Refractions

  How she loves Just a hundred heartbeats after his birth, he lies on his mother’s skin. He is wet with newness. They warm each other. His mother has already  forgotten the pain. One day his mother will not even remember forgetting the pain. She will forget a lot of pain. Forgetting pain is how she loves.

 Just as sparks fly upward Trouble, hard as flint, and sharp, intrudes itself into every heart. We ache for loss, for shame, for wounds, we ache for knowing what we know. This is the fruit of the knowing we desired,  as the voice from our shadow  promised agency without grace, warmth without fire. Trouble is near, greedy for ruin, for death, this stalking violence we hope to deflect  with our wealth with our power,  with our prayers… …with our prayers! – what makes us think that your friendship exempts us from loss, from shame, from wounds, from knowing what we know? The sin of the world, is it the entropy of goodness,  wholeness, safety, life? Is it the trouble we’re always in, born to it just as sparks fly upward? How does the violent death of that young rabbi, in that place, at that hour,  take away this sin, free us from this trouble? I’m asking for a friend.

  Affirmation  We inhabit this truth: That God in love  created all that is, fashioned our first ancestors from earth and from each other; walked with them, brokenhearted, from the garden; befriended Abraham and Sarah,  Hagar and Ishmael, Isaac and Rebekah, Esau and Jacob and Rachel and Leah,   and in this moment looks to us as friends. We hold dear this truth: That God's child enters our midst - by the trust of Mary and the constancy of Joseph; by birth at the edge of empire, sung by the angels to shepherds; by witness of John, by baptism and desert; by healing and teaching, by a table hosting all. We trust in this truth: That the rabbi's cross is victory, and empties every grave; that the risen One speaks Mary's name, heals Peter's shame, and bears the wounds of love; that lifted beyond us yet present among us,  and promising Breath from heaven,  Jesus lives. So with all creation we stand tiptoe to catch a glimpse of truth to come. So into this ...

  Speak up. Step up. Yesterday’s attack on the United States’ Capitol building by rioters seeking to disrupt the work of the American congress, egged on by months of the president’s unhinged rhetoric – and perhaps more immediately by Rudy Giuliani’s call for “trial by combat” – is over. But the spiritual realities that nourished it remain.  All this on the western Christian feast of Epiphany, whose central act is the visit of the Magi, first to King Herod and then to the little family in Bethlehem.  That visit is followed closely by the first attempt on Jesus’ life, by means of the extra-judicial murder of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two. As was the second – and successful – attempt to bring about Jesus’ death, Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” is driven by fear and expressed as rage. Jesus survives because his father has fled with Jesus and his mother to Egypt. But the families of Bethlehem’s toddlers are shattered. I began the day as I have begun every ...

Precious Lord, take my hand,  lead me on, let me stand, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn; Through the storm, through the night,  lead me on to the light, Take my hand, precious Lord, Lead me home.  (Composed in 1932 by Thomas Dorsey as he grieved the death of his wife and newborn son) The people on the video-conference all nodded when one participant said what so many are saying in so many places.  Things are never going to be the same. The other bookend is this – Nobody knows how things are going to be. We are in the perfect place in the calendar of the church to speak about and into the loss of the familiar and the uncertainty of the outcome. You could easily call Holy Week by another name: “Things-Are-Never-Going-To-Be-The-Same Week”. The week begins with Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem and ends with his execution, with his friends and followers cowering behind locked doors. Twenty years ago a colleague, Paul Maclean, introduced m...

Mean-Time Lent 5, Year A. Ezekiel 37.1-14, Romans 8.6-11, John 11.1-45 In the past weeks, life and the absence of life have become a matter of such sharp urgency that they dominate the considerations governing our daily lives, our hourly choices. An entire world economy has been all but suspended, we adopt new language and practice (such as “social distancing”) as normal and necessary, and we begin to understand that this meantime may be longer – and meaner – than we had thought. It is as a people whose sense of life and the absence of life has become focused and could easily become anxious that Ezekiel introduces us to the bonescape in the midst of which the hand of God has set him down. “It was full of bones… and they were very dry.” It is as a people whose sense of life and the absence of life has become focused and could easily become anxious that Paul opens the question of the relationship (or not) between flesh and spirit. It is as a people whose sense of lif...

Caesar has never wanted us to know anything but the grinding juggernaut of inevitability, of just the way things are. Caesar has never wanted us to know that there is an alternative to Caesar, another way, another kind of power and a different kind of future.   Caesar has only ever offered the extension of current arrangements to create a known, predictable, imposed future. “Resistance is futile.” Mostly we accommodate ourselves to this, deliberately or by default. We argue realpolitik and “It could be worse.” Some choose to make a deal, to become agents of Caesar, entrenching his power ever more deeply in the fabric of communities and the lives of households and persons, shoring up its claim to permanence and inevitability. Some retreat – to private and ahistorical spiritualities, to addictions, to one or more of the “isms” that embody our penchant for idolatry. Some are destroyed by the greed and violence of Caesar, Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar. Some rise up violently to overthro...