This old house would have burnt down a long time ago*
I am an old woman . . . have been for a long time now . . . so long that if a baby came my way, I’d Sarah-laugh in God’s face. Babies are for the young. And I haven’t been young since, well, I can’t even remember, now, can I? And whenever I’m tempted to forget just how old I am, I get a look at my old man . . . now there’s a face worn by time. I do love the old coot, but where did all those wrinkles and folds and creases come from? I wish I remembered. We had so many dreams . . . all with child faces . . . our house would be overrun with them. No children came, and so our dreams died.
Make me an angel that flies from Montgom'ry
Make me a poster of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go*
I don’t have much left to hold on to. . . without the babies I should have had, life is just too hard. How is it, I sometimes wonder (although not so much anymore), that I can see their faces, know their lives, these little people of our loins who never were? Where, oh where, are my babies? How I wish I knew. Did they find other homes? Better mothers? Oh Lord, why give me this longing to never be fulfilled? I never thought you a cruel God . . . until now. I am an old woman. . . have been for a long time now. . . the children of others tease me with their smiling, winning ways . . . I reach out my arms for them only to have mothers scoop them out from under me . . . and no, Lord, I would not laugh . . . I am not Sarah . . . I am Elizabeth – satisfaction of God . . . well, Lord, you may be satisfied with me, but I am far from satisfied with you . . . there – I said it . . . will you strike me? Sometimes I wish you would . . . for this infernal, eternal – silence – mixed with my own longing, does drive me mad . . . And where, I would very much like to know, is my miracle? My Hannah’s promise fulfilled? My angel? It’s not that I’m not grateful, but he appeared to the Old Man? Really? Am I not the one to bear this son? Where, then, Satisfying One, was my angel? Most days, in my joy, I do forget this slight, this favoritism. Most days. This is not one of those days. John is gone to the wilderness. I don’t know that I’ll see him again. And I do so fear what will become of him, he speaks out so. It would have been nice on days like this to have had an angel memory to hold on to. That’s all I’m saying – it would have been nice. Please do not think me ungrateful. For this gift of a son, I am grateful. For the elimination of my shame, I am grateful. But now I am a mother and I know what I did not know before. Now I know that my own heart does reside outside my body. It resides with him. And all will not be well with him. Will it? So yes, an encouraging angel memory would have been nice. I’m going to need some bucking up in these days. So all I’m saying is that it would have been nice.
Ah John, what did you expect? I came into your lives to change them, yes, but it is still life that I came to . . . . Life of the hard things . . . the scary go-bump-in-the-night things . . . the this-can’t-be-right things . . . I expected no less . . . you, it seems, expected so much more . . . Sorry to disappoint, lad, but you see this, then, is how it had to be . . . Had to be . . . not in the sense of script-already-written predestining divine plotting – nay – had to be in the sense of how could it be otherwise . . . should I join you in the trenches of it all . . . in the love and hurt and wonder of it all . . . in the thus has it ever been querying questioning asking demanding of it all . . . This, lad, is what I came for . . . You did not know that God is a mud-wrestler by nature? They will sing of you, boy of mine . . . the one who stood the Jordan’s banks . . . the wilderness walker . . . the whisperer of nothing and shouter of everything . . . the impatient one . . . my beloved herald . . . go tell John, they will sing . . . and to him, the told and telling one, would I say . . . go ask Jacob – about mud and wrestling and things that go bump in the night . . . For then, lad, then, shall you know and understand then shall you cease your shouting and rest into the singing of me echoing down the halls of time itself then shall you, dear boy, be comforted . . .
SCRIPTURE READING: Matthew 11.2-6 (NRSV) When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
Pilgrimaging Towards Joy
The thing about pilgrimaging towards joy is that in the journey itself, we often cannot even imagine the joy that awaits us at our destination . . . and thus do we all too often lose our joy in the journeying.
So it was with John the Baptist. . . sitting in jail awaiting his sentence of execution by beheading at the hands of those who have power but no scruples . . . the ability to carry out the sentence with no understanding why they even would. . . John is on death row and death row is no place for joy.
John asks of Jesus . . . are we still awaiting our Messiah or are you the one? Jesus’ answer isn’t much comfort for John . . . the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.
John already knows all that. What John’s question is saying, in effect, is this: But what about me!?! They are going to kill me! What are you going to do about that!?!
Jesus’ literal answer is nothing. Jesus does nothing about John’s execution. There is no last minute reprieve. John must travel, as must we all one way or another, through his own death to find his paradise.
And at some level, that just seems so very unfair.
The pilgrimage that our Messiah takes and invites us to join is, like old age, most definitely not for sissies. If we have an expectation that our prayers are like ransom demands God must meet in order to have our allegiance, we expect in vain. If we condition our faith on certain outcomes, we believe in vain.
Yet it is joy towards which we journey . . . always . . . whether we know it or not . . . believe it or not . . . live it . . . or not.
It’s not the joy we expected, this present gift-wrapped in a baby’s skin only to be opened to find there lying a cross.
But it is joy.
It is the joy of Job standing speechless before the Lord.
The joy of Adam and Eve no longer in a garden but God walking alongside nonetheless.
The joy of Thomas seeing his risen Lord still bearing the wounds.
It’s the hard-scrabble joy of eking out a crop from unwilling ground. . . the joy of hoping against all hope that this journey we call life actually has a destination . . .
In the movie Empire of the Sun, a Welsh lullaby, Suo Gan is sung three times by a boy tenor . . . at the beginning, at the climax of the war and at the end.
At the beginning, life is good for this little boy of wealthy parents. At the end, there is reunion, but we don’t know what will happen after. In the middle is the crucible of life in the midst of great upheaval and death, when everything of before is overturned and rewritten.
In the beginning, the lullaby is merely a performance piece sung by boys of great privilege who happen to have lovely singing voices. There is joy there in the doing of the thing well. But this is not the joy that is our purpose, our journey.
In the end, the lullaby is the reassurance that there remains the possibility of hopes realized even after the greatest of sufferings imaginable. And this too, is joy – great joy – the joy of a child reunited with parents thought lost forever. Yet, even as great as is this joy, this is not the joy of our pilgrimaging.
In the middle is where the song finds its most poignant, most expansive, most damning, most condemning, most heart-breaking meaning . . . with no loving parent to hold, guide or protect any of them, a group of boys meet across a barbed-wire fence: Jim, the English boy in the camp stands on one side and on the other are a group of Japanese boys in uniform about to depart on kamakaze missions . . . these boys are the only ones left to send . . . in the midst of their warrior ritual sending comes the lullaby song of one lone English boy on the other side of the fence . . . singing his heart to these boys of the nation which holds him captive, he sings the song of the young everywhere . . . the lullabies once sung to them by their mothers, the only song they’ve got left . . .
It is the distant memory that things can be other than how they are, for they once were . . . there, in the singing, lies the joy of our journeying . . . the joy of walking alongside no matter how hard the journey . . . the joy of recognition as eyes meet across so many divides . . . the joy of the pilgrim, whether he flies or dies.
This is the joy of our journeying and it is holy ground.
Boys are sent flying away into a sky that will not save nor hold them.
The end, of course, gives us a hint of hope at the full circle of things as the little boy now not a little boy, rests in the arms of the mother who lost him in the crowd.
But life is the in-the-meantime part . . . the part sandwiched between all the beginnings and endings of every movie ever watched, every book ever read, ever life ever lived.
And in life, moving life, the full-circledness of it is scarcely hinted at, let alone seen or experienced. Each joy is its own. So too each loss, each arrow of pain or slight or fear or anguish. All of them must be lived.
So it is. That it is so with God as with us is beyond words remarkable, that out of this grand love affair with our kind, the God of All would empty God’s very self in order to become sufficiently small to be not just a human being, but a human baby. . .it is an act of self-sacrifice beyond my reckoning . . . this pilgrim journey Jesus took from deity to humanity and back again.
And lest we forget, in his very humanity rests the best exemplar of divinity . . . the giving over of self that all may have life and have it abundantly . . . and so it is in every house in every moment on every street . . . there stands . . . lays . . . walks . . . loves . . . lives . . . and dies . . . Jesus . . .
In the arms of a mother loving or indifferent . . . in the fields of the farmer industrious or lazy . . . in the schoolyard bully or bullied . . . in the hospital and the gymnasium . . . at the tables of peace and upon the fields of battle . . . in the dying of a child and the living of a man . . . all wrapped up into one, like the world-weary inspired salute of a child to fellow children gone off to a war not of their own making they can scarce understand . . . carrying with them the whispered memory of a mother’s lullaby . . . and there, at the crest of the sun, to die.
In the longing for Eden in this fallen garden of an earth . . . there remains an echo of a song once heard . . . almost forgotten . . . ours for the claiming . . . even when enemies stand across the barbed wire of their differences . . . even when children are sent to war . . . for even when we no longer know the words . . . the melody of a distant song calling our hearts to home remains.
Oh yes, John . . . he is most definitely the one.
_____________________________
*English translation of the verses sung in the clip above of the lullaby Suo Geer Sleep child on my bosom Cozy and warm is this; Mother's arms are tight around you, Mother's love is under my breast; Nothing may affect your napping, No man will cross you; Sleep quietly, dear child, Sleep sweetly on your mother's breast. Do not fear, nothing but a leaf Knocks, knocks on the door; Do not fear, a small lonely wave Murmurs, murmurs on the seashore; Sleep child, there's nothing here Nothing to give you a fright; Smile quietly in my bosom,
Born so auspiciously . . . they both died so shamefully . . . one beheaded to satisfy the boredom and hurt pride of a licentious woman . . . another crucified as a talisman against the fears of an oppressed people that he would bring Rome’s unwanted attentions upon them . . . both died as the butt of the jokes of others . . . both, by their very existence, made others afraid . . . and in the meantime, they lived parallel lives of joy and despair . . . and urgency . . .
These were the pride of their family, cousins we could think of as brothers of another mother – two so intertwined in their lives and their destinies that where one left off, the other began.
One is the Son of the Most High . . . the other is His prophet . . .
Both spent their youth growing and becoming strong and wise . . .
One prepares the way for the other, who will be known as The Way . . .
Both were prophets, but to paraphrase Oscar Romero, a priest murdered for his witness against the injustices of the government where he lived, John was a “prophet of a future not his own.”
Among their ancestors, jealousy was the order of the day . . . from Cain and Abel . . . to Jacob and Esau . . . to Joseph and his brothers . . . relationship led to enslavement . . . and theft . . . and murder . . . yet for these brothers of other mothers, there would be none of that . . . from the first time they met, inside their mother’s bellies, they recognized the kindred and the call in the other . . . and the younger would walk in the path laid down for him by his older cousin . . . the path leading into his own kingship . . . and death. . .
It is a paradox where one follows the other by going first . . . first into the wilderness . . . first into the prophet’s journey . . . first into baptism . . . first into death itself . . . each and every step Jesus takes bears the footprints of John going ahead . . . preparing the way . . . the way laid out from before the very beginning of time itself . . .
Today we observe and celebrate that Christ, The Risen One, is our King . . . the king who comes to us an infant in a feed trough . . . The Resounding Yes to the proverbial parental question, were you born in a barn? . . .
The King who is our brother of another mother too . . . bound in eternal kinship by our common Father . . . let us, like John, go and prepare His Way . . . in our own lives . . . in the life of the church . . . in the life of the world . . .
A READING FROM THE GOSPEL OF LUKELuke 1.68-79 (NRSV)
[John’s] father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy:
“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. He has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”Friends, this is the Word of the Lord . . . thanks be to God.
MEDITATIONOf a Father’s Love Begotten
Imagine, as you hear the Song of Zechariah, the scene . . . imagine you are there . . . who are you? Are you the proud father, lifting his child aloft, crying out with joy? Are you part of the listening crowd? As for me, I’m the baby, held securely in my father’s arms. It’s a lovely picture, but there’s something wrong in it . . . for although I am a child of God, I am no longer a baby – not in years and not in faith.
In his book The Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen points out that most of us picture ourselves in Luke’s parable as the prodigal son (the one who went away into a life of sin later to return repentant into his waiting father’s arms) . . . either that, or we see ourselves as the ‘good son’, the one who stayed faithfully at the father’s side, only to resent the warm welcome his wayward brother receives.
But as believers, says Nouwen, we are challenged by the story to place ourselves in the position of the father of open and welcoming arms, as the figure in the story who represents God . . . the first time I read that, I was stunned . . . place myself in the position of God? No! It is too much!
Yet listen to Nouwen: “A child does not remain a child . . . When the prodigal returns home, he returns not to remain a child, but to claim his sonship and become a father himself. As a returned child of God . . . the challenge now, yes the call, is to become the Father myself. I am awed by this call. . . It has taken me much spiritual work to make the elder son as well as the younger son in me turn around and receive the welcoming love of the Father. . . on many levels, I am still returning. But . . . there is a call beyond the call to return. It is the call to become the Father who welcomes home. . . Having reclaimed my sonship, I now have to claim fatherhood. . . the hands that forgive, console, heal and offer a festive meal must become my own.”Friends, we are called with John to make God’s way straight, to prepare the road God will travel into the hearts of human beings, one soul at a time. We are called away from childhood and into parenthood."
In the Exodus, God leads the people out of Egypt and into the promised land. The image of God going ahead of God’s people, making the way straight and easy for them, is one of great meaning and comfort. But in Luke, we have the reverse: the people – we – are to go ahead of God rather than God ahead of the us . . . we are to prepare God’s way, rather than God preparing our way.
The purpose of the calling to go ahead of God, to prepare God’s way, is very clear and very specific: to give to others the knowledge and comfort, as well as challenge, of the saving ways of God, to let them know that God forgives and in God’s forgiveness is God’s saving. . .
And . . . it . . . is . . . coming!
Isn’t that an incredible message? Isn’t that an amazing word of peace?
How can we be at war with ourselves or with each other in the face of such promise? How can we be anything but hopeful in the face of these promises already completed?
And so we pray: Lord, guide our feet all of our days into the ways of Your Peace. Amen.
The place of the ashes and dust of all things . . .
Jesus is chased back
back to beginnings
back to first things
back . . . back . . . back . . .
There is no going forward
for him
for us
until he has first gone back
It’s dangerous
this chaos-place
where rules haven’t yet been made
and those without wings
are dared to fly
those without bread
challenged to eat rocks
those without power
mocked to don their king robes and claim it all
There
back into that nothingness. . .
There
Jesus must go
driven there by God’s own fury
that it should be so
to the wilderness
doth Jesus go
What must it have been like
to survive all that
only to find
on his return
that John was arrested
sure to die
in the hands of such a one as Herod
unfit, surely, for even the sandals of John?
He doesn’t miss a beat
this wilderness-surviving Jesus
it’s like Messiah boot camp. . .
when you come out of that
you’re stronger
tougher
and you stand just a little bit taller
able to see what others cannot
able to see the wilderness
that lives inside
of you
able to see the face of that and live
When you survive the place where the wild things are
you just know
that whatever you do next
is enough
This is my Son
the Beloved
in him I was
I am
I will be
Pleased
And
it
and
he
is
enough
___________________
*Continuing from yesterday's post, this is the 2nd Sermon Reflection from the 1st Sunday in Lent, reflecting upon Mark 1.9-15 (Jesus' baptism, time in the wilderness and beginning ministry after the arrest of John).
