like trees, planted by streams of water

Where Are We Rooted?

Psalm 1

Manassas Church of the Brethren

May 20, 2012

Happy are those
  who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
  or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
  and on his law they meditate day and night.
They are like trees
  planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
  and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.

The wicked are not so,
  but are like chaff that the wind drives away. 

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgement,
  nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
  but the way of the wicked will perish.

I was born and bred in a Hokie family. My sister, father, and grandfather all attended Virginia Tech, and when I was little, the entire family lived and breathed orange and maroon. We were in Blacksburg often, for basketball games, baseball games, campus visits, but most of all: FOOTBALL. I am not a huge sports fan, but all that early indoctrination planted in me an undying love for Hokie football.

College football in the south is a big deal – there are elaborate rituals built up around it that bring people together and give us something to be deeply passionate about. And Virginia Tech football is no exception. Honestly, it’s divine. How do we know that God is a Hokie? Obviously, because the leaves turn orange and maroon in the fall.

A couple of months ago, the university revealed plans to build a brand new, state-of-the art practice facility for the football team. The current one is old, out of date, and not able to keep up with the rate of “progress” of rival teams. It’s a needed update for a growing program that brings in a LOT of money to a state university. A good thing. But. The plans for the practice facility put it right in the middle of an old stand of trees called Stadium Woods. No, a REALLY old stand of trees. In fact, this grove is actually one of the only remaining old-growth forests on the east coast. The woods are marked on a confederate general’s map of the area from 1864 and some of the white oaks there are over 300 years old…and could continue growing for another 300 years.

I have a tree-hugging hippie’s soul, so it says something about my loyalty to Hokie football that my own opinion on the stadium woods practice facility is pretty ambiguous. I like trees, but I LOVE football.

There’s a movement to save the stadium woods, and put the new practice facility elsewhere. A faculty member who opposes the practice facility puts it this way:

“The practice facility’s life span is 50 years. White oaks can live to be 600.” “Sometimes trees must be cut for progress,” he said, “But we stop in the presence of 350-year-old trees and say, ‘Whoa. We don’t go here.’ You take your hat off and give them the respect they deserve.”

Like dust, blown away by the wind, they have no standing.

Like trees, planted by streams of water, they bear fruit at just the right time.

How many of you have a Facebook profile? Okay, now that everyone knows, you might be getting a few more friend requests this afternoon. And you’re not alone – 900 MILLION people around the world use Facebook. 900 MILLION. I cannot even imagine how that translates into numbers of pictures of cats doing ridiculously cute things.

This week, Facebook became a publically traded company, and it entered the market as the third-largest public offering ever in the US – just behind General Motors and Visa. Now, I don’t really understand the stock market, but I do understand a bit about Facebook - I’m on it a lot – and it really astounds me that a company built on a completely virtual service could compel such gigantic monetary buy-in. Facebook doesn’t sell anything to users, doesn’t deliver any material product to your doorstep, doesn’t really change our physical reality in any way. Their revenue comes from advertising – screen space and those 900 million sets of eyes.

In all of the hullabaloo about Facebook this week, someone asked: “What would happen if Facebook just disappeared? How would your life change?” Well, my nosy self would certainly miss the constant barrage of information about other peoples’ lives, and I’d definitely lose touch with some far away friends. But otherwise…? The amount of time I spend staring at a screen full of status updates really isn’t all that fruitful. How would life change? I’d probably spend more time out in the garden, or hiking in the mountains, or nourishing relationships with neighbors and people close by, here.

Like dust, blown away by the wind, they have no standing.

Like trees, planted by streams of water, they bear fruit at just the right time.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild, in her book The Outsourced Life, explores the ways that we’ve begun to turn over responsibility for relatively basic human functions to others. She lists services that we can now pay someone else to do. We have online dating to find our spouses, nameologists to pick names for our babies, party planners to create the perfect birthday experience, paid graveside visitors to free us from the drag of visiting a cemetery, life coaches to guide us through technique and training for living, and even things like “wantologists,” to help us discover our own desires and “Rent-a-Friends,” whose name says it all.

Now, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with hiring a wedding planner or asking for help when we need it. I think that’s good. What’s troubling is that we sometimes seem so distanced from our own lives that we feel the need to pay someone else to do these things that were once the very stuff that comprised a life well lived: nurturing relationships, falling in love, caring for children, celebrating life’s joys and grieving its pain. If someone else is getting to do all the good stuff for us, what’s left? Where does our life come from? Where are we rooted?

Like dust, blown away by the wind, they have no standing.

Like trees, planted by streams of water, they bear fruit at just the right time.

The psalmist paints a picture of two distinct ways of being – rooted in God’s abundant life or being blown dust, tossed aside by the breeze. It might be that these two ways translate into “good” and “evil,” but I’m inclined to think that the choices we have are both more and less complicated than that.

On the one hand, things like football and facebook and personal services are NOT evil. They’re human inventions. Sport is good fun, social media is a blessing for far-flung families and friends, and we ENCOURAGE ourselves to become servants, to wash the feet of others and accept that others will wash our own feet, too. When we choose these things, we’re not choosing wickedness. We’re not deciding to become sly and nefarious sinners – we’re just living in the world.

But on the other hand, if we really listen to the Psalmist, and if we really do meditate on God’s word day and night, we might come to the conclusion that just living in the world is not enough. Just living leaves us vulnerable to those winds that chase chaff and dust all over the place. If we’re aiming to be, as verse one says, “truly happy,” we’re probably longing for something much more than that – something more secure, more certain, more rooted. We want to bear good fruit, to be of good use, and in order to do that, we have to choose pretty carefully.

Because the choice is not really between righteous and wicked, good and evil, or right and wrong. The choice is really between life – deeply-rooted, well-nourished, fruit-bearing life – and dusty, empty death.

So, I guess the question is, what are the choices that help us sink our roots deeper? What are the things that give us life? The psalmist says meditating on God’s word does it – which is surely true. Prayer probably works. I like hiking, and writing, and am learning to appreciate baking and gardening – those activities that require attention and involve risk and mystery. Arthur Boers calls these kinds of things “focal practices,” by which he means activities that have a commanding presence, making demands on us, continuity – connecting us to others before and after us, and centering power – the ability to call us back to focus from the midst of distracted and distanced lives. Boers talks about cooking, gardening, quilting, photography, running, birdwatching, and practicing hospitality as examples of focal practices – things that root people in place, connect them to others, and remind them of the mystery of God’s world around them. These are things that require patience, discipline, and commitment. Sinking roots requires effort, but pays back in rich rewards. What sorts of focal activities do you practice? How do they draw you closer to God and call you into life?

My mom works as a hospice chaplain, sitting with sick and dying people and their families, companioning them as they move out of this life. She gets to be with people in very tender moments rich with revelation and mystery. Just this week, she was sitting with a dying woman who was dozing in and out of consciousness. Mom told me that the woman slowly opened her eyes, looked at her and said, “They have the prettiest trees there.” And then, smiling, “I found the prettiest yellow flower there. I laid it on the counter for you. I thought you would like it.” I don’t know what that means, or where this dying woman saw those beautiful trees and yellow flowers. But I think it must have been some kind of delightful place, close by to a stream of water, because the next thing she said was “Those two boys went out there in the mud and got it all over their boots! And I am not going to clean them up!”

Isn’t that the kind of deeply-rooted life that we really long for? To be so well planted in God’s gorgeous kingdom that it’s what we see when we’re moving on from this life to the next?  

The Psalmist tells us we have a choice. Dust is not all there is. We can sink our roots right next to God’s nourishing streams, and we will bear the right fruit at the right time, and our leaves will never fade.

And God promises to watch over us, always.

Amen.

moments to file

Brunching on homemade poptarts with DC BVSers, talking about food and foodways and diets and nourishment. Dylan, perceptive Catholic: "I think really, anytime we eat together is a sacrament - small "s", of course, but still a sacrament." I'm Brethren, brother, so I'm completely on board with the capitalized version. And grateful to share the Sacrament with volunteers leaving their lives to transform the world...and find themselves transformed in the process.

Wondering this morning - a rare Sunday devoid of worship responsibilities - who I'd sit with in church, and bemoaning (just a bit) the fact that I don't yet have a regular pew or seatmates. As soon as I walked in the church door, A and G ran by, asking if they can sit with me because their parents would be elsewhere. Serendipitous, grace-filled community.

During a baby dedication, tiny A is squirrelly and squirmy, curious about the congregation and the pastors' papers, jumping from arm to arm of his mom, his dad, his grandma and grandpa. But as soon as the congregation opens their collective mouths to affirm their love and commitment to him, his eyes go wide and his body goes still: what IS that noise, who ARE all those people, what's all this about? I can see his little brain overwhelmed with the sensation. He knows already that this is something special.


Schleiermacher says feeling negotiates the knowing and the doing - that the sense of absolute dependence, our experience of an infinite God in a finite world, is the necessary connection between what we know and what we do. I guess I wonder: how does anyone get anywhere without a few moments like these? The synapse has been missing, but transmissions are sparking back to life.

comfort food

Comfort Food

Luke 24:13-32

Manassas Church of the Brethren

April 22, 2012

There is so much going on in this passage at the end of the gospel of Luke. Jesus appears to the disciples, but they don’t recognize him. The disciples invite this stranger home with them, offering hospitality even without recognition. Even when they do recognize him, Jesus has to explain to them – again – what it is that’s just happened before their eyes. Jesus appears, vanishes, and appears again.

But I think the strangest thing in this story is that the disciples finally recognized their friend “in the breaking of the bread.” What in the world does that mean?

But first, let’s back up a little. How is it that the disciples didn’t recognize Jesus – the guy they’d been called to follow, the man who had led them all over the place, the friend who had performed miracles and preached against the rabbis and raised people from the dead and even prophesied his own death…and resurrection. Jesus TOLD his disciples that he’d come back, and still they didn’t recognize him.

Why?

It seems like the resurrected Jesus looked a lot different than the pre-crucifixion Jesus. Something was not the same. He couldn’t have been too sparkly and divine looking – that would have cast suspicion and the disciples would never have invited him into their conversation and into their homes. Maybe being in the tomb changed his appearance. Maybe the disciples were just too shocked, too sad, too deep in the depths of grief that they just didn’t notice that it was him. One of our youth suggested that maybe Jesus was actually a zombie when he joined the disciples here on the road to Emmaus, and while it makes as much sense to me as any of the other explanations, I’m pretty sure zombies can’t speak, so that effectively rules out that solution.

Who knows why the disciples didn’t recognize Jesus? Whatever the difference was, whatever the reason is, they didn’t. They saw him as a random guy on the road, a fellow traveler on his way to somewhere else and – here’s the kicker – they INVITED him HOME with them to EAT.

They had just met a fellow traveler on the road, didn’t know him from Adam, and invited him home with them. “It’s getting late,” they said, “just come on home to our house.”

Isn’t this, radical hospitality, what Jesus had been teaching them all along – that even strangers were worthy of inclusion, worthy of care, worthy of nourishment? How many times did Jesus interact with someone unclean, or forgotten or beneath him, and how many times did the disciples ask why he was doing that? They finally, it seems, figured it out. In this moment of grief and confusion, they fall back on what has become instinct and invite an unknown stranger into their home.

And that’s when it happens – Jesus comes home with them and sits down to eat the meal they prepare for him. He breaks the bread (takes it, blesses it, and breaks it) and their eyes are open and they see God, sitting right there in front of them, eating their food and laughing at their jokes. He was made known to them, the text says, in the breaking of the bread.

 Donna Bolt was reading about the Love Feast a few weeks ago, and she came into the office one day asking this question. “What was it about the way Jesus broke bread that made the disciples recognize him? Did he do it some special way? Did he have some signature bread-breaking technique?”

There are certainly plenty of ways to break bread together, plenty of special ways and plenty of signature techniques. In the Church of the Brethren, one of our main rituals is the Love Feast – a re-enactment of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples. Love Feast is my favorite part of church, by far, and I love Love Feast stories.

At my home church in Roanoke, there’s an old, old story – a legend, really – about Uncle Willy and the Love Feast. Uncle Willy was a deacon, and the deacons were always in charge of setting up for Love Feast. Uncle Willy was especially intense about the Love Feast preparations, or so the story goes. The tables needed to be set up in the proper formation. The beef had to be cooked for just the right number of hours. And the place settings needed to be exactly uniform from one seat to another. Uncle Willy was so serious about getting the meal set up exactly right each time that he broke out a ruler and measured the inches between each plate on the table, each glass, each plate of beef and bowl of sop. If it was going to be a real Love Feast, Uncle Willy said, everything had to be just right and exactly as it was the last time and the time before that, and the time before that. In order for the service to be real, he seemed to think, everything had to be perfect and just the same as it had been before. If tradition was broken, the Love Feast wasn’t real.

So, maybe when Jesus broke bread after that Emmaus walk, he did it in such a way that his disciples immediately recognized him. Maybe he DID have a particular way of blessing a meal, breaking the bread, sharing with his friends. Maybe.

In fact, the way Luke talks about this meal in this chapter is very, very similar to the way he talks about other meals with Jesus. Here, Jesus “took the bread, blessed it, and broke it.” That same phrase describes how Jesus served his disciples at the Last Supper, and that same phrase describes Jesus turning a few loaves and a few fish into enough to feed thousands of people. Jesus “took the bread, blessed it, and broke it,” and hungry people were fed, disciples were given a powerful memory, and grieving friends suddenly recognize their Lord in their own midst. It must have been a special gesture.

I heard another story this week about a pie, specifically a coconut cream pie that a particular woman down in Shenandoah district made every year for their Hunger Auction. Her pie was apparently sought after, and bids would go higher and higher as people tried hard to be the proud owner of this particular woman’s pie. Apparently, the last year she made the pie – she was 104, then – it sold at auction for $1,200. Maybe some of you knew this woman. I didn’t, but I know this story. And that tells me that her pie – specifically that last one – was more than just a pie. Someone paid $1,200 for a PIE. It was, of course, for a good cause. But it seems to me that it was also a way to honor a very special woman and her faithfulness.

Sometimes, a pie is not just a pie.

Sometimes, it’s really a memory or a connection or an act of faith.

Sometimes, bread is not just bread, and sometimes eating together is not just about the food.

The disciples knew Jesus in the breaking of the bread because he’d done it before. They remembered this: sharing food, offering hospitality, building relationship, living in abundance. They remembered that, and they recognized him.

But here’s the thing: they only got the opportunity because they were willing to invite a stranger home with them and share their dinner. They only got the chance to see Jesus (he was headed another way – they begged him to come home with them) because they were willing to break free from their patterns and share their resources.

The author Sara Miles writes about her unusual conversion experience in her book, Take This Bread. She was a skeptical, secular atheist journalist living in San Francisco and grieving the recent loss of her father when she stumbled into St. Gregory’s Episcopal church. Before she really knew what was happening, she was dancing toward the altar and taking communion. She describes it this way:

“We sat down and stood up, sang and sat down, waited and listened and stood up and sang, and it was all pretty peaceful and sort of interesting.  ‘Jesus invites everyone to his table,’ the woman announced, and we started moving up in a stately dance to the table in the rotunda. It had some dishes on it, and a pottery goblet.

And then we gathered around that table. And there was more singing and standing, and someone was putting a piece of fresh, crumbly bread in my hands, saying “the body of Christ,” and handing me the goblet of sweet wine, saying “the blood of Christ,” and then something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me.”

Miles was completely unknown to the people at St. Gregory’s. She literally walked into their communion service off the street. But that taste of God led her into a transformation. She kept coming to church because she wanted to taste the bread and the wine again – she wanted to meet Jesus again and again. And that desire led her to join the congregation, and to begin feeding other people. She started a food pantry that combined worship and eating together, and the food pantry grew, and now, twelve years later, serves 1,200 families and gives away ten tons of food each week.

She was a stranger who got welcomed in, and she met Jesus there in the breaking of the bread…

The thing about eating together is that it’s really very simple. We can try forever to get the particular measurements for the table setting, or the right ingredients for a famous pie, or the proper rules for a communion service, but those things aren’t the point. The point is what happens when we sit down together at a table, share our resources, and share our lives. The point is that all are welcome, that we open our homes and our tables to everyone – even the stranger passing by as we walk down the road, and even – maybe especially - in the very midst of our own grief and confusion and uncertainty.

Because if Luke is saying what it seems he’s saying…if Jesus means what he seems to mean, that’s the only way we can recognize Christ – Christ who is already everywhere and always here with us, walking and talking and sitting down to eat with us. We open our homes and open our hearts and hopefully our eyes will be opened, and we, too, will know Christ in the breaking of the bread.

Amen.

and when

from screens and screens,
airport corridors and the adjoining seat,
grocery store lines and rush hour traffic
erupts this
manufactured outrage -
a pointed explosive perfectly aimed
to obscure,
with its hateful,
prickly
hot lava vomit,
any trace of what actually is:
the beguiling,
the seductive,
the slow, unfolding movement of body-bound human reality.

because it is,
all around,
all the time -
that glacially paced
reality
of human existence,
drawing out drama for weeks or months or millenia.
babies take decades to die.
love needs years to take hold.
cancer holds out over slow, quiet months.

infuriated, we look for a fault,
a valve to release a little steam,
to allow ourselves to keep boiling,
keep roasting.
life is too slow for us,
too gradual for our instant messages
and too long-winded to fit
in a facebook update.

so what else are we to do?
erupt.
emote all over ourselves.
and in the momentary catharsis
forget how much is left to come,
how many fellow slowgrowers we're leaving
buried in
the wake of our lava leaks.

better to simmer a while,
to linger a little longer,
to give the unfolding its due time
than to spit vitriol in an
ill-fated attempt to wrestle
God's own chronology
into our stuffy little notions
of what ought to be
and when.

april is always poetry month

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

- Margaret Piercy, "To be of use"

why not how

I've been thinking a lot about asking the right questions lately. Jeff - the pastor at my new church - preached a sermon a few weeks ago on Mark 6, the story of Jesus walking on water. We can get pretty tangled up, he said, in comparing and contrasting competing theories of how Jesus walked on water (shallow depths, freak ice floes, trick o' the eye). But the how is not the point of the story. In fact, Jesus was actually prepared to pass right by the disciples, but instead changed course to calm their fears. The how of water walking isn't the point. The point is that he saw his friends in trouble, and scared, and he had compassion on them. The real question isn't HOW Jesus walked on water, but WHY.

So, recently, I've been thinking more about the whys and less about the hows. A lot of my friends are pretty a-religious, either simply unconcerned with spirituality and religion or (unsurprisingly, if they have some church experience in their past) militantly opposed to it. Their question to me is always the same: "How can you continue to be a part of the Church? How can you persist in being associated with such a twisted, irrelevant, ineffective bunch of hypocrites?"

And, usually, I have no answer. I honestly don't know how. I mostly agree with my friends: the Church IS twisted, and irrelevant, and ineffective, and hurtful, and hypocritical. I've experienced all those things up close. I have no good answer to the question of how.

But when I started thinking about WHY I persist, a whole slew of reasons came immediately to mind. So, I tweeted them. And when Rachel Held Evans wrote this post, I commented them there, too.

I don't know how we can keep doing this thing, but I do know at least a few of the reasons WHY:

Because in the last 24 hours, I've had real conversations with toddlers, teenagers, young adults, middle aged and elderly.

Because worship reminds me which questions are worth asking.

Because church formed me and forms us into compassionate servants.

Because when there was nowhere else to go, church made a place for me.

Because of mason jar burial urns, love feast and footwashing, communal discernment, and the mystery of the holy spirit.

Because of Matthew 18, the Sermon on the Mount, Ecclesiastes and the Word becoming Flesh.

Because of Annie Dillard, Anna Mow, Mary Oliver, Ron Rash, Thomas Lynch and Flannery O'Connor.

Because of glimpses of something already and not quite here, inexplicable movement, ineffable relationship, and the possibility of transformation.

But mostly, I'm still here because I'm compelled to be here - not often convinced, but always compelled. Say what you will about that (I certainly criticize my own reasons often enough), but it's true.

teratomas and international aid

I’ve been talking this morning with my friend John, in Ghana. For the last couple of weeks, John’s been telling me about his friend Celestine, who’s lived the last three years with some kind of debilitating tumor in her abdomen. John’s been back and forth to the hospital in Accra this week, signing Celestine up for the national health care, scheduling CT and MRI scans, making sure she’s getting some much-needed protein, and covering her expenses out of his pocket.

He’s been keeping me up to date, I guess, because Celestine reminded him of me. Three years ago, I was introduced to the evil and sinister Mr. Teratoma Steve, a big ‘ol monstrous (seriously, that’s the Greek etymolygy) tumor on my right ovary. Google “teratoma” – if you’re of sound mind and strong stomach.

It was pretty scary, but really a small-ish deal in the end. The doctor in Elgin found the tumor, I flew home to Virginia, and another doctor removed Steve immediately. My health insurance covered the whole process, I got to stay on the couch in my parents’ house for six weeks of rather comfortable recovery, and things snapped mostly right back to normal (minus 1.5 teratomas and 1 ovary).

The process is different for Celestine – she’s been sitting in her house for three years while her tumor grows. Her son dropped out of school to care for her, she got so sick she couldn’t eat, and her family didn’t have the resources to get her the care she needed.

I’m grateful, and angry, and connected, and confused.

Honestly, I’m pretty skeptical and embarrassed by this kind of comparative empathy. I’m grateful for the family and the money and the medicine that allowed me to get rid of Steve so quickly and - with the help of a few Vicodin - so painlessly. But being grateful because of someone else’s lack seems incredibly coarse.

I don’t know Celestine, and I’ve never been to Ghana. I don’t know how healthcare works there, or how the Ghanaian culture thinks about and treats illness. I’ve been properly schooled in cultural sensitivity and immersed in political correctness long enough to know, at least, that there is a magnitude that I just do not know.

I’ve been reading commentary on the recent Invisible Children campaign about Joseph Kony – passionate advocacy to bring a war criminal to justice and equally impassioned critique about the operations of Invisible Children and their tactics. Some of my youth have been involved with Invisible Children for a while, and it’s obvious that it’s sparked some deep connection and compassion within them. But I also know that it’s just impossible to know everything about everything – and that all aid and advocacy is not good aid and advocacy.

So, how do we know what to do? The world is big, the problems are myriad, and it’s hard to know who to trust, what to back, where to start.

So, I’m worried and I’m anxious. I’m worried about acting out of false empathy and anxious about fueling sentimental, emotionally charged but ultimately ineffective campaigns. But there’s all this energy, all this compassion, all this connection, and it needs to go somewhere.

I’m skeptical of non-profit fundraisers and outside aid organizations imposing their expectations on people and families they’ve never met. But still, I live with reckless abundance while other people suffer. What do I do about that?

I don’t know Celestine, and I don’t know Ghana. I don’t know what’s going on with Celestine in the hospital. I don’t know how I can or should be involved. I don’t know what the answers to the big questions about aid and advocacy and cultural imperialism and global connection are, and that bothers me.

But I do know John. Three years ago, when I told him I had a tumor, he hung up the phone, got in his car, and drove from St. Louis to Chicago. He slept on my couch, calmed my anxiety, and drove me to the airport. He knew I needed something, so he did something about it. And now, three years later and half a world away, he’s doing the same thing for someone he just met.

Doing the right thing – knowing what the right thing is – usually seems like an unending battle to me. No matter how hard I try to let go and ease into some generous ethical posture of good, my brain and my being fight back against the simplicity, the imperfections, the looming possibility of not getting it right.

But here’s what I’m thinking, today: I don’t know a lot of answers, but I do know a lot of people – people in Ghana and Oregon and Germany and Indiana and Sudan and Mississippi and Bosnia and California and Ireland and Virginia, people who know people and people who know the specific suffering of those particular places.

So I think, for today, I’ll trust that. I’ll trust that connection and compassion come through real relationship, and start there. I don’t know if that’s enough or not, and I don’t know if it’s right. But it’s what I’ve got, so it’s what I’ll do.

This Weekend...

This weekend - fresh off a week of BVS Retreat in the middle o' nowhere, Illinois - has been packed to the gills with delight.

I wore these, so as to be properly attired for Saturday afternoon's bowl-a-thon:

I heard this guy play this right in front of my face:

I ate this (the one dessert with the power to annihilate any semblance of willpower I possess):

And I got to hang out with these guys:

Not too shabby, eh?

Picking Up the...Mantle

Manassas Church of the Brethren
19 February 2012
2 Kings 2: 1-12

This is the story of Elisha, and it is the story of Elijah. The passage for today is just one moment in the midst of a grand narrative, a narrative filled with love, violence, intrigue, and superhero prophets. It’s a long story, but it is a story we all already know. We might have forgotten some of the details, but we know this story.

But like all good stories, this one is worth retelling. So here’s a refresher.

Elijah is one of the towering prophetic giants in the story of Israel. He’s such a pervasive presence in the Jewish imagination that even today, Jewish people set an empty cup for Elijah every week at their Friday night seder dinner, and there’s an empty chair just for him at every circumcision. Elijah and his story linger on.

And with good reason. Elijah had quite the life. I imagine, if he had actually died (that whole being taken up in a chariot of fire is great and all, but it does sort of rob us of a proper funeral and appropriate eulogy), the preaching at his funeral would have been QUALITY.

You know Elijah’s story.

This is the guy whose prophetic career got kicked off by telling Ahab - the most sinful of all Israel’s kings - that God was sending a drought to punish him. And the drought came, and Elijah survived because RAVENS brought him water and food in the desert - sounds like a Cinderella fairytale to me, what with the woodland animals bringing in food and sustenance.

This is the guy who brought a widow’s dead son back to life just by touching him and crying out to God.

This is the guy who bested all of Baal’s prophets in that epic competition - you remember: 450 of Ahab’s Canaanite prophets went up to Mt. Carmel and called on the name of Baal for hours upon hours to send down fire on their altar, raving on cutting themselves and screaming out - to no avail. And then Elijah, the only prophet of the Lord who’s left, put his bull on the altar, doused it in water three times, prayed once, and the fire of the Lord fell immediately and consumed it all: bull, altar, stones, trench, and even licking up the water in the trench around it.

When that happened, Elijah’s message to the false prophets and their king was pretty simple: “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” It’s pretty clear who Elijah followed.

But that’s not all. This is Elijah. This is the guy who, after bringing kids back from the dead and calling down divine fire to prove God’s existence went into a cave in search of God, this is the guy who heard God NOT in the rushing wind and NOT in the earthquake and NOT in the fire, but who heard God in the sound of sheer silence.

And when he heard God, Elijah wrapped his face in his mantle - his cloak - and asked what was next. God spoke, spoke directly to Elijah out of the silence, and told him to anoint Elisha as a prophet in his place. “This work doesn’t end with you,” God told him. “This work is bigger than you are, and I’ve got plans that go beyond even your lifetime.”


So Elijah went out to find Elisha in order to anoint him. And he finds him - plowing his family’s fields. The moment of anointing is surprisingly casual in the text: “Elijah passed by him and threw his mantle over him.” That’s it. Like, “Hey, here’s a prophet’s cape, come with me.” Elisha is, understandably, a bit confused. “Just a minute, let me go tell my parents where I’m going, I’ll be right with ya.” Elijah won’t have it. “Look,” he says, “I just anointed you, man! Come on! We’ve got places to go, people to heal, kings to crown, nations to warn, prophecies to preach! We’ve got stuff to DO. Let’s GO.” So Elisha gives in, kills the very oxen he’s been using to plow, leaves his life, and follows Elijah. Just like that.

And the prophets spend ten years together: Elijah and Elisha, the super prophetic duo. They took on the nefarious King Ahab and his twisted wife, Jezebel. They spoke prophecies to King Ahaziah, and when he sent disrespectful companies of his army to talk to Elijah in his stead, they called down fire to consume them - twice. And finally, they travel a long distance together, down to Bethel, and then to Jericho, and lastly to the Jordan.

And all of that leads us here, to this moment, with the two prophets standing at the edge of the Jordan river.

The scene unfolds pretty much like you would expect it to: Elijah keeps telling Elisha to stay back - he doesn’t need to see what’s about to happen, it would only upset him. But Elisha insists on being with him. Three times, Elijah tells Elisha to let him go alone, and three times, Elisha refuses. “As the Lord lives,” he says, “and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” A company of prophets shows up, too, and they try to get Elisha to acknowledge what’s about to happen: “don’t you know that the Lord is about to take your master away from you?” But Elisha can’t hear it: “Shush!” Twice they try to get him to acknowledge the inevitable, and twice he responds, “Yes, I know, I know, now hush up about it!”

As they walk toward the river, Elijah takes off his mantle, rolls it up, and strikes the water, and the Jordan river parts in two to let the prophets cross over. Elijah asks, “what is it that you want from me, now that I’m leaving?” And Elisha - because he knows what’s about to happen and because he feels ill-equipped to carry on the work of the prophet - asks for a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, asks for the inheritance of the prophet’s power.

And then, in a flash of chariot and fire and whirlwind, Elijah is gone. He’s just gone, taken up, disappeared. And Elisha is left, alone, crying out in grief there by the waters of the Jordan river.

We know this story. But more than that, we KNOW this story, deep down in our bones. This is the story of Elijah and Elisha, but it is also the story of us: of living life with God, following faithfully, and learning as we go. It is the story of encountering God in both expected and unexpected places, the story of being attentive and the story of getting surprised. And it is the story of what happens in those moments where we find ourselves completely at a loss, grieving, confused, and feeling very alone.

You know those moments. You’ve had them, and they’re not pretty.

One of the things that I’ve been inviting the youth to try out these last few weeks is a practice called the Examen, or the Ignatian Examen, or sometimes called the Examen of Conscience. It’s an ancient monastic practice, but I stumbled into it completely by accident. In the 2nd of my three years of seminary, I found myself hanging onto some flimsy threads of leftover belief. The process of examining everything you think you know, taking it apart and figuring out how and why it fits and what it means and where it leads you is not only spiritually exhausting (and exhilirating), it’s also something of a process of loss. As I paid closer attention to my faith and relationship with God, I found that things were shifting so much that I no longer knew how to pray. I was writing papers about who God was and what God did and how we understood it all, I was arguing with a bunch of good Methodists about how some of our more radical Anabaptist beliefs and practices really were valid ways of being Christian, and in the midst of that I found that I could no longer RELATE to God. I had forgotten how to pray. And it was disturbing. Ministers - and people training how to be ministers - really OUGHT to be able to, at the very least, say a prayer, you know?

In the midst of all that swirling theological language and philosophical nonsense, I started casting around for something to keep me grounded, something that I COULD do to hold me over until I could remember how to do this very basic Christian thing. And I remembered the gratitude journal that my grandmother had given me when I was in high school. And I remembered that on certain days during college, I would be so full up of gratitude that I’d just start listing the reasons I liked the day - on my AIM away message, if y’all remember what that is. And I realized I could still do that. I could still name the moments in any given day when I felt deep gratitude, when I felt God moving close to me, when I felt the presence of the Divine. So I started listing those moments, daily. And slowly, gradually, that practice of listing the moments of gratitude began to give way back to being able to pray, back to a sense of God’s consistent presence.

I didn’t know when I started doing the Examen that I was doing the Examen. I just knew that my grandmother taught me to be grateful, that I’d tried it out before, and that it was something I was capable of doing even in the midst of that swirling seminary whirlwind.

I don’t know what your moments have been - maybe they’re similar to mine. Maybe they’ve been more subtle, or maybe less so. Maybe they’ve been brought on by inciting incidents that were out of your control, or maybe you just found yourself sometime in a dark valley during the long walk that faith entails. You know your own moments.

Elisha was having one of THESE moments - and how. He did NOT carry on without a blip when Elijah disappeared on him. He did NOT immediately dust himself off and move on, valiantly taking up exactly where Elijah left off. No, Elisha screamed! He cried, he grabbed his clothes and ripped them in two, and I imagine he fell down weeping on the ground beside the Jordan River.

Can you picture this scene? It’s so vivid and so familiar that it plays in my head like a movie montage. Elisha, weeping and screaming and falling down in grief. And then:

And then, slowly, Elisha calms down. His tears slow and his eyes open, and he remembers to pay attention to what’s going on around him. I imagine his glance slides over the riverbank, and his eye gets caught on the piece of fabric lying there. What’s this? Oh, Elijah has left something behind, after all! And Elisha gets up, walks toward the pile of cloth, and kind of wonderingly picks it up. It’s Elijah’s mantle - the one he covered his face with when he heard God’s voice, the one he casually threw over Elisha’s shoulders when he called him to be a prophet, the one he rolled up and used to part the waters of the Jordan.

Elisha picks up the mantle, and Elisha remembers: there is something yet left to do. This story doesn’t end here with this weird glimpse of God in chariot and fire. This story doesn’t end in grief and confusion. This story is larger than one prophet, even a great prophet. Elisha’s master taught him what he had to do, and Elisha knows how to be a prophet - he trained with the best for ten years. And so, he picks up the mantle, and he decides to try it out. He rolls it up - just like he saw Elijah do not an hour ago - he brings it up over his head, and he calls on the Lord, Elijah’s God. And he strikes the water, and the water divides in two. And Elisha crosses over.

What I find so intriguing about this moment is that Elisha - even though he has training and experience and has been called by Elijah, God’s very own prophet - even though he KNOWS what it is he needs to do, he still doesn’t know how to move forward. He still casts around, looking for some direction, some confirmation, some encouragement.

And what’s even more intriguing: he finds it. Elijah has been taken up into the heavens, but he has very strategically - or not - left behind his mantle, the symbol of prophetic power and the tool Elisha needs to find the courage to cross back over the River and get back to business.

It’s hard to say this without sounding trite, but I wonder: what are the mantles in our own lives? What are the things that remind us of what we are to do? What are the things that assure us of God’s continued and unending presence with us, even in those moments of great confusion, grief, and despair? What are the things that convince us to keep going, to continue living as characters in the great, grand narrative of God’s work in our world?

I don’t know all the answers to those questions. I think mantles come in all shapes and sizes. I think they come as simple practices of gratitude and attentiveness. I think they come as wise mentors, guides, and saints who show us where to look and what to do. I think they come in great big revelations, and I think they come in the quiet assurance of familiar routine.

Whatever these mantles are, it seems to me that we find them only by sticking close to God. Elijah keeps telling Elisha to stay behind, and Elisha refuses, again and again. “As long as you live, and as long as the Lord lives,” he vows, “I will not leave you.” And that seems like our call, too - to stick close to our Lord, to watch and practice and soak up every bit of presence that we can, so that when those moments of crisis come we can be reminded: somewhere around here, there’s a mantle lying on the ground. I better see if I can find it, and cross back over that river.

Amen.