Luke 14:1, 7-14

And it came to pass that Jesus was going to the house of one of the leaders of the Pharisees on the sabbath to break bread, and they all were watching him closely.

He began to tell a parable to those who had been invited, 

remarking how they were choosing the best places for themselves, saying:

“When you are invited by anyone to a wedding feast, 

do not recline in the best place, 

lest someone even more honorable than you might have been invited, 

and the one who invited you both might come to you and say to you, 

“Give your place to this man,” 

and then you should with shame take the lowest place.

But when you are invited, go, recline in the lowest place, 

so that when the one who invited comes, he might say to you, 

“Friend, come up higher!” 

Then you will be glorified before all of those reclining with you.

For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, 

and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

Then he said to the one who invited him, 

“When you make a meal, whether in the morning, midday, or evening, don’t call 

your friends, 

or your brothers, 

or your relatives, 

or your rich neighbors, 

lest they return your invitation, and you would be repaid. 

But when you make a feast, call the poor,

The crippled,

The lame, 

The blind… 

and blessed you will be, because they have nothing.

They cannot repay you.

And you will be repaid in return at the resurrection of the just.

The crows are at it again.

A murder screaming in the treetops

pulls the whole neighborhood into their business

as they rage after a remorseful kestrel

for whom no sanctuary is coming.

And all I can think is

what power in numbers,

what freedom and ferocity

in banding together to take back the skies.

Often, when I am reading sacred text, I find myself wondering: what does God *actually* sound like? As in, if I had been *there* at *that moment* what would I have heard? This is especially true for me when it comes to the prophets, because they are so often tasked with unenviable task of mediating God’s words to God’s people. So they receive something, and then they share it.

I can relate to that. As a pastor, one of my most visible tasks is to pay attention to scripture, to receive it, and then to help my people see it as something worth paying attention to. Ancient texts are deceptive–there is a lot of context and back story that is often invisible to us on the page which makes the task of understanding just a little bit harder. We miss the ancient jokes, the word play, the allusions that make our modern conversations come alive.

Over the past few years, I have found that biblical storytelling has been a way for me to help make scripture come alive for my community. Biblical storytelling pays attention to the words, and the context, and what we know about the ancient world, and then it helps the community to hear it fresh. The magic that happens when academic study and creative proclamation are brought together is incredibly refreshing.

But there are choices that have to be made, such as, What does God sound like? This week, I found myself asking that question with respect to Jeremiah 23. I could say a lot about it at this point, but the general gist is that the book of Jeremiah is bitter medicine. Bad news all around for the people of God. The young Jeremiah knows it, God knows it, and nobody is particularly happy about it. And there are other prophets out there, whose message is more popular, *maybe just maybe* because it is a lot more hopeful and positive.

By the time we get to Jeremiah 23, God is fed up with these false prophets and is laying into them. To me, God seems beyond angry. God is at that point where God is almost amused by the ridiculousness of it all. I imagined God breaking into our worship on Sunday, lounging in the front pew eating popcorn and saying what God really thinks of (waves hands) all this.

When I was a child, love often looked like an empty plate. “Eat! Eat!” my loved ones would say, as they pushed all manner of gastronomical delights towards us. Nobody ever told me to stop eating. Nobody ever told me that my appetite was too much. They simply delighted in my delight. Because they wanted me to grow.

But you know the story. At some point, there was a shift. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment, but the message was crystal clear to my young self: somewhere around 15, it became evident that my appetite exceeded the space that others were willing to give to it.

This wasn’t just about food, mind you. I was simply “too much” for many of the people in my life, especially my peers. I was too loud. Too opinionated. Too naive. Too unguarded. Too hungry.

What was once a delight became a source of shame. A problem to hide and deny. A monster to punish and constrain.

What happens to us, that turns so many of us into deprivation machines? Why is it that so many of us (myself included here) came to the conclusion that our appetites are shameful? That we can not trust our own hunger?

For over ten years, I raged with a hunger that could not be filled, could not be filled in part because I would not let it. And I would not let it because the world whispered at me that this self-denial was the only path to happiness for a good girl like me. I grew accustomed to living with less than my body needed–less food, less love, less attention, less passion. I settled (GOD I hate that word) and told myself that it was enough.

One of the only places where I felt like my hunger was welcomed was in the church. There, I met people who told me it was holy to hunger and thirst for righteousness. I found people whose appetite for fellowship was unbounded. Who talked too much, drank too much, loved one another too much. I closed out diners in Cambridge with dear friends as we shared a vision for a new kind of church and shared a communion of stale chocolate chip cookies and grape juice. I made a home with fellow radicals in Philadelphia who dreamed of a city where the poor and the rich shared a table piled high with good food together, and then we did it. And when I became a pastor, people celebrated my “too muchness” because it turned out that passion is infectious.

As I experienced the satisfaction of being more of myself, I have started to wonder what is holding me back in my personal life. If God accepts my too muchness in the company of fellow travelers, why would God not embrace me if I were fully myself in the rest of my life? And what would that even begin to look like? I have lived a constrained self for so long, I suspect it will take time to figure out what it feels like to embrace the freedom of simply being me. But when I look back to my childhood, I am reminded that the answer will likely put delight at the center. Delight in my body. Delight in myself. Delight in the experience of being created in the image of God.

I never thought of myself as what you might call a “tortured soul.”

As a child, I lived a rather boring, ordinary life. My parents were (for the most part) very happy. The worst you could say about me, if you could say something, was that I was far too competitive (incidentally, things often came easily to me and I was encouraged at whatever I did, which may have been related). And so it was that I was a good student, an accomplished musician, and dedicated athlete. I didn’t get into much trouble, either. I was pretty much a model kiddo.

Except the fact that, no matter how much I succeeded, I always had this nagging sense that, deep down, if folks really knew who I really was, they wouldn’t like me all that much. Strip away my “doing” self, and I figured that what was left would send the people whose affirmation I most craved packing. I don’t know where that feeling came from, but it was there, from very early, convincing me that my only value was attached to what I could do. Whispering that the love of my family and friends was in some sense conditional.

When you think that way, it can lead you down some pretty strange roads. You can convince yourself to make all sorts of compromises. You can tell yourself that the only way to survive is to abandon yourself. And you can convince yourself that denying yourself is normal, that it is healthy, even. You can find these messages everywhere– in pop culture, in religion, and often in the way that families talk about (or don’t talk about) success.

And so early on I set to work contorting myself into a shape I thought people wanted me to be. A shape that appeared pleasing. Competent. Good. Sure, I was loud, even bossy sometimes, but almost always in the service of “acceptable” (let the reader understand: culturally approved) goals.

But every time I did dare to be loud, or silly, or “too much,” I knew I would spend the next 24 hours second-guessing every choice I had made. No matter how many groups and activities I added to my resume, the suspicion would linger– is it enough? Will they love me?

My sister would probably tell you that there were times when I was completely insufferable growing up, and she is almost certainly right. I was insufferable. But I was also suffering. I spent so much time trying to be what I thought the world wanted me to be that I ended up neglecting to ask the critical question: what do you really want?

Things got bad enough that at one point I started engaging in harmful behaviors, all in the service of the story I was telling myself that the world would only love me if I appeared a certain way. I struggled with safe boundaries because I was afraid that if I said no, I would be abandoned by those I most wanted to accept me. I kept myself from drawing too far outside the lines, because I had been told exactly what the picture was meant to look like.

What a perfect life, right? Doesn’t it sound wonderful? The worst part of all this is that I did this to myself. My little soul convinced herself somewhere along the way that this was the best it was going to get. That I better settle down for a lifetime of this way of life, and learn to enjoy it.

My biggest rebellion, in fact, if you could call it that, was becoming a pastor. Church was a place where I saw a future for myself, a glimpse of something real, even thought I don’t think I understood that fully at the time. Church was also a place that was mine–I chose it, and when the rest of my family moved on, I held fast to it and ultimately gave my life in service to Christ because I believed in the fellowship and community made possible inside its walls. And while I still believe with all my heart that the church is capable of great things when it holds fast to Jesus, I have learned to be skeptical of those who claim to have figured it all out.

I wish I could sit my young self down and tell her exactly how Beloved she was in the eyes of G-d. That there was not a hair on her head that G-d herself didn’t know and cherish. That yes, childhood can be brutal, that the desire to be a part of something can eat you alive, but that she would find her people, eventually. That there would be a community of broken-hearted people who could handle her dumb, silly antics, and even love her for them.

It took a long time to start believing in myself instead of my accomplishments. To start letting go of the compulsion to hide behind what I could do and instead embrace who I am. I am still learning this–every day is a lesson, an opportunity to start over again.

One partner in my current reflections is the book of Ecclesiastes. It has been on my mind this week as I have pondered the excellent ministry of biblical storytelling that some of my people shared last week at the Network of Biblical Storytellers conference. And one of the themes of Ecclesiastes is the question of meaning. The author struggles to find a purpose “under the sun,” and one thing that frustrates them most is the recognition that no matter what you do (or don’t), or what you have (or don’t), how smart or dull you are, how known or invisible, your fate is the same:

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all….

So go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lotin life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

Ecclesiastes 9:3, 7-10

For me, for now, I hear this as a call to let go of all the bullshit that has held me down for so long. To give myself permission to stop wasting my life worrying about what people will think about me, and to instead embrace the journey and the gift of life itself. We waste so much precious time worrying about making the one, right choice…but what if there are no right choices? What if there are only pathways forward, not a single one of them perfect, all of them choked through with possibility?

At least, that is what I tell myself today. Who knows what tomorrow might bring?

May you carry light within you, friends.