The place God promises to meet you

1 Kings 5:1-5, 12-13; 8:1-6, 27-30

John 2:13-22

A couple of weeks ago, our session of elders gathered on a retreat.  Among other things, we asked one another the question, what is worship to you?

And some of the things that some of you said worship is were…

Something bigger than myself

keeps me grounded in the here and now

place God and us talk and listen to each other

puts my story in the context of scripture and the world around me

place where God and people meet, where heaven and earth touch

puts us back in touch with God again

Not about how I feel

happens in community

reminds me of the truth

helps me live the rest of my life with integrity

We do it to connect our stories to God’s story, we come somehow into God’s presence.

and many more…

What happens when we worship?  What is this strange ritual of coming together like this, and why do we do it?

Israel built a temple to worship God.  After hundreds of years in slavery, forty wandering in the dessert, hundreds more in the promised land but at war off and on, there was finally peace and prosperity in Israel.  And King Solomon picked up his father David’s building plans and set about doing what it took to fulfill his father’s dream – to build a temple, a house for YHWH, one central place of worship for the One Holy God. 

There had been other places – alters built on hills, piles of rocks to commemorate a meeting place with God, local sanctuaries and the tabernacle tent, the temporary structure that moved with them throughout the wilderness and which still housed the ark of the covenant with its stone tablets containing the law given to Moses.  But when the temple was built, it became the place that all of these were foreshadowing, anticipating, waiting for.  And scholars tell us it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the temple to Jewish worship and life.  

"This is the place," one scholar says, "where Israel’s worship finds its heartbeat." (Craig Koester) The center of their life, where the Ark could come to rest and the people could come to worship. It was here the psalms became corporate songs of praise, here that almost all we know as worship found its beginnings, its language and rhythm, here the people were reminded in sacred and practiced forms who they were and to whom they belonged.

Now later - when the temple is destroyed and the people are be scattered – they’re  devastated, and have to figure out all over again, how are they God’s people? and how is God is their God? It becomes the open gash of their exile; their homelessness and banishment is most expressed in the grief of the loss of the temple.

 Later still, it gets rebuilt, as center of Israel’s faith life.  The second temple becomes a prominent place in the New Testament, the place Jesus is dedicated and where he comes as a child, a gathering place for the disciples.

The temple was it, folks. Their touchstone.  The place where the God who cannot be confined nevertheless promised to meet them. It was called “the footstool of God.” The Temple was place God promised to meet Israel, the sacramental place.

So how deeply offensive was it, hundreds of years later after Solomon built the temple, when it had stood for centuries as the home of God, the place God meets them, for Jesus to come charging through this holy place, the (second) temple with a whip, bashing down the merchants stalls and sending feathers and dung flying? When he roared that they’d turned what was meant to be a house of prayer for all nations, God’s dwelling place, into a den of robbers, and he desecrated their desecration, how much more did he break down that day than the tables of vendors?

And then, in a stunning moment of eternal clarity, when the onlooker sees what the whole cast misses completely, Jesus calls himself the temple. The place where God promises to meet us. The person of God come near for us not in stone and morter but in the very person of this raging man standing before us. 

Because God is forever breaking out of the boxes we build up and coming nearer, and nearer still.  And the word became flesh and pitched his tent right among us, full of grace and truth… (John 1)

God is greater than buildings can contain, greater than our ideas of God, greater than our prayers and our liturgies, beyond our best efforts to be relevant or real.  God extends beyond all definitions and boundaries, and is not limited in the least by our language or our polity or our structures.

God is everywhere. God can meet us anywhere. But God knows we are human. And we need touchstones. So there are some places God promises to meet us.

When I was 18 years old, I backpacked around Europe for a month with two girlfriends.  We were on our way back from 5 ½ months in West Africa and the Canary Islands.  As fun and life-changing as this adventure had all been, I was feeling a bit homesick and road weary.  We had settled in for a couple of days at a youth hostel in the middle of Amsterdam, right outside the red light district.  We were about two weeks from coming home; it was Good Friday, and I was craving, of all things, church.

My friends were content hanging out at the hostel, but I desperately wanted to find a church to worship in that night.  I asked at the front desk about churches in the area, and assuming I meant to sightsee, they gave me a map with a couple cathedrals circled and I set out.  I followed my way to one large church-building and found it abandoned, with spray-painted words on the bricks and the doors chained and padlocked.  I wandered from there through twisting streets as the sun was setting, frantically searching for another church, gazing up at the horizon for steeples and seeking out their buildings beneath, only to find them empty, locked and dark, and getting more and more frightened at being out alone at night and on the verge of lost.  Finally, not wanting to be caught alone in the Red Light District at night, I gave up.

When I arrived frazzled and despondent back in the brightly lit hostel, I heard the laughter and conversation from the community room, and did not feel like being with people just yet.  I was deeply disappointed, lonely, and pining for something I couldn’t put my finger on.  I shuffled back to the dorm room and climbed up onto my top bunk. 

All the other beds were empty at the moment, their occupants down in the raucous lounge or out on the town. I reached in my backpack for a roll I had left over from lunch.  And an orange.  And I sat in the middle of my bed, peeling the orange and laying the segments in a little pile.  Then I dug out my pocket bible from the bottom of my bag and spent a while trying to find the part where Jesus broke bread with his disciples. I finally found it and read it. 

Then I took the roll and I prayed.  I prayed that it could be communion. That somehow, even though I was alone, even though I was far away from the people I loved, even though I couldn’t find any community to share communion with, even though I had a dinner roll and an orange, instead of bread and wine, that somehow this moment would be communion. 

Then I closed my eyes and ripped a chunk off the roll and put it in my mouth.  When I had finished chewing and swallowing it, I picked up an orange slice, held it in my hand for a moment, closed my eyes again and then placed that too in my mouth.

And next to the loneliness I felt a grace and warmth. I felt like I was part of something bigger going on all over world, this eve of Easter Vigil.  I felt like I wasn’t alone.  I felt like I had gone from being tossed on the breeze like a loose kite to being firmly planted on the ground. Oddly and momentarily secure. I might still be swaying a bit, but Somebody had anchored my tail with their foot.

It was a sacrament -  Jesus Christ came close and united me with the Body of Christ – even though I was apart from them in the moment.  I hadn’t wanted to go see churches; I had needed CHURCH.

We worship, we gather here and do these things because now we are the Body of Christ. Christ is present in and with us in a real way.  God’s promise to be near to the world is given form in us. We can’t begin to understand what this means, except to accept that somehow, when we come together, God meets us here.  Or wherever we would gather, wherever here may be. We are the place. This is the touchstone.  All of us.  All of the us’s all over the world. Gathering together in worship.

Our symbols and practices, our polity and denominations, our worship music and hymns and everything else that we do cannot contain God, or even, on their own, reveal God.  At worst they become like the vendors in the temple, they obscure God and warp God’s message.  At worst, they become what we worship instead of what helps us worship God.  But at best they speak of God and remind us who God is and why we are here and invite God to come and be with us.  And then, whether we’ve done it well or poorly, whether we feel or believe it or not, because God is God with us, and we are the Body of Christ, God does.

I spent this last week between Kansas City, where I met my newest nephew and lots of new foster nieces and nephews, and then at ARC retreat center in Cambridge, where I wandered trails in the woods and sat in a quiet cabin under the still, quiet, star-filled sky, (when I wasn’t co-wrangling five children). 

And God was there, in both places.  I met God.  In the tears of a struggling sister and the laughter of an oblivious nephew, and the warmth and astounding beauty of a tiny sleeping infant on my chest, and the sacredness of a godson writing a prayer for snow and tucking it between some rocks stuffed with other people’s rolled up prayers.  In the friendship between young boys that don’t know their moms are listening to them help each other, and the late night conversations between otherwise long-distance friends when the pain and the joy find words with wine and whispers not to wake the baby. 

In difficult conversations with a friend and support that is beyond ours to give and somehow we give it anyway, we are church, God is present. 

But how to make sense of these experiences? How to recognize God in them? How to share the things I am afraid or sad about, or the things that bring wonder and joy?  Where do these things become faith for me, cohesive, revealing, instead of scattered, individual moments?

In this worship.  In these people. In this gathering. In the community eating broken bread and drinking spilled wine, and pouring dribbled water over a dry head.  These actions are our sacraments, our thin places, the places God promises to meet us. God is present everywhere, but God has promised to meet us in this place, in our worship. The Holy Spirit makes us into the temple of God, the Body of Christ, the place in which the God who is already everywhere in the world, nevertheless promises to meet the world. 

So as Solomon prayed when he dedicated the temple, in hope and longing, and trust for it to be the place where God meets us, Let us also pray in dedication:

Holy God who cannot be contained, who will always be greater than any attempt we could ever make to know or see or reach, or speak for you, we ask you today,

 Be here in this space, this space we have made for you. Make your home among us, between us, within us in our worship.  Make us a thin place, a sacred place, a place you promise to meet the world.

When people come here with grief and sadness and they cry out to you, give them comfort.

When they come here in anger, seeking the strength to forgive, forgive them and give them the power to do likewise.

When people come here because they are lost, overwhelmed or confused, meet them in solace and give them strength.

When people come here divided, torn apart by tensions that seem insurmountable, hear them, and meet them with reconciliation and hope, with healing and unity. 

When people come here alone, give them belonging. 

When they come weary, give them refreshment.

When people wander in from nearby or come from far away, because they need a place of sanctuary, a place of prayer, because they long to be in a place where they can meet you, meet them here, O God, answer their prayer. 

Dwell here among us. Sojourn here with us as we gather.

 May this place be your place.  May we be your people.  Make us your temple.

Amen.

The words between a man and his God

Michaelangelo's version

1 Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 51:1-10

I have kept a journal almost since I could write.  The early ones are sporadic, satin covered or beaded, pretty and impractical – age 8 on vacation with my family, complaining about my sister, age 11 an a visit to my far away best friend Christy, who was showing signs of puberty earlier than I was. 

Then in junior high, at just about the most awkward time in a person’s life, the journaling became a bit more regular.  I taught myself the Greek alphabet from a textbook in my father’s office, and a friend and I became prolific in writing in pseudo-Greek.  Notes passed in school, whole swatches of journals written in code, as though so intensely private I needed to hide these thoughts even from myself if I was going to get them out into the light of day. I could write it my “Greek” as fast as in English.

By high school journaling became a coping mechanism, and in college, a journal was a constant carry-on. If I didn’t have a journal, I would write on a napkin, the back of a flyer, a receipt.  Sometimes the urge to write something was so strong I would bum a pen off a total stranger.

For a good 15 years, they were all prayers. Every single thing going on in my life – every crush, every worry, every mundane conversation, if I thought it important enough to write down – and I didn’t have qualms about considering most things just that important – it became part of the prayer. The ongoing, long-term, never-ending prayer.  The top of every page began with the date and the greeting: “God,…”

For a long time, journaling was what made things real; I could feel something had actually happened when I had record it, told it to God, put it into ink. 

After a time it became less that, and more where I would vent terrible sadness or work out new ideas, questions or struggles.  I would find that I’d have no idea what I would say when I cracked open the book, (many start with “I’m sitting at Starbucks…”) and then by the time I had finished, I had reached a new perspective on the issue, I had come to some clarity or relief.  When Andy and I were newly married, we added a $20 a month coffee shop journaling line item to our shoestring student budget for the maintenance of my sanity.

My journaling waned and became more sporadic over the years.

Then kids. And the need to write about them crashed against the lack of time and space to do so, and my journaling changed. Now I keep three journals. My own, and one for each of them.  Only a handful of entries a year, these days, but letters to them, about them – who they are, how I experience them in these moments.  My own journal barely gets touched anymore.  Instead I’m working it’s sermon fragments, files of thoughts, wrestling with text, or pondering an experience, or I work it out in a blog entry or facebook quip – one line life summaries.

I’ve looked back at my journals from time to time. Some of the entries are really insightful, and a line here or there is beautiful. But mostly, they are really, really embarrassing.  Context-less raving, whining or pining.  And sometimes, they’re heartwrenching. Rereading them is like reliving the losses, deaths, hard lessons.  But I have also found compassion stir in me- for how hard things felt when they don’t seem hard looking back.  Or great humor at little moments I captured without meaning to, or the drama I made of something so hysterically human.

But looking back is hard, because it also makes me aware just how fleeting it all is. Just how fast it all goes.  It’s only a handful of pages between my son’s birth and his first day of kindergarten. 

A whole entire lifetime fits in the dash between dates on a tombstone. 

And I feel longing. 
To stop the clock.  
Pause, read it slower, relish it more. 
Write it all down. 

David was a journaler.  
He worked out his inner life in words, songs, poems.  He sorted his feelings, vented and raged, burst out in praise or celebration.  He put down random snippets, that apart from context, are sometimes beautiful, sometimes boring, sometimes completely relatable and sometimes utterly foreign.

Yesterday I found a timeline of King David’s life, and it reads like the outline of the plot for an HBO series.  I found myself craving the chance to see it on the screen, in color and action with a soundtrack. It’s epic, his life. It’s definitely the stuff movies are made of. The person who assembled the timeline prefaced it with these words:

 “ Of all the lives in Scripture, David’s is the only one that is exhaustively examined from the time of his childhood to his death. It is an open book like no other. Even his state of mind is revealed in the Psalms, like a diary open to our review. How would our own lives look if subjected to this type of scrutiny? I am humiliated to consider that the day is coming when all the hidden things of my life will be revealed. For that reason alone, we should be kind to the memory of David, recognizing in him many of our own failings and weaknesses, but also admiring his strengths.” (William H. Gross)

Looking through the vast swath of the Old Testament dedicated to David’s story, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles, you can easily see that he would be the ideal on-screen hero: handsome and talented, winsome and strong, and also deeply flawed, arrogant and punishing, then equally benevolent and ruthless in the wisdom of his old age. 

And he’s got the perfect villain, King Saul – predecessor to the throne, the former army general, star of the show, powerful and immensely kingly then increasingly mad, jealous of David and hungry to hang onto his power.  Headstrong, and dangerous, prone to fly into terrible rages, calmed only by the gentle harp playing of his nemesis, which must make him all the more mad.

This story’s got the wise Yoda figure, Samuel, who first anointed Saul to be Israel’s very first king chosen by God, and then later secretly anointed David by God’s command when he was only a boy. Samuel, the prophet who advises both Saul and David, and to whom God tells the plans God has for the kingdom.  Samuel to whom David runs for advice and comfort, but Saul does too – so reliant on his direction that Saul even hires a witch against his own laws of Israel prohibiting magic, to summon Samuel from the dead to ask his advice, only to find out from the passed-on prophet that he would die the next day. 

Then there’s the bond of a soulmate, a deep, abiding friendship, a close and intimate confidant, Jonathan, who as a boy watches the boy David slay Goliath and then introduces himself, and who loves our hero as he loves his own heart. 

He also happens to be the mad king’s son, and he stands between the two to protect David’s life on several occasions. They meet in fields and caves when David is in hiding from Saul’s fury, amassing a pirate crew of renegades and living off the land, Jonathon trying relentlessly to make peace and bring David back into the King’s good graces, and finally, in grief and sorrow, letting him go when he sees Saul will never relent.
 

Jonathan and David promise forever to stand by one another no matter what, and years later, well after Jonathan and Saul’s deaths, which David grieves horribly, David searches far and wide and discovers there is a son remaining to Jonathon, a man whose legs are crippled.  And he finds him and brings him to eat at the King’s table for all his remaining days, giving him servants and land and caring for him as his own, in honor of his bond with Jonathon, and despite the fact that most of the rest of Saul’s family is wiped out by David’s side in the ongoing battles for power.

There is the love of a princess, who becomes wife, and later is deeply mortified by David’s public display of emotions, then another woman who saves her own husband from David’s wrath, deeply impressing him and then marrying him when her husband dies, and more women who become wives as well.

And there’s the poignant brokenness and public fall of a great man, his weakness and failure, obsessing over the married Bethsheba and impregnating her, then sending her husband to the front lines of battle commanding the rest to retreat so he would be killed and David could take his wife as his own and cover up his shame.  His foolish and arrogant blindness to his own greed and gluttony are exposed in the humiliating confrontation with Nathan, the new prophet, whom God sends to David to set him straight.  And in terrible sorrow and dismay David breaks down and repents.  And even though that baby does not live, they remain married and other children follow.

This tale has family drama to beat the band, horror between siblings, killing and redeeming honor and grieving the loss of loved ones who were enemies and adversaries as much as they were sons or brothers.  It’s got Bathsheba, the rooftop bather, then wife of David, then mother of Solomon, rising to some power herself, advising her own son once he assumes the throne. 

And it’s got a little kid killing a giant in front of two mighty, fear-paralyzed armies, for pete’s sake.

David begins a humble shepherd boy, the youngest and least important in a large family, who becomes a battle hero, about whom women sing in the streets.  He’s a poet and musician, friend, husband, and lover, a friend of God and wise ruler of the people, builder of Jerusalem, and he ends his life passing on drawings and plans for the construction of the temple like a mantle and blessing to Solomon.

 But in his life he also experiences betrayal and the pervasive threat of death, terror and staggering loss, a torn-apart family and being constantly at the center of the drama of a whole nation in war and peace, the building of a city, establishing of a nation.  He steals and cheats and lies and sacrifices those he loves for his own power and well-being, and he also rules in wisdom and love, generosity and care, and shows deep and abiding loyalty and trustworthiness.

So I’m thinking this baby needs a full orchestra and a thousand extras, sweeping vistas of land, pounding horses and clanging swords, lavish feasts and secret rendezvous, bloodcurdling grief, and quiet moments of sheer beauty and stillness, queens and slaves and naked prophets whirling around bonfires in ecstasy and enchantment.  It could fill out several seasons in surround-sound, high-def, absolutely satisfying cinema.  I’m telling you, it’s an epic story.

But when all that is said, what I’m most struck by in all of it, are the journals. 
The lyrics set to music. The poems. The litanies of complaints.  The unabashed celebration.  The words between a man and his God. 

Behind all the armor and underneath the bravado is shame. grief. joy. rage. peace. longing.  

The words that come when awakening in the sharp bite of morning air next to warm sheep.  Or hiding out in damp caves for fear of your life.  Or breaking down in utter dismay over something you’ve done that can never be undone. 

Words of trust and a bond between God and this man.  
Who, in the end, was really just a person. Like every person. But whose story was recorded and writ large by onlookers and historians, and whose journals gave words to centuries of longing, and ashamed, and overjoyed hearts seeking a way to say it outloud to God, with God.

Prayers lifted in Cathedrals and concentration camps alike, shaping the faith of generations, giving voice to the inner prayers of all persons.  And they came from his life. From his heart.

From Psalm 3

A Psalm of David, when he fled from his son Absalom.


O Lord, how many are my foes!
   

Many are rising against me; 


many are saying to me,
   

‘There is no help for you in God.’
  

        


But you, O Lord, are a shield around me,
   

my glory, and the one who lifts up my head. 


I cry aloud to the Lord,
   

and he answers me from his holy hill.
  

        


I lie down and sleep;
   

I wake again, for the Lord sustains me. 


I am not afraid of tens of thousands of people
   

who have set themselves against me all around.

From Psalm 6

Prayer for Recovery from Grave Illness

To the leader: with stringed instruments; according to The Sheminith. A Psalm of David.


O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger,
   

or discipline me in your wrath. 


Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing;
   

O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror. 


My soul also is struck with terror,
   

while you, O Lord—how long?


Turn, O Lord, save my life;
   

deliver me for the sake of your steadfast love. 


For in death there is no remembrance of you;
   

in Sheol who can give you praise?


I am weary with my moaning;
   

every night I flood my bed with tears;
   

I drench my couch with my weeping. 


My eyes waste away because of grief;
   

they grow weak because of all my foes.

From Psalm 8

Divine Majesty and Human Dignity

To the leader: according to The Gittith. A Psalm of David.


O Lord, our Sovereign,
   

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

….


When I look at your heavens,

the work of your fingers,
   

the moon and the stars that you have established; 


what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
   

mortals that you care for them?

From Psalm 30

Thanksgiving for Recovery from Grave Illness

A Psalm. Of David. Then sung as A Song at the dedication of the temple.

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
   

you have taken off my sackcloth
   

and clothed me with joy, 


so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
   

O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you for ever.

From Psalm 18

Royal Thanksgiving for Victory

To the leader. A Psalm of David the servant of the Lord, who addressed the words of this song to the Lord on the day when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul.

He said:
I love you, O Lord, my strength. 


The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer,
   

my God, my rock in whom I take refuge,
   

my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. 


…


In my distress I called upon the Lord;
   

to my God I cried for help.


From his temple he heard my voice,
   

and my cry to him reached his ears.


Then the earth reeled and rocked;
   

the foundations also of the mountains trembled
   

and quaked, because he was angry. 


Smoke went up from his nostrils,
   

and devouring fire from his mouth;
   

glowing coals flamed forth from him. 


He bowed the heavens, and came down;
   

thick darkness was under his feet. 



   …

The Lord also thundered in the heavens,
   

and the Most High uttered his voice. 


…

Then the channels of the sea were seen,
   

and the foundations of the world were laid bare


at your rebuke, O Lord,
   

at the blast of the breath of your nostrils.


He reached down from on high, he took me;
   

he drew me out of mighty waters. 


He delivered me from my strong enemy,
   

and from those who hated me;
   

for they were too mighty for me. 


They confronted me in the day of my calamity;
   

but the Lord was my support. 


He brought me out into a broad place;
   

he delivered me, because he delighted in me.

From Psalm 63

Comfort and Assurance in God’s Presence

A Psalm of David, when he was in the Wilderness of Judah.


O God, you are my God, I seek you,
   

my soul thirsts for you;


my flesh faints for you,
   

as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. 


So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
   

beholding your power and glory. 


Because your steadfast love is better than life,
   

my lips will praise you. 


So I will bless you as long as I live;
   

I will lift up my hands and call on your name.

From Psalm 22

To the leader: according to [the tune] The Deer of the Dawn.

A Psalm of David.


My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
   

Why are you so far from helping me,

from the words of my groaning? 


O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
   

and by night, but find no rest.

From Psalm 122

Song of Praise and Prayer for Jerusalem, which David built.

A Song of Ascents. Of David.


I was glad when they said to me,
   

‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’ 


Our feet are standing
   

within your gates, O Jerusalem.


Jerusalem—built as a city
   

that is bound firmly together. 


...


Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
   

‘May they prosper who love you. 


Peace be within your walls,
   

and security within your towers.’ 


For the sake of my relatives and friends
   

I will say, ‘Peace be within you.’ 


For the sake of the house of the Lord our God,
   

I will seek your good.

Psalm 127

God’s Blessings in the Home

A Song of Ascents. Of Solomon.
(David’s blessing of Solomon).

Unless the Lord builds the house,
   

those who build it labor in vain.


Unless the Lord guards the city,
   

the guard keeps watch in vain.




It is in vain that you rise up early
   

and go late to rest,


eating the bread of anxious toil;
   

for he gives sleep to his beloved.


Sons are indeed a heritage from the Lord,
   

the fruit of the womb a reward. 


Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
   

are the sons of one’s youth. 


Happy is the man who has
   

his quiver full of them.


He shall not be put to shame
   

when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

Psalm 131

Song of Quiet Trust

A Song of Ascents. Of David.


O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
   

my eyes are not raised too high;


I do not occupy myself with things
   

too great and too marvelous for me. 


But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
   

like a weaned child with its mother;
   

my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.


O Israel, hope in the Lord
   

from this time on and for evermore.

I wonder how it feels to God to hear these words again in different times and places and languages, here in our mouths, with our own thoughts and struggles before us, our own joys finding expression within their cadence?

Is God reminded of the time when they were first uttered? 

Or the millions of times after that – each one holding up a life before it, like a gift to the Creator, an invitation to come near?

Monarchs and majesty notwithstanding, shepherd kid aside: no life is insignificant. No moment unseen. No heart-longing unheard.  Nobody is all saint or all sinner, neither deserving nor denied.  In all our own drama and shame, glory and grief, we are invited to draw near.  
So come into the presence of God with singing.  
Lift up your voice in prayer.  
And let your heart find in God a home.

חסד and the I-will-go-there-with-you God

(Matthew 22:34-40)

Ruth 1

We have a word in our house that means something real but for which there is no English word. 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, she had sent herself into a frenzy, red-faced and furious, kicking and waving her arms and wailing at the top of her lungs.

 When we finally heard her and realized what the sound was, we took the stairs two at a time, 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 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 moves 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 this whole Story of God, 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 that.

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.

Perhaps the best way to think about Hesed is something like “belongingness”.  It is the inner logic of belonging, the substance of it.  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 his bedside every day, even when the memory has faded and he no longer knows you are 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 her into your house when she’s too sick to care for herself.  

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.

Carolyn pointed out to me yesterday how greatly this 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 begin to conceive of in our wildest imagination.

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 took the way of 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 be her 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.

And the Story of God continues.  After the last big chapter, with its drama and fire and priests and laws and leaders, and conquering and defeat and redemption - there’s this part.  This sweet little story, tucked in there after all that testosterone.  And in this humble tale we don’t hear the voice of God 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 chose this remind God’s people, both then, and also in future generations - when they’d forgotten what they were meant to be about and who they were supposed to be, and sought to remove foreigners from their midst to maintain their pure identity – God chose to use this story 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, The Story, is none other than Ruth, the 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 once again to bring life to a people, hope to a story.  “I will go there with you.” they said. “You will not be alone.”

God claims you in a wide embrace of unending belongingness.  And stirs you to join in extending that embrace.  In your poverty or abundance, strength or weakness, joy or sorrow, fullness or barrenness, pain or delight, right there, every day, you belong.  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.

In a world of hoatis, God is Hesed.  This is an astounding thing.

May you taste Hesed this day, and everyday. 

And may your soul be filled with all fullness as to spill it over into the world.  

Amen.

A previous reflection on the story of Ruth can be found here.