Sit and Eat

On Babies and God's Love

Allie is two and a half years old, and he's my buddy.  His Mom and Dad are good friends of mine, and I'm lucky enough to get to see him quite a bit.  

There's this funny thing about Allie, which is that he loves me.  He loves me in this strange and mysterious way that I don't think I'll ever fully understand.  He gets really excited when I come to visit and makes special paintings for me in preparation.   When I arrive we play together A LOT.  There is much giggling and galloping and wearing of capes.  On a recent visit, he looked into my eyes and said plainly, "Emmy, I like you." Which made my heart sort of expand and explode at the same time.   

I'm going to school right now and in class we're talking a lot about Luther's notion of grace.  This idea that God's love is freely given, simply bestowed upon you.  My whole life, I've been hearing people talk about God, who loves me no matter how broken I may be.  I've heard it over and over again, but I don't think I really understood it until Allie decided that he loved me.  There's nothing in the world I've done to deserve his love.  He just loves me.  And there's nothing I need to do to earn it.  He doesn't need me to try harder to be perfect.  He doesn't need me to try and make up for all the ways I've gone wrong.  He just loves me.

Somehow it's always so much simpler than you want to make it.  The idea that love could be free...that there is enough of it to flood all the places in your heart you've been so carefully guarding...it's a dizzying notion.  An impossible notion.  You've tried to believe it your whole life.  And then in a moment you understand it with your whole body: this is love, this is all. 

Welcome to Nazareth, Population: 1,473

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, February 20 as part of our ongoing exploration of the book of Mark.  The text is Mark 6:1-13; read it here. 

 

 

The word that struck me in this passage was “hometown.”

Oh my goodness, what a word. 

 

Our hometowns, the places that we came from, can represent so much.  Depending on our situations, our families, and our contexts, they can be many things. 

 

They can hold memories that we’d rather forget. 

 

Or a represent a time that we long to return to. 

 

They can be models of what we’re doing our best to live up to. 

Or be places we’ve worked hard to escape, 

or are still trying to escape. 

They can bring comfort, 

be inhabited by people we miss a great deal. 

 

Or they can bring a sense of disconnection:

they can be places where we always feel that we don’t quite fit in. 

 

Probably for most of us, they’re some complicated cocktail of all the above.

 

Hometowns can mean many things, but one thing they often mean, especially if you’re from a small hometown, is characters.  Every town has it’s characters, almost stock characters, as if we’re all playing out the same drama.  

There’s the mean guy who won’t let kids run on across his lawn. 

The weird guy who lives in that beat up house where no one will go trick-or-treating. 

The gossip who knows everything about everyone.

The kid at school whose parents have more money and a bigger house than everyone else. 

The kid who was always different, who never quite fit in. 

 

Our towns have stock characters because we need them too.  Some primal, elemental part of us needs everyone to find a role and play it well.  If we didn’t have the weird guy in the beat up house on the north side of town, there’d be someone on the sound side who we’d decide is equally scary. 

Because we need someone to fear. 

Or to ostracize, 

or to idolize,

or to gossip about. 

 

My guess is that Jesus’ hometown wasn’t much different.  There’s certain things that never change.  And my guess is that, just as returning home means something to each of us, returning to Nazareth probably meant something to Jesus.  We can’t know why he chose this moment to go home, or what he hoped to accomplish there, but these passages do give us a rare picture of Jesus as part of a family.  In Mark’s Gospel Jesus the oldest child of a family of four brothers, plus at least a few sisters.  The townspeople say he’s a carpenter: someone who works with his hands doing manual labor.  They also call him “Son of Mary,” a not-so-kind way of pointing out that folks in town whisper about who his father really was.  The rumors have followed him his whole life, and he’s a quiet man.  Some might say strange. 

 

Then a few months ago, this oldest child walked away from his family, and all the responsibilities of that role, to go and follow this preacher John the Baptist in the wilderness.  And now he’s back, the carpenter who has no schooling to speak of, sitting up in the temple and preaching. 

 

One translation of this text has the townspeople scoffing to each other, “Who does he think his is?”

 

It’s not only that these folks saw Jesus grow up from birth, toddling around in a diaper when he was just a kid, though that was probably part of it.  And it’s not only the fact that he was always a little strange, always standing on the outside of things, though that was probably part of it too.  It’s that he, of all people,  should have the nerve to get up in the synagogue and teach when that’s not his place, not his role.  It’s that he, of all people, seems to be preaching this message that calls into question everything they believe about how their lives are organized.  

 

He sits among Levi the tax collector and women who have been sick for many years and Jarius, the leader of the synagogue, all these people who are from completely different parts of town, who should have nothing to do with one another. 

 

He sits among them and looks at his own family and says “Who are my mother and my brothers?  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”  

 

It doesn’t matter who your father is, he’s saying,

where you came from, 

what you do for a living. 

If you do God’s will, you are God’s family. 

 

“Who does he think he is?”

 

If Jewish culture was a structure made of stone,

Jesus has just pulled out the keystone, 

and the whole thing has come crumbling down. 

 

Because if the son of a carpenter 

can teach and preach and heal...

well,

then anything can happen. 

 

 

In God’s world,

the outsider bastard-kid of Mary stands up in the synagogue to preach.

The crazy guy who lived out by the graveyard moves into the place next door,

and the tax collector leaves his booth and never comes back. 

Turns out he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. 

The paralyzed beggar who was always at the city gate is suddenly gone,

and the woman who’s been sick for so many years

is sighted buying spices in the market. 

 

Who will we be be afraid of?

Who will we ostracize?

Who will we idolize?

Who’s playing which character?

How will we know who we are 

if we don’t know who they are?

 

As usual, Jesus is preaching a message of change. 

A message that dismantles, 

stone by stone, 

everything we thought we knew about the way life works.

 

A message about shedding all those expectations 

about who we are, 

who others perceive us to be,

who they need us to be. 

 

It’s a message that asks us to rely, 

not on stock characters to tell us who we are, 

not on parentage or lineage

or job titles or social circles, 

but on God and God alone. 

Our parents may need us to be straight-A students,

or the black sheep who always gets blamed.

Our hometowns may need us to be someone to ostracize,

or someone to idolize, 

but Jesus needs us to leave all that baggage behind. 

 

Jesus needs us to drop everyone’s expectations for who we’re supposed to be, 

because he’s gonna send us out two by two 

to find out who we’re called to be. 

 

And we don’t need anything for this journey. 

No bread, no bag, no money in our belts. 

 

It means leaving all sorts of things behind. 

All the expectations everyone’s ever held for us, 

the expectations we’ve held for ourselves,

even our very sense of identity. 

 

It means opening our hearts to an experience 

that we can’t control, 

a call that we can’t choose,

a fate that we can’t predict. 

 

It is wild and unexpected 

and beyond the reach of

what all those folks might have had us pegged for. 

There are no stock characters here. 

 

Only a death of the old life 

and a new one to grow into,

like shedding a skin,

transforming into a new creature, 

God’s creature. 

 

About Midnight

I preached this sermon at Yale Divinity School on February 14, 2011, as part of a service on "Paperless Singing," or singing music from the Oral Tradition without printed music or hymnals.  The text is Acts 16:25-26; read it here. 

 

Sometimes, when I’m working with a group of teenagers, I’ll go around the room and ask them where they meet God.  Where do they experience the divine in their lives?

 

They say all sorts of things.  They say they meet God in the waves of the ocean, or through the hum of the city in the early morning.  Sometimes they say that they meet God at church, or at school, or on the subway.

 

When I was a teenager, if someone had asked me this question, I would have said that I met God through music.  I was a brass player at the time: a trombonist, pretty deep into classical playing.  Already, I had felt the power of sitting in the back row of an orchestra of 110 people as the conductor pushed and pushed, and the swell of sound gathered force and energy and lifted me, lifted all of us, then broke like a wave on the shore. 

 

I had sat in an audience, spellbound, as a performer wrought sounds of such beauty and heartache from an instrument that I felt couldn’t catch my breath. 

 

Later in my career, I began, tentatively, to learn how to improvise.  I practiced what’s called “free improvisation,” where a group of musicians simply sits together, and then plays together, with no plan or idea of how things will go, no structure to guide them. 

 

It was during these sessions that I experienced something I can only describe as grace. 

Our music began with eyes catching, 

then a synchronized breath, 

then dissonance as we began,

searching for one another, 

catching rhythm and melody, 

throwing fragments to one another, 

finally finding our way, 

building toward something that we could only create together. 

None of us knew where we were taking each other, 

but somehow we were arriving. 

 

After finding a way to an end, 

the last note would evaporate, 

and we’d sit in silence for a moment, 

breathing and marveling. 

 

I was taking communion at the Episcopal Church down the road, but making something from nothing, drawing sound from silence, that was my communion as well.  When those improvisations worked, that group of 6 or 8 musicians became one body, inspired by the breath of God.  We might not have all used the same language to describe it, but we all knew that we had stood at the edge of something holy. 

 

 

I’ve been invited here today to lead a service of  “paperless” singing, or singing from the Oral Tradition.  And in leading you, I’m leaning on the traditions of so many people who have gone before us.  Communities around the world and here in the United States who have been singing this way for a long, long time.  The truth of the matter is that making music is one of the most fundamentally human things that humans do.  Right up there next to gathering around a fire or gathering around a meal, singing and dancing are a basic, elemental, primal part of who we are.  Part of who God made us to be. 

 

All of us are singers. 

And all of us are dancers. 

There are many cultures in the world, and here in the United States, where singing and dancing is so integral to everyday life that you cannot separate them out.  To work and play and pray is to sing and to dance.  But other cultures, somewhere along the way, have lost the beat of the people’s song.  Singing has become something that only professionals do, and when we gather together, we might find it’s very difficult to sing without books or paper, or something else to organize us. 

 

The music we’re singing today does not exist to replace scores and hymnals.  It exists because it’s the place all those musics came from: a melody that someone spun in their hearts a long time ago, then taught to someone else, who taught it to someone else, who maybe, one day, wrote it down. 

 

But it came first, from the heart. 

 

 

 

About midnight Paul and Silas were in prison,

praying and singing to God, 

and all the prisoners were listening to them. 

 

Can it surprise us that they were singing?

Can it surprise us that it was their song 

that ushered in God’s spirit, 

causing the earth to shake, 

the doors to open, 

the chains to come unfastened?

 

Can it surprise us that it was their song 

that broke the walls of that prison and made them free?

That song has the power to bring us places we didn’t realize we could reach?

The power to remind us that, 

though our feet may be in shackles,

there is nothing that can imprison us?

 

The power to remind us that, 

though our hands may be bound,

there is no one who can own us?

 

The power to remind us that, 

though we may be told otherwise, 

we belong to God, and God only, 

God has made us and called us by name,

we are God’s children. 

 

 

The moment may come, as you sing a song passed down to you through generations, or a new song you have never heard before, or the line of a hymn you’ve sung over and over again, but has never touched you in just this way, 

and it’s as if God has chosen, 

in that moment to speak to you. 

To remind you of who you are, 

and whose you are. 

 

And you find that 

your heart is suddenly expanding, 

that something that feels just a bit like an earthquake

is rumbling beneath your feet.

It frightens you, 

and your heart breathes, and opens. 

 

 

Sometimes, it’s easy for us church professionals to get confused about why it is we come here, why we have church.  We might think that it’s important for us to make accurate theological points or lead worship in just the right way, or hold meetings that are calm and well ordered.  We might begin to count the number of bedsides we’ve visited, or count the number of people in our pews, the amount of the offering, believing that perhaps God is counting too.  Sometimes we get so busy trying to keep everything moving that we forget 

that a central part of our job

is simply 

to be still. 

 

We can forget the reason people assemble each Sunday:

that they’re looking for something:

Looking that moment when the ground shakes beneath their feet 

and the doors unlock and the chains fall open, 

and they feel, suddenly and unexpectedly, 

that they’re standing at the edge of something 

very, very Holy. 

The melody escapes their lips,

The heart blossoms, imperceptibly.

 

 

The simplest things can bring us to this place.

A melody that rises and falls with grace.

A tune picked out and repeated. 

The moment when harmony blooms. 

The voice of your mother, your lover, your friend 

as they sing next to you. 

 

 

When I was learning to improvise, I had the difficult task of learning an simple lesson:

it only happens once. 

You can record it, 

write it down, 

save it for later,

but it won’t be the same. 

You can’t bottle God,

capture the divine. 

 

Instead, I learned, 

painfully, 

to recognize those moments of rare and sudden divinity 

when they descended, 

to sit in them, 

and then to let them go, 

praying that it would happen again. 

And again. 

And once more.

 

God didn’t create the world so we could keep it. 

God created a world that spins and grows, 

where clouds gather weight and open, 

pouring down rain and washing away what’s come before. 

 

What we need is here. 

This moment. 

This song.

The melody,

this note, 

struck in this way with these people 

only once. 

Let it go.

 

Sing and release. 

Repeat. 

 

Repeat. 

 

Repeat. 

The Only Thing Sturdy Enough

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, February 6, as part of our ongoing exploration of the book of Mark.  The text is Mark 2:13-17.  Read it here. 

 

I found myself wondering this week, 

what was the table conversation like at Levi’s house?

Here’s everyone around the table.  There, at the head, is Jesus, who’s been healing people right and left.  And there’s Simon and his brother Andrew, who used to be fishermen, but seem to have given that up to follow Jesus.  Then there’s Simon’s mother in law, who’s still getting over the fact that this strange man healed her from her fever.  There’s the guy who used to beg at the gates to the city because he was paralyzed, but now he’s healed and walking around just fine.  Then there’s the women who’s been working the corner over near the well for a couple months now, and a few of her friends, and oh yes, the host, Levi, the tax collector, who everyone knows, paid for this meal with the money he stole from all of them.*

 

What was that table conversation like?

 

Capernum was a pretty small city -- a town really.  Only about 1,600 people.  So, if I was sitting at that table, I’d be thinking about the last time I walked into the city and walked right by the paralytic, shaking his cup.  I’d be struggling to strike up some kind of conversation with the town prostitute that wasn’t completely awkward for either of us.  And I’d be seething mad at my host, Levi, whose appearance at my door a month ago meant that I had nothing to feed my kids that week. 

 

But here we are all together at the table,

a motley crew,

gathered around a man 

whose words forgive and challenge, 

and whose touch heals. 

Here we all are to break bread together. 

 

 

There was a article a few months ago by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, reviewing a few books that have come out lately about Jesus.  Gopnik talks about the contrast in the gospels between John the Baptist, the faster, and Jesus, the feaster.  Jesus, who’s always eating. 

 

“Jesus eats and drinks,” Gopnik writes, “with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and, finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine.”

He continues, “Jesus lives within a Mediterranean Jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why.  So the way Jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating...would have shocked his contemporaries.  He dines with people of a different social rank, which would have shocked most Romans, and with people of different tribal alliances, which would have shocked most Jews...

“Jesus feeds the multitudes rather than instructing them how to go without. He's interested in saving people living normal lives... rather than in retreating into the company of those who have already arrived at a moral conclusion about themselves.”

 

 

Well said, Adam Gopnik. 

 

 

What do we see of Jesus in this story?

That he is a feaster, yes, 

that he gathers a motley crew of followers 

around an abundance of food, and probably of wine. 

But that his feasts are risky, bold occasions 

that confuse the customs, 

turn rules on their heads, 

and elicit an upheaval of upset and conflict. 

 

These dinner parties are not about keeping everyone happy. 

Instead, Jesus and his followers 

gather around a table, 

because it’s the only thing sturdy enough 

to hold them all together:

The fishermen and the prostitutes, the thieves and the women and the beggars. 

 

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say to someone who’s experience is really different from your own, or someone who sees things very differently from you. I have certainly experienced moments of wondering how to speak to someone.  What questions to ask, what stories to tell, that will allow me to hear something of who that person is, and share something of who I am. 

 

The good news is, we’re gathered here to figure it out together, 

and the strength of this table can bear the burden of our mistakes. 

 

We blush or stutter as we stumble to share ourselves with each other, 

but it means only that we’re getting close to something important.

Our blunders mean only that we’re learning, risking, 

aiming for something that’s really hard. 

And really worthwhile. 

 

 

Those who are well 

have no need of a physician

but those who are sick, 

Jesus told them.   

 

 

I’m going to the tell you a secret. 

You have something in common with every one in this room. 

Because every single one of us 

is sick. 

Every single one of us 

is broken, 

imperfect. 

Every single one of us 

has suffered,

has faltered,

has struggled. 

 

None of us is righteous,

(not even the scribes or the pharisees)

None of us elevated. 

 

Every one of us is in need of healing, 

in need of a physician. 

 

I’ll tell you a story about me, 

because it might also be a story about you:

 

I used to have a hard time recognizing that I was sick. 

Because I thought if I did, 

I wouldn’t be able to love myself. 

It turns out that in order to love myself, 

I had to recognize that I was sick. 

To have compassion for myself, 

forgiveness for myself, 

I first needed to recognize 

that I needed both those things. 

There’s a strange duality about it: 

in order to love myself, I had to see myself as in need of love. 

 

We’re all completely different at these tables. 

Completely different, 

and exactly the same. 

We’re all human. 

All imperfect. 

All fearfully and wonderfully made. 

All beloved by a God who, 

no matter what we have done, 

or left undone, 

no matter what we have accomplished, 

or not accomplished, 

 

Loves this motley crew

whether we like it or not.  

 

 

 

*Tax collectors in Ancient Israel were generally Jewish people who collected taxes from other Jews for Rome.  They generally collected more than they needed to from their own people, keeping whatever was leftover for themselves.  They were known as extortionists. 

 

Digging Through

I preached this sermon on January 31 at St. Lydia's as part of our exploration of the book of Mark.  The text is Mark 2:1-12.  Read it here.

 

I once knew a little girl who came from a family that moved all the time.  She had lived in many countries all over the world.  She had seen so many things and met so many people.  But it seemed as if just as soon as her family had unpacked the last box, put the last book on the shelf, it was time to pack it all up again. 

 

“I used to make friends,” she told me plainly, “but I don’t anymore, because we’re just going to move, and it’s just going to hurt.”

 

 

And so this little girl became paralyzed.  Each time the moving truck pulled into the driveway, a little piece of her became frozen and motionless, and as she grew older, she became very cold. 

 

 

I spent this week in Philadelphia taking a week-long course about complicated issues in death, dying and grief.  All of us grieve losses of one kind or another.  We loose people we love to death or to distance or to change.  But we loose other things to.  A lost job may mean a lost sense of identity.  Becoming an adult means leaving childhood behind.  Saying yes to a wonderful job means saying goodbye to some wonderful people.  Or being involved in a new relationship means saying goodbye to a more independent way of living. 

 

The class I took was about what happens when the losses we face become complicated or even debilitating.  When the pain of loss is so great that we decide we’d rather not feel it.  Or we’ll feel it acutely, every day for years and years. 

 

Whatever the case, loss and grief have the ability to paralyze us. 

To freeze us in time, 

feeling or not feeling, 

not moving forward 

and not moving back. 

We’re just stuck. 

We’re just like the little girl 

who decided she’d rather not have friends 

than face the pain of loosing them. 

 

Paralysis is a highly effective tool.  It protects us from pain.  But it also protects us from love. 

 

Where are your frozen places? 

What are you guarding from pain?

Where are you resisting love?

 

 

Our story in Mark is a very strange one.  And one of the best examples I can think of that the writers of the gospels penned works imbued with layers of meaning.  This story is crazy and comical.  Jesus is teaching in a house, (maybe he’s back a Peter’s house) and the crowd is so thick that a couple of guys get the bright idea to dig through the roof and lower their friend through it.  

 

What we’re talking about here is probably a small, one or two room house with a ladder up to the roof.  Roofs were precious space in the ancient near east, used for all sorts of stuff like curing meat and probably drying laundry and herbs and whatever else needed to be done.  And houses were made of frames made of long branches, and covered over with a sort of mud/plaster substance.  So these four friends are literally digging through the roof to lower their friend through. 

 

Can you imagine, Jesus sitting there teaching and little bits of debris starting to fall on his head as these guys destroy the roof of the house?  It’s insane. 

 

And it tells us that this story is more about digging through 

than it is about digging through a roof. 

And more about paralysis 

than it is about someone who’s paralyzed. 

In so many ways, 

we are that man on the mat, 

our souls and bodies locked in paralysis, 

frozen from pain

and resistant to love. 

 

We are that man, who, 

though he can’t imagine that anyone could possibly care about him,  

is lifted onto a mat and carried through the streets

by four people 

who really, really, do. 

 

We are that man 

who needs more than to hear, 

but needs to be touched and healed and forgiven, 

and so chips away at the mud of the roof 

until finally it cracks and gives, 

and a dusty stream of light breaks through. 

 

 

How difficult it is to chip away at that sturdy wall we’ve built. 

And how terrifying to be healed. 

For paralysis means a brittle, frozen safety. 

But those first faltering steps mean 

pain, 

risk, 

vulnerability. 

 

 

My professor said something to me this week 

that I thought was amazing. 

 

She said that, 

when we work through the pain of our grief,

when we allow it to touch us, 

we grow. 

 

We become richer, deeper people than we were before. 

Pain and loss have the ability to paralyze us, 

but they also have the ability to transform us. 

Experiencing loss doesn’t have to make us less of who we are. 

It doesn’t have to mean loosing part of ourselves along the way.

If we can learn to befriend pain, 

it has the capability to enliven and transform us. 

 

We tell a story of a man, 

a healer and a prophet, 

who was executed on a cross. 

 

There were three long, dark days 

that followed that Friday. 

Three days of living in the very heart of pain. 

 

But on the third day, 

on the third day everything changes. 

We can go down to the pit

and come back not just to tell a story of life that continues,

but to live a story of life transformed and renewed.  

 

Life is blessings and burdens. 

Let pain touch you and change you. 

And take those first faltering steps 

of risk and vulnerability toward fear and hope and love.