meditation after the Orlando massacre

Written for the vigil held at Below Zero Lounge.
(Unrelated, no idea what's going on with the font sizes here.)

I have two things to say tonight.
One is that we need to mourn.
A man went into the Pulse night club yesterday
and opened fire and in the end
there are 49 of our brothers and sisters dead on the floor,
another 53 wounded,
hundreds mourning their loved ones,
and tens of thousands more bearing the wounds of fear.
This is bullshit.
This is not how we care for one another as human beings.
This is the time for anger and pain and misery.
We don’t want to go over the events of yesterday again, but we must.
It’s important to name the evil and the pain and the anger we feel.
When even a single person dies of natural causes, we should be sad,
we should mourn.
How much more should we mourn when so many die,
when their deaths are caused by hate and fear,
when their deaths are used as political ammunition.
It is important for us to feel sad and angry
and confused and numb and violated and unsafe
and infuriated and vulnerable.
I imagine that many of us here remember other times when we have been hurt,
when someone has tried to destroy us.
Maybe it was being beaten because of who you were holding hands with
or because of how you walked.
Maybe you’re remembering someone who was dressed like me,
a clergy person, or some other flavor of religion
that made you feel that you were wrong in your very existence.
Maybe it was harsh words, spoken low but intended for you to hear.
Maybe you’re remembering the AIDS epidemic of the 70s and 80s
or Stonewall or chemical castration and hard labor camps.
People the world has called queer for centuries
have many, many reasons to mourn today.
But…and this is one of my favorite words in the English language…but…
This is not the end of the story.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the author of the book of Psalms says,
“Weeping will endure the night but joy comes with the morning.” Weeping will endure the night but joy comes with the morning.
This one little word tells us something huge.
It’s a hinge where everything changes.
You are weeping now, of course you are,
BUT that’s not the whole of reality.
We are overwhelmed by repeated acts of violence
against the LGBTQ community and against just humans
all over the world
BUT there’s something else happening,
love and love and love and love.
My experience of the world is that God is present in that one tiny word,
calling to us in our misery and showing us what else is happening.
I need to hear this so much that I had it tattooed on my body.
Well, something similar.
It says “Everything will be okay in the end.
If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
This is the second thing I want to tell you.
Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
This is what my faith tells me, and this is what my experience tells me.
When my college friend Ed was diagnosed with HIV, we wept.
And when new drugs helped his T-cells, we rejoiced.
When Leelah took her own life, we wept.
And we came together and rejoiced
over the Cincinnati trans community.
It’s not okay right now, so it’s not the end.
Bad news is not the end of the story.
As a nation, we are fumbling our way out of homophobia
—it’s not done, but it’s happening.
Slowly.
Forty years ago at Stonewall, the police raided the bar
as they had for decades, arresting and beating the people in the bar.
Yesterday, the police did the hard work
of breaking through the wall into the Pulse,
taking out the shooter,
saving so many people.
It’s different now. They’re outside now protecting us tonight.
And we here tonight,
and others in the LGBTQ community and allies,
all across Cincinnati and beyond,
we stand up for each other,
not hiding and hoping it will all go away.
We love, all of us, deeply, openly,
in ways that may leave us open to hurt.
This community isn’t perfect—we have our own brokenness to atone for.
But—(there’s that word again)—but we will go on,
we will make art and love
and live our lives more intensely, more beautifully,
more devotedly than before.
Last night, watching the Tony’s,
I met the musical Bright Star for the first time.
Carmen Cusak sang these words that made me cry:
If you knew my story
You’d have a good story to tell
Me I’m not alone
Tell me I’m not alone
Even though I’ll stumble
Even though I’ll fall
You’ll never see me crumble
You’ll never see me crawl
If you knew my story

Your story, our story, is hard and beautiful and not over yet.


sermon on Psalm 1, privilege, and racism

Psalm 1, has a lot of meat. It reads:
1 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;
2 but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.
3 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.
4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
6 for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
On a first reading, it’s fairly innocuous.
Yes, we’re happier when we’re not terrible to each other.
We’re more fulfilled and connected to God
when we participate in what God is doing.
We are more fruitful when we pay attention to God’s desire for love.
I’m into it.
And wickedness—or sinfulness,
we often experience as that rootlessness,
that powerlessness over our wrongdoing
that the psalm describes as chaff that the wind blows away.
We get bandied about by our desires.
And we crave justice—“those wicked people need to be punished,”
maybe even “I’m so wicked I need punishment.”
We long for a just universe where good is rewarded and evil punished.
I’m still into it.
Maybe we just end the sermon here?
Maybe not.
There’s a thread in modern theology that says
this psalm and many other bits of scripture
are about something more concrete.
It’s about the haves and the have nots.
Certainly those who “have” God, as it were, and those who don’t.
But also about those who have prosperity and lots of stuff
and those who do not.
As though those things are entirely related to whether you have God.
The righteous have much, are blessed, succeed.
The wicked have little, are miserable, and fail.
So, it follows from this simple reading that
those who have little, are miserable, or fail must be wicked. And those who have much, are blessed, and succeed
are righteous.
No?
Don’t we say God helps those who help themselves?
Sure, it’s not in the Bible, but it’s true, right?
And look at statistics: look how closely crime and poverty line up.
But this reading is from a place of privilege.
Let me complexify this for us.
A number of years ago,
I took my diocese’s required Racism Awareness workshop.
There was a mix of folks from across the diocese there.
As a conversation-starter,
we were given an envelope with 26 notecards inside.
On each notecard was a question
and we were asked to put those cards into two piles:
“this does apply to me” and “this doesn’t apply to me.”
Let me share with you some of the statements on the cards.
Maybe you can keep a tally of where you’d put them:
“I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the person in charge,
I will be facing a person of my race.”
“I can turn on the television or open the front page of the paper
and see people of my race widely-represented.”
“I am rarely asked to speak for all people of my racial group.”
“I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials
that testify to the existence and contributions of their race.”
“I can worry about racism without being seen
as self-interested or self-seeking.”
“I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color
and have them more or less match my skin.”
“Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash,
I can count on my skin color not to work against
the appearance of financial responsibility.”
“If a traffic cop pulls me over, or if the IRS audits my tax return,
I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my color.”
Hearing where each person put their notecards was
—and I cannot put this dramatically enough—
earth-shaking for me.
I had put 25 of the 26 cards in the “it does apply to me” pile.
And the white folks around me were similar.
All of the people of color in the workshop
had put a majority of the notecards
in the “it doesn’t apply to me” pile.
In this moment, I had a sudden, intense, clear vision
of the privilege that I enjoy as a white person.
Just recently I read an article in which the author spoke
of grocery-shopping with her half-sister at their regular store.
Both of them are of mixed-race, but the author “passes” for white,
that is, she has more Caucasian features,
whereas her sister looks clearly black.
The sisters were in line to check out with their groceries.
The author was first in line, wrote a check, was not asked for ID,
and began bagging her groceries
while her sister’s were being scanned.
The sister then began writing a check as well
and the cashier immediately asked for ID
and looked intently, the author says “suspiciously,”
between the ID and the check.
The author called attention to this behavior,
asking what she was looking for.
The cashier replied it was policy to ask for ID.
The author asked why she herself hadn’t been asked for ID
moments before.
The store manager was called. It became a bit of an issue.
I’m aware that this is an anecdote,
but one which our black brothers and sisters
would not find surprising.
What is going on here?
I want to be clear that there are all kinds of privilege,
not just this example of embedded racism.
In this country there’s the privilege of being comfortable or even wealthy,
of being male, of being straight, of being educated.
And being privileged in some way doesn’t mean things haven’t been hard.
Of course wealthy people have depression and anxiety
and difficult family situations,
but they know they’re going to eat for the foreseeable future
and they’re going to be respected.
And of course a poor white family will have significant struggles
just as a poor black family will,
but that poor black family will have other struggles as well.
And an educated white woman might enjoy many privileges
in her hometown
but be targeted by rape and death threats in some online communities
because she is a woman.
Privilege changes and overlaps with lack-of privilege
—we call this intersectionality.
Now, I suspect that by my bringing this up in church,
some folks out there are tensing up.
If it’s because you disagree with me, I understand, but please hear me out.
I think scripture has something to speak into our lives here
that’s both difficult and freeing.
If it’s because we don’t talk about this kind of stuff in church,
I have to ask why not?
Why wouldn’t we talk about the ways in which
we Christians act like Pharisees, whether we know it or not?
Why wouldn’t we open our eyes to systems of oppression
and do what we can to make folks’ lives better?
Isn’t that basically what the prophets and Jesus were doing?
My point is this:
It is very easy to fall into the belief that something is not a problem
because it’s not a problem to us personally.
It’s so difficult to identify with this idea of privilege
because by its very nature, it’s invisible if you’ve got it.
And my second point is that
privilege isn’t a bad thing per se,
it’s a question of what we do with it once we see it.
How do I respond, for example, when I get pulled over for speeding,
and the officer literally backs away from me and says
“I can’t give a priest a ticket!”
Rejoice at my good fortune? Insist he give me a ticket?
Give him a lecture about privilege?
Ask some other officers about policy and practice and begin dialogue?
Our scriptures are rife with folks getting away with things
because they’re in charge or favored or pretty.
And those stories portray privilege sometimes as violent and terrible
like David’s sending the husband of the woman he lusted after
to the frontline to be killed.
And sometimes as the only way to save thousands of lives,
like Esther’s ability to speak to the king her husband
to spare the lives of the Jews.
And they’re rife with stories of people on the other side of things,
seeing the imbalance of power,
experiencing the oppression of invading forces
or economic pressures.
They’re rife with stories of the outsider and the rejected
pushing back against power and privilege.
This is Ruth. This is Tamar.
This is Moses in Egypt. This is Mary Magdalene and Peter.
This is too many people to list.
Looking back at my first description of Psalm 1,
I think we’re being called to awareness and compassion.
I said, “we are happier when we’re not terrible to each other.”
Which means we need to notice when we’re being terrible.
And when someone else is being hurt by our privilege.
How do we use that awareness to show that person love?
We are more fulfilled and connected to God
when we participate in what God is doing.
Maybe we ask what God is already doing in our community
rather than plowing forward with what we know needs to be done?
We are more fruitful when we pay attention to God’s desire for love.
Not productive, mind you, that’s our consumer culture speaking.
No, we make the fruit we were meant to
when we’re paying attention to love and forgiveness
and understanding and creativity.
How do we educate ourselves about issues
that don’t affect us personally?
And how do we learn to forgive?
This is where Psalm 1 gives us some beautiful grace.
It doesn’t say that the Lord watches over the righteous
but the wicked will perish.
It says “the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.”
The way. The way in which we do things.
The path we walk. The way of seeing the world.
God watches over and fosters and delights
in the path of love that each of us walks.
I even imagine God,
with one of those brooms they use in curling,
shuffling backwards in front of us,
sweeping the broom back and forth,
smoothing out the path when it gets rough…
And God will allow/is allowing the path of sin and misery
that each of us walks to fall into disrepair.
Psalm 1 is maybe foreshadowing Psalm 30,
“weeping may linger the night, but joy comes in the morning.”
In other words, everything will be okay in the end.
If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
And God invites us to participate in making things okay.
It will be uncomfortable for us to face how we are complacent
in the face of suffering.
It will be hard to begin dismantling our individual and corporate sin.
But we don’t do it alone.
God is walking that path with us,
nudging us towards the one that’s been cleared,
raising us up when we fall,
and celebrating with us when we succeed.
This is one message of the cross:
in Jesus’ death and resurrection that we celebrate this Easter season,
it is not that Jesus reminds an angry God that we are God’s beloved,
we are reminded that we are created in God’s image,
that we are God’s beloved, that we were made for love.
God’s been there all the time, maintaining the universe,
shining love on all of us.
We just forgot.
On the cross, Jesus showed us
where all our grasping and violence and moralizing lead us.
And in the empty tomb, Jesus shows us
all the possibilities of creation.
We can be and are like trees planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
May it be so.


Good Friday meditation on Psalm 31 and bodies


Let’s talk about sex offenders for a moment.
If we can’t talk about them on Good Friday
when Jesus gave up his body for the sins of the world
—including not just we God’s faithful people
but also all the people we look down on or are disgusted by
—when can we?
I’ve been in a pastoral relationship
with someone on the Sex Offender Registry for several years now.
And I’ve been pondering for most of that time
why there are such extreme reactions to this person’s offense.
Over and above other kinds of offenses, that is
—it’s a different reaction than if you disclosed to me
that you’d stolen a watch
or even that you’d murdered someone.
It’s a powerful, visceral, angry reaction
which leads not only to creating the Registry in the first place
but also to everyday folks regularly checking out that Registry
for people in their neighborhood.
Because…why?
Registered sex offenders are the second least likely to reoffend…just behind murderers.
Why do we do this to ourselves? And to them?
It’s something to do with our essence, our being, our bodies.
A sex offense is…intimate and personal,
and an offense against our bodies
is somehow an offense against more than our bodies.
It’s like when you’re badly hurt with a broken leg, say,
or when you’re throwing up everything you ever ate,
the world condenses to this one primal, vulnerable space
where your body is.
All your being is concentrated on the misery of your body.
But somehow a sex offense magnifies that feeling.
Regardless of what the offense was
—and believe me, there is a wide spectrum
represented on the Registry—
knowing that a hurt was sexual in nature
brings up bone-deep revulsion
which seems to be the only truth.
To be clear, yes to all those feelings.
Violation of the body is deeply painful and emotional
and no one who perpetrates such violation should be given a pass.
If you’ve experienced such hurt, please tell someone
—don’t suffer alone.
It turns out, the violence of those encounters
leaves its scars on the perpetrators as well.
This person whom I know has struggled and been to jail
and to all the therapy and has transformed themself
in ways I frankly envy.
Even after all that, they fear reoffending
and even more the emptiness that comes
when a new friend finds them on the Registry.
Which happens all the time.
This person is outcast from social media, from employment,
and from more than one or two long-term friendships.
Perhaps you might justifiably say, “good.”
And perhaps you might also notice
the similarity between this person
and the people Jesus spent much of his time with.
Not because they were paragons of virtue
but because they were imprisoned by something
and wanted to be set free.
*       *       *
Let’s talk about close male friendships for a moment.
There was a time, as recently as the first World War,
when men who were friends
might be seen holding hands or hugging in public,
slinging their arms around each others waists, cuddling of a sort.
If you don’t believe me, just Google “male affection photo”
for an article called “Bosom Buddies.”
Human beings need touch—you know the studies
about babies who die because they’re not touched.
But more than that, we all need loving, gentle, consistent touch
for brain development and for spiritual development.
Our children are built for it,
demanding cuddling at wonderful and inopportune times.
But in the last 50 years, such touch between adult males has become rare.
Some folks wonder if societal homophobia
has robbed us of close male friendships.
My husband tells me his high school students
can’t even express the bare minimum of verbal friendship
without someone suggesting they might be gay.
Could we as a people be so concerned over the possibility of a come-on
that we’ve lost something precious?
“Boys imitate what they see.
If what they see is emotional distance, guardedness, and coldness
between men they will grow up to imitate that behavior…
What do boys learn when they do not see men
with close friendships, where there are no visible models
of intimacy in a man’s life beyond his spouse?”[1]

Women may be more able to show affection,
yet we participate in a culture of homophobia and touch-me-not.
We are made in the image of God and we are built for physical intimacy.
Perhaps you might justifiably say,
“But it can go so wrong so easily, even without assault.”
And perhaps you might also note that Jesus spent the Last Supper
reclining beside the beloved disciple John
whom our Celtic brothers and sisters say was so close
he heard the heartbeat of God.
No matter how enlightened we are,
we are imprisoned by our fear of closeness and we need to be set free.
*       *       *
Let’s talk about being unworthy for a moment.
I know students at UC who can’t fathom
that anyone would respect or love them.
They may seem happy or calm on the surface,
but it’s a cardboard cutout of themselves.
I know folks at UC who fill their days and nights with work
because they can’t trust themselves or others
to have their back and they fear failure.
I know friends who know deep in their hearts
that they’d never really be welcome in church
because they haven’t attended in years
or because they think God hates what they do with their bodies
or because they’re not good enough.
I know people who, because of their gender identity or homelessness
feel invisible.
And when they hear that God loves them,
they scoff or cry or get angry because how could God possibly love them. It’s patently ridiculous.
Peter at the Last Supper shows us a silly version
of this deeply-held self-revulsion.
When Jesus arrives at Peter’s feet, Peter says,
“wait, what? You can’t wash my feet! They’re gross.
And you’re…you know…God or something.”
And Jesus patiently explains it again and Peter says,
“Oh, right, I’m so filthy, I need you to wash my whole self!”
We don’t wash the feet of our dinner guests anymore.
But my friends Chris and Kevin once did something similar for me.
After my entire family had been sick simultaneously
with a stomach bug for several days,
my friends came to our house and cleaned up.
While we were still weak,
they swept and mopped and did dishes
and sanitized counters and doorknobs.
They didn’t hesitate to touch
where our disease had made things unclean.
How could I have been worthy of such a gift?
Perhaps you might justifiably say, “oh man, that’s me. I’m just the worst.”
And perhaps you might also recall
just how many times our scriptures record
the consistent and overwhelming love of God
for some really filthy people.
All of us are imprisoned by sin and we need to be set free.
*       *       *
Now, let’s talk about Jesus’ body.
We say that he was God made human
and centuries of theologians have written
about how he was REALLY HUMAN.
It’s not that he just looked like us but was actually smoke and mirrors.
He didn’t have a glowing God center with a crunchy human shell.
He was really, really, physically, emotionally a person.
Jesus is God becoming a vulnerable, squalling, pooing baby
and a vulnerable, squalling, pooing adult
—that’s his whole deal.
That’s the whole point.
Our God who created the universe,
who made this world in all its amazing variety,
who made us—
these complex, thinking bodies charging through space—
our God didn’t just watch from afar,
munching popcorn like we’re some kind of soap opera.
God got themselves a body and ate hummus
and snuggled with Mary and Joseph
and in the teen years refused to be touched
and walked the dirty roads of Jerusalem
and touched disgusting sick people
and touched unworthy prostitutes and office workers
and touched cruel sinners
and then died in extreme pain in front of his earthly parents,
watching them sob.
And then—spoiler warning—came back to life for real.
It’s all about God’s body.
Jesus body standing in for all the bodies in the world.
All of them.
Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection
is about our bodies being strong and resilient
and vulnerable and imprisoned and…worthy of being set free. And it’s about God loving us more than enough to do it.
That freedom is scary.
It’s a painful and fascinating transition.
But as the Psalmist says in the 31st Psalm,
“Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord.”


[1] Kindlon and Thompson, Raising Cain

sermon on Luke 1, Mary the mother of Jesus, prophecy, and bad good news


A       Mary the mother of Jesus was a prophet.
Like Isaiah and Micah and Amos and Habakkuk.
Let’s dig into that for just a moment.
There in Luke is a great example of what we call an annunciation form—
basically, there are bits of scripture
that are very similar to each other,
things like the traditional form of a pastoral letter,
or love poems, or proverbs,
or the form of announcing a miraculous birth.
You remember Abraham and Sarah
and their miraculous, late-in-life birth, right?
Or Hannah mother of the prophet Samuel?
Their stories, when the angels or God visit
and tell them of their impending pregnancy,
generally follow a particular form.
Interestingly, while Mary’s story is indeed
a birth announcement and fits that form,
it actually fits a different form much more closely
—the prophetic call.
Like Moses, Gideon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel before her,
Mary encounters an angel
who calls her to some sort of difficult action,
Mary objects to the call,
she is reassured and given a sign.

B       It turns out lots of early church writers saw this well before I did,
but it’s an image of Mary that we’ve lost over the years
—somehow we are left with a quiet, obedient Mother
 without the firebrand language of the Magnificat
she sings immediately afterwards.
She sings about God’s greatness and mercy
but she also sings this,
“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
It’s reminiscent of the song of Moses
and of basically all of the Hebrew prophets.
God is indeed great and merciful
AND ALSO is about justice and significant change to the status quo.
If you’re poor or afflicted, you’re gonna get fed.
Also, if you’re comfortable or in power,
you’re gonna get taken down a peg or two.
Prophets, you see, are a bit difficult.
They’re not domesticated.
They speak from their own oppressed group.
They speak the languages of challenge and hope.
Prophets, Mary included, see clearly what is,
the patterns of human behavior
and how we consistently screw things up.
And prophets, Mary included, see what can be,
the potential for beauty and compassion and grace.
Prophets, Mary included, speak to their own oppressed people
and say, “This is terrible but it won’t last.
If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
It’s good news, but it might not seem like it.
C       Pastor Larry and I used to argue this point.
He’d say, “Good news is always good news.”
Being contrary, I’d say, “No it’s not.”
The word “Gospel” literally means “good news”
and I agree that it is in fact always good.
BUT it doesn’t always feel like it.
That the rich—spoiler warning, that’s us
—that the rich will be sent away empty sounds like a threat.
That the proud—spoiler warning, that’s also us
—will be scattered sounds like bad news.
This is the Gospel which says you lose your life to find it
and that’s damned hard. That’s miserable. I don’t want that.
The leveling of the playing field that Mary sings about
and that Isaiah writes about and that all the prophets
and law-givers and poets of our scriptures talk about
—that leveling means we might all lose something
and we will all gain something even better.
Past that loss of wealth or status or security,
         past Good Friday, past the pain of pregnancy and childbirth
is the New Thing that God is making.
Mary says to us,
“This is terrible but it won’t last. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
“When a person in a marginalized group is voicing their concern over something you’ve done, it’s a natural reaction to jump and try to defend yourself. Taking the time to listen and truly understand goes an incredibly long way to promoting the understanding that is so desperately needed...”[1]

As we continue in this Advent season,
as we wait for something new with increasing agitation,
when every one of us is pregnant with possibility,
I invite you to listen to Mary’s story retold.

D      Mary stands in her home, kneading bread for dinner
and looking absently out the window.
She sees her little son Jesus running around with the neighbor kids
playing chase and she corrects herself
—not little son, not any more, was he ever little,
seemed pretty big when he came out,
where has the time gone.
Mary watches as her son stops to help up one of the smaller children
who’s fallen in the dust,
then takes off like a shot around the corner of another house
and the Roman soldier keeping an eye on their neighborhood.
Mary presses down hard with the heel of her hand into the dough,
flips it over, presses again,
the repetitive motion part frustration and part meditation.
Her thoughts drift gently from her son’s momentary kindness
to his tantrum this morning about breakfast
to his sleeping face last night
to that same face, softer, rounder, more covered with snot,
lo, these many years ago.
Mary remembers swaddling her baby boy in that warm, dirty stable
and weeping with joy and terror at this new thing
—why didn’t anyone say, I can’t believe how amazing he is,
Joseph can you even…, how could I love someone this much.
And she remembers the day of the angel with the same joy and terror
—how can you be so beautiful and so frightening,
of course I’m afraid, you want me to do what,
from…Hashem, but…a baby?
Mary’s hands press down hard into the dough,
flipping it over, pressing it again.
Her hands covered in flour and callouses ache
as she remembers the early days of pregnancy
—the painful joints, the exhaustion,
the fluttering in her belly which she kept thinking was the baby
but which was only gas.
And later when the fluttering took her breath away
and she grabbed for Joseph’s hand to feel the tiny elbow pressing up
against her belly.
Once she remembers that elbow coming up and her pushing it back,
tapping it like a message. And the elbow tapping back.
She smiles as she flips the dough over to let it rest
and wipes her hands on the towel at her waist.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Jesus and his friends
run helter-skelter back into sight.
She begins to hum as she takes out a knife to cut up garlic.
It’s a song she’d all but forgotten, but in the quiet of a rare moment alone,
she remembers.
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”
Ah, yes, she thinks, and sighs aloud.
How that song had welled up in her that day in cousin Elizabeth’s house.
They were both pregnant,
commiserating about aches and pains
and husbands who were attentive but in the wrong ways.
They talked of swaddling and breastfeeding
and the births they’d been present for.
They talked about how the world wasn’t good enough for their sons,
hands resting protectively on round bellies.
They talked about their awe
that they could be making people within themselves.
They talked about their awe that Hashem had given them this chance,
that maybe their boys would be the ones to change things.
And Mary began to sing her gratitude.
It was an old tune but the words came from deep within her,
from the knot of baby growing in her belly and in her heart.
She sang about her own unworthiness to be a mother
and how overwhelmingly giddy it made her.
She sang about Hashem’s attentiveness to the people with no power
and about Hashem’s power to remake the world.
She sang about justice and regime change and transformation.
She sang about her sadness
and she sang about her hope that all would see the face of Hashem
and know the truth of their sin and blessedness.
In the end, a breathless silence
and then cousin Elizabeth applauded
and called her Prophetess
and they laughed.
Mary begins chopping the cloves of peeled garlic
piled up like coins in front of her and hums.
This child will change everything, she sings.
This child has already changed everything.




[1] Jessica Lachenal, “Why the Batgirl #37 controversy is the conversation we need right now.” www.themarysue.com 12/15/14 6:30pm

sermon on Ezekiel 33:1-7



Friends, the internet is a jerk.
I mean, maybe it’s the people, but online is such an easy place to be rude—I’ve done it myself! It’s an easy place not to do research, to demand people take you seriously regardless of what you’re saying. It can be a deeply connecting place as well, a place to be educated, to be inspired, but for God’s sake, don’t read the comments. Like, ever. I made the mistake this past week of reading a few comments on news stories about Ferguson, Missouri. They were…disgusting.

And I don’t know of you’re aware of the stolen, nude photos of actress Jennifer Lawrence? Basically, Jennifer Lawrence had some nude photos of herself for her own purposes. Someone hacked into her accounts and stole them. Some guys on the website 4chan shared them but then a group of folks on another website Reddit spread the photos around far and wide. Jennifer Lawrence was embarrassed, people who saw it were embarrassed, and eventually the folks on Reddit were embarrassed. They had a change of heart—they took the photos down and then did a fundraiser for a cancer charity that Jennifer Lawerence had been associated with. When they sent the thousands of dollars they’d raised to the charity, their note said they were trying to make up for their lapses in judgment and included jokes about what had happened. The charity…said, “no.” Basically, “no, we’re not taking your money, you can’t pay for forgiveness.” Not to be deterred, the Reddit guys sent the money to a water charity with a similar note and with an addendum about how surely this charity would take the donation, they’d be fools not to. And the water charity…said, “no.” No, you don’t get to do something jerk-y and then do one nice thing and expect the scales to be balanced.

It’s not just the internet, though. The Bible is a jerk. Did you notice in that Ezekiel reading, “But if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life.” Basically, tell people how they’re sinning because otherwise you’ll burn with them. Somehow, we are saved because we have pointed out others’ sins. I’ve met well-meaning Christians who take this as license to insist on their understanding of good and evil and to try to convert me to that. Our scriptures have can be a deeply connecting place as well, a place to be educated, to be inspired, but for God’s sake, don’t read the comments. Or, well, take the centuries of commentary and contemporary, me-first theology together and with a healthy grain of salt.

The thing is, we are about law AND gospel. Yes, the Law says to be righteous and righteously judge your neighbor for their misdeeds. It also says NOT to judge your neighbor—that’s not just Jesus’ line.
No, the Law can be good because I certainly drive better when there’s a cop nearby, don’t you? It’s so easy to justify my own selfishness if I just let a law slide here and there. But the gospel is about something else. Gospel is literally “good news”—it’s a challenge or a comfort that enters into your place of bad news, of really shitty news and transforms it into something beautiful. This is not to say that believing in Jesus makes everything go right for us from finding a parking place to cancer remission. Good news is about hope.
And Ezekiel’s version of good news involves repentance. For him, repentance is about hope. Because we recognize the terrible things we do and say, because we commit to not doing them—even though we’ll fail many times—we have hope that things can be different, will be different. Instead of a cycle of violence that we see enacted in the world all the time, when we admit our failings, we participate in a cycle of forgiveness.
It’s true that the internet is a jerk—it’s a true fact, look it up. But it’s also true that the internet is a beacon of hope. I just recently discovered the vlogbrothers—I’m late to the party, I know—and their videos are the most perfect example of hope I can think of right now. In case you’re also running late for the party, here’s the executive summary: they’re brothers, one a novelist, one a scientist, who do short weekly videos to each other about all kinds of things and have developed a huge following and collaborative community around them. I don’t think they mention it much these days, but back in the day, John mentioned offhandedly that he’s a religious man and at several points Hank has mentioned that he is not. But the words of wonder at the universe and love of collaboration and delight in decreasing world suck—these all speak to me in my language of the creative presence of God constantly grinning like an idiot and saying, “Yes! And…?” Their videos suggest to me the theology of God the primal mover: God acts first, then we respond. John and Hank made videos and then tons of people responded, like a huge sigh of relief—we can make a difference! And for Christians, God loves us first, and when we see that, when we feel it beyond words on a page, suddenly the air is cleaner in our lungs and our eyesight clearer—we can make a difference.

So here are two undying truths from across generations of Christians and, indeed, across generations and faiths of human beings:
Don’t be a jerk.
and
God loves you even though you are a jerk.

Amen.
*   *   *
Here's a link to a great vlogbrothers video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc_XWlqURTg

retreat address on the Song of Songs


Readings from the Song:
Woman: 1:5-6 (don’t despise me because I am black)
Man: 4:9-16 (you are beautiful and you smell sexy)
Woman: 5:2-8 (ready for “bed” and can’t find lover)
Man: 7:1-9 (you’re beautiful, this time with food)

I joked with my students in describing this retreat
that it was going to be about the sexy, sexy Bible. Was I kidding?
For centuries, we’ve tried to figure out this poem.
Some see it as a kind of performance art,
reenacting a fertility rite to bring good fortune to crops.
Others as an allegory
—a one-to-one metaphor for God’s love for recalcitrant Israel.
It’s read on Passover in many Jewish households because,
in the words of my friend Rabbi Yitz,
“Passover is the dating process
of the just-born Jewish nation with G-d,
culminating in the Marriage Ceremony
under the canopy of Clouds at Mount Sinai.”
For many Christians, it’s been God dating the Church instead.
Others see it as a celebration of physical and romantic love, God-given.
Still others wonder why it’s in our Scriptures at all
—God’s not mentioned once.
Do we ever read it in church? Not much.
And then only the least racy parts.
Like, not the bits with dripping nard or channels or bellies
and breasts and lips.
That stuff is best kept far away from Sunday morning.
Only, why? Are we embarrassed?
We are certainly embarrassing as a Christian people
to non-Christians who don’t understand why
we’re so embarrassed about our bodies and what they do.
The Song of Songs is, at least a little bit, all these things.
The woman who wrote the Song
and the men who included it in the canon of scripture
and the millions of Jews and Christians who have read it
across the centuries have already voted.
This Song is scandalously specific and ambiguous.
It is almost pornographic and deeply spiritual.
The Song of Songs is about sustaining relationships
and about constantly striving
and it is about the love which is the ground of all our being
in one way or another.
First, it’s poetry. Some of your eyes are lighting up at the thought,
others are bracing yourselves for a long, boring lecture
and ultimately not understanding any more than when you began.
Don’t worry, I only mean that it means more than it seems to mean.
Like the TV show Lost. Or whatever your favorite pop song is. Only better.
So, The Song of Songs is about a woman
who is deeply in love and lust with her beloved
who may or may not be King Solomon. Probably not.  
And they have frequent trysts but apparently don’t live together.
Or maybe they’re married,
though the text doesn’t offer much support for that.
Or maybe their relationship is scandalous somehow
since she gets beaten at one point for trying to find him.
It’s not a straightforward story-poem
with a beginning, middle, and end,
nor is it entirely clear who the characters are.
It reads a bit like a series of monologues
between the man and the woman
but they don’t always flow from one to another.
The language, as you might expect, is heightened, is metaphorical;
“your teeth are like a flock of goats,”
“your neck is like a tower, all it’s stones in courses.”
It’s like saying, “your skin is as soft as a kitten’s fur”
or “your hips are as curvaceous as the Guggenheim Museum
and truly, they don’t lie.”
Her neck is not a tower, not really,
and her teeth aren’t hairy like a flock of goats.
It’s about taking inspiration
from the natural and human-made world
—what’s beautiful to you?
That’s what you compare your love to.
“Your body,” she says in one place, “is like ivory.”
Which, it turns out, is a lot like other places in scripture
when someone sees someone else’s “feet,” meaning genitals.
The Hebrew word translated “body”
means a man’s midsection,
so the woman is speaking of the man’s penis as like ivory,
like an elephant’s tusk.
Yes, in a lovely, poetic way, she’s saying,
“my beloved is well-hung.”[1]
Second, the Song of Songs is part of a theology called “Bridal mysticism,”
the theology derived poetically
that Jesus is our collective and individual boyfriend.  
If you think of it literally, it’s a bit creepy.
But also beautiful and has a long history in the church.
We see married people all the time
—certainly we see broken marriages,
but also connectedness and reliance and mutual giving.
Of course we’d use it as a metaphor for our relationship with God.
Bridal mysticism takes Jesus as the boyfriend to its logical extreme
and puts the mystic or the reader in the place of the bride
—when we read these passages, when we pray,
we can experience the great hope a bride feels,
the anticipation of new life,
the excitement of being with the one our heart most desires
—you know this feeling.
Not just the heart palpitations of a crush,
but the deep connectedness to someone we truly love
and who loves us back.
For some of you, that might be a romantic or married partner,
for others it might be a deep soulfriend,
for others it could be the relationship you have
with a parent or sibling.
These are beautiful experiences and we ought to want them—
but they require a certain vulnerability on our end.
We have to be able to be vulnerable to God.
Bridal mysticism requires us to present ourselves
exactly as we are to our bridegroom Jesus.
Third, and maybe most important,
“the protagonist in the Song is the only unmediated female voice in scripture.”[2]
Meaning, every other woman’s story is told by someone else,
either by another character in a story or by the writer of the book.
Here, the woman speaks in the first person,
she is a woman in touch with her own heart and mind,
a woman in touch with her sensuality,
a woman empowered.
And so, because her story needs to be heard, I’ll tell it to you,
at least, an imagined story of how she came to write this poem.
I was told I had to work in my brothers’ vineyards.
I was told I had dark, ugly, black skin.
I was told I’d never amount to anything, that I was unloveable.
I was told I would have babies and that would make me valuable.
I was told to be quiet in church, to submit to my husband, to lie back and think of England.
I was told it was all in my head, that it was my fault.
I was told.
And now I will tell.

When I saw him the first time, I came over all giddy.
I was talking to my friend and suddenly I was stammering
and my hands were shaking and my nipples were hard
and I couldn’t stop staring.
When he talked to me the first time,
I looked down at my shaking knees,
knowing he couldn’t possibly find me pleasant to look at,
but he lifted my chin with a finger and looked at me
like no one else ever had.
He really saw me—what did he see?
He said that I was more beautiful than a flock of goats on the hillside,
more sweet than persimmons dipped in honey,
more elegant the Temple Mount itself.
He said, “she’s a brick house!”
He compared my breasts to round baby sheep
nursing at their mother’s side.
He said my heart was bigger than the Jerusalem marketplace,
that my mind was sharper than the rocks at the shore
which tear up the hulls of boats,
that my ass was as round as melons
and how he wanted to take a bite.
How could he see this when I am, at best, average?
He saw me and he loved me.
And I saw him and I loved him.
We devour each other with our eyes.
When we see each other around town, from yards and yards away,
we cannot resist seeing, we cannot resist knowing.
I know that last night we spoke of philosophy and the nature of God,
we spoke of politics and farming and birds and bees,
we spoke of our fears and of our darkest fantasies.
And we touched each other
—we removed each other’s clothes slowly, achingly slowly,
fingers tracing the hollow of the throat,
like the curve of a spoon dipped in custard,
fingers circling wrists vulnerable as newborn puppies,
fingers caressing inner thighs,
open like a book revealing its secrets.
And today, when we see each other,
we know, deeply, what the other looks like under their clothes,
how they respond to kisses and challenges.
We devour each other with more than our eyes.
Yet I cannot see him now.
And so often, I cannot find him.
He doesn’t respond when I text and our friends have not seen him.
I run across sidewalks and fields,
through the autumn trees smelling of wet leaves and death
and I weep.
I meet people as I wander and they look at me in disgust.
They speak harshly, telling me no one could love me as he does,
telling me I’m making a fool of myself,
telling me to not to speak up for myself,
telling me to go home.
And so I return to my bed, to my empty apartment
which still smells of his soap and his skin and sex.
I return to my shower and wash away my tears in hot water.
I rub lotion into my skin and put on my pajamas,
giving in to exhaustion.
I tell myself it will be better tomorrow.
I tell myself he will return.
I tell myself to fall asleep.
I give in memories and touch myself.
And just on the edge of sleep, I think I hear him next to me,
his hand on my belly, his lips at my ear.
I wake with a jolt but he is not here.
I run to the door,
my hands still slick with lotion and my own moisture,
my feet bare,
but he is not there.
And later we have carved out time to lie on the grass,
feeling the warm sun on our skin,
seeing the red glow of it through our eyelids,
smelling burning leaves and each other’s familiar scent.
Cloves and eucalypus and nard filling my nose and my heart.
His hand in mine, our only touchpoint, yet containing multitudes.
I bask in my beloved’s presence and he in mine.
And tell him,
Many haters cannot quench your love for me.
Many insults will not quench my joy in my own body
nor the want I feel for you, my beloved.
Many sorrows and arguments will not quench our commitment.
Many wars cannot quench the spark of the divine and the hope of peace.
Many waters cannot quench the fire of my love,
neither can floods drown it.

For the holiness of all that is love, hear me tell you my story and know this same love.


[2] Women’s Bible Commentary, “Song of Songs” by Renita J Weems, 164