh, to remove that day from existence like scooping a worm from the flour bag!
But we must live with our choices, musn’t we?  

It was never the same after that.  After he had known her, who had only known me, I no longer knew him in the same way.  Somehow he was stranger to me.  My Abram – a divide now yawned between us that I couldn’t have bridged if I had wanted to. 
And I didn’t want to.

And she! Oh, how she lorded it over me!  As her belly began to swell she looked upon me, her mistress, with such contempt, as though I were less than worthless. 
The two of them… I could barely stomach the thought of it; it plagued me relentlessly!  That she would give to him what I never could? 
This child wouldn’t be ours; it would be theirs. 

I couldn’t stand the sight of her; the pain burned inside me into a molten rage and I “dealt harshly” with my slave woman. 
After she fled from me I regretted what I had done. Not only was I useless, I was wicked.  I should never have behaved in that way.  No matter what has happened, I am still Abram’s wife, I said, and mistress of this household. And it is incumbent upon me to remember my place and the duty I have to uphold the dignity of my husband and position.  I am the one who did this.  And I will bear the consequences graciously if it kills me. 
She did come back, and I swallowed my pride and struggled daily to push past my shame and anger and the gnawing, constant grief, and keep my head high and my emotions restrained.  But after that, part of me was dead.

The years went on and we managed.  We found a way, our odd little family.  Abram doted on Ishmael, his son, and I fulfilled my duty and cared for the boy for Abram’s sake and the sake of this project we were now in, living the dream for this God who had settled him here, anchored him in this boy, leaving only me to drift through the desert alone. 

For a while, I fought the hostility inside me every day; the regret, pain and confusion, and mostly the loneliness and isolation.  We were still together, he still reached for me in the darkness of the night, there was still some comfort in the familiarity of his arms and the daily patterns and unspoken rhythms of a lifetime side by side; we still shared language and even occasionally laughter, but what we’d had was gone. And sometimes I’d gaze at him and realize with a start that I’d no more know his thoughts than a perfect stranger’s.  We were closed to one another.  
But over time, the anger softened into defeat, and I accepted the life we had grown into.  I was no longer young, and my old age had worn away regret and gradually filled in the places with a not-unpleasant mixture of gratitude and resignation.

Then it happened again, this promise giving, this sudden burst of belief, and Abram returned one day, like he had the first time, seventy years before, flushed and luminous and filled with purpose.  He set about circumcising all the males in the whole place and going on about the promise once again.   He said God had changed his name, that he was to be Abraham now, ancestor of a multitude of nations, for through him were to come nations and kings.  And he announced that there was now a covenant, God claiming them all as God’s people forever. And this was fine. I’d grown accustomed to accepting this spectacular direction our lives had become oriented to and his breathless reports of God’s words, only a few days later he started in again on me. 

He stood as we were finishing dinner -  Ishmael, the continuously in motion teenager, had gone off somewhere in his usual flurry, and I was about to clear the meal, and Abraham grabbed my hands and pulled me down to sit beside him.  Sarai, he said, with a strange mixture of sadness and hope in his watery eyes, Ishmael is not the promise. 
Then he stood over me and laid his hands on my head, closed his eyes and said, You are now to be called Sarah, the princess of a people, for God will bless you and give to me a son through you. God will bless you and you shall give rise to nations, kings of people shall come from you.  Sarah you are and Sarah you shall be. 
His hands still heavy on my head, he knelt back down in front of me, and then gently slid them from my head to my face, cradling it before him.
I sat like a stone. 
I could feel his breath on my face, he was so close.  Finally I raised my eyes and looked into his crazy, hope-filled face and I felt nothing. 
There was nothing. 
I gave him nothing.

How could he? 
How dare he? 
I reached up and gently took him by the wrists, removed his hands from my cheeks, and lowered his arms away from me.  Then I turned away from this man, and slowly rose to my feet and walked out of the tent.

I was finished.

Some time later three visitors appeared in our camp in the heat of the day.
We don’t often have visitors, and Abraham was turbulent with hospitality, caring for their animals, offering them rest and shade, setting the whole camp into motion to provide respite and welcome to these travelers stopping in.  He rushed into our tent and told me how to do my job, always a sure sign of his nervous energy, and I set about making cakes for his guests, while Abraham, all ninety-some years of him, hiked up his robe and ran to the herd to select a calf and have it prepared for a feast. 
Once all was ready and they were eating in the shade of the tree, one of them said to him, “Where is your wife, Sarah?”

Inside the tent, my heart skipped a beat.  Abraham had not spoken my name; I had declined to come out of the tent and meet the guests.  (I had made it silently and unmistakably clear that these little projects of his no longer included me). 

I drew near the entrance to hear what they were saying.
“She’s there, in the tent.” Abraham answered. He seemed embarrassed.  Good.
Then one of them said, “I will return in due time, and I will find your wife Sarah with a son.”

When I heard that, I laughed to myself.
Oh, I am so beyond that! I thought.  WE are so beyond that.  He’s old, I’m old; he and I are FINISHED, and NOW, in my old age, when my life has been riddled with disappointment beyond words, NOW I am to have pleasure?  I highly doubt it, strange sir.  Nice sentiment, but you seem to have caught the illness that touches folks around here…there is to be no great happiness for me.  What you say is IMPOSSIBLE.

And I ask you, truly, What else could I do but laugh? 
The tears dried up long before my womb.  I had nothing left to weep. Nothing.

But somehow they knew. Somehow God knew.  I may have been hiding there in the tent, but these strangers had read my mind. 
Why did Sarah laugh? was the question. Why did she laugh and say, Shall I indeed bear a child now that I have gotten old?
I slipped outside the door, my heart pounding in fear.  They looked over at me and I at them, trembling.
Is anything too wonderful for God? 
And the visitor turned back to Abraham and repeated, louder this time, “In due time I will return and Sarah will have a son.”
“I didn’t laugh.” I blurted across to them.
And he stood and looked at me once again.  And a shiver went through me.
“Oh yes. You did laugh.” he said.

More time and drama came after that.  More moving, more of the same adjusting to the new. Lot came back into our lives for a time, we even had another “pretend you’re my sister” incident, like the good old days, complete with another household in upheaval until God alerted them that I belonged to Abraham and we were once again on our way, wondering at how we’d managed to repeat an old mistake so egregiously.  But it was nice to feel desirable again, anyway, to get back into the groove with Abraham, a little like our young selves, all this adventure and motion. 
And something within me had come back to life.  I could feel it healed over, like fresh, fertile soil in my soul, willing to begin anew with Abraham, willing to open myself to the possibility that life might hold something promising.  Even if I didn’t understand it.

That strange day with the visitors lived always in the shadows behind everything that happened.  It hovered there, without explanation, but also without disappearing.  And I had grown to treasure it for its inexplicable warmth.  If nothing else, for what it felt like to finally be seen. To hear my name as the opening to a stranger’s promise. To have my very self laid so bare for such a brief and shocking moment.  And to find, in some strange way, solidarity with Abraham in the holy, in the place he had always stood alone and told me of later. To feel the mystery electrify the air between us all, hear the voice of God together - it seemed to burn away the hardness between us, to fill the gulf that divided us and draw us close, and we could see each other again, reach each other again. 

And then one ordinary day, God did as God had said. 
One regular, uneventful day, unremarkable day, the Lord did for me as the Lord has promised.
I conceived.
And in due time, I bore Abraham a son in his old age,
just as God had promised. 

On the day he was born, when I held his tiny life against me, and felt the tapping of his new little heartbeat against the timeless thudding of my own, when I lowered him to my breast and gazed at the downy softness of his impossibly beautiful head, I said in my joy, the hot, fresh tears streaming down my face, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me!  Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children?  Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”

Abraham called him Isaac. Which means “laughter.”
 And on the eighth day he circumcised Isaac, to bear the mark of one held in the covenant of God, one belonging to the God who will never forsake the people of God’s promise. 
Abraham was one hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.
And I not much younger.

Is anything too wonderful for God? 
How could I not laugh?
I held in my own arms the promise itself, the sign of a God who will never forsake the people of God’s promise. The joy pours out of me yet, for my body bore the promise made flesh, and my breasts nursed not just my own fulfillment, but the future of God’s people: nations and kings, numerous as the stars, a people chosen and brought forth by God.  A people of God’s blessing, with God’s purpose.

This promise of Abraham’s, that guided our whole lives, it never belonged to him. 
Or to me.
We belonged to it.
The plan of God doesn’t come from what is possible; it comes from what is promised.
And nothing we do can hinder it or break it, can prevent it from coming. 
One could, I suppose, decline the invitation to participate, and I suppose I almost did, for a while.
But God is relentless and committed;
God will do what God will do. 
And blessed, oh so blessed, are those through whom God does.



Sunday, October 2, 2011

That kind of story, that kind of God

This is the third in a chronological narrative series through Genesis, which began with Creation and the Fall.  This reflection spans Genesis 6-9, and the story of Noah.






Sometimes a story is so overused, so adapted to the wrong context, that you stop hearing it altogether.  And then if, for whatever reason, you decide to give it a second look, you are utterly horrified at what you see, it’s not at ALL what you thought it was.

I think, for example, of nursery rhymes sung to children, ring around the rosie, pocket full of posie, ashes ashes, we all die of the black plague, is what that’s really about.  Or tearing down a monarchy and having the children sing, “down will come baby, cradle and all!” 
And so often when we’ve stopped hearing the words or remembering where they came from and we pass them onto the children without a second thought.

Let me be clear right off the bat.  Noah and the Ark is NOT a children’s story.  So let’s leave the two-by-two wallpapered nursery and stuffed playsets and first say it like it is.  This is a really disturbing story of what looks like God giving up on creation and destroying the whole entire world and everything in it, but saving one guy and his family to start over.  Right? Even in the best light, is this what we want our kids looking at from their cribs?

At first glance, real glance, this seems like an awful story. At least to me. There are any number of things in it I don’t like, not least of which is the idea that God gives up on what God had just declared “good”, and lets the whole rest of creation get sunk along with humanity.  Or that God is so abidingly upset about how violent the world has gotten, that God violently washes it away. 
And then there’s the nagging question, What made Noah so saveable and everyone else so damnable? 

And what exactly is the promise here? I always heard it in Sunday school as God promises not to destroy the world by FLOOD ever again. Phew, I thought at the time. That eliminates ONE method. Of course, God may use any other means God desires, but at least flood is off the table.

From the point of view of the people who bit the dust, this story sucks. From the point of view of Noah and his family, it’s nice to be saved, but beyond that, not much better.  It can’t have been a pleasant task. 
And most of all, from our point of view, what on earth are we supposed to do with this thing?

To be honest, I am still wrestling with this story. I don’t like it.  It’s not a nice story. It’s not an easy story. And part of that is because it is a story of God’s judgment. At least in part.  There is judgment in this story, God deems something unacceptable, some people unacceptable, and punishment – or what feels like it – follows.
And so, we hear the words of our song earlier, O Sinner Man, where you gonna run to?  This God gets the last word.  He knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness’ sake, because you’ll be held accountable in the end.

But, if I might be so bold as to say this is what is so great about the bible, and about our faith.  These things are hard to understand, and we are invited to wrestle, like we’ll see in a few weeks Jacob wrestling the angel, and to leave blessed but limping from the exchange. You can’t enter into this dialogue with any honesty and not be changed.

So while we haven’t made easy friends, this story and I, I’ve come to discover there is far more than meets the eye. And I’ve actually had something of a change of heart.

It came when I remembered, finally, that this story, which is part of a much bigger story, has a primary protagonist, and sister, it isn’t Noah.  (In fact, just in case we begin to think Noah is some perfect person, the story is immediately followed by a bizarre incident involving alcohol, nudity, humiliation and disproportionate rage. So, no saints here). 

The central character of this story is God. This is a story about God. And we’ve already seen that this God who wields the power to create an entire universe out of nothing, has also opened Godself to these creatures made in God’s own image and invited them to share God’s love and care for the world and one another.

But the relationship is broken. And the brokenness affects God.  The brokenness does not exist simply between human beings or between them and God, it is carried inside God.  The grief of a parent over her child destroying himself and rejecting her, and any love or help she seeks to give him, standing on the sidelines where he has thrust her, watching the inevitable destruction he is hurtling himself towards cannot begin to touch the grief within God’s own heart over what is unfolding in this creation God poured God’s soul into.  And the devestating fracture runs deep between God and these ones God has planned to share life with who have utterly turned their backs on God and devoted themselves to the violent tearing down of one another at all cost.

And I wonder if at some point, amidst the grief and the anger, God doesn’t take it on Godself: this is God’s own failure as much as it is theirs.  God made it, and clearly they are unable to pull themselves out of the death spiral, so God’s going to fix it.  Wipe it out and start over.

So God reverses creation.  In language paralleling the creation story, the dome of the sky that separated the waters collapses and the deep that was pushed out by land wells up again and everything is returned to the chaos from which it was liberated and created.

Except God can’t quite do it.  Can’t quite obliterate all of it.  It was so beautiful. so good and God loves it so much. Perhaps it could be good again? Perhaps it can be saved?  So God chooses this one little family out of everyone else to save, to begin again.  And a sample of every kind of animal as well; maybe it wont be an utter loss.
 And then God rages and weeps and releases all of the wrath and sadness and anger, and creation is violently dismantled and returned to nearly the nothingness from which it first emerged, except for this boat, bobbing on top of it all, this odd little remnant of hope. 

It’s a tragic and horrifying scene, a heartwrenching scene:

21And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings; 22everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. 23He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. 24And the waters swelled on the earth for one hundred and fifty days.
Then after this purging and cleansing, the time of recreation begins:

But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; 2the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, 3and the waters gradually receded from the earth.

And finally the ark comes to rest and the inhabitants pour out into a brand new world.

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9‘As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10and with every living creature that is with you… that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.’
12God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth….16When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.’
And here’s the kicker.  Here is where the story turned and grabbed me, where I realized I don’t hate this story at all. This is a marvelous story, an astounding story, a deeply and beautifully true story:
God began the story seeing no other way but to write it all off and begin fresh.  But when all is said and done, and everything is dead and gone, and the earth goes back to its watery formless state, something happens inside God.  Because by the time the water recedes and the naked and fresh earth is exposed, and it is ready to begin again, God is in a different place altogether.  You might say God has gotten some clarity and made some decisions. 

God realizes that over and over again humanity is going to choose death instead of life, choose hatred instead of love, choose to cut off from one another and from God, instead of live in the connection that God created us all for, that even flooding the whole earth hasn’t washed away sin from the hearts of humanity.  But even seeing that, despite all of that, God hangs God’s bow in the sky, the weapon of a warrior God puts down, and pledges to all creation never to wipe out the whole earth again. 

...the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind… nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. 
22 As long as the earth endures,
   seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
 shall not cease.’

What does this mean?  What is God promising?

Nathan Nettleton says it beautifully:
This story is telling us that God neither gives up on us, nor clings to the right to wipe us out if we get too out of hand or the pain we cause becomes too great for God to bear.
It tells us that God voluntarily gives up some freedoms; voluntarily accepts some new restrictions on what God can and can’t do. God signs away the right to simply treat us as we deserve; to dish out punishments that are simply direct and proportional consequences to the crimes.  God swears off such options, and makes an irrevocable commitment to wildly disproportionate generosity and mercy.  And God does this with open eyes, knowing that such a commitment means signing on for continual betrayal and heartbreak, continual grief and frustration and pain.
But that is a price God is prepared to pay. God makes a personal commitment to be open to the pain, to enter into the pain, to absorb the pain, and to go on loving without limit.

This God, I want to know more. This God I want to see at work in the world and feel in my own life.  I want to recognize this God in the lives of those around me, and hear within the stories of those far away that I will never meet but who share this same world with me signs of the unquenchable love of this God.  
 This God gives me hope.



I will admit this today, that I still don’t completely understand these old stories of our faith, the prehistoric ones that were carried by heart and mouth from generation to generation and finally written and passed down to us today.  But I’m willing to wrestle with them until they bless me. And I’m willing to go away limping as well - rearranged, humbled.  Because these stories are part of my story.  I belong to this God.  These people - whether the ones in the stories themselves ever existed as we see them here or not, whether the drama depicted ever unfolded this way or not - these people are my people, and this God is my God. 

And it helps me to see and live in the world, claiming this story.  It helps me notice the ways I choose death over life, and gives me a way to grieve and even rage over the violence we do to each other and creation. 
And then it quiets me in the awe of a God who goes on loving without limit.  Who “neither gives up on us nor clings to the right to wipe us out if we get too out of hand or the pain gets too great.” 
Who begins here, with Noah, to live in a covenant with humanity, a kind of indestructible commitment to humanity that culminates in plunging right into this world with us, alongside us in utter solidarity and taking onto Godself the darkest and most broken parts of us in a relentless resolve to share life with us, and tenaciously work towards restoring us to the wholeness we were created for. 

So I press on in the story, and I invite you to as well.  Dig in, wrestle, question, open yourself and press on. Together we’ll watch what comes next.

How to Repent (It's not how you think)

Psalm 46 ,  Jeremiah 31:31-34 When I was in college, I spent the large part of one summer sleeping on a 3-foot round papason chair cushion o...