Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, November 11, 2018:

First Reading: 1 Kings 17:8-16

First Reading (Semi-cont.): Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17

Psalm: Psalm 146

Psalm (Semi-cont.): Psalm 127

Second Reading: Hebrews 9:24-28

Gospel: Mark 12:38-44

In some churches this Sunday, congregations will hear the story of Ruth, and then hear about the poor widow in the Gospel. Some pastors will tell their congregations that the lesson to be learned is to be nice to your mother-in-law, and some will wrap the poor widow into a stewardship Gospel as they ask congregations to give until it hurts. What is Jesus really trying to say?

I've often had trouble with the historical church's approach to women, but rarely has the message of Jesus seemed anti-female. With Gospels like this one, at first I'm pleased to see that Jesus uses a female as a model of good behavior. The Gospel seems to fit with the story of the rich young man who is told to give away all that he has to the poor and with the message of Jesus about the yoke we must wear.

But then I stop and think. She's not just any woman. If Jesus just wanted a model of good behavior, he might have stopped there. No, she's not just any woman. She's a widow. Women didn't have much status in the days of Jesus, and widows had even less. Why would Jesus make her a widow?

I suspect that Jesus, as always, has something to tell us about the power structures of his day--power structures that look a lot like power structures of our day. The poor widow is poor not because she couldn't manage her money. No, she was poor because of the class structures put in place to keep her destitute. She is surrounded by men who have no trouble making their financial commitments to the Temple, while she gives all that she has.

Jesus calls us to always--always--help the poor, the destitute, and the outcast. But that is not enough. Jesus also calls us to participate in Kingdom building. We are to work to transform the world so that nobody will be poor and outcast. We are to work towards a world where everyone has enough so that no one has to donate their last coins to the Temple to help the poor.

Helping the poor is charity work, and it's important. We're called to do it. Transforming our society so that we have no poor people in need of charity work is social justice work, and it's even more important than charity work.

You might think about your own life. Where do you see poor widows in need of help? How can you help transform our society so that at some point there will be no poor widows?

Jesus also has a message that we shouldn't ignore about holding on too closely to our coins. We live in a world that often judges us by how successful we are, and money is often the rubric used to assess us.  Jesus has a different story to tell us, a story where we are truly free, and judged by a different set of metrics, one that is seldom valued by the world. Jesus values radical generosity, generosity that the world would regard as lunacy. Jesus invites us into the transformative grace of that story.

One Last Look at All Saints 2018

All Saints Sunday was one of great creativity for me.  I described part of it in yesterday's post.  I also took pictures during the day.  This one is technically a mistake, taken with the lens fogged up from the difference in temperature from inside to outside, but I like the ghostliness of it--appropriate for All Saints!

As I heard the Gospel story again and again, the lines that leapt out for me were the last ones, where Jesus orders Lazarus unbound. And so I made this image during our later service:

I was playing with the markers that we'll be using in the online journaling class that I'm taking. They're colors that I might not have chosen on my own. I used words from all of the lessons of the day:

First Reading: Isaiah 25:6-9

Second Reading: Revelation 21:1-6a

Gospel: John 11:32-44


And then I came home and did some additional work with the markers and journaling--more on that as the journaling course continues.  So far, it's been a course that's been very inspiring, worth every penny.

All Saints Strips and Crosses

Yesterday, I was in charge of our interactive service.  I had known for awhile that I would be in charge, and I thought briefly about doing something with altars and the way that some of our Latin American neighbors celebrate the Day of the Dead.  But I couldn't quite pull that together, given my lack of a kitchen (no Day of the Dead bread) and the way we've been worshiping the last several weeks, so I couldn't remind people to bring things for the altar.

Then I saw an idea in this blog post and decided to adopt it.  I knew that I had a sheet I could tear into strips so that we could write the names of our loved ones and saints on them.

I had planned to make a cross that we could tie our strips to it, but I didn't find anything I really liked.

Then I remembered that we already have such a cross--we used it for Easter flowers, so I thought that tying strips half a year later had a nice resonance and symbolism.

After we tied our strips, we scattered some rose petals on the memorial stones in the butterfly garden.

Then we came inside and talked about our highs and lows and prayed and had Communion.  A note for next year:  strips like these could make a beautiful banner too.  Below is a picture from Katie Mathews Treadway's church:

Voting Lines and Church

This will not be the kind of post where I rail against pastors who are too political in the pulpit.  I will not be proposing that churches lose their tax exempt status.  I want to praise churches as one of the few places left where people of various backgrounds gather together.

There are other places, of course.  Certain grocery stores that straddle neighborhoods and urban wastelands might see the same kind of mix.  It's hard for me to think of many other diverse spaces in the stratified society in which we live.  Most of us aren't going to schools that introduce us to people not like our families.  Most of us work in places where we have more in common than more that separates us.

I am painfully aware that churches can be just as stratified.  I go to my Lutheran church every week, where I don't meet any Orthodox Jews or even many evangelical Christians.  But I've had more conversations with homeless people in the context of church than I have had in any other setting.  I have met people from a wide variety of backgrounds in church.  I sit in a space with both babies and people who are deeply old, which doesn't happen very often in any other context.

I thought about space and differences as I stood in the longest line to vote I've ever stood in, outside of presidential elections.  I stood between an Orthodox Jewish couple and a woman who works in a downtown Scandinavian bakery--downtown Hollywood--which is in South Florida.  People chatted in a variety of languages.  We were a variety of ages.  Even children were there, which made me happy.  Everyone was patient, again something that doesn't happen very often in South Florida.

As with church, many of us in that line had a yearning for something better.  Why else show up?  In our political lives, as in our spiritual lives, we participate in rituals that we don't fully understand, and many of us don't fully trust.  But what else can we do?

I realize that there are lots of answers:  building bombs or building houses for the less fortunate, and I could go on and on.  But with each answer I see a smaller sliver of humans participating.

Until this election, I might have said the same thing about midterm elections.  Usually, I show up to vote in midterm elections to find pollworkers happy to see me because the site has been so empty.  That was not the case this year.

I began the week-end by going to vote.  I will end the week-end as I usually do, by going to church.  I will be fed in ways that I expect and in ways I won't even realize until later.  These week-end bookends make me feel better about the future of the country.  If I spent the week-end inside, watching the various news shows and/or the unavoidable political commercials, which will be the lot of many of us this week-end, I'd have a very different view of the nation.

The U.S. is a fibrous construction of humanity, and I have faith and hope that while we are a bit unraveled, we're far from ripped.

Nuggets of Happiness in a Gloomy Time

As the days move into November, many of us feel a bit gloomier.  The days are getting much shorter, and we are surrounded by reminders that our total time here on the planet is very short.  We do our best to make this idea festive with our Halloween decorations, our Day of the Dead celebrations. 

Let me add some nuggets of happiness to the festive days of this week:

--I went to early voting yesterday.  The lines were the longest I've ever stood in for a non-Presidential year election--a wide diversity of people all patiently waiting and chatting. It made me feel weepy with hope--a great feeling these days!  Everyone was civil and patient.  I loved all the children emerging from the voting area with "I Voted Early" stickers all over their clothes and faces.  One woman who works in the Danish bakery in downtown Hollywood brought 2 boxes of pastries for the workers.

--Voting makes me realize how much I love this giant experiment of a country.  Our democracy doesn't seem fragile when I stand in line with my fellow citizens, all of us sweating in the sun that's still intense in November in South Florida.  I stood in line with such a variety of people.  This country is so huge, both in terms of land mass, beliefs, and types of humans--it's hard to believe that we could go the way of Germany in the 1930's or the former Yugoslavia of the 1990's.

--Before we went to vote, we spent the evening reading the ballot, researching the various ammendments.  I made a joke about our romantic evening at home, doing political research, but I was partly serious.   It was a pleasant way to spend an evening, but we are odd that way as a liberal artsy couple.  We often we have similar evenings at home, at least several nights a week, talking about a variety of philosophical issues.

--After a time of not writing much poetry, I wrote 4 poems this week, and one of them came out fully formed.  I went to observe the Chemistry teacher yesterday, on the Feast of All Souls.  I came away with a poem about rust's slow will to conquer an oxidized nail--rust and oxidation and EMS compressions and people writing dissertations in geologic time and a dose of a feast day--I'm pleased with that poem.  I am less pleased with my poem about early voting, but it has potential.  I also wrote a poem rooted in home repairs, and a Halloween poem.  It's been a long, long time since I wrote 4 poems in one week.

--We had a good Halloween week at school.  Two years ago, on Halloween, I started my time here.  Many people this week wished me a happy anniversary.  I'm still happy at this campus.

It's strange to count up my happiness nuggets in a week where so many of us grieved the shooting at a synagogue and countless other losses.  But maybe in a week like this one, it's more important than ever.

The Feast of All Souls: Celebrating in Traditional and Untraditional Ways

Today is the Feast of All Souls. You might be confused--didn't we just celebrate this holiday yesterday?

No, that was All Saints. All Saints was originally designed to honor the saints, those who had been beatified: official saints, canonized by the Pope. Some traditions would also include Christian martyrs.

All Souls Day, celebrated the day after All Saints, was designed to honor everyone else who had died.

In some traditions, All Saints Day honors all the Christian dead, and All Souls Day honors those who have died in the past year. In the medieval Catholic theology, those souls would still be in Purgatory, and special prayers would be offered for them on the Feast of All Souls.

Those of you with excellent memories of your English major days may remember that Sir Gawain left for his adventure with the Green Knight on All Souls Day. Medieval audiences would have read a lot into that date of departure. They would be expecting that next year, Gawain would be one of the souls prayed for on this feast day.

All Souls would develop into the kind of day that drove Martin Luther crazy. On All Souls Day, people would be encouraged to spend money so that their loved ones would get out of purgatory sooner. According to medieval theology, a soul wasn't ready to go to Heaven right away.

A few years ago, I came across a reference piece that talked about the triduum of Halloween, All Saints and All Souls. Triduum means "three days," but I've only ever heard of it used as the time period between Good Friday and Easter. It's so much easier to celebrate the Triduum of Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls, when it occurs on a week-end.  On those years, I bake some bread and have some time to do some contemplation.

Today, I will spend an additional day with the dead.  So many of us are thinking of the people shot in the synagogue on Saturday.  I hear so many people bemoaning the fact that we aren't even safe where and when we worship--but frankly, it hasn't felt safe in years.  Anywhere a door is unlocked, that kind of evil can enter.

These days, I feel unsafe in so many ways.  I am most concerned about how vitriolic so many aspects of our common culture have become.  I worry about the way violence explodes these days.  I know that my white skin and my middle to upper class status buys me some protection.  I know that I am vulnerable as a woman, but my middle age and my height and weight also buy me protection--I do not present as a typical female victim.

But I also know that when one of us is unsafe in a culture, we're all unsafe.  Sooner or later, they're coming for you.

So today, I will also spend some time mourning what we've become.  And I'll try not to get mired in this autumnal gloom.  I'll light my metaphorical candles and think about the world I want to see, not the world that I do see.

And then I'll go vote.  My state allows early voting, but it will soon be over.  Voting--it's not a traditional way of celebrating the Feast Day of All Souls, but as I stand in the lines I expect to see, I'll pray the same kinds of prayers.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel and Today's Feast Day

The readings for Sunday, November 4, 2018:

First Reading: Isaiah 25:6-9

First Reading (Alt.): Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9

Psalm: Psalm 24

Second Reading: Revelation 21:1-6a

Gospel: John 11:32-44

This Sunday and today, Nov. 1, we celebrate the Feast of All Saints', traditionally a time when we remember our dead loved ones and all the saints triumphant. Some of us are lucky--we have come through the past year without death coming close to us or those whom we love. Some of us have spent the past year grieving, and we can't imagine how we will ever leave the tomb of grief ourselves.

And along comes Jesus, who calls us to a new life.

Jesus constantly reminds us that the glory of God is all around us, if only we had eyes to see. Jesus invites us to a Resurrection Culture. Sometimes, it's a forceful invitation: the cancer that is caught in time, the loss of a relationship or job that leaves us open to something more nourishing, the addiction that loosens its hold, the return of the prodigal loved ones. Other times, we catch sight of God's Kingdom as a fleeting glimpse: the dance of butterflies, the bad mood that lifts, the perfect bottle of wine that we share with friends.

Still we must cope with the ultimate sorrow. As thinking creatures, we go through life aware that if we live long enough, we will lose all that we love. How do we square the Resurrection Culture of Jesus with this knowledge?

Jesus promises us that death is not the final answer. We may not fully understand how Jesus will fulfill that promise. Some will argue that we go directly to Heaven, and some will tell us that we'll wait in a safe place until the final coming of Christ. And in the meantime, Jesus invites us to participate in the creation of the Kingdom, right here, right now. We don't have to wait until we're dead.

Jesus stands at the door of our tombs and calls to us. How will we answer? Will we say, "Go away! I'm comfortable here in my coffin. Leave me alone." Or will we emerge, blinking, into the sunshine of new life? Will we let Jesus unwrap us from our death cloths?