"And Mary said..."

The heavy return of my brain cancer this month has put me into two straight weeks of full brain radiation, which has worn me out. My eyes, still blurred from their dry weeks under the chemo trial, have made it harder to read and write, though I'm giving it my best shot.

One thing I have decided to do in my Scripture reading is simply to "flee to the life of Jesus." Accordingly, I chose the gospel of Luke and began with its long first chapter -- one of my favorite chapters in all of Scripture -- this morning.

I love the way Luke introduces us to the important people in his story and moves that story along. I love the symmetry of the encounters that Zechariah and Mary have with Gabriel, their similarities and their differences (especially in responses to the amazing bits of news they are receiving!). I love that Elizabeth, who does not receive a personal visitation, nonetheless is the first (or seems to be the first, see below!) to be filled with the Holy Spirit and to sing out. I love that Zechariah, bumbling in his "I believe, oh Lord, help my unbelief" sort of faith (and he, a priest!) eventually sings out a song so deep and true that it resonates with my heart today in tremendous power, especially the part about God, in his tender mercy, visiting his people who sit in the shadow of death with an incredible sunrise of light.

And of course, I have always loved Mary's song, the one in between, her amazing Magnificat.

But you know what I noticed today? Unlike Elizabeth and Zechariah, Luke does not tell us, before Mary sings her life-giving and prophetic words, that she was filled with the Holy Spirit. He simply says "And Mary said..."

That puzzled me this morning. For a moment, it seemed like a glaring omission (not something I would ever associate with the Scriptures, and certainly not with Luke, that careful and artful inspired historian). So why, I thought to myself, why would Luke not bring our attention to the fact that Mary was filled with the Holy Spirit too?

And then it dawned on me...duh...I am slow...that he didn't have to. Because he already had. Gabriel had told Mary that the Holy Spirit would come upon her and the power of the Most High overshadow her when Jesus was conceived. And once Jesus was conceived, she carried him inside her. How could it be any plainer? The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, clearly lived inside Mary! Truly and amazingly, in a way that he would never quite live inside anyone else! And in case we somehow missed this news, or had a hard time believing what has just happened to this young girl in her face to face encounter with Gabriel and her humble and loving acquiescence to God's plan and her part in it, he gives Mary (and us, as readers) confirmation of what has happened in Elizabeth's prophecy!

The role of these women in God's unfolding plan of salvation should stun us and compel us, both men and women, to stand in awe of the Lord and his plans for the world. His mercy and lovingkindness goes on and on, his creativity in bringing people into the dance of his mercy is breath-taking. He brings them in, young an old, believing and not fully believing, and once they bow to him and say "yes, Lord" in the face of what he is doing, he takes their readiness and rejoices in it and works through it, and they are set on fire with his Spirit and they sing forth his word. Perhaps we as women should take special encouragement that in the beginning of this gospel. two of the key witnesses and participants are women, because we live in a world (and sometimes a church) that has sometimes tried to sideline our involvement in the Lord's work in the name of cultural traditions.Here we see the kind of women God calls -- they are bold and they are prophetic and they are holding close to God and his promises as they live them and speak them out.

Let it be so in our lives, Lord. Let it be so.

Recounting the Deeds of the Lord

I was reading in the Scriptures this morning and came across these words in Psalm 78:

4 We will recount to generations to come
the praiseworthy deeds and the power of the Lord,
and the wonderful works he has done.


There is something powerful in the simplicity and strength of this statement. For me, it felt a little bit like marching orders for the people of God.


It was not just their calling to live their lives in constant awareness of God's goodness and mercy, and to respond to God in faith, but also to show their love for him and their place in his story by faithfully living out their commitment to him by sharing what God had done in their lives and in the world with the next generations.


Live in God's presence.
Respond to his grace and mercy.
Be thankful at all times.
Praise him for all he is and all he has done.
Praise him in front of your children, and your children's children.
Teach the next generations about who he is and what he has done! For you, for the world!


That is what I am hearing today, on a morning when I woke up tired (as always) and was asking the Lord for my "marching orders." I do that a lot these days, for the shape of my days look different than they used to. I have days when just getting through a few things that need to be done is all I can manage before it's time to topple over again, still exhausted.  I have days where I think small, remembering my many limitations. I think things like "all I can do today is stay upright, do a little housework, pay a few bills, teach a bit of school to my daughter, write a page or two, handle my medical appointments, try to eat..." (and many days, it's just a couple of the things on that list not all of them). I could add other mundane but important things to that list too...refill a medication, write a thank you note, send an update to my extended family, handle a load of laundry.


And of course, all of those things are necessary, they need to be done. On the most challenging days, I try to remember why I am doing small things, why I am continuing to battle for health and life (with the Lord's strength and in his rest). I am trying to plod along doing the small stuff, but I don't want to forget the big stuff, the overarching vision. Not just for my life, but for all our lives. I need to remember kingdom vision.


And what does that look like? Well, one facet of the kingdom is surely this.


We will recount to generations to come
the praiseworthy deeds and the power of the Lord,
and the wonderful works he has done.

(Psalm 78:4, BCP)

Or as Peterson puts is in the Message, "we're not keeping this to ourselves." God's goodness is meant to be shared!

What and Who Binds Us Together

I was reading along in one of the appointed Psalms this morning, Psalm 28. And I got to these words, which always delight my heart whenever I stumble upon them in the lectionary:



7 Blessed is the Lord! *
for he has heard the voice of my prayer.

8 The Lord is my strength and my shield; *
my heart trusts in him, and I have been helped;

9 Therefore my heart dances for joy, *
and in my song will I praise him.

10 The Lord is the strength of his people, *
a safe refuge for his anointed.

11 Save your people and bless your inheritance; *
shepherd them and carry them for ever.

Something struck me about those words this morning, and about my love for those words. It struck me that one reason I love the Psalms is because the writers of them, the people who prayed these words originally and wrote them down, often speak words that seem to transcend the centuries and differences of culture and just pour out of human longings that we still have in common with them today.

But just when I was feeling awed by that connection, what awed me even further was the realization that yes, we share the same longings, the same needs, the same joys, but we also share the same God. The one who heard the voice of that Psalmist's prayer? He is the one who hears the voice of my prayer today!

No wonder the communion of saints feels so tightly connected! We are connected by so many things! I sometimes imagine a golden cord that we all hold onto through the years, a cord that binds us all together and keeps us dancing in the same circle.  But the cord that binds us is not just one strand, is it? It's a thick cord of strands that includes the thickest, most golden truth of all: that we worship the same Lord, the one who made us, loves us, redeems us, and sustains us through his Spirit.

Marching Orders for the People of God

As part of my morning reading today, I was meditating on Deuteronomy 10:12-22 in Eugene Peterson's paraphrase The Message. I needed to hear these words afresh. And what I found and pulled out, mostly using the exact words of the paraphrase, but pushing them together a bit, is what I am thinking of as "marching orders for the people of God."

They needed them then.

We still need them today.

And here they are....

********

Live in God’s presence in holy reverence

Follow the road he sets out for you

Love Him

Serve Him

Serve Him, your God, with everything you have in you

Obey the commandments

Live a good life

Look around you – everything you see is God’s – the heavens and beyond, the earth and everything on it

Remember that God fell in love with you and chose you

Cut away the thick calluses from around your heart

Stop being willfully hardhearted

Remember who God is – powerful, awesome, immense

Remember where you’ve been and what he’s brought you through

You’ve seen this with your own eyes! Praise him!

Treat others with the same lovingkindness that God treats you

Remember, again, who you were and yet who you have become. He did this. All of it.

The Gift of Memory

This morning I woke up feeling grateful for the gift of memory. I think my gratitude is at least two-fold.

On the personal side, there is my utter gladness that my brain surgery last October was successful. I'm not sure there has been a more frightening moment in my healing journey so far than the moment I first learned that the cancer had reached my brain. The struggles I'd been having to find the right word suddenly loomed crystal clear.

It turned out that the tumor that the neuro-surgeon could, thank the Lord, fully remove, was located near my brain's memory center. When I think how close disease came to trying to take the gifts of language and memory, it still can make me catch my breath. Thank you, God, that these gifts are still with me. Help me to treasure them every day and not take them for granted.

On the more communal side, I've been thinking a lot lately about how important memory is to a community or culture. One of the things I think we are seeing in our broken, angry, and anxiety- ridden national culture right now is a lack of appreciation for memory. We either truly forget, or sometimes choose to forget, the very ideals and experiences that have formed us as a culture and a people. Because of that, we sometimes find ourselves making the same mistakes our forbears did (and then some). I think we would often rather forge ahead as innovators, pretending that what we do is the best thing possible and conveniently forgetting that we stand on the shoulders of others who helped to get us where we are, forgetting too the mistakes we've made in the past as well as the good things we've accomplished when we've managed to get our priorities in order. Our lack of compassion for those who are hurting and displaced and our lack of compassion for each others' woundedness seem linked, I think, to the fact that we forget who we are and who we are called to be. "To whom much has been given, much will be required" is something our power-hungry, resource-rich culture seems to have forgotten.

Of course, we're not the only community of people who have ever forgotten our past. In the Scriptures, time and time again, we see the people of God forgetting who they are and whose they are. They forget God's deliverance; they forget they once were slaves; they forget who they were called to be. And so they stumble in the wilderness and lose their way, falling into the trap of idolatry and becoming what the cultures around them want them to become instead of keeping their eyes on God and his bigger, fuller vision for them.

That narrative continues in the New Testament too. In my morning readings, in Mark 8, I see how Jesus tries to prod his disciples' memories so that they can manage to keep their eyes on him instead of on the anxieties produced by their seeming lack. They are worried because they don't have enough bread to eat that day, and he has to remind them that, only recently, he provided bread for thousands when there was hardly any bread at all. In fact, he'd done it twice, and he patiently prods them to remember both instances and how many leftovers they had counted when he was done providing for the crowds in the name and the power of the Father.

When Jesus did this, he seemed to be reminding them, not only that he himself was the bread of life and that they could count on him to provide for their needs (and in abundance!) but that life isn't always just about our concerns for what we put into our bodies, as important as they may be, but what we allow into our hearts, minds, and souls. Part of the reason the disciples started fussing about bread in the first place was because they heard Jesus warn them about the leaven (yeast) of the Pharisees and Herodians. He wasn't talking about actual yeast; he was using a metaphor to describe the fast-spreading, fast-acting poisonous ideas floating around them. He didn't want them to give into the definitions of the surrounding culture and how that culture would try to tell them to live. He wanted them to remember who they were and whose they were.

Isn't this why we remember Jesus' life and death every time we go to the communion table? We re-enter the story of who he is and what he did for us in part so we can stay on the path to which he has called us, our eyes firmly fixed on him, the author and finisher of our faith. When we remember who he is and what he is done, we remember too who we are and what we are called to do as we follow in his footsteps as closely as possible. Right now it seems to me that the church is often forgetting that we are primarily citizens of God's kingdom (which beats our allegiance to any earthly realm) and that we are called to be salt and light to the nations. 

These are important things for me to remember right now, especially as I spend a lot of time feeling isolated and frustrated and tired. As I spend more and more time focused on what my body needs (medicines, doctor visits, fluids, special foods, treatment options) and as my body continues to grow more tired and more strange to me as it changes and goes through my ongoing struggle against disease, I am sometimes tempted by the enemy to think all these external changes means there have been internal changes. But I am still who I am, regardless of how I look and feel on the outside. I am still God's beloved daughter, called by him to be and do what he wants me to be and do, called to keep my eyes firmly fixed on Jesus as I walk the road he's asked me to walk. I am called to remember who he is and what he has done.

Memory matters. It matters so much that I think I am about to embark on a couple of memorization projects this month, words I can fix in my mind and meditate on. I'm going to start easily with a short passage of Scripture and also a short poem.  After thinking a while this morning, I decided that I am going to memorize John 14:1-3 (in the ESV translation). I also plan to memorize the poem "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry. In all honesty, I have read both of these so many times for so many years that I have big parts of them well memorized already, but this month I am going to try to focus on them by writing them, reading them, and reciting them often so I can commit them to memory even better.

Want to join me? You can pick your own passages, of course.  Memory is a gift, and remembering who we are and whose we are is one way to keep our equilibrium and our peace in difficult times. And to stay on the path of life, our eyes fixed on the God who made us, loves us, and sustains us, fully committed to doing what we're called to do.

Psalmists' Prayers and Disciples' Confessions

My morning meditation...in all its honesty and messiness.

January 18, 2017 (Confession of St. Peter)

From Psalm 38:

3 There is no health in my flesh,
because of your indignation; *
there is no soundness in my body, because of my sin.

It’s hard to read Psalm 38 when you’re really sick. I read this Psalm and others like it a lot differently than I used to, because I now relate to phrases like “there is no health in my flesh.” I know that sometimes someone can be sick because of their sin (I am thinking here of behavior that someone might participate in that can lead directly to sickness, or over a long period of time, or something someone does that leads them into a dangerous situation in which they are injured or left vulnerable to sickness) but I also sometimes wonder if the psalmist is making an incorrect assumption here that sin is the reason behind why he is ill. 

I say that, not to tiptoe gingerly around the Scriptures, but for a couple of reasons. One is that we have other Scriptures in the New Testament that would seem to indicate that Jesus himself did not believe that sin leads to sickness was the only conclusion we should jump to. Remember the disciples asking him “who sinned, this man or his parents?” when they were confronted with the blind man? And Jesus told them that that was simply not the reason the man was born blind (I realize that’s a birth defect and not an “illness” per se, but I think the theological reasoning holds). The man was born blind in order that his healing could bring God glory. 

So I find myself wondering if the psalmist is not jumping to a bumbling, false-guilt sort of assumption, the way the disciples were prone to do. One reason I love God’s word so much is that there are parts in it that I think are there, not just to show us Jesus, but to give us a peek into how we goof it up sometimes. There are other moments in the Psalms, for instance, when the one praying is talking about wreaking vengeance (which we know belongs only to God) and wanting to bash people’s heads in and banish the name of his enemy off the face of the planet, etc., which we know are not Godly choices. But I think the Lord lets them stand in the prayer book contained within his word because they are authentic, human feelings and emotions that need to be prayed through sometimes and placed at his feet. And the Psalms give us that model. Not everything in the Psalms, that is, is necessarily God’s perspective on a situation. They are honest cries that come from the lips of those who suffer or who are angry. Those praying the words can’t always see the forest for the trees. They feel trapped and caught and frustrated. They bring all this to God and he transforms it…something, by the way, that we see even here in Psalm 38, when the Psalmist is so sure that he is sick by reason of his own foolishness and sin…

4 For my iniquities overwhelm me; *
like a heavy burden they are too much for me to bear.

5 My wounds stink and fester *
by reason of my foolishness.

…

14 I have become like one who does not hear *
and from whose mouth comes no defense.

15 For in you, O Lord, have I fixed my hope; *
you will answer me, O Lord my God.

…

17 Truly, I am on the verge of falling, *
and my pain is always with me.

18 I will confess my iniquity *
and be sorry for my sin.

I love the way this Psalm turns because we see that even in the midst of his guilt – and perhaps, as I said, he is praying honestly, and somehow does know that his pain is directly connected to his iniquity – the psalmist turns to God. He fixes his hope in God. He trusts him. He tells him exactly how he is feeling and what he is worried about. And he confesses his sin, trusting in the Lord’s forgiveness.

I confess I do struggle sometimes, even knowing that my doctors have told me that there is no evidence that anything I did brought on this cancer (I never smoked, for instance) – that it is, in fact, a rare and strange series of mutations – I still struggle. I think that perhaps it was stuff I ate over a long period of time, or not taking my health seriously enough or exercising the way I should. But most of the time, I find myself more in the place of the blind man I talked about above. I wonder if God did not allow this sickness to happen (I do not believe he purposefully gave it to me, but I do sense he allowed it) in order to bring him glory. In order to do something in my life that otherwise he couldn’t have done, to bring me into deeper intimacy with him, and to let me walk the road of suffering in ways that help others and bring them into deeper intimacy with Jesus too.

Lots of wrestling here, with just a few verses this morning, but there is a lot going on in my heart and mind. 

And I do feel grateful for the honest prayers of the Psalmist and the bumbling, stumbling, sometimes rather dense disciples and their place in God’s story, which helps me to find mine.

And speaking of stumbling disciples…how I love that today we celebrate Peter’s confession! It is a wonderful confession from a man who dearly loved Jesus and who was prone to blurt out the first thing that came into his heart and mind. Sometimes that means he really goofed it up. But sometimes…oh sometimes! He just hit it out of the park. I have a feeling Peter made Jesus smile (and occasionally inwardly groan as well as outwardly rebuke!) and this must have been one of those joy filled moments for our Lord, when he saw that Peter truly GOT IT. Peter understood, deep down, who Jesus was. Which means he was on the path to true life and peace, rooted in reality and ready to become a vessel for Jesus’ love to pour into and spill out over the world. What a wonderful place to be and stand. This reminds me too of Martha’s confession, another wonderful one we hear in the gospels. Neither Peter nor Martha got everything right, as the stories about them show us. But when it came down to the most important thing, they certainly did. They looked into Jesus’ eyes and they saw their Lord, their Savior, the Son of God, the resurrection and the life, the perfect imprint of the Father. Oh Lord, give us eyes like their eyes, I pray. Amen.