Sit and Eat

God of the Weeds

I preched this sermon at St. Lydia's the week of November 10, as we prepare for the season of Advent.  The text is Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; you can read it here. 

 

 

Two years ago, almost to the day, 

I biked down to Zucotti park to see what all the fuss was about. 

Protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement 

had been camped out there for just about three months. 

The cold was setting in, 

the city was getting impatient, 

and the cops were increasingly armed. 

 

I was, at the time, a bit skeptical of the movement. 

They seemed un-unified and unlikely to garner attention

from those whose policies they sought to change. 

“If I, a sympathetic liberal, don’t take them seriously, 

I asked a friend,

“why would Wall Street take them seriously?”

“Just go take a look,” he told me. 

And so I did.  

I found I had been looking with the wrong eyes. 

 

Remembering it now, I'm sure that my uncertainty about the movement 

was composed less of a political critique

than a fearfulness that I wouldn’t fit in. 

That I couldn’t belong to their unruly collective. 

 

 

I arrived at the park for the first time

in the middle of what turned out to be 

one of the rougher protests that occurred during their time there.

I saw a protester get his face smashed with a night stick. 

Somebody took a picture and he was all over the tabloids the next morning. 

 

What I noticed first off 

was that the police force on site 

was wildly disproportionate 

to the threat the protesters presented. 

Cops were suited up in riot gear, 

their clear plastic shields lined up against a bunch of peacefully-intentioned 

librarians, drifters, students. 

 

“Are we really that threatening?” 

I wondered. 

It would seem that we were. 

 

*

 

Reading passages like this one in Isaiah, 

I feel drawn in by the poetry of the words.

I feel drawn in by the promise of the restoration 

of everything that that has collapsed, 

the healing of everything that is broken. 

The promise that, somehow, all shall be well, 

and everything will be right in the end. 

 

And yet so much of the time, 

everything seems so very wrong. 

Around us, everything is unequal. 

A few feast while the rest go hungry. 

The protesters are swept from the park without ceremony,  

and I am left wondering who to believe:

the prophet’s promises?

Or the writing on the wall?

 

 

For me, 

Occupy became a kind of promise. 

I began to see what happened there, 

not as a vision of how the world should be run, necessarily,  

but as a glimpse of a possibility of a different way. 

Occupy was like a hole punctured in the everyday

that let a new kind of possibility stream in. 

It was like a vibrant dream that, 

upon waking, 

made our reality seem stark and greyscale. 

 

*

 

The prophet Isaiah is making a promise

to a people who have returned home after exile

to a city in ruins. 

They rebuild but find that their reconstructed future 

does not compare to their remembered past. 

They rebuild, but find that some are feasting while others are going hungry. 

 

“You shall build up the ancient ruins,” 

Isaiah tells them,

   “you shall raise up the former devastations;

you shall repair the ruined cities,

   the devastations of many generations.”

 

It’s a promise of everything to come:

everything that God is doing, 

and everything that the people of God will do 

in light of that promise. 

The hungry shall be fed, 

the captives shall be released, 

debt shall be forgiven 

and the city shall be rebuilt. 

The promise: that there will be justice and righteousness. 

 

The prophet has made a promise. 

But what he doesn’t tell us so clearly

is that we might have to wait. 

 

*

 

Columnist Tim Kreider wrote four pieces on the Occupy Movement

that were never published. 

 

I want to read from the last essay in the set, entitled, 

“Occupy Wall Street: The Day After.”*

He writes, 

“Occupy Wall Street was an attempt to circumvent [a] hopelessly corrupted system, to try something new, something that couldn’t be appeased or bought off, appropriated or compromised...I liked going there for the same reason I like going to libraries, concerts, or church: it was a place where large numbers of people were gathered to devote themselves to an enterprise other than the pursuit of money...

It all ended the way we probably always should have known it would. Mayor Bloomberg, whose legendary obsession with safety and sanitation is evident to anyone strolling through West Harlem or Flatbush, ordered the park cleaned out as though those people and their possessions were so much unsightly litter. It’s a depressing spectacle I’ve already seen too often in my lifetime—the side with uniforms and guns winning yet again. They win every battle. Except I notice they never win the wars. The uniforms and guns have been lined up in a solid phalanx throughout our history against the labor movement, the integrationists, the antiwar protesters...Yet today we have weekends and child labor laws and a black President, and Vietnam and Iraq are acknowledged by all but those most adamantly in denial to have been horrific crimes and blunders. The iron rule of Power and Money is like the law of entropy: absolute and inflexible, its ultimate end the death of everything.  Justice is more like life: a fragile, crafty thing that has to resort to ingenious dodges like sex and evolution, memory and books, to circumvent destruction. Maybe it can’t win in the end, but it is also, apparently, ineradicable.”

 

 

Kreider, who I happen to know is a atheist, 

uncannily echoes Isaiah 61 in his essay. 

“Justice is more like life,” he writes, 

Justice is like a shoot springing up in a garden, 

the writer if Isaiah tells us. 

Or maybe it’s more like a weed, 

pushing through the pavement, 

stubbornly impossible to root out. 

 

*

 

That thing that Kreider writes, 

about losing the battles but winning the wars. 

Perhaps that notion is the very thing 

that keeps me coming back to this table. 

The utter impossibility that the world continues to keep unfolding, 

despite the all odds, 

and despite utter impossibility,

despite riot gear and guns and pepper spray...

 

toward justice. 

 

It is the same confounding backwardness

that we see throughout the gospel stories. 

Of a king born in a feeding trough. 

Of a criminal whose execution restores the world. 

If I was to trace the pattern of God’s work in the world, 

I would follow the work of a God of the weeds, 

eroding the foundations of greed and oppression

with an insidious,

tenacious 

system of roots. 

Roots that can crumble concrete 

and take down skyscrapers. 

 

*

 

The prophet Isaiah 

writes that justice comes 

like the earth bringing forth shoots, 

and as the nights begin to grow longer 

and the days colder, 

I know that for green shoots to spring from the earth,

we have to wait. 

 

Even God has to wait sometimes, 

for the world to be ready to germinate something new. 

 

As Bonhoeffer wrote

from his cell in prison, 

“For the greatest, most profound, tenderest things in the world, 

we must wait. 

It happens not here in a storm

but according to the divine laws

of sprouting, growing, and becoming.”**

 

Advent is a season 

characterized by waiting. 

Waiting expectantly for God to break into our lives

like a hole punctured in the everyday. 

Waiting for the world to be turned upside down once more. 

 

It’s a season of remembering all that lies dormant.

That though we may not see it 

or feel it, 

or know it,

God is binding up our broken hearts, 

even through the frozen earth of this season. 

 

God is unlocking the prison gates

and beckoning us to walk through the door and be free. 

 

We shall always hold ashes 

in the cupped palms of our hands. 

But twining around us, up through the asphalt, 

is a tangle of weeds. 

And the weeds are blooming.  

 

 

 

 

*A collection of Tim Kreider's work may be found on his website.

**Letter to fiancee Maria von Wedemeyer from prison, December 13, 1943.

It's Hard to Look at Endings

I preached this sermon the week of October 27 as part of a four part series on Hagar at St. Lydia's.  The text is Genesis 21:15-21; you can read it here. 

 

 

It is hard to look at endings. 

 

Hagar has run out of water and her young son is very thirsty. 

And so she lays him down in the shade of a tree and turns around and walks away. 

“Let me not look on the death of the boy,”

she says. 

Because she can’t see it. 

She can’t witness this ending. 

 

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about endings. 

I’m actually right in the middle of one, it seems. 

And though I can’t share the details of this particular ending with all of you, 

I can tell you how truly terrible it feels 

to reach that ending. 

To lay a fragile, new hope 

under the shade of a tree in the desert 

and walk away. 

I don’t want to look on it --  

on the death of hope. 

I don’t want to leave it there, 

and yet I’m compelled 

to lay it down

and go. 

 

I had forgotten how much finding the end 

of something 

feels like giving birth: 

pushing a new 

and sometimes unwanted reality into being 

in the midst of pain and tears and human messiness. 

 

There is a terrible resistance at play 

in moving toward a new life, different from the one that preceded it. 

We don’t always want to go where we’re going,

and yet here is where we find ourselves. 

 

*

 

Hagar is finding her ending in the desert. 

The last of the bread is consumed and the water skin is empty.

She gives her child the relief of the shade and turns away 

toward death. 

And then, the story tells us, 

she lifts up her voice, and weeps. 

She is not begging for help. 

She is not crying out for deliverance. 

She is wailing the cry of one for whom all is lost -- 

a cry filled with nothing but stark loss and abandonment. 

Perhaps you have cried such a cry

when you have found yourself at an ending. 

Perhaps you have turned away from seeing it -- 

from looking at the ending coming into being. 

 

*

 

Endings are rarely neat and hardly ever pretty. 

The ends of relationships are often fractured

and mired with hesitancy and indecision. 

The end of life can be painfully long in coming, 

tangled with IV tubes and doped up on painkillers. 

 

The summer I worked as a hospital chaplain 

I found that the end of life was often frantic with logistics --

trips back and forth to the airport as relatives came and left,

cell phones ringing and nurses in and out of the hospital room. 

Tensions simmered between siblings 

or arguments erupted about end-of-life wishes. 

 

There was, truth-be-told, an ugliness to all of it. 

 

One day I sat with a man whose roommate at the hospital 

suddenly went into cardiac arrest. 

Behind the thin curtain that divided the two beds, 

the doctors worked on the man for almost an hour,

trying to bring him back. 

It is not like it is in the movies. 

It’s not dramatic. 

It’s just long and drawn out, 

and very physical, 

very bodily. 

He did not survive. 

And when his wife arrived for a visit and found that her husband was dead, 

her anger and vitriol could not be described as anything but ugly. 

 

It’s hard to look at endings. 

 

I had, perhaps, expected that there would be grace-filled moments in the hospital, 

praying with patients at their bedside and hearing their stories. 

And there were those moments, in the midst of all of it.

But more often the grace I experienced

came late at night when I left the hospital, exhausted, 

and arrived home and sobbed 

for the pain of it all. 

It was as if I was sobbing for the pain of the whole world. 

And there in that desolation -- that’s where I ran smack into God. 

It was not a bright light or a gentle presence. 

Not an angelic voice. 

It felt more like descending farther and farther into a very deep pool, 

and then feeling my feet hit the bottom. 

God was tangible in those moments --

nothing could have been more real 

than finding the smooth, cold bottom of the pool.  

 

*

 

It’s hard to look at endings. 

Hagar lays her son down under a tree 

and turns her face away. 

She lifts her voice and weeps and waits for her ending. 

 

But Hagar has not been brought to the wilderness to die. 

 

When God opens her eyes, 

she emerges into a new reality -- 

a wilderness which is made, 

not for her demise, 

but for her rebirth.

Water springs up before her,

fresh and cool,

and as she fills her water skin and places it to her son’s lips, 

a new life begins to knit itself together before her. 

It is a new and different kind of life in the wilderness:

a land which she once understood as harsh and barren, 

but now sees can sustain her. 

It is a new and different life:

one that exists outside the captivity of slavery from which she came. 

It is a life that promises harshness and difficulty --

but it also promises freedom. 

 

There is a strange kind of possibility at work 

when we lay down hope

and walk away. 

 

And it is hard to look at endings. 

It is hard to see what is being made 

as we divest ourselves of hope, 

divest ourselves of a vision 

of “how it was supposed to be.”

Or even divest ourselves of version of life we clung to, 

not because it was good, but simply because it was what we knew. 

 

We did not envision this life in the wilderness, 

but God has shown us that there is water enough here for us to live.

Here there is food to eat, 

and shelter. 

And here there is freedom. 

 

 

Hagar In the Wilderness

I preached this sermon on October 20 and 21 at St. Lydia's, as part of a series on the story of Hagar.  We read Genesis 21:1-4, which you can read too by clicking here.  We also read the version of the story found in the hadith, which tells the story as Muslims know it.  You can read it by clicking here.  

 

 

There are a lot of different ways to be in the wilderness. 

And it turns out that how you got there makes a big difference. 

 

I have travelled across the country by car twice in my life.

The first time, I was a twelve year old, 

heading from Connecticut to Seattle, 

where there was a new home waiting for me and my family. 

And the second time, I was twenty two years old, 

heading, strangely enough, back along the exact same route, 

from Seattle to Connecticut, 

where I was beginning my Divinity School degree. 

 

These two journeys through the wilderness of our nation 

followed almost the same route. 

But they were very different journeys. 

 

The first time, as a twelve year old, 

I didn’t have much choice in the journey, or how it played out. 

My Dad had a new job, and we were moving to Seattle. 

And so I watched as our things were packed up 

and reluctantly climbed into the back seat of the car.  

I never would have chosen to leave behind the first group of friends 

I had found that made me feel welcome and at home. 

I had had no choice in picking out our new home 

or the town in which it was situated, 

or choosing my new school. 

As twelve year olds, we don’t get a whole lot of choice about of anything. 

And so I’m sure that I was not a very pleasant traveling companion 

for that seven day trek across the country. 

Despite my parents’ best efforts as we stopped at roadside attractions, 

and spent the night at motels with pools and cable TV, 

I was not to be moved. 

I was an unwilling sojourner on I-90 West. 

 

*

 

I-90 East was a different story. 

After a year abroad, I flew home to Seattle, 

stuffed the makings of a new apartment into the first car I had ever owned, 

and headed East, 

my boyfriend at the time in the passenger seat 

with a map of the country spread across his lap. 

We camped by still, cold lakes as we crossed the rockies,

took a ferry across the unending expanse of Lake Michigan, 

and caught a parade in a small midwestern town. 

I was headed toward a new university, a new town, 

a place of my own -- a graduate degree --

but mostly I was following a call, and I could feel that call, 

drawing me with the steady pull of a magnet 

toward a new life that was beginning to unfold. 

 

It was a bittersweet trip, in many ways, 

for though I had not yet admitted it to myself, 

some part of me knew that the new life that was calling me

meant the end of my relationship with the navigator in the passenger seat. 

In all the photos from that trip, I look like I’m on the verge of tears. 

 

*

 

Both of those journeys brought me through a wilderness of sorts. 

A geographic wilderness, in which my traveling companions and I 

navigated the unknown and expansive territory around us. 

And a wilderness of the soul. 

That wilderness was a place of more unknowing than knowing.

A place where uncertainty became a well-known passenger. 

 

*

 

In our exploration of the story of Hagar this month, 

we have encountered a variety of interpretations of this story. 

There are multiple voices that comprise the narrative itself, 

and multiple communities that have seen themselves in her story

and claimed it as their own. 

 

Reading a variety of scholarship on the text, 

I’m seeing that in addition to our five characters:

Hagar and Isamael, Sarah and Isaac, and Abraham, 

there is a sixth character in this story:

that of the wilderness. 

 

The wilderness can be seen in all sorts of different ways. 

 

For the Jewish people, 

and for those who wrote this text, 

the wilderness was a place of exile reminiscent of the Diaspora, 

when Jews were forced from their homeland of Judea 

and scattered or enslaved. 

In the wilderness, we the Jewish people remember their homeland with longing, 

and ask God to bring them home. 

There are many stories in the Hebrew Bible of meeting God in the wilderness, 

stories of God feeding the people of Israel of caring for them, 

but there are not many stories of staying there. 

 

Muslim scholar Riffat Hassan offers a different perspective on the wilderness, 

and on the narrative of Hagar. 

Is Islam, the wilderness is associated with the hijrah, 

in which one goes into exile for the sake of God. 

The hijrah is a blessed state in which one leaves one’s place of origin, 

one’s home, 

and sojourns for God. 

“Each year,” she writes, 

“as millions of Muslim pilgrims run or walk 

between the points that symbolize Safa and Marwa, 

they pay homage to Hagar, 

who has become an indestructible emblem 

not only of a mother’s love for her offspring 

but of a true believer’s faith in the saving power of God.”*

 

 

Delores Williams, author of Sisters in the Wilderness

offers a third perspective on the wilderness

which emerges from the experience of enslaved Africans in this country. 

“...for African America slaves, female and male, 

the wilderness did not bear the negative connotations 

that mainline white pioneer culture had assigned to it.  

Rather, for the slave, the wilderness was a positive place 

conducive to uplifting the spirit and to strengthening religious life. 

Wilderness experience, 

involving a compatible relation between humans and nature, 

was to be sought actively...

Going into the wilderness assured slaves 

that they would meet Jesus if they persevered.”**

 

*

 

How you end up in the wilderness makes a big difference. 

In the story from Exodus, 

Hagar is thrown out, 

pushed into the wilderness with some bread, water, and no explanation. 

In the Muslim story,

she is accompanied there, 

left under a tree with some dates and water. 

But she has some idea why. 

“Has Allah ordered you to leave us here?” 

she shouts. 

“Yes,” is the answer. 

“Then he will not neglect us.”

 

How you end up in the wilderness makes a difference. 

But in both stories,

God shows up. 

In both stories, 

God gives water in the wilderness. 

In both stories, 

God makes a way out of no way. 

 

*

 

Hagar, where have you come from, and where are you going?

That’s the question God has for Hagar 

when God finds her alone in the wilderness the first time. 

Where have you come from,

and where are you going?

 

It’s a question we each might ask ourselves

in whatever wilderness we happen to find ourselves this evening. 

As a twelve year old, headed west, 

I had come from a town that I found contained everything that I needed: 

the security of all that was known, 

and the love of those who understood me. 

I was going toward a place I had never seen 

and people I had never met 

and a life I could not imagine could fill the hole in my heart. 

 

As a twenty two year old headed East, 

I was coming from a year of grown-up living in a strange new country, 

and headed toward what I was very sure was some strand of my future. 

I had caught the hint of a melody carried on the wind 

and I was following it, 

(despite what it meant leaving behind)

toward an unknown but unfolding future,

certain that God was by my side. 

 

*

 

We don’t always choose the wilderness. 

Our ancestors landed on the shores of this country 

in varied and sundry ways: 

some were running from persecution,

some were following freedom, 

some were chained in the belly of a ship. 

It makes a big difference how you ended up in the wilderness. 

 

And yet every story seems to tell us 

that in the middle of most desolate moment, 

when the water skin is empty 

and the child on our back is crying for milk that will not come, 

God makes a way out of no way.

God draws water from the dessert, 

and hope springs up where no hope could be seen before. 

 

Where have you come from, and where are you going?

 

Only you and God know the answer to that question. 

Perhaps your life has been one long wilderness, 

a long search for home. 

Or perhaps you have only just being called out 

into territory that seems arid and barren. 

Perhaps you have met God in the moments when you have cried out, 

or perhaps you trust, like Hagar, that God will not neglect you. 

Perhaps you have no such trust. 

Perhaps you yearn for an end to this wilderness.

 

There are many ways to tell the story. 

But in each of them, 

there will be water. 

 

 

 

*Riffat Hissan, “Islamic Hagar and Her Family,” in Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, Eds. Phyllis Trible and Letty Russell (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). 

**Williams, Delores, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, (Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1993).