It has been a rather cool couple of days up here in the Mid-Atlantic–warm enough to melt the NY snow but cool enough to make me want to stay indoors and drink something warm.  The rain was pretty heavy yesterday, and is supposed to pick back up today, which means that, when added to the snow melt, we are looking at the possibility of the Delaware flooding its banks by evening tonight.  We aren’t close enough to the water line to be in any danger, but some folks in the church are, so we will have to see whether there is any fall out.  It is nice, though, to have all that rain melt away all the gross old snow.  You almost forget for a moment that it is winter.

It’s been a big week in the church calendar as well–Ash Wednesday was this week, and, when you add that with Presbytery, Lenten Vespers, and regular services, I found myself up to my eyeballs in things to do.  I had been up in NJ by myself this week, and had expected to get a good deal of reading done, but the week is almost come and gone, and instead I have found that little things really do add up.  Hopefully things will cool down come next week–I could use a bit of a breather.

Overall, not a bad week, though.  Every day I am reminded by the little kicker inside me that my life is changing rapidly, but I am excited about it.  And while Lent can be busy, I enjoy the change in pace in the church.  Hopefully the sun might break through, a little, though, and give me a good excuse to sit on the porch instead of in the house while I am working away.

Sermon Texts:

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18

Matthew 5:38-48

There once was a young boy named Luka.  He lived in a city with his brother, his mother, and his sister.

Luka loved his family with all his heart—his older brother, who was much older than he, and whom he looked up to.  His dear mother, who loved him passionately and for whom his birth had been a miracle, and his father, who every day would fill his head and his dreams with stories, wild tales of a magical world where the evils of this world were no more, and the conventional rules did not apply.  Luka would find himself wishing he could be in that place, find that world and live in it completely with his family by his side.

Perhaps he wished this because things weren’t so easy for Luka out in the world.  Born 18 years after his older brother, Luka was a dreamer, and often he got in trouble for drifting off in class.  And there was one more thing:  he was left-handed.  This may not seem so bad to you, but perhaps that is because you are right-handed, and so the world is made for you to be in it.  Luka felt different, because the world didn’t operate in a left-handed way; everything was made for right-handed people, and things were often harder for him than they were for other people.  His difference also made him a target for people who liked to push others around.

His mother told him: you are special.  Your left-handedness is a gift, given for a reason.

His father would tell him that there was a special magical world, like and yet unlike our own, where everyone was left-handed, and it made him sigh to dream of such a place where he would feel normal.

Now one night, the family was gathered on the porch, watching the stars in the sky, when his father began to feel unwell.  His went to bed early that night, and the next morning Luka’s father didn’t wake up.  In fact, he slept for days, as if under a spell, and the family began to worry that something evil might be afoot.

Luka knew that something was wrong.  Every day his father seemed weaker, his breath shallower, his pulse weaker.  He realized that his father might not wake up, and he wanted with all his might to help his father get better.  He wasn’t ready for a world without his father and his wonderful stories.  He remembered that his brother had once gone on a adventure to save his family long ago, and Luka yearned to be like his brother, brave and strong, capable of anything.  So he decided to go on a quest of his own, to find a cure for his father’s illness.

That night, while his family lay sleeping, Luka snuck out of the house with his pet Dog, and set out to find a cure for his father.  He journeyed through many lands, searching high and low for a healing balm.  As he journeyed, he was surprised to find that was guided by his father’s words of wisdom, stories that he could hear in his heart as he sought to help him.  He was also encouraged by the example of his brother, whom he admired.

And as he journeyed, he also encountered friends who helped him, as well as foes that threatened his quest.  At every near disaster, his friends were by his side, encouraging him and supporting him.  If not for them, he would surely have failed, for they gave him strength that he never knew he had to keep going when things seemed impossible.

Finally, after a long journey, Luka found a cure for his father.  It was a healing fire, the Fire of Life itself, smoldering at the top of a steep mountain that seemed impassible.  He worried to himself—how can I possibly get up there?  There seemed to be no way up the mountain; Luka feared he had come all this way for nothing. He could not imagine a way forward through this fearsome barrier.

Just as he was about to give up hope, Luka remembered a story that his father had once told him.  One night, after a hard day at school, his father had sat him on his knee by the fire and had told him a story:

It may not seem like it, but there are two worlds out there:  the Right-Hand and the Left-Hand world.  Most of the time, we find ourselves in the Right-Handed world, and for many of us, this world feels just as it should be.  But for some of us, perhaps for you, this world is impossibly difficult and feels all wrong.  For these other people, it is the Left-Hand world that makes sense.  But it can be difficult to see the Left-Handed world when all we have been surrounded with is the Right-Handed world.  In order to find our way to the Left-Hand world, we must first accept who we are, embrace our difference, for then we have the ability to know which world we belong in and we also possess the willingness to seek that world out with confidence.

Luka wondered to himself:  What if I am looking at this mountain all wrong?  What if I am trying to look at it Right, when I should be looking Left? What if I am trying to be something I am not meant to be?  Perhaps my mother was right—my left-handedness might turn out to be a gift after all.

Luka closed his eyes and focused with all his might on this one thought, put all of his energy into his belief that he needed to see Left instead of Right, to embrace his different nature, to love who he was and what he was made for.

He counted to three- 1, 2, 3—and he opened his eyes.  To his astonishment the steep mountain had—poof—completely disappeared, and in its place was a rolling hillside.  Barely able to contain himself, Luka ran up the hill to the fire, giddy with delight, and carried it home to his father, where he was restored by the warmth of the light that Luka bore him.  Luka never again let himself fall into the trap that there was only one way of seeing things, for now he knew the truth—there is more than one way to be in the world.  And Luka never again felt ashamed to be Left-handed; for he knew that he was special, and that this was the way he was meant to be.

What might this parable mean?

Like Luka, we Christians find ourselves left-handed in a world made for right-handed people.  For we are commanded in the Scriptures to live in a way that seems to put us with odds with everything around us.  The world is simply not designed for people who live their lives by the code that Jesus teaches:  people who reject selfishness and instead embrace generosity to strangers and the needy.  Nor does the world we live in reward those who choose to reject the punitive system of justice, choosing to turn the other cheek and to resist retaliation, instead praying for our enemies and loving those who persecute us.  And this world just does not understand those who define their neighbor not in terms of who lives next door, but rather by God’s terms—as those whom God loves.

When we try too hard to play by the rules of the world, we risk denying who and whose we are—we lose our capacity for generosity, our ability to see the world as God sees it.  When we try to pretend that being Christian is no different from being anybody else, then, Scriptures like Leviticus 19 and Matthew 5 become a problem, because they point out the difference that we try to hide when we try to hard to fit in.

If we choose to walk the path laid out by Scripture, then we find ourselves on a quest, much like Luka, in which we will certainly face adversity before us.  We must be willing to take risks because, like Luka, ours is a journey of love for our Father.  We too are lucky, for we do not journey alone, but are accompanied by the many who walk with us, those loving neighbors in the body of Christ, and we are encouraged by God’s Word and the examples of those brothers and sisters who have gone before us.  And we are guided by the example of one who walked this path before us, Jesus the Christ, whose living revealed that walking this path isn’t impossible; it is merely risky.  Because of his example, we know that there will be obstacles, people and things that stand in our way, but we also know that we are on this journey for a reason:  we walk because love bids us do so.  And we know that we will only survive this journey if we know who we are and embrace it:  We are Left-Handed people, living in a Right-Handed World.  We are Jesus-Followers and God-Lovers who reject the idea that all that matters is “Me.”

When we embrace this otherness, we find that we can see the world like God sees the world.  And we are changed, for we know that once we see the world as God sees it, nothing will ever be the same.

And this is what makes us Holy as God is Holy, and Perfect as God is Perfect.  The ability to know our story, God’s story, and embrace the people it shapes us into.

Alleluia, Amen.

Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

John 20: 24-25

This afternoon hubby and I made our first (and hopefully only) visit to the local hospital in order to have an ultrasound on young “Snaggy,” as we have been calling the creature inhabiting my body for the last 22 weeks or so (there is a story, but it isn’t worth repeating here).  While our birth center doesn’t require any fetal imaging for low risk pregnancies like mine, we decided we wanted to go through with the 20-week (or in our case, 22-week) fetal anatomy scan.  The point of the scan, essentially, is to confirm fetal age (and therefore also due date), as well as get as many photos as possible of things like the heart, kidneys, bladder, stomach, and extremities in order to confirm that things are going as they should.

The ultrasound took about an hour, and the tech was extremely nice to us both, pointing out the various elements of the scanning to us as well as commenting on our apparently quite active little critter.  An hour later, we left with copies of a couple of the ultrasound shots, and a healthy dose of information regarding el nino’s health and well-being.

All-in-all, it was an interesting process, but it also got me to thinking a little on the way home about the importance of seeing.  By all accounts, hubby and I have no reason to suspect that anything would be wrong with “snaggy”–we are both young and healthy, and the midwives at our birth center are confident of our baby’s health as well.  And yet, having someone show us that little critter flipping around inside of me, pointing out a healthy heart and kidneys and bladder, along with legs and arms that look as they ought, feels somehow like the proof we needed.

But it is more than that. It has been getting harder and harder to forget that I am pregnant these days (any tendency to forget is mediated by a growing belly, a slower run pace, and the jabs of this little one gaining its strength), but seeing it someone confirms the peculiar truth that there is a little person inside of me, a little critter with its own mind and heart that is growing and experiencing life even as we speak.  For hubby and I, to see its face for the first time was in some ways to realize its reality.

So what is it exactly about seeing something with one’s eyes that is peculiarly truth-affirming?  Why is it that we, like the disciple Thomas, find that seeing something makes believing it easier?  What is it about humanity that the eyes, easy to fool as they are, become a means toward accepting what often is there?  I must admit, there is a part of me that is uneasy with the need to see to believe.  Part of me wasn’t certain I wanted to do the ultrasound at all–I found myself wondering to what extent seeing this child might limit the possibilities that await us down the line.  While it is nice to see, there is something about seeing that has the potential to kill the mystery of a thing.  For when we see, our imaginations no longer fill in the blanks–whether it be God, a baby, or anything else.  And while some things indeed need to be seen, I find that I tend to prefer to sit with the mystery when given a chance.

Don’t get me wrong–I am happy that this baby is healthy, and it was amazing to see its little self flipping around within me.  But I also imagine that I would be just as happy to wait for the inevitable future in which it will be in my arms–because no matter what, this baby is gonna be a reality soon enough.

Many Christians spend a lot of energy pointing on all the mistakes that the Israelites made on the journey–they will look the stories of the people’s doubt and fear as examples of their lack of faith.  They will point to the golden calf and they will proclaim, “Hah!  Those fools had God with them in the wilderness and still they sinned!  No wonder they suffered so!”

But as I find myself in the middle of my own desert wandering, my own peculiar “40″ experience, I am inclined to sympathize with that band of courageous and, yes, desperately human people who found themselves in the middle of an unknown land and unsure of what might be before them.

I imagine that, in the beginning, the people of God must have been excited, perhaps even thrilled, by the possibility of what lay before them.  Perhaps they didn’t even really believe that this could be real–was it really the case that their identity as slaves was no more?  Could it be true that Egypt held them captive no more?  Were they really free?  It must have been exhilarating.

But as the days begin to pass, and little seems to be changing, I can imagine how questions might begin to rise up like steam, clouding the future and erasing the certainty that they had once held tight to.  Where were they, anyways?  20 years into the wilderness, and only a pillar of cloud and fire to guide the way might make me downright cranky.  Even knowing that God has promised an end might be of little comfort when you are barely halfway there and most of your life is behind you.

I wonder how many of us find ourselves on a journey and don’t even realize it until the beginning is long over and the end is nowhere in sight?  It certainly didn’t occur to me to think of my 40 as “wilderness” time until almost 10 weeks had passed, and with every sunrise and sunset, I feel myself wrestling with opposing emotions:  frustration and expectancy for what is to come, hope and doubt of how this might change me, how it might already be changing me without my even realizing it.

As I sit and as I write on this, my 19th week of journeying, I can’t help but wonder what lies before me without my even realizing it.  What doubts or fears might arise within me?  What frustrations might I wrestle with in the coming days and weeks?  When it is all over, how might I look back and realize that my life was changed forever by what I am experiencing right now?  I have no pillar to follow, only my own feeble and desperate trust that God is with me in this, guiding me through the unknown towards a land and an identity that God has prepared for me.  May it be so.

Music has always been the heart of the Church and our worship of the Mighty one. In the desert wilderness, the wandering Israelites sang prayers and hymns to a God whom they followed as a pillar of cloud by day, and as a raging fire by night. In the land of Canaan, the people of Israel composed psalms to express their love, their praise, their grief, and their struggles to a God who had made covenant with his people. On the way to Babylon, the exiles dried their tears with songs from home, prayers to the One who created.

And so it should not surprise us that when the Holy Spirit came to Mary, she cried out to God in song, proclaiming thanks that God’s revolution was near, offering thanksgiving to the one who shined in the darkness and could not be overcome. At Christ’s birth, angels sang alelluias, and shepherds whispered songs of wonderment to the baby lying in the manger. The magi marched ever closer to the star, drawn by strange and exotic rhythms to the cave where Jesus laid his head.

And this is only the beginning of a story that spans a lifetime—I imagine that Jesus would in turn be formed by the songs of his people: the melodic prayers of a people who see God in every part of their lives, whether it be rejoicing, or sorrow. The familiar words would comfort him in his grief, comfort the disciples and followers of Christ who stood in the shadow of the cross and who waited for the Holy Spirit to be with them.

We are the bearers of this tradition, of singing our faith to God and to one another. Our ancestors, the saints of the church, have passed on their faith to us through the songs they sing—O Come O Come Emmanuel, Amazing Grace, O Come All Ye Faithful, Joy to the World. And each and every psalm is a window into faith of those who have sat in these pews before us, who have waited in the darkness of Advent for a light to shine, hoping and praying and singing for a Savior who would come to redeem them. They, like us, hear the psalmist’s cry: “ Sing to the Lord a new Song, tell of his salvation from day to day.” They cower with the shepherds in the fields as the angels as their praise to God sets the sky afire.

I believe that these hymns are at the center of our worship, especially during this season, for they are a reminder for us of why we bother gathering at all—we gather because the one we worship, whom we call God-with-us, Light of Light, Rod of Jesse and Dayspring from on High, is more than just a baby in manger, he is also our King and Savior. This tiny, vulnerable child, born out of poverty and scandal to unwed parents, brought into the world in a dirty stable and laid in a trough, attended by shepherds and worshiped by foreigners, wise men from distant lands, will, through his life and his death, teach us what it means to be light to the world. To those most forgotten and forlorn, he will open his arms wide in an embrace to remind us that God’s love is beyond anything we can comprehend. And to those who are already embraced by the world, to the comfortable and the happy, he will issue a challenge—follow me, empty yourself, create a space where God can dwell, learn to love as God first loved us—welcome everyone, sick, hungry, thirsty, imprisoned, resisting the very human impulse to be content with what is rather than the Kingdom of God that should be, even unto death.

Perhaps this is why, during this season of Advent, I have found myself again and again drawn to the words of a hymn that speaks not of the manger, and mentions no shepherd and angels, or even a star in the sky. Instead, I have found myself more often than not, drawn to the words of an Easter hymn, for I am reminded during this Christmas season that the joy of the manger means nothing without the cross. That the star in the sky points us to more than a holy family—it shines a light on the one who will be light for all people. And this is why, this Christmas, I find myself singing with the saints:

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!

What wondrous love is this, O my soul!

What wondrous love is this

That caused the Lord of bliss

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul!

To God and to the Lamb I will sing, I will sing;

To God and to the Lamb I will sing;

To God and to the Lamb,

Who is the great I AM,

While millions join the theme, I will sing, I will sing,

While millions join the theme, I will sing.

May it be, that during this season of Christmas, we are with the million who sing, drawn deeper into the mystery and the joy of the One who comes to redeem us all. Alleluia, Amen.

1 By the rivers of Babylon—

there we sat down and there we wept

when we remembered Zion.

2 On the willows there

we hung up our harps.

3 For there our captors

asked us for songs,

and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,

“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

4 How could we sing the Lord’s song

in a foreign land?

5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

let my right hand wither!

6 Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,

if I do not remember you,

if I do not set Jerusalem

above my highest joy.

7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites

the day of Jerusalem’s fall,

how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!

Down to its foundations!”

8 O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

Happy shall they be who pay you back

what you have done to us!

9 Happy shall they be who take your little ones

and dash them against the rock!

-Psalm 137

A disclaimer to those of you who imagine peace through John Lennon’s rose-colored lenses—today’s scripture shatters the illusion that the work—and it is work—of peacemaking is something pretty to look at, or rational in practice or idealistic in scope.  Contrary to the prose of some of great pop songs out there on the subject, the practice of truly making peace is downright messy.  It is profoundly realistic about the evil that exists in the world, and is only “peaceful” in light of the storm of violence and rage that all too often precedes a lasting peace.  Peacemaking is full of emotion, is never detached from the world around it and always aware of the dangers that threaten it.  And in a twist that may seem awfully contradictory for us peaceniks, the truth of the matter is that to make peace is, in a sense, to wage war against all of that which resists it.

To think otherwise is to live in a land of unreality.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at Psalm 137.  Now, many of us feel uncomfortable when we hear this Psalm—it manages to describe images that we know ought never to go together—songs sung by victims for the merriment of tormentors, babies’ heads and sharp rocks, enslavement and suffering of the faithful people of God.  The sometimes violent imagery of this psalm describes for us that which seems furthest from what we think of when we speak about peace.

Perhaps this is because, for many of us, this Psalm sounds less like a promise to fight even and more like a white flag on a barren landscape. For instead of prayers of hope for a promised future secure and free in God, we encounter lament.  Instead of nonviolent resistance, we encounter hostility and angry, violent words.  And perhaps, we may think, instead of faith in God, we encounter despair.  We encounter chaos in the heart of God’s people.

And so it becomes tempting to skip over the difficulties of this Word.  It becomes tempting to pat this sad little psalm on the head and move on to a Word from God that sounds more like the peace we imagine—strong, and vital, tranquil and still, harmonious and ultimately unthreatening.

But to do that is to make a grave mistake.  To deny that this Word can speak of peace is to ignore the very voice of those who most desperately are in need of peace.  The voice of Psalm 137 is the voice of the peace-less, the voice of those who cry out from the darkness for a real and an urgent and a raging peace in this world right now.

Psalm 137 is the lament of the oppressed who weep for freedom from the forces of Empire which enslave, limit, destroy, and murder.

It is the cry of people who have experienced and witnessed violence against themselves and their community—those whose babies HAVE been dashed against the rocks, or who have been sexually victimized, flayed by bullets and machetes, silenced by oppressors whose brute power over them is total.

It is the wail of the more than 1 billion people in this world for whom peace is impossible because they are literally starving for want of adequate food and water.

It is the moan of those rendered invisible by the social and economic forces of a markt whose ethics and morals are sold to the highest bidder, and to whom the powerless are expendable commodities.

To speak of peace without these voices is unfaithful, for these voices are the very reason that we dream of peace in this world.  And to ignore the real and present pain and suffering of the peace-less is neither honest nor particularly helpful—for in truth, to ignore their voices or read past them is to once again do violence to those who most need to be heard, for it is to render them invisible once more, and it is to exert power over an already trampled and forsaken people.

Furthermore, we have it on good authority that we are called out precisely to listen for and to speak with these voices.  For this is precisely how our Lord Jesus Christ responded to the desolate and the dejected of his own time.  Rather than ignore them, he sought them out.  And rather than speak for those in need, Jesus taught us the power of learning to speak with those society had rendered invisible, first by getting to know their stories and their lives, and then by inviting them to a table to participate in the ongoing conversation and work of ushering forth the Kingdom of God.

The Jesus of Nazareth whom we follow lived and worked and prayed and taught and ate and cried and lamented with precisely these downtrodden, these marginalized, these voiceless people of God.  And in the end, he was willing to lay down his life rather than cease working and speaking and praying with those whom society labels the least of God’s people.  Our Savior was willing to wage war against the Empire itself, and he did so armed with the Word of God and a Fierce Love for God’s people that would not back down to tormentors and baby dashers.

The least that we can do, brothers and sisters in Christ, is welcome these voices to our table, open our arms to those who grieve and cry and lament and weep for peace, and welcome them to the Table that Christ has welcomed us to as we seek to understand one another as we fight for truth peace in this dark and stormy world.  We are stronger, and more faithful, when we dare to do so in the name of the One who dared to risk His Life so that we may have Life in Him.

Alleluia, May it be so.

Poison Ivy

by Sibelan Forrester

1. The First Time

Who says wrists and ankles aren’t still eroticized?
They’re the first parts you can get to, the parts
most at risk even if you dress in all the clothes
you can think of, long sleeves, socks and shoes,
gardening gloves — hey, I’m not a specialist.

Hauling on the big vines, using your weight
to master them, of course when they snap
you tumble into the little beginning sprouts
that you don’t recognize. The next day,
or in three the first touches will appear
like slender irritated necklaces, puss
pearls on a fraying red thread.

Proving who is the true god of the garden.

2. The Second Time

Poison ivy is like sexual obsession,
it pulls all my body’s attention
to those blistering organs of delight.
My body says, touch me there, touch
my ankle. Rub a little. Ooooooooh.

Three minutes later it’s calling again
with every seductive swish of my skirt,
begging any passing hands, especially my own.

3. The Fall

I was being so good, not scratching
the fulminating bubbles, in spite
of all the temptation: I was doing
what the doctor said, until
I went downstairs to put on the laundry
and stood for five minutes, head down,
in front of the dryer, scratching every bit
of available skin from the knees down
to the cold cement ground.

Weak woman,
leaky vessel!
Now I am seeping,
I must wear the red Letter.

4. So I Am Changed

Now that I am an initiate
I see it everywhere, the glossy
triangular eyes of its young
leer at me from every garden
and roadside in recognition.

All these years I didn’t know
what might be out there to get me,
but now wherever I walk I keep
an eye out for that glossy leaf
and tendril, lurking at the edge
of the lawn, the soft touch
and proof of my angry imperfection.