Sunday, September 20, 2015

The inner language of God's life

Jan Richardson's "The Best Supper,"available along with lots of her amazing art, at janrichardson.com.
(Previously purchased and used with permission)


We have a word in our house that means something real but which there is no English word for. When Maisy was just a few weeks old, we left her one afternoon, napping on our bed alone.  We all went downstairs, and neglected to turn on the baby monitor.  By the time we realized she was crying an hour later, we took the stairs two at a time, and threw open the door. She had sent herself into a frenzy, red-faced and furious, kicking and waving her arms and wailing at the top of her lungs.

 We flew to her side, and piled on the bed, crooning and comforting and reaching for her, “It’s ok! Maisy! We’re here, sweetie, we’re so sorry! You’re ok now!”  Not quite three year old Owen laid his hands on her chest and leaned his head down on the bed near her cheek and said tenderly and wisely, “Oh Maisy, don’t worry, honey. It was only Hoatis.  It’s OK, baby. You just had hoatis.” 

Andy and I shrugged at each other in confusion, and then Andy cleared his throat and asked, “Owen, what’s hoatis?” Owen glanced up from comforting his sister and said to us, matter of factly, “You know. Hoatis. When you’re all alone and crying and nobody hears you.” 
Hoatis.  It’s a real thing. There needed to be a word for that.

Here are some other words I have found that describe real things, for which there is no English equivalent:
Tartle. Scottish – The act of hesitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name.
Jayus. Indonesian – “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh”
Torschlusspanik. German – Translated literally, this word means “gate-closing panic,” but its contextual meaning refers to “the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.”
Tingo. Pascuense (Easter Island) – “the act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them.”

There are lots of things that are real about life, things we experience, but which we don’t quite have the words to describe.  Our whole story today centers around a huge reality that is described with a Hebrew word for which we have no English equivalent.  That word is “Hesed.”  It is Hesed that drives Ruth to stand with Naomi, Hesed that Boaz later shows toward Ruth, and ultimately, God’s Hesed that drives the whole story.
Hesed shows up all throughout all over this book, actually.  It’s Hesed that the Psalmist raves about in song, Hesed that sustains the patriarchs and matriarchs in all their blundering and barrenness, Hesed that saves children of Israel out of Egypt and Hesed that gives them the words of life in the wilderness. 

Hesed is the gift meant to be reveled in at Sabbath, studied in scripture, sung of in worship, and practiced in daily life.  One might even say Hesed describes the true substance of Way of God, in the lives of those gone before and , of which today’s little chapter is just a fraction, and our own lives another tiny but significant piece. 
Hesed is hidden within the ordinary fabric of life, all life, our lives.   It powerfully binds, upholds, and communicates what all of this is about.  

So, what does Hesed mean?
It has sometimes been translated as “mercy”, and certainly that’s a part – that undeserved forgiveness, compassion and grace – but mercy doesn’t nearly capture it, Hesed is more mutual, more communal than mercy.

Another way it’s been translated is lovingkindness.  And yes, it feels like kindness, And undoubtedly it is full of love.  But kindness can be impersonal, and love – at least in English – sounds too much like a feeling.  Hesed is more intimate than kindness and more bonding than love, or rather, it calls love to be more bonding.

It has also been translated as loyalty. And this gets even closer, because it is a “through thick and thin”, “no matter what” kind of faithfulness and constancy. But loyalty can be exclusive, and Hesed is broad and inclusive. It spreads wider as it reaches out, bringing others, and still others.

One might even try calling it “Friendship,” (in the classic sense not the Facebook sense).  Friendship as chosen love and commitment; not demanded by bloodlines or desired for personal gain, not for networking or nostalgia.  Generous, really seeing an other and desiring their best, choosing to be with and for them, sacrificing yourself even, for their well-being.  Hesed is like friendship, but deeper, thicker, richer, it is what gives friendship its strength and its depth.

Perhaps the best way to think about Hesed is something like “belongingness”.  It is the inner logic and substance of belonging, the verb of it, even.  It looks like compassion, mercy and loyalty, lovingkindness and friendship. It looks like choosing over and over again to be there with and for this other, no matter what and without end.  “The Hesed of the Lord never ceases, God’s Hesed never comes to an end.” (Lamentations 3:22)

Hesed says, I will go there with you.  Hesed forgives.  It hopes.  It prays.  It sits at her bedside every day, even when the memory has faded and she no longer knows he is there.  It stands by you when everybody else has fallen away; even if you deserved for them to, it won’t desert you.  It drives across country to settle you into your first house, or moves him into your house when he’s too sick to care for himself.  
When you hold that new life in your arms for the first time Hesed gives you that sudden, jolting realization that you will forever and always now belong to this one.  You are now part of belongingness with them.
When we talked about this story three years ago, Carolyn was teaching the children’s lesson, and as we reflected together on this scripture, she pointed out to me how greatly “Belonging” extends our being, how it stretches and lengthens us beyond our selves, beyond the moment.  You will Be. Long.  Like, forever, long. Long, will you be for these others. 
And that’s just the fleeting and frail human participation in Hesed! That’s just the tiny tastes we share here and now.  It’s far bigger than all of that. Bigger, even, than we could ever, in our wildest imagination, begin to conceive of.

Hesed is what held the Israelites all through the wilderness into the Promised Land, and then through hundreds of years of them turning their back on God and returning, again and again. And before that, Hesed is the voice God spoke into nothing and made life.  Hesed is the breath of God that animated human Spirit, and formed in God’s own image, like the belongingness within God’s own self Father, Son and Spirit, a new creature of belonging, a new community of life to whom to belong. You belong to me; I belong to you. My precious creation, my life, my love.  And I will stop at nothing to cherish you in this belonging; I will never leave you or forsake you.  I am the Lord your God.

Ruth should have stayed with her people. Started her life over.  That was the wise thing, the right thing to do.  But instead she let her life be enveloped and driven by Hesed. She stayed with Naomi.
What could she do for Naomi, really? She had nothing to give, she was not a man, she had no standing or property or means of support – nothing.  She could do absolutely nothing for Naomi but be with her, share her position, her journey, her currently miserable lot in life.  She could give Naomi Belongingness. She could join her in Hesed.
“Where you go I will go, your people shall be my people, your God shall be my God, and when you die they will bury me beside you.” I will give up my own security and future to accompany you, come what may.
And the story of this woman, this widow, this foreigner with nothing to give and no future in front of her, became the story of the people of Israel, the story of King David, the story of Jesus Christ.  Ruth had no idea she was doing anything more than joining her own seemingly insignificant life to the seemingly insignificant life of her friend.  She certainly didn’t intend to be for the people of this God she didn’t even know yet, the bearer of Hesed, the bringer of belonging.
But this is how God works. 

We are following again from the beginning of scripture the Way of God unfolding – God’s relationship with God’s people. We’ve just seen the people after wilderness wandering on the brink of entering the Promised Land, and God’s words to them to Never Forget – that they Belong to God, and not to Pharaoh, that they Belong to each other, and not against one another, that their whole identity in the world as they leave their migrant life and settle in what will be home will remain as journeyers who embody the Hesed of God, extend this Hesed to strangers, and see themselves as only truly at home in Hesed on this side of eternity. 

So much of the scriptures at this point in the Old Testament are filled with struggles and drama, laws and leaders, battles and conquering and defeat and redemption – and then there is this sweet little story, tucked in here amidst all that testosterone.  And in this humble tale we don’t hear the voice of God spoken directly at all.  We don’t see the hand of God smiting or waving or cheering or punishing.  We don’t see big sweeping judgments or wide arcing redemption.  We just see these few ordinary people, living their ordinary lives, trying to survive the best they can, broken and without hope, but moving forward anyway the best they know how. 

And in the divine sense of humor, or direction, or both, God chooses this story – the lives of these women, to remind God’s people, both then, and also in future generations who they are and what defines them. 
Later on, when they’d forgotten what life is really about and who they were supposed to be, and sought to remove foreigners from their midst to maintain their pure identity – God use this story, the lives of these women, to remind them that what makes them the people of God is not their bloodline, their security, their wealth or their knowledge. It isn’t their leadership or good manners or connections or power, and it isn’t their piety.  They did not earn this, and they certainly don’t deserve it.  
What makes them God’s people is nothing less than the incomprehensible belongingness of God. It is Hesed.  That God is a relentless belongingness kind of God, and they are to be God’s radical belongingness kind of people. 
You are MY people and I am YOUR God. I am God because of you. And I am God in spite of you.  You are mine, and I am yours. And my Hesed moves within and between you, but also beyond and outside of you.
 And just in case you forget, or maybe because you will quite often forget, it is really important that the person who carries forward THIS part of your story, who reveals the Big Picture, is none other than Ruth, the ordinary, widowed, Moabite foreigner.

At the end of the story, when Boaz, the kinsmen of Naomi’s husband decides to take Ruth as his wife, the townspeople and elders say to him, ‘We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel.” 

And so Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When they came together, the Lord made her conceive, and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, ‘Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without next-of-kin; and may his name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him.’

And They named him Obed; he became the father of Jesse, the father of David. (Ruth 4)

From the barenness of widows and impossibility of foreigners, God moves in Hesed again to continue bringing life to a people, and revealing again the inner life and expression of God’s own being.  Look. “I will go there with you.” “You will not be alone.”

God claims you and me and us and this world in a wide and fierce embrace of unending belongingness, of unshakable Hesed. So much so, that in Jesus Christ God said I will go there with you, Long will I be with you, There will never be anything, no matter how great or small, that can separate you from the love of God, you are my beloved. 
We are pulled by Christ right into the very heart of God.  
So right where we you, no matter where you are, every day, you belong to God.  
And right there, every day, you are invited to Be. Long. with the ones God has put in your life. And the ones into whose life you’ve been put.  
This is how God is with us; this is where Jesus is.

Sisters and brothers, in a world of hoatis, God is Hesed.
And until the very end, when all hoatis is gone and we are finally fully at home in God, it is only in God’s Hesed, in dwelling in, giving and receiving the powerful belongingness of God that comes in shared weakness and solidarity, that we share in the Kingdom of God. In God’s Hesed we remember who we were made to be, and what this life is all about.

Amen.

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Never forget

Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. 200,000 people in tents.


You know how whenever the school year starts, a whole bunch of time is spent reiterating the rules? Or when you pick up a sequel to a book, the whole first chapter or two tells you again who the main characters are and what they’re all about? Well, we are starting over in the Old Testament, friends, and even though we just had the Ten Commandments last year, these things bear repeating, and, this is actually a different iteration of them, with a different context.

The first time we heard them, Moses had just come down the mountain and delivered the message to the people – here is what life with God at the center looks like, here is what our lives as the people of God will look like.

But the people turned away from God and made for themselves an idol, and God told them that none of them would enter into the promised land, so forty years goes by and they wander in the desert, eating manna, and I imagine, being shaped as a people just as much by their wandering rootless existence as they were by the slavery they endured in Egypt.

When a generation’s turn was over and their children were adults, Moses gathered them together on the threshold of the Promised Land to tell them again – here is what it means to have God at the center, and here is what it means to live as the people of God.

And he addresses them first by saying – these are your words from God- they weren’t just given to your parents; they belong to you, they define you.  And Moses proceeds to again tell them what in Hebrew are called The Ten Words.
There is a very little difference between the first telling and the second one, in fact, they are all identical except for the Sabbath command, but what is different is quite significant.

In Exodus the Sabbath command says Observe the Sabbath, and then gives the rationale…For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

So the people, who have come from a relentless kind of existence as slaves, are given the command now as they set out on their journey to the Promised Land, that they are to observe the Sabbath because they are made in the image of a God who rests.  Their lives are not defined by their slavery; they are human beings with worth, children of God, brought into God’s rest.

But in the Deuteronomy version, a generation later, after they’ve ostensibly been living with these Ten Words guiding their lives their whole lives, it says this:

Remember the Sabbath, and then it goes on to say why the command says that everybody should rest, including livestock and slaves and strangers in the land…so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

As they stand, a migrant people, on the threshold of what will be their home, God is reminding them again what kind of life they are made for and what it will look like to share that life with others.  Sabbath tells them, through rest, that they are responsible to shape a different kind of life for all, one that keeps in mind that they were once enslaved, and that God delivered them. By stopping work and resting together, the whole community is restored to the way of God – if only for one day every week – where people are all worthy and valuable by another standard than the one the world of commerce and caste tells us is true every other day.

This week the global immigration crisis has come to the forefront-  millions of displaced people in what is being called the greatest humanitarian crisis since WWII and the biggest mass migration in modern times. People dying in the sea because a paid smuggler and rubber raft is safer than staying in the war-ravaged rubble of no-longer home.  Hundreds of thousands in refugee camps, living in tents, thousands a day arriving on the threshold of new countries, not knowing what they will face.

And so this week, awareness of this story unfolding around us has been the backdrop of our scripture text for me, and I can’t help but be reminded again that the very origins of our faith story is here.  Our forefathers and foremothers were almost all migrants.  In fact, throughout all of scripture, the people God chooses and those through whom God consistently works are homeless, exiled, and wandering people without a whole lot going for them by the world’s standards as the moment God claims them and uses them in his schemes of salvation and hope. 

There are things we say over and over again because they tell us something about our identity or purpose as a people – the pledge of allegiance at baseball games, the karate creed before class begins, the girl scout law, the 12 steps. 
A little later in Deuteronomy, this book of instruction, is a direction from God, a creed to be spoken every year in their new home when they’ve settled down and made a life for themselves, that each person was supposed to say when they would bring their first portions of the harvest to the Lord’s house on the Feast of Pentecost (First Fruits), and it goes like this:
When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: 
‘A wandering Aramean (Syrian) was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’ 
You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. (Dest. 26:5-10)

Every year, at this festival when they brought their offerings of gratitude and trust to God they were to speak aloud a reminder, “that they descended from wanderers who had often depended on the merciful hospitality of strangers to survive.” Scholar Harvey C Kwiyani explains,, “This is their history. This is their identity. Deuteronomy 26 is talking about Jacob (whose mother was a Syrian, married two Syrian women, and raised up his children in Syria for a long time). But, at a distant, we can tell they would have Abraham in mind for he was a Syrian by birth. There is no telling of Jewish history apart from migration.”

In fact, cast your mind back in the scriptures – Adam and Eve ousted from the garden, Noah and his family settling a new earth, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Leah and Rachel, Joseph bringing the family into Egypt, Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt… and it continues on with the prophets of the Exile and onward to Jesus and Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt, and much of the early church story…

All throughout scripture, the people God chooses are the outsiders and migrants, those who know what it is to be displaced, to be at the mercy of strangers.  Jesus himself had no home of his own, and when he sends out his disciples he tells them to bring nothing but the clothes on their back – go and rely on the hospitality of strangers to survive as you bring to them the message of hope, the gospel of God.

Why is this so?
Why does God choose to have so much of our faith story in the hands of those who are journeying and unsettled?

Maybe that’s because, in the real reality, we are all this. 
Maybe it’s to remind us that here is not our true home.  We are always searching, always a little bit fish out of water, always relying on the hospitality of each other and giving that to others, in the journey to what will really feel like life as it was meant to be, at home in the very presence of God.

All this time we’ve been talking about the Kingdom of God, about another reality that is more real than the one we are living – where we exist with and for each other instead of against each other, where we are meant to live in trust instead of fear, in generosity instead of stinginess. 
And God is taking these people here in today’s scripture about to settle into a “home” – (which, by the way, displaces others!), and there is a warning here in this, an urgency to this reiteration of the Way of God in the Ten Words – don’t forget!
Don’t forget where you came from; don’t forget whose you really are. 

Because things are going to change when you see yourself as “settled,” when you begin to feel as though you belong and you and your children and your grandchildren adjust to the comforts of power and predictability, and forget what it was to be rootless. 

It’s one thing to rely on God when, every single day, your very food – your only food, comes directly from God out of the sky, when you have no other existence than this dependent one of transition between places, sharing the journey with each other without settling, without staying, without an identity that can come from vocation and labor, from wealth and success or place in society.

You’ve been off the grid for your whole life, the identity as slaves has slowly been drained out of you and been replaced, hopefully, with an awareness of what it means to trust God, and be in this with each other – and God doesn’t want you to forget this.
Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise...
Don’t forget whose you are! Don’t forget who you are!

Sisters and brothers, we are not from here; this place is not our final home. We are all in transition, on a journey, hopefully growing in our trust of God alongside, with and for each other, instead of against each other.  
Both our ancestors and our future remind us of this truth – there will be a day when we will be at home in God, when nobody will be hungry or thirsty or without shelter or voice or hope. When love will be the rule. We were made to live that way.
And we should never settle in so much that we forget this.

We should never just accept that life as we know it now is what it is meant to be or will be.  God is calling us to live another way.
We must see one another; we must see our sisters and brothers who are feeling their homelessness more than we are, who are journeying more literally you and I at the moment, who have had what was secure taken from them and find themselves at the mercy of the hospitality of strangers. 
And in the times that you or I are the ones feeling acutely our own displacement or transition, our own rootlessness or journey, and we, like Jesus’ parents, and Paul in Damascus, and the children of Israel and Father Abraham and all the rest gone before, like God incarnate who came vulnerable and dependent into this world, are without resources and forced to rely on the love and care of others, when we do, we will meet God, because that is where God is most with us.

When we look at the world and wonder where God is, what God is up to, we should look where God has always been – with those who are suffering, those who are journeying, those who are in need, with and for us, alongside us, that is where Jesus always is. 

So this week, when I looked for Emmanuel, God with us, I saw Jesus in the heartbreaking photo of Aylan Kurdi’s father, holding his little shrouded body at his funeral with what is left of his beleaguered community gathered around him. 
And I saw the Kingdom of God in the overwhelming response of 10,000 Icelanders who told their government that despite their nation’s quota of 50 immigrants, they were willing to open their homes to welcome in those in need-  “I’m happy to look after children, take them to kindergarten, school and wherever they need. I can cook for people and show them friendship and warmth. I can pay the airfare for one small family. I can contribute with my expertise and assist pregnant women with pre-natal care.”

I saw the love and life of Christ in the wealthy family who runs their own Mobile Immigrant rescue ship – meeting boats in the sea and providing medical care, food and water, rescuing thousands of people.
 
Hungarian woman and man on the freeway with
food and water for Syrian refugees approaching on foot
I saw God-with-us in the trail of people walking across Hungary into Austria, holding sleeping children and supporting tired friends, and I saw the Kingdom of God, Christ alongside us, in the Hungarian men and women who went out and bought crates of food and lined up on the side of the highway in anticipation of those who would soon be walking past.

I got a glimpse of God’s Kingdom when the crowd of German men, women and children who left work and home and gathered with only their voices and their hands, cheered and applaud their to welcome to the weary refugees as they passed across the border into Germany.
I see you. You are my sister; you are my brother. You are not alone. You are welcome here.

Remember, God says. Don’t forget.
I am giving you life in a different way, my way.  Not a way of slavery.  Not a way of isolated independence. Not a way of dominance or self-advancement.  A way of sacrifice and love. A way of joining and sharing. The way you were made for to begin with. 
I am the Way.
It begins with me.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
And, Jesus summarizes the rest of the law, Love your neighbor as yourself.

I alone, I am Lord. No ruler or pressure or prestige, no rat race, or religion, or regret. 
I am your God.
Love me.  Listen to me. Find your home in me.  I will be at the center of it all. I will care for you. 
And I will show you what it means to be my people. Join me in loving each other, welcoming each other, treating one another with respect and honor.
If you do this, it will go well for you in the land in which you are living, the land in which you wander.  And one day, I will bring you home.

Sisters and brothers, as we sharing the journey, the seemingly settled times and the times of obvious upheaval and redirection: may we never forget where we come from or where we are going, never abandon or ignore those alongside us, and never turn from the One who is at the center of it all. 
Amen.

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