Two of the people I compare myself and my life with the most are my father (middle) and my grandfather (his father, left). These pictures were taken somewhere around 1905, 1950ish and 1976-7. Each of us grew up in Oxford, Maryland. It’s safe to say that there is no place in the world that any of us felt or feels more at home when it comes to a location.
Things I have learned from my father: it’s possible to be a lot like someone in character and disposition while also being very different in terms of the gifts you have and the passions you pursue; sports and a love of sports is absolutely a love language; the happiness of your children is a life goal and aspiration and a moving target that as a parent you can never hit; you can say a lot with very few words; time spent with family in any location is something to be treasured; there is grace in putting others before yourself that it is not possible to know any other way; the word “damnit” is a catch-all—tone means everything.
My Dad was born in Oxford in 1944 and lived on a small farm in the town of Oxford, which would be a trip to think of there now. My aunt lives in the house they grew up in. He went to school in the building that is now the Oxford Community Center, then to Easton High School, then to Severn High School, then to the University of Virginia. He met my Mom for the first time when they were about 14 and 13 years old.
He graduated from UVA in 1966. The Vietnam War was going on. He enlisted in the U.S. Army. He got lucky and was sent to Germany, where he lived for three years.
He came back to Oxford, he and my Mom bought the house where my sister and I grew up and where they lived until 2021 when the house burned down.
He got a job as an accountant working for Fall Casson for a few years until he and three others took a chance and went out on their own starting Beatty Satchell & Company, a CPA firm. My Dad was known as “Mr. & Company” because he thought it looked tacky to have too many names on a business and didn’t need his name listed. Of the four that started the firm, he is the only one who still works there.
My memories of him as I was growing up include tax season, fishing with he and my grandfather, his office softball team (he played first base, like Eddie Murray), cookouts on the water at the Tred Avon Yacht Club, haunted houses every year as part of the Kiwanis Club, and him being asked to be treasurer of every nonprofit organization he volunteered for.
Their parenting style has always been to let their kids find their own way, make mistakes, figure out what was important, and to be supportive in every step of the way, helping us up when we fell. I fell, and fall, a lot more than my sister did or does. I always cared less about getting in trouble and more about letting my Dad down.
I have been so incredibly lucky that from childhood to now that my Dad has always been the first person I call to share good news, the first person I turn to for advice, and the first person I look to for solace when life falls apart. And he still picks up the phone.
We’ve been to Baltimore Orioles playoff games and a World Series game, Baltimore Ravens games, including playoff wins and losses. Going to a game together when they win (playoff win pictured above) is an awesome feeling.
Yesterday, my Dad turned 80. I tear up with stuff like this because I am so full of gratitude to have him as a role model, a friend, a grandfather to the girls—for them to get to know and appreciate him like I do—as someone who our family gets to share the joys, sorrows, confusion, wonder, and all the best stuff of life with. One of my all-time and forever favorite sounds and experiences is him laughing.
Turning 80. What a gift. The person having the birthday is the one who gets gifts. But it’s those of us who know and love him that get the biggest gift here.
Happy birthday, Dad. I don’t have the words to say what I actually want to say so these will have to do. I love you. We all do.
Background: Last Saturday evening there was a wedding on Saturday evening at Christ Church Easton, so we moved our Alive @ 5 contemporary music service into the Parish Hall and served dinner at the end of the service. The band was in the style of MTV Unplugged and the Parish Hall was full of good food and fellowship. The Gospel from the lectionary last weekend was Matthew 18:15-20, where Jesus outlines how to deal with conflict/sin between people in the community. With our Rector/Pastor officiating the wedding, I preached at our Saturday evening service.
“Bearing With Each Other”
“Christian conflict resolution” is not a class that would have a waiting list to get into. It comes off a bit like a root canal—necessary, but not something to look forward to.
But when you look around society and how we deal with feeling wronged, we do need some guidance. These days there are a lot of passive-aggressive outlets out there. What are some notable passive-aggressive ways to not actually deal with conflict?
If your neighbor has done something to you, you might go through the neighborhood association, or contact the town. When a friend makes us angry, we might defriend or block them on social media, or write huffy, angry comments under something we disagree with. Politicallythese days, when someone slights or disagrees with someone, the goal is to discredit, belittle, shame, and have others pile on. Nothing is resolved. And resentment becomes more deeply rooted.
When someone wrongs us, when someone sins against us, we want things to be made right, for us. Our self-righteousness demands satisfaction.
That’s not what’s going on in today’s reading. Jesus is looking at this earliest church community, not society at large. And he is giving instructions for the benefit of the sinner, whose actions are pulling him/her/them outside of the community. Jesus is giving the disciples steps to restore that person, to keep the community together.
What an unmodern concept—to care about the sinner, and about the community, more than our own sense of justice.
This is a teaching about reconciliation, and it’s reconciliation based on love and forgiveness.
It’s not easy. It’s counter-cultural. It doesn’t make sense with how our laws are written.
But community can’t be built on the law. Legalism won’t save us. If you look at most laws, including those in Scripture, they’re drawn up around doing no harm. And that’s not bad—those kinds of laws help keep us safe.
When it comes to a faith community, safety isn’t enough.
Jesus doesn’t summarize the commandments by saying, “don’t harm God and don’t harm your neighbors.”
We’re called to love.
God doesn’t want us to coexist (though the sentiment on those blue bumper stickers is better than the alternative of wiping each other completely out of existence).
God wants us to thrive. To help one another. To be there for each other. To love one another.
Both Paul, writing today’s New Testament reading, and Jesus, speaking in today’s Gospel, want to make sure we get the message loud and clear.
When we love, we more than fulfill the law. And Jesus looks at conflict within the church community through love.
When there is conflict, where someone is going astray: deal with it, fix it, work it out. This is where things get hard for us, especially in a church. Historically, churches have publicly fallen on their faces with conflict resolution on big issues. Look at how many scandals and atrocities have been dealt with by the church, by transferring an offending clergyperson somewhere else—out of sight, out of mind, not our problem. That’s conflict, that’s crime, and that’s reconciliation on a different scale, but it’s real and something the church has to deal with in order to be the example it needs to be in the world.
As parishioners, on a much lesser scale, when it comes to having an issue with someone in the congregation, we might find it easier to find another church rather than work through something difficult when someone has wronged us.
Avoidance is an easier path than reconciling. And there is a cost to that.
Best-selling author, theologian and Bishop N.T. Wright says:
“Reconciliation is a huge issue today. We can see the results of not doing it: suicide bombs, campaigns of terror, heavy-handed repression by occupying forces. That’s on the large scale. On the small scale, we see broken marriages, shattered families, feuds between neighbors, divided churches.”
Jesus knows how hard it is going to be for the early church to stick together in community, especially once he is gone. And he goes straight at things, right up front.
He says, first, try to work it out between the two of you. If that doesn’t work, take a couple people with you. Expand that circle slowly. Allow the person to save face as much as possible.
Jesus doesn’t say—talk about that person, gossip, try to get everyone on your side. Instead, deal with it quickly and between the two of you.
Let’s remember the goal: bringing the sinner back into the fold, keeping the community together. All while dealing with what happened.
Here is N.T. Wright again:
“Forgiveness doesn’t mean saying “it didn’t really happen” or “it didn’t really matter.” Forgiveness is when it did happen and it did matter, and you’re going to deal with it and end up loving and accepting one another again anyway.”
We are sinners, all of us. We all mess up. We all fall off the path we are trying to walk. Forgiveness, grace, love—how God deals with us, is how we are to deal with each other.
What does the church need? Reconciliation (that’s our word of the night). The mission of the church is to reconcile the world to God. To do that, we have to model it in our midst. Not in some abstract way, but right down into the details of our lives and how we treat each other.
There’s a part of this reading that is easy to miss. Jesus tells the disciples that when an offender refuses to listen even to the church, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
Let them go, as outsiders.
What do we know about Matthew from the text a few weeks ago? He’s a tax collector. And Jesus still loved and restored him. Even in continued disagreement and going separate ways, the goal is still restoration.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer has a little book called “Life Together,” where he looks at Christian community. He says that when it comes to ministry in a community, listening, active helpfulness, and bearing with others are foundational. He says it is hard to bear the sin of another person because it breaks fellowship with God and with his brother.
“It is only in bearing with him that the great grace of God becomes wholly plain. To cherish no contempt for the sinner but rather to prize the privilege of bearing him means not to have to give him up as lost, to be able to accept him, to preserve fellowship with him through forgiveness… As Christ bore and received us as sinners so we in fellowship may bear and receive sinners into the fellowship of Jesus Christ through the forgiving of sins.”
And Bonhoeffer ties it together saying that “where ministry of listening, active helpfulness, and bearing with others is faithfully performed, the ultimate and highest service can also be rendered, namely, the ministry of the Word of God.”
If as a community, we aren’t oriented towards listening, actively helping, and bearing with others, we are going to have a hard time ministering the Word of God to others. Because where would it be found in our lives and our community?
And then we get to these incredible last lines of the reading: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
How many people have heard that line before? How many have used it in the context of gathering together? And how many realized that Matthew includes those words from Jesus, here, when he is talking about sin, disagreement, and reconciliation—not at the Last Supper, or the Sermon on the Mount, or some hopeful healing or miracle. It’s here, where or when we are struggling, maybe even divided, that we need to remember and call on his presence among us.
If we as the church are going to reconcile the world to God, we aren’t going to do it on our own. We need God’s help. Thankfully, God has already done the work, in and through Jesus, who is with us, always.
And if we are going to call on his name, and continue his work, we’ve got to work through the tough stuff, not brush it under the rug and pretend it didn’t happen.
We’ve got to listen, we’ve got to help, we’ve got to bear with each other. That’s what love and forgiveness look like.
Amen.
Bonus quote, which we used in our Zoom discussion about the Gospel reading on Sunday morning. The quote comes from Padraig O’Tuama’s book, “Daily Prayer With the Corrymeela Community”–
“Listening is a sacrament when the topic is important, and when strife divides people in small places, the sacrament of listening is vital. So many people and so many places in the world have difficult relationships with difference. We seek to practice the art of hospitality in the places of hostility, and in so doing practice kindness in places the most in need of kindness.”
Sometimes I’m drawn forward and sometimes I am turned to circle back, usually so I can pick something up I need to go forward. That’s an eyebrow-raising, quizzical-look statement, I know. Let’s try this:
This past weekend, I went for a run–my first run since early April. It was slow, but it didn’t matter–the smile on my face running through John Ford Park, saying good morning to folks I encountered, feeling air in my lungs and my feet in motion, even if stumbling slowly, was something I have been missing.
Running, skateboarding, and writing are three life-giving activities I discovered in my early teens that sustain and stoke me in my early 50s. There is a thread that connects them.
“There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding. You don’t ever let go of the thread.“
Nepo writes, “To discover the thread that goes through everything is the main reason to listen, express, and write… I began to realize that listening, expressing, and writing are the means by which we stay clear, the inner practices by which we realize our connection to other souls and a living Universe.” Then he invites us to think about, write about, and try to discern what that thread is for us, individually. What is the constant that is with you, through joy, pain, sadness, lows, highs, that makes you, you?
As I sat there, coffee, sunlight, and summer-breeze-fueled, scratching out a few notes, the thing that hit me was: a sense of wonder. That’s the thread. From marveling at honeysuckle and marsh grasses in the neighborhood as a kid, to Morning Glories and Great Blue Herons as an adult, a childlike sense of wonder has underpinned it all.
Nepo is a writer I’ve just found. He circled me back to Stafford and a poem I’ve been reading for years–something I needed to pick back up to move forward with new eyes.
Running, skateboarding, and writing have been wonder-stokers for me all along. Somehow they have distilled over time to where the wonder is there now as soon as I step on a board, pick up a pen, or put running shoe to pavement.
Yesterday morning, Landy Cook and I met at the Oxford Conservation Park to start the week off with a sunrise longboarding adventure. The sun was smiling with us and lent its rays to every moment and every photo. It was a morning to catch up, to laugh, to skate, to enjoy the moments, to breathe in the day. It’s a place we skate frequently, it’s not new scenery, but every morning is its own, there is always something new or different to catch, to appreciate, to be grateful for.
For me, part of those experiences, those moments, of being given a gift, is wanting to communicate it, to share it, maybe if I am lucky to wake something up for someone else, to connect in some way.
Nepo says it: “listening, expressing, and writing are the means by which we stay clear, the inner practices by which we realize our connection to other souls and a living Universe.” That’s what writing brings to my aesthetic and Spirit-filled table. Even rolling on a skateboard, I make sure to have a pocket notebook and pen to try to catch something of the wonder of the experience.
A couple weeks ago I was sent back to another favorite writer, John O’Donohue. Last summer we led a small group discussing his book, “Anam Cara.” A friend from church continues to read and reflect on it regularly and he wanted to pass along a copy to someone who is going through profound loss, hoping it might give them something to latch onto–perspective, compassion, care, connection, hope.
The class last summer was right around this time of year and a memory, a quote from “Anam Cara” circled its way back in front of me. It’s a thought that struck me as something Holly has been working through after coming back from a 12-day mission trip to Amazon river villages in Peru, where the life of the villagers was deliberate, present, and connected to the days and nights, the land, and each other. O’Donohue wrote:
“It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here.”
The miracle, the wonder, of being here. That’s our connection to each other, other living souls, to God, to the living Universe; whether we are in Peru, the backyard, or skateboarding with the sunrise.
“Unabashed” is a word we might get to know better. It’s defined different places as “not embarrassed, disconcerted, or ashamed,” and “undisguised, unapologetic.” It’s a word that is tough to live into for thoughtful, humble people who are concerned how people might take what they think or feel. Unfortunately, the flipside is that there are plenty of thoughtless people for whom being unabashed comes easily.
I am grateful when I get reminders to pick up favorite books of my shelf and re-read them. Dorchester County Public Library gave me my most recent reminder when they promoted a program for Ross Gay’s book “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” (really such a great title, without even reading the book).
“Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.”
A community orchard in Bloomington, Indiana, informs Gay’s take on gratitude, together with his experience gardening.
“…In this neck of the woods you have to prune a peach tree if you don’t want the fruit to rot, if you don’t want all that fragrant grandstanding to be for naught.”
He mourns the life cycle and necessary work to a tree in his poem “the opening” and continues:
“…This is how, every spring, I promise the fruit will swell with sugar: by bringing in the air and light– until, like the old-timers say, the tree is open enough for a bird to fly through.”
And he talks about two cardinals and a blue jay flying through and a little grayish bird that sings a song “half dirge, half disco.” There is maybe one of the best and most memorable descriptions for a life fully felt and fully lived, “half dirge, half disco.”
I’m a fan of sunrises and sunsets. I will stop what I am doing, turn away from a conversation (though generally I am still listening) to take in those fleeting moments. The fact that they are only there for a few minutes is what makes them beautiful. You have to catch them as they happen–you can’t tell a sunset you’ll get back to it, or ask it to hold on. You’ve got to give it your full attention. Appreciate the whole scene and everything going on around it. Drink it in.
Life is that way. It is full of moments and if we want to live it to the fullest, we have to pay attention to all the moments we can.
In the title poem, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” Gay says:
“Thank you to the woman barefoot in a gaudy dress for stopping her car in the middle of the road and the tractor trailer behind her, and the van behind it, whisking a turtle off the road.”
And I think of so many of my friends who do that and fill the social media feed with turtle rescue photos and every single one of them gives me a little hope for humanity. Even though after we stopped to move a turtle on the way to Hoopers Island a couple weeks ago, the truck going by didn’t much appreciate the effort. It’s all part of it.
I have so many lines and parts and images from Gay’s catalog underlined and tucked into my heart, I hardly know what to share. But I like this notion of community:
“we dreamt an orchard that way, furrowing our brows, and hauling our wheelbarrows, and sweating through our shirts, and less than a year later there was a party at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth”
Dreaming together, thinking together, cultivating together, working together, celebrating together. I just finished re-reading Gay’s catalog. If you want to get a different, deeper, more inclusive picture of what we can be grateful for, give it a read. DCPL can help you to that end. And maybe come out for the program at the Dorchester Center for the Arts–I have found that my appreciation and perspective for every book I have read and been moved by has deepened from discussing and sharing and listening to what others have taken from the same book.
In the meantime, I am going to pick back up Gay’s “Book of Delights,” his record of small joys that are so easy for us to overlook. And I’m going to continue to try to bring gratitude to each day, unabashedly, sharing as much as I can, one sunset, one moment, at a time.
Some prayers move, they wander, they surf like a skateboard, they stop to look at birds or sit under a tree. Some prayers stop to pick up a six pack. Some prayers start while reading and writing next to the river and keep going sitting in a salon where my daughter is getting box braids in her hair to get ready for surgery on Monday.
U2’s “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” plays from the speakers, which makes me smile because a couple days ago Ava mentioned having that song on her playlist.
My prayer reads Brenda Miller’s “The Shape of Emptiness “ where a creative writing student whose mother had just died passes out Playdough to the class and has them squeeze it in their hands and then puts all their “hands” on a table at the front of the classroom. Miller says, “He made visible the air we never see.” And then:
“When he finishes reading he gathers our hands and gives them back to us one by one. We take them from him carefully so we can carry our emptiness into the day. We compare them, showing off the shape of our grasping. Curved like prayers. Like anger. Like love.”
God, maybe our prayers are like those hands, our grasping to fill emptiness, trying to bridge the distance between us. Sometimes that distance is wide and tough to cross. Other days we are sitting next to each other by the river smiling the same smile, thinking the same thoughts.
Lord, my prayer is written on my heart and it is for Ava on Monday and the next couple weeks, that all goes well and the surgeons and neurologists and medical team find what they need to know and that their knowledge brings hope.
Some prayers last for a couple days and have more silence in them than words. I know you appreciate the silence, Lord, because sometimes the world is too noisy. And silence speaks louder.
My prayer, God, is about love and right now love is sitting in a salon and being so full that words either pour out or nothing will come. Right now, love looks like box braids and someone taking the time and care to help my daughter so she doesn’t have to have her head shaved.
Some prayers take weeks, months, years. Some prayers run out of ink as I write them, run out of words as I speak them, and take an entire life to say what I need to say and listen for what I need to hear.
Some prayers are to be continued. Just like our love. Just like your love. And all of them are written on our hearts and with our lives, which belong to you.
There is something about this time of year. As Fr. Bill Ortt points out, the word “Lent” comes from an Old English word that means “lengthen”—for the days getting longer. It’s not the spring is here yet, but we are moving in that direction. The magnolia tree in our front yard attests to that (as do the neighbors saying, “there he is in the yard staring at and taking pictures of the tree again…”).
This week we end a long study of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. And we start both Zoom and in-person studies of Debie Thomas’s “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.”
Talking about Romans, Rev. Jay Sidebotham in his book, “Conversations with Scripture: Romans” writes:
“Paul offers specific examples of what a community transformed by grace looks like. It is a community of righteousness, a matter of being in right relationship with each other. That community will be marked by a willingness to forgo one’s own agenda for the better of another, most definitely a countercultural thing to do… The Christian community is to be marked by a spirit that honors the other.”
For Paul, it was the impossible task of unifying the Jewish believers in Christ with the Gentiles–something that had never been done. It’s telling that we have had more than 2,000 years to work at this, but we seem to have taken steps backwards at welcoming and honoring the outsider, the other. That is something to think about and pray on during Lent (and beyond).
In society today, we’ve decided that faith is a personal/individual thing, it’s between us and God. But I wonder what happens if we poke our individual faith with a stick.
In the first essay in “Into the Mess,” Thomas looks at Luke’s Gospel, (1:26-38) where the angel Gabriel tells Mary what’s going on with her and how God is calling her. Thomas talks about what a shocking and impossible reality was being opened up for Mary. And after the angel leaves:
“(Mary) has to consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. She has to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites–that beyond all easy platitudes and pieties of religion, we serve a God who dwells in mystery. If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we will face periods of bewilderment… (leading to) it’s when our inherited beliefs collide with the messy circumstances of our lives that we go from a two-dimensional faith to one that is vibrant and textured.”
For both Mary and Paul, when they said yes to their callings/journeys with God, their lives got more difficult, harder to bear, not easier. For some of us, that kind of poking may be uncomfortable. It’s meant to be.
Thomas goes on to talk about the cost of loving, “to love anyone in this broken world takes tenacity and grit, long-suffering and great strength.” She goes from talking about Mary, to talking about us:
“The particularities of our own stories might differ from Mary’s, but the weight and cost of ‘bearing’ remain the same–and so does the grace. When we consent to bear the unbearable, we learn a new kind of hope. A hope set free from expectation and frenzy. A resurrected hope that doesn’t need or want easy answers. A hope that accepts the grayness of things and leaves room for mystery.”
Bearing the love for another in the world has its cost and its grace. Bearing the love of Christ in the world–being those who love God, welcome and love the outsider/other, those who feed the poor, heal the sick, or simply those who try to understand and love those who are difficult for us to understand or love–has its cost and its grace.
Faith isn’t an individual matter of being rescued from the mess, it is a choice to meet God in the mess, where He is, and we are, needed.
At Christ Church Easton, Fr. Bill has declared this Lent to be a season of healing, a time of sharing our stories and listening to others; of helping to find and spark hope for each other.
Tell us your story about where God entered your life and did something unexpected and remarkable. Share your story of healing.
The days are getting longer. We have a season where creation around us is going green and things are starting to blossom. We can use this season to draw closer to God and to encourage each other. We can bear the love of Christ into the world and in the process expand our faith into something vibrant and textured that embraces the messiness and mystery of life.
Sitting by the river with a strong breeze moving the water and blowing against one side of my face while the sun warms the other.
I woke up in a warm house, while it was still dark and made coffee. Made a to-go breakfast for my older daughter for her drive to work. I laughed with my younger daughter taking her to school.
Now I am sitting in the sun and the wind by the water praying, reading, writing, listening, smiling.
Behind me is a cemetery where my grandparents, family members, and friends rest peacefully. Memories and love dance between us and connect us.
The books in front of me are titled “Pilgrim” and “Gold.”
Talking to God, Rumi writes:
“Today you arrived beaming with laughter– that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.
You are hope’s beating heart. You are a doorway to the sun. You are the one I seek and the one who seeks me. Beginning and end.
You greet need with generous hands. You flood us with spirit,
ringing from the heart, lifting thought.”
Reading this, he and I say it together. I like to think God smiles in the sunlight.
Across the cove the sun and the wind dress a weeping willow tree. Geese float tucked away from the tide.
When I am fully here, in this moment, with a full heart and an open mind, and time alone with God, what more can I ask for? I am not alone.
Thank you for this view. Thank you for this day. Thank you for this life. Thank you for your love.
Amen.
* My practice/devotion for Lent this year is to write a “proem” (prayer-poem-prose) in the spirit of Brian Doyle each day of the season. I will share some of them.This is day #3.
Life has felt large and open and raw of late, where prayers, feelings, experiences and thoughts are all super charged.
There are plenty of reasons: Ava’s stereotactic neurosurgery is on Monday; Anna turns 21 on Tuesday and Ava turns 18 in mid-February; we’ve past the half-way point in our Romans Bible studies; seminary is stirring good things up and Kelsey Spiker and I just became postulants, the next designation in the path to ordination to the priesthood; even occasional preaching is a full-body experience; gearing up for Lent small groups; and the girls had their first ever snow skiing experiences, which was a trip with Holly and her kids as well as many teen and twenty-something friends.
Life has an open feeling, which is both filling and fulfilling and taxing and shaky sometimes.
Studying for a Saturday seminary day retreat, Rev. Susie Leight has us reading and thinking about the spirituality of the priesthood, which included excerpts from Barbara Brown Taylor’s “The Preaching Life” and Gordon W. Lathrop’s “The Pastor: A Spirituality.” Lathrop recalls an experience in a Swiss airport where he read a quote on a poster from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, written in French. Lathrop translated it literally to say:
“As a profound thirst: the desire to be a human being among human beings.”
A deep and profound desire to be a human being–someone who lives and feels, who is flawed and who needs others–among human beings. To be in community and to be allowed to be fully ourselves. This is what it is to be open, to be honest, to be vulnerable, which is not instantly a comfortable place to be.
Thursday we had a class discussing Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Life on Mars,” which is one of my favorite books. The discussion was about space and time, love, loss, grief, dancing, intimacy, language–it was flung like stars around the minds and hearts of those there. The last poem read was titled, “The Weather in Space”–
Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we’re certain to lose, so alive–
Faces radiant with panic.
That is part of the challenge of being human, loss and fear are always in the mix with us. It’s a lot and sometimes we want to–I want to–shut the faucet off. But that’s not why we’re here. That’s not why I am here.
On Tuesday morning, I was thinking ahead to this weekend’s Gospel reading, which is Matthew 5:1-12, commonly known as the Beatitudes:
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.“
I’ve been in a habit of looking to see if Debie Thomas has anything to say about a particular Bible passage in her book “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.” And reading her take on the Beatitudes, it hit me that her book would make an incredible Lent study, looking at and discussing different aspects of Jesus’s life. Here is a bit of her take on the reading:
“What Jesus bears witness to in the Beatitudes is God’s unwavering proximity to pain, suffering, sorrow, and loss. God is nearest to those who are lowly, oppressed, unwanted and broken. God isn’t obsessed with the shiny and the impressive; God is too busy sticking close to what’s messy, chaotic, unruly, and unattractive.”
She goes further:
“I think what Jesus is saying in the Beatitudes is that I have something to learn about discipleship that my privileged life circumstances will not teach me. Something to grasp about the beauty, glory, and freedom of the Christian life that I will never grasp until God becomes my all, my go-to, my starting and ending place. Something to recognize about the radical counter-intuitiveness of God’s priorities and promises. Something to notice about the obfuscating power of plenty to blind me to my own emptiness. Something to gain from the humility that says, ‘The people I think I am superior to have everything to teach me. Maybe it’s time to pay attention.'”
If I want to be a human being among human beings, I have to be open to, to learn from, to love, those whom God loves: everyone. More than that, if as followers of Christ, we look to do God’s work in the world, we have to be, we have to show, we have to act out in faith the love that God makes real here and now, especially to those who feel alienated or shut off from it.
In teaching the Beatitudes, Jesus is turning the world and what we think we know about it, on its head. This is something he does frequently in his teachings and his parables. We should ask why.
Next week we will discuss poet Joy Harjo’s book “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.” In “Talking with the Sun,” she writes:
After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are a part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us overhead. When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are renewed. There is no mistaking this connection, though Walmart might be just down the road. Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of meaning.
To be a human being among human beings is also to be human in and as a part of God’s Creation. Which He asks us to be stewards of, to take care of.
Humans are vulnerable and rely on kindnesses. When I try to live with my heart open, I have a greater sense of, and gratitude for these kindnesses–kindnesses that can come from anywhere and anyone. Any one of us. Even me.
Thankfully, life rarely comes down to desert island preferences. You know the scenarios: if you were stranded on a desert island and could only have five albums, or if you could only eat one kind of food, or if you had to watch one movie, and on and on. But they make for great conversation scenarios. You get to know someone by cutting through all the white noise and cocktail party chatter and learn something about what is important to that person. And those questions often circle back to things like music, food, books–things that open up something about what we love.
Here is one for me: if I could only read one genre of writing for the rest of my life, it would be poetry. I don’t have to think about it, I don’t need the Final Jeopardy music playing, I can say that instantly. Poetry fills my soul, speaks to my heart, and expands my mind in ways that no other kind of writing can.
When John and I thought about what poets to discuss for that class, we went with some of the well-known writers; it’s maybe a stretch to say that a poet other than Shakespeare can be a household name, but Milton, Blake, and Wordsworth are close. Talking about a class for this winter and what poets read and talk about, we had a different approach.
Poetry often seems to be the realm of old, dead white guys. What if for a follow up, we let people know that poetry is as meaningful, powerful, and relevant today, that poetry matters and has a much broader range of accomplished writers than those from the past. Let’s look at three living women of color who are carrying on the mantel.
Tracy K. Smith, Joy Harjo, and Rita Dove have won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and just about any other recognition you can think of for their writing. And they have each served as Poet Laureates of the United States.
Smith’s book, “Life on Mars,” Harjo’s “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings,” and Dove’s “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” have come out in 2011, 2015, and 2022: they are recent, relevant, and are evidence that these writers, these women, are wrestling with and trying to make sense out of life, experience, and so many of the alienating forces at work in the world. These are writers, and books, that belong on our bookshelves and in our hearts and minds as we try to walk through life doing the same.
I go back to Robin Williams’ line from the movie Dead Poets Society frequently because I think it says it so powerfully:
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
Or maybe we give the floor to Tracy K. Smith, the first poet we will read and discuss in our class. “Life on Mars” is a book that took a hold of me from the first time I picked it up. Smith’s father was an engineer on the Hubble Telescope, which is something that comes out in her searching and brilliant poem, “My God, It’s Full of Stars.” You can read more about Smith and hear her read from that poem at the link.
Smith talks about why she loves poetry:
That’s a lofty but worthwhile goal. It’s part of the hope of a class like this: that the world we return to after reading and discussing Smith, Harjo, and Dove might seem fuller and more comprehensible as a result.
This week, I was asked to lead our Wednesday morning healing prayer service. It’s a small, wonderful, heartfelt and Spirit-led service, which is held every Wednesday at 10:00am. The Gospel reading for the morning was Matthew 22:34-40, which is Jesus answering the question, which is the greatest commandment. I’m including the reading below and then the homily I gave in response to it:
Matthew 22:34-40 NRSV
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
“Let Love Become a Reality”
I love when people asked Jesus questions. Depending on who was asking, they didn’t always love his responses, or the questions he asked back to them.
But I think Jesus also had in mind the spirit in which the questions were asked. Thinking of John’s Gospel—both Nikodemus and the woman at the well were trying to understand. And Jesus encouraged them. Here and elsewhere, when the Pharisees, Sadducees, and lawyers asked questions, it was often to try to trip him up, to trick him into saying the wrong thing so they could discredit him or have him arrested.
Here we have an expert in the law asking him which commandment is the greatest?
So Jesus goes to Scripture, he pulls from Deuteronomy 6:5, part of the Shema, the creed of Judaism, for “Love the Lord your God,” and to Leviticus 19:18 for “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
On these two commandments, hang all the Law and the Prophets. He’s given a perfect legal answer. And he’s done something even more to confound the law expert.
Michael Green in his book “The Message of Matthew,” points out that “For people who, like this expert in the law, were strong on ethics and weak on relationships, this strongly relational teaching was a revealing mirror of the heart.”
Strong on ethics, weak on relationships. A mirror of the heart. When I think about a lot of people today—we are strong on ideas, maybe strong on convictions, but not so great on relationships. We want to label people as different from us and say therefore they are wrong. Our tendency is to distance ourselves rather than drawing closer, rather than trying to understand or to love.
When we think of God and our neighbors in terms of relationships, in terms of beings who we are called to love, we have to get off of our high horses. If we try to love God with everything we have, we also have to love his creation, and the people he created.
Green writes:
“If there is real love for God, there will inevitably be real love for neighbor; God’s overflowing love is infectious. The criterion of whether love for God is real is whether or not it is reflected in our relationships with others. And it will not do to say, as many do, ‘I don’t do any harm to anyone.’ That is not only negative, but it neglects the first and great commandment, to put God as number one in our lives. With God first and neighbor second, all else in the law is commentary.”
To make a go at loving, we have to have softer hearts, our hearts need to be renewed—we can’t just be following orders (the law).
How do we do this? It doesn’t happen all at once. It takes time.
Our friend and brother John Coleman points out that as a police officer, he responds differently to situations today than he did 25 years ago. He always did his job and responded according to law, but now his first response is based much more in love and understanding, then when he was newer at the job. He credits both God and time with working on him.
I can tell you from my own experience that I think and feel and respond differently now to things than I did five years ago. And that has been five years of studying Scripture, of prayer and worship, of spiritual friendships and encouragement. When we use the term Christian formation, we are hoping, working to be formed in a more Christ-like way.
I hope I continue to grow and learn and improve how I love God and love my neighbor.
Reflecting on this passage in Matthew, N.T. Wright (in his book “Matthew for Everyone”) says:
“The heart doesn’t seem to get renewed all in one go. Many, many bits of darkness and impurity still lurk in its depths, and sometimes take a lot of work, prayer, and counsel to dig out and replace with the love which we all agree should really be there.”
I’m thinking of Paul writing in Romans where he says, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.” I think we all can relate to Paul’s dilemma sometimes.
Given the fact that we are standing here together at a healing service on Wednesday morning, I think we all know it is right and a good thing to love God and love our neighbor. We can agree both that that is what we are supposed to do and that it is what we are commanded to do.
But it has to be more than a command, it has to be more than instructions to follow.
Wright says:
Commandments “come into their own when they are seen not as orders to be obeyed in our own strength, but as invitations and promises to a new way of life in which, bit by bit, hatred and pride can be left behind and love can become a reality.”
There it is: an invitation, a promise to a new way of life where we leave behind hatred and pride and love becomes our reality. Let’s make that our prayer, let’s make that our guiding star.
If we go back to the scene, this encounter that Matthew gives us: Jesus is answering the question posed to him by a legal expert, and he gives a brilliant answer.
If we love God with all our heart, mind, and soul—we’re not going to put idols above him, we’re not going to have other gods before him, we’re not going to take his name in vain, and on down the list.
And if we truly love our neighbor as ourselves, that should take care of murder, stealing, coveting, adultery, bearing false witness.
Jesus gives us the Cliff Notes, the summary, the thing we can memorize or a cheat sheet we can put in our pockets and refer to when we need it—you know, for when we don’t have our Bibles with us or don’t have the time to look up the answers about the law.
But it’s so much more than that. It can be a basis for a new way of life, a better way of life.
The poet Pablo Neruda wrote in his love sonnets:
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
What if we think about knowing and loving God that intimately. What if we have God’s love so much in our hearts and in our lives that we become that love when we think, when we feel, when we pray, and when we act. What if we know no other way of loving, than as God loves.
What if it didn’t matter that love was a commandment, because love was simply our reality.
