Doxology

I am sitting at a coffee shop inside of a library, as fine a combination of institutions as I can imagine.  I am listening to Daniel Barenboim’s rendition of Mendelssohn’s 'Songs without Words’ on my headphones, but the tune drowning out Barenboim in my head is The Old One Hundred.  I am chant/humming the ending to some 300 year old Christian hymns for the morning and evening prayers by Thomas Ken that we now call The Doxology.

Yesterday my surgeon called me at home.  He said he had the pathology reports from the samples sent for biopsy during my lobectomy last week.  The waiting for the phone call had been difficult.  As the time Ketl and I first expected we might hear from him passed, I became more anxious. “Maybe the news is bad and he wants to wait until the 'tumor board' (yes there is such a group) meets to add authority to his news and treatment plan.” “Maybe he is too busy and wants to put off bad news.” Maybe, maybe, maybe.  You cannot reliably infer from silence.

I had tried to promise myself to sing Dayenu no matter the news.  Yet despite my prayers, as Ketl and I walked in the evening I grasped her tight to me and sobbed.  I sobbed for our future, my children, for my life.

Anyone who tells you not to argue with God has not carefully listened to the biblical texts as they formulated such ideas.  The psalmist, in a tight spot, surrounded by enemies, or I imagine, waiting for pathology reports, pleads, “Who will praise you if you send me to the dust of death?” Or, “Who will sing of your great power to heal, to set things straight, if I am dead?”  (see Psalm 6 or 30 or 115) You get my drift, I wanted to sing Dayenu, but fear, loss, regret, longing, all rose up as I waited.  I always told Ketl I just wanted one more day to be her husband, the father to our children.  Just one more day.  And if given that day, surely near its end, I would want another.  That is why Dayenu is such a profound response to the inevitable about us.

But now I sit with coffee and books and Mendelssohn's lieder and The Old One Hundred in my head.  The results are negative, no sign of cancer.  No return to the halls of that surgery unit to hear, and possibly endure, horrors.  Time to hold my wife some more. Time to hear Anya sing and laugh some more.  Time to find adventure and a good night market meal in Singapore with Rachel.  As he spoke the words to me, 'the results are negative’, a new song “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.  Praise Him all creatures here below.  Praise Him above the heavenly hosts. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.” just broke into my head.  Years of Sundays in church with faithful parents and later as an adult, 40 days and 500 miles walking and praying in Spain, holding hands and singing this song after sharing the Eucharist at my new church, Bethel AME, all that repetition over all those years splashed that tune and those words into my heart.  That was my Dayenu.  Well maybe it wasn't gracious equanimity in the face of bad news quite yet, but it surely was gratitude for a return to an open-ended future.

I shared the news with friends and cribbed from the V'ahavta of my Friday nights, 'Cue up the Doxology and sing it when you rise up.  Sing it again when you lie down.  Sing it as you enter, and again when you leave.  Write out the words and tie them around your wrist so they are always handy. If you need to, make a recording and play it through headphones so you are always humming it.  Make sure your children know how to sing it too.  Sing it so often it is as much you as your very blood and bones.’ So if that 300 year old song is really the first thing that springs from my mouth when I hear that I am out of a tight spot and I will live: dayenu.  I will have to keep singing for a while longer to be ready so it springs from my mouth when the news is otherwise.  Meantime, cue the Doxology.  Ketl's rabbi showed me a 400 mile pilgrimage trail across northern Italy to the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul in Rome. Ketl and I have to get in shape for surely days of sweat walking through wonders and nights of wine and holding hands in village squares will be involved.  Cue the Doxology indeed.  Hum along. Buen Camino.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqBnzM1JBWM

Dayenu

I wasn't really supposed to hear.  “It looks like the chest tube site might have become infected.  She is on meds for schizophrenia and she is a type 1 diabetic.” I wasn't really supposed to hear, but I am walking the halls of the thoracic surgery unit.  I am exercising and regaining my health.  She, whoever she is, she is in my prayers.  I am shuffling along in stocking feet.  She, well, I hope someone who loves her is close by. 

I wasn't really supposed to hear, but I was walking awaiting my own news.  I had a 'spot’.  Then it was a 'lump’.  Then it was cancer.  That word caused all who heard to shrink back.  I often wept as I said it aloud.  In my Sunday School class a woman put her hand on me and cried '”Begone.  Just Begone.”.

My surgeon says, in a slightly different form, much the same.  He worked with great skill, as the Imago Dei he was meant to be, to, as my Rabbi's prayer says, bring order to chaos.  He took the top lobe of my right lung. "Begone".  So I am shuffling the halls and hearing horrors.  I am pacing waiting for the pathology report.  Was order really restored or has microscopic chaos escaped his skilled hands? 

Today as I await my news, I have been humming a song from the Passover we celebrate with such joy.  The song is called “Dayenu”.  You sing of one of the blessings of the great liberation and the chorus “Dayenu” reminds us 'it would have been enough.’. We sing of the next blessing and again sing “Dayenu”--it would have been enough.

I walk the halls, regaining strength.  I think on my wife who has held my heart next to her’s for these many years.  I sing “Dayenu”.  I settle on my beautiful children so full of grace.  I sing “Dayenu”.  I think of a long walk with a dear friend, 500 miles across Spain.  I sing “Dayenu”.  I whimper in the face of the news to come.  Oh let me sing “Dayenu” today, before the news, and tomorrow, after the news.  I should not have really heard about her chest tube or her schizophrenia or her diabetes.  No one should hear because no one should have chest tubes and schizphrenia, and diabetes, and so much more.  But she does have. We do have. We await pathology reports, so we must learn to sing “Dayenu”.  Buen Camino 

A baptism long ago and a pall for days to come: life well dressed.

A couple of weeks ago I contacted the church my parents belonged to in Battle Creek, MI where I was born.  I wanted to find the date of my baptism and the name of the officiant.  The current pastor at Maple United Methodist was very helpful.  She got back in touch quickly.  The news was mixed.  While they had a record of my mother's and father’s membership and the date of my sister’s baptism, there were no records of my baptism.  Indeed, there was a gap in all records of baptism, marriage, and membership beginning in the summer of the year I was born and continuing for 3 and ½ years.  Apparently, the minister and officiant at my baptism was not the greatest administrator in the history of the Methodist church.

I went in search of the specific date of my baptism because I wanted to plan a specific portion of my funeral.  You see, I’m not one who is much enamored by the trend among American Protestants to call funerals “Celebrations of Life”.  Celebrations of Life are, as one author called them, “the triumph of the biographical.”  They send us back through the life of the deceased, and we remember the moments of light comedy, the accomplishments, and we highlight that which her/his friends and family find worthy.  Then we are instructed not to mourn, but to “Celebrate”, because the deceased has “gone home”.   Indeed, oftentimes, there are hints that the deceased has not ‘gone’ anywhere at all, but hovers over the proceedings watching and smiling in nebulous bliss.

Despite the hints of orthodox theology, life over death and all, there is more than a whiff of Gnosticism wafting about these celebrations.  Gnosticism disparages the world.  Gnosticism denies the scriptural testimony of Elohim’s experience at creation.  There it is, plain as day, “And God saw that it was good.” But no, for the Gnostic, this world, our bodies, matter, well, they really aren’t that good. Some vaguely ‘spiritual’ world, found either inside of us somewhere or in some ethereal ‘heaven’, is superior.  The early Church spent much of its time and intellectual effort trying to turn away the many heresies spawned by the Gnostic world view.  The Apostles’ Creed begins with creation and ends with resurrection of the body: nothing other worldly there.  Unfortunately, a version of Gnosticism has spread into American Protestantism.  In many of our churches “going to heaven” is preached as the goal of the Christian life.  We are told to mistrust our bodies because they so obviously are subject to weaknesses and corruption.  Why our intellects that contemplate the “propositional truths” or the ‘lessons’ of Scripture aren’t equally weak and corruptible is a question not asked.  Mind or spirit is, “of course” superior to body or ‘this world’.

All that is to say that a Celebration of Life denies the movement of time unrelentingly toward eternity.  There is, according to the Scriptures, an “In the beginning” and there is an announcement by the Lamb, “Yes, I am coming soon.”  There is memory, as in “remember you too were once slaves in Egypt.”  But there is no rewind.  This world, corrupted by sin as it may be, has meaning that is not to be denied by sentimental do-overs on a last day.  Just ask the apostle Thomas.  The once stone-cold dead and now risen Jesus still has the hole of a life pierced by pain and a Roman spear in his side.  Jesus lived and died in the world that His Father loves.  His life and suffering are not to be ignored and passed over,  just as our sufferings as well as joys should not be passed over.

 More importantly, Celebrations of Life practically shout at us to deny our feelings.  We are hurt by loss.  I remember quite vividly coming to attend a funeral of a saint of the church and when I mentioned to the officiant that it was a sad day, I was chastised, told my feelings were mistaken, that “no, this is a great day.  She is with the Lord she followed through life.”  Au contraire, I thought.  Even as I share both the now deceased saint’s and the pastor’s hope in the promise of resurrection—the day of the saint’s funeral was not that resurrection day.  I was missing her.  Those of us who call ourselves friends of the grieving are simply being nervously thoughtless or near hopelessly self-centered when we try to convince the grief stricken, either in private conversations, or worse yet from the authority of a pulpit, that ‘good’ Christians are happy in the face of loss rather than devastated by the hole death opened up in the ground right there in front of them.

 Why do we downplay the pain?  Are our histories with the dead, our lives of uncertainty due to loss, and the real anguish of our body aching to hold a loved one close to be so discounted and minimized?  Now it may be true that a long lived, died in her sleep, saint of the church deserves to have her virtues proclaimed at the ceremonial recognition of her death.  They are proclaimed because we will miss them.  They are gone from this present.  Her life mattered.  Her loss is felt.

So, back to my search for the date of my baptism and my funeral plans.  I recently stumbled upon an ancient Christian practice: the funeral pall.   The use of a funeral pall seems to me to properly weigh and balance a Christian recognition of a life lived and now gone, the pain and finality of death, and the hope of life to come.  Since early in the life of the Church, the dead have been draped in a cloth: a mort-cloth [mort, literally death, in Latin], or pall.  It can be black or white (more usual now) and it is usually embroidered with a cross or other Christian symbol.  It is laid over the body or coffin (or nowadays, urn).  At some point in my service, I want the officiant to point to the pall and say something like this, “As St. Paul told the Galatians, ‘For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ’.  So too, Peter, presented by his faithful parents, MaryBeth and Chuck Doan, was baptized, and so clothed with Christ, in 1954 at Maple Methodist Church in Battle Creek, Michigan with Rev. Robert Dobbs officiating.  So here, signified by this pall, Peter is still, even in this day, clothed in Christ, and will be clothed in Christ as he sleeps in the dust in the hope, promised by Christ, of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting yet to come.” 

Now that, to me, is a fine testimony to the fullness of life, the finality of death, and the hope of life to come.  The goodness of the creation is honored in recounting of the name of the place where I was clothed in Christ.  God’s careful formation me, bodily, in the womb is recognized in the remembering the names of my parents. The church, one visible part of the body of Christ in this world, is recalled by naming the officiant.  The finality of my death and its consequence is named aloud in the recognition that I return to the dust out of which humans were formed.  The hope of a day to come, not a day in which I will ‘get to heaven’ but a day in which Christ will  bring heaven to earth and raise me bodily from the dead is proclaimed in the words of the Creed. 

In the end, as my last act of evangelism in this life, I want a funeral pall.  A pall announces the Good News that Jesus has come, died, and lives again in order to clothe the world in Himself.   A pall evokes the wonder and majesty of the scope and stretch of God’s presence in His Son, Jesus, in and over my life and death, in and over this world He so loves.  As I was baptized and clothed in Christ, so I will wait for His return well dressed.  Buen Camino.

When I was young. . .

When I was young . . .
     Curmudgeon culture is pretty popular these days.  You know it when you hear it.  In fact, there is a near perfect correlation between a comment that begins "when I was young " and curmudgeonliness. A curmudgeonly Facebook posting often features this sort of thing, "I was spanked.  I turned out alright [evidence generally not provided]. Today's kids are bad.  We need to bash them some, and then they'd be like me: alright."  More genial, but just as curmudgeonly,  "We came in when the streetlights came on [yes, kids, we actually were supposed too]."  "We played outside."  "We said 'Yes sir.' and 'No ma'am.'"  We did thus and so.  The logic is always the same:
1) a bit of self-congratulation,  "We, and our ways, are good."
2) a bit of analysis often based on scanty anecdotal evidence, "Today they [and you know who 'they' are--'they' are decidedly not 'us'] don't do that stuff."
3) and now the acid to the face,   "And just look, anyone can see, they are bad."

There is even a political version of curmudgeonliness: The golden age [for 'us' at least] is gone. 'They' took it. Give me power.  I will get it back for 'us'.  Yuck.  Dangerous and often deadly, yuck.

     One of the things I vowed to leave behind on my 2012 pilgrimage through Spain was my creeping case of the curmudgeons.  You know when you have that first reaction to something or someone and it's negative.  Well, I vowed to try to choke that off for at least a moment and let openness have a chance.  What is so maddening about a curmudgeonly character is that it is simply a closed off heart.  It is to look at a fellow human being and to shout "No, you can't do that!  No, you can't be that!  There is no room in this big earth for you.  It is for me and my ways.  Not for you and your ways."

     I must admit I failed. I'm still all too quick to pass judgement, to criticize, and if maybe, in my own defense, I don't toss acid to the face, I do all too often toss chilling waters.
 
     Yesterday, I got a simple but clear reminder of what I learned in Spain.  My north of 85 mother-in-law has been having trouble with one of her ear piercings.  Anya suggested that she go to a tattoo parlor and they could help.  So off went the family to Pangea Piercing in downtown Ann Arbor.  "When I was young" only "weirdos" had tattoos.  You never saw one of your school teachers with a tattoo (well maybe the shop guy).  Your doctor never had tattoos.  Nope not a one.  Neither your pastor, your politicians, your friends nor your neighbors (unless they were a sailor in their youth!).  I'll admit it.  I'm a tattoo curmudgeon.

     Well, this fella, was competent to a fault.  He solved her problem.  More important, my mother-in-law suffers from dementia and is often anxious and confused in all but the most familiar of situations.  As you can imagine, sitting in a tattoo parlor qualifies as an unfamiliar situation for her.  He was not only competent, he was compassionate.  He calmed her and did not start working until she was ready. Then to put a hilarious punchline onto the whole adventure, he said she needed some lubricant to use if the problem returned. He directed her next door.  So the whole family trooped next door to shop called "Bongs and Thongs" to purchase lubricant. Just wonderfully hilarious: three generations of Freedmans crowding into a place that sold glassware for smoking dope and "toys" for, well I'm so square I probably can't imagine, leave it at 'for intimate moments'.  I'll bet that made a picture that went home from work as a story that night.
   
     "When I was young",  the world  was really a smaller, meaner place in some pretty important ways.  I learned small and mean lessons about what to think about 'them' and how they differed from 'us'.  God spare me the curmudgeon.  Yesterday, was a reminder to me of how simple it really is.  We are all peregrino, each and every one of us. We are pilgrims and wanderers, not yet home.  Let your first impulse be always to 'love God', and your next impulse let it always be to, 'love your neighbor'.  And Rabbi Hillel is right, the rest is just commentary.   Buen Camino.  Thanks guy with so many tattoos.

On Leaders and Servants

I have been thinking about the official responses to the Flint water crisis as our politicians weigh in or ignore the folk in Flint.  Their health has been endangered.  Their children may face lifelong difficulty because the tap water hurt them.  Property values are probably near zero.  My goodness, my goodness.
By chapter 25 of the book of Exodus, all the action of rescuing from Egypt, getting the 10 words on Sinai, and confirming the covenant is over.  Now comes a commandment from God to build a tabernacle and a very detailed set of instructions about what that tabernacle is to look like, what the accoutrements of worship are to look like, and what the priestly garb is to look like.  Following that comes a retelling of the detailed instructions as the craftsmen and craftswomen actually build the tabernacle, the accoutrements of worship, and the priestly garb.  After the action of seas parting and Shekinah descending on mountains, golden calves and smashed tablets, well its a little boring.
Buried in that description is the following phrase, " . . .and I will dwell among them."  All that detail, Well the God of heaven and earth, the God of redemption from slavery, wants a place to live not up on Olympus, but "among them."
John begins his Gospel of Jesus by couching Jesus' coming in even more startling terms, "And the Word became Flesh and dwelt (tabernacled!) among us."  The God who rescues slaves and raises the dead and forgives folks who don't acknowledge it when it happens, that God now comes and dwells in a body just like mine.  Paul says that Jesus gave up the heavens to "empty" himself and become one with us.  Jesus presses his followers to empty themselves as he has done--thus the washing of feet, reaching out to the lame, the blind, the hungry, the suffering.
All these images of intimate sharing between Creator and creature I've strung together a bit too quickly here stand in sharp contrast to the politicians of our day. Has Governor Snyder said, "I am responsible for this mess.  These were my employees.  I will move to Flint and 'dwell' there until it's resolved."  Did Sanders or Clinton make that kind of suggestion?  Micheal Moore?  The churches?  Anybody?
 " . . .and I will dwell among them."

What word to bring for Easter?

On my way to church Sunday I heard an NPR story about a ministry to homeless youth in Seattle.  The tables are set once a week.  A meal is served, and the pastor shares a "word of encouragement" before the kids set out into the night.  One transgender youth who appreciated both the meal and the fellowship said, "I never came to church before.  I thought these were the people that hurt you." I felt like I was punched in the stomach.

What Word is the Church, my church, bringing for Easter?  A word that hurts a transgender homeless kid and keeps him/her away?  A word of hemming and hawing about Christ changing us--usually not into the image of a Palestinian Jew dying on the empire's cross, but more often than not into the image of  North American Mom and Dad and Bud and Sis primly sitting in neat rows for an hour or so on Sunday? A Word of grace, naked and honest to goodness grace? What Word do we really bring?

I visit an inmate in Milan FCI.  Unlike holy fire that burns without consuming, his passion, a passion he could not quench, burned his life down.  His wife died of cancer during his trial.  He seldom talks with his adult children.  It is always on his initiative. They never write or visit.  As I visited him this week, he said that he phoned them for Valentine's day.  After some stilted pleasantries, his daughter told him that all the kids agree: when he gets out, he will not be permitted to see any of his grandchildren.  Now, his unholy fire has burned even the bridges between generations.

I will next see him on Easter.  At my house, there is no big ham dinner to be made when I get home from church.  Easter is just another Sunday at chez Freedman-Doan.  But it's not just another Sunday in the life of the Church.  Without the Passion, the Cross, a dead body growing cold and stiff in a silent grave, and then women returning in tears from an Empty Tomb, well without all that, what is there?

Every Easter I can recall, I've heard a sermon on new life, resurrection power, and life renewed.  I've heard god awful chrysalis to butterfly analogies and God blessed exegesis that ponders the holy details of the mystery of life and all creation turned back to right by a God willing to pay great costs to redeem.

So when I go to Milan, what word do I bring from my church, from the Church?  What good is "new life" if you can't hold your grandchildren?  What good is release of the captive, when you have no where to go? When you find that some sin burned bridges will never be rebuilt, how do you get over to the Hallelujah? I think on the Thomas incident in the Gospels.  The holes are still, and always, in Jesus' body.  Death may be defeated, but the past is indelibly written in the flesh.  I have been tasked with bringing a Word and I am tongue tied.  Cliches, Pollyanna, nice, nice, won't do. The Word must be both gracious and true to the bone true.  A Word is what I need, but what Word do I bring on Easter?

Miracles

Sunday’s lectionary reading was the story of the wedding feast at Cana in John’s gospel.  Jesus turns water into wine: the first of the seven signs John recounts.  All over the world, folks, like me, whose pastors’ follow the Revised Common Lectionary heard mediations on miracles.  Here’s another sort of mediation on miracles, based on a different story.

This week’s parsha for Jews around the world was בְּשַׁלַּח , Beshalach, “when let go”.  The passage tells the story of the Great Escape—the time when God saved His people from slavery.  It is the story we tell at our Passover Seder each year.  It is the story that Jesus retells at His final Seder in Jerusalem on the night before He died.

The details of the story are worth attention. The parsha begins just after the instructions about how to celebrate the events that the instructions interrupt: “And it came to pass, when Pharaoh let the people go, that God led them not by way of the land of the Philistines [the short direct way to Canaan] . . .But God led the people about, by way of the wilderness by the Red Sea,” (Exodus 13: 17-18).  When the text says “God led the people”, the writers are not kidding around, “the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, . . . and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light;” (13:21).  You want to talk your fodder for sermons on miracles—here it is.  You want your “sign from God” to insure this gamble we call faith pays off here it is. Clear as a bell day or night—the visible presence of the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Redeemer from the slave pits of Egypt—right there before your eyes directing your steps.  How’s that for miracle.

Then Chapter 14, the cinematic highlight scene, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are “led” to camp at Pi-hahiroth hard on the sea.  The mighty Pharaoh, heart hardened, welshes on the deal to let the Israelites go and puts 600 chariots worth of hard men in motion to get them back.

“When Pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were sore afraid; and the children of Israel cried out to the Lord. And they said unto Moses: ‘Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?’ (14:10-11) Moses shouts, “Fear not”, and assures them that the Lord will fight for them and they have nothing to fear.

And then the miracle.  The movie makers, and the way we tell the story to our children around the Seder table, would have you believe that the parting of the sea is the miracle: ‘and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all the night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided [think about the creation story in Genesis]. 

But I think the miracle is somewhere else.  Somewhere a little quieter. Somewhere a little more human.  Note the crucial details: “And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘Wherefore criest thou unto Me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.”  But how can they go forward?  Just when they need reassurance and direction most, “the angel of God, who went before the camp of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud removed from before them, and stood behind them; (v. 19).  Just at the crucial moment, one set of miracles ceased.  The signposts pointing the way disappear. Disaster looms on all sides, and then the real miracle occurs.  Someone, unnamed in the story, a real nobody, follows the command God gives: “go forward”.  One heart answered the call of God to ‘fear not’.  One heart moved one step and 620,000 slaves walked to freedom. One heart, an uncertain and frightening future, and one miracle: dayenu; it is enough.

Buen Camino. 

Psalm 40* is a Gospel psalm—a psalm of good news.  What is that Good News?  Simply put, it is: the Lord can and does save.  The most basic accusation of the faithless is, “Your God cannot save.”  In Psalm 40, the writer says he was in a “pit of destruction (v.2).  Later we find some of that may have been a pit of his own making (v. 12) and some came from enemies around him (v. 14).  In the midst of that pit, he cries to the Lord (v. 13—make haste to help me).  His enemies then make the most basic attack possible, they go for the jugular of faith—they see his trouble and cry “Aha” your god cannot save.  This sneering finger pointing is one of the most basic themes of all the scriptures.  The great Pharoh would not let a motley host of slaves go free and dared God (in the person Moses) to make them free.  On the run in the wilderness, as the water ran short and the food ran out, the people cry again to Moses.  The substance of their cry, “it would be better if we had never left”, is the accusers cry—God cannot save.   Over and over again in the history of Israel, those who resist the instruction of the Lord, the Torah, accuse God.   At the most basic level, they shout “You cannot save”.  The priests of Baal surround Elijah and laugh that YaWeH can do nothing to them.  When the kings of Israel think that the armies of Egypt look like a better bet to resist the armies of Assyria and keep Israel free and independent, Isaiah tells the faithful that the accuser has won; his charge “Your God cannot save” has been vindicated.  When Herod’s terrorist death squad sweeps into Bethlehem and starts slaughtering children, the cry on their lips may as well have been “Your God cannot save.”  Even today, believers here and all over the world are challenged to vindicate their God.  “Your God cannot save” is the most basic accusation that anyone can level at a believer. 

How are we to respond?

For the last 100 years or so one common place in North American Protestant Christianity is to retreat and narrow the field of God’s saving activity.   In hope that God won’t be made a fool of Christians retreat and say, “well, God really only means to save souls”, and souls are conceived of in a sense that has no connection with life as any of us know it  – workplaces, scientific endeavors, political institutions, creative expression, educational institutions, virtually the sum of life are declared secular or neutral and thus not in need of God’s saving Grace and Power. Only souls are in need of grace, not really the world that God so loved.  Another tactic so that God won’t be made a fool is to merely baptize the present with the piety of Christian terminology.  Practices born out of religions that worship false gods are “Christianized”—music born in rebellion against God gets allegedly Christian lyrics and God is supposed to be vindicated.  Sentimental prosody pap that makes a mockery of the fullness of our emotional lives has a few words from carefully selected scripture inserted, and now it’s supposed to be fit for the refrigerator magnet treatment as “inspiring”.  Economic practices that grind down on the poor and make their lives misery are baptized with terms like Christian freedom and vocation and “see our God can save”, well at least those of us lucky enough to have been born in the US, Canada, or Europe. 

But the Good New of Psalm 40 and the story of God’s salvation from Genesis to Revelation is that God offers us a different way:  If we truly remember what God has done for us, saving us from Egyptian slavers, keeping us through the dark nights of Exile in Babylon, nurturing us even when the King’s terrorist death squads tried to take away our only hope, building us up when all of Rome was against us, protecting our Scriptures and our traditions when the supposed keepers of the faith wanted us far away from the Scriptures as possible, --if we remember all those things.  If we celebrate them year after year, holy liturgical season after season, like the Psalmist does when he proclaims “Many, O LORD my God, are (11) the wonders which You have done,

          And Your (12) thoughts toward us;

          There is none to compare with You.

          If I would declare and speak of them,

          They (13) would be too numerous to count.”

Then we will slowly, and sometimes painfully, build up a trust in the God who has saved in the past and when crunch time comes for us, when jobs choke the God given creativity out of us, when our politicians want to wage death in our names and everybody around us wants us to sign off on it, even when death strikes those close to our hearts, in those times then we will be ready for blessing for we will believe God can save, indeed “How  blessed is the man who has made the LORD his trust, And  has not turned to the proud, nor to those who  lapse into falsehood.”   We will even enter into the history of God’s saving works by writing our own scrolls of testimony of the great things God has done for us, we’ll bring them to the temple and proclaim them for all to hear.  We’ll let our neighbors know that while all others might shout “he cannot save”—we will offer our story that indeed he does save.  We will not hide his righteousness (his faithful promise keeping) in our hearts.  We will not be silent about his faithfulness and salvation.  We will not conceal his loving kindness.

In the Matthew’s account of the Passion week, the soldiers executing Jesus shout at him, “Save yourself, If you’re really God’s Son, come down off that cross.”  The accusers basic charge is shouted for all to hear.  And for a time even the disciples believed that charge.  Peter with the last bit of hope in his heart sprints back to the tomb when Mary Magdelene reports that it’s empty.  There he finds a few clothes and again believes the accusers charge—he walks away shaking his head.  Later, when he really meets the risen Lord, face to face, he like the Psalmist now believes that God can save—that the world can be set to rights. Now like the psalmist he’s got a testimony to bring to the temple, he cannot restrain his lips—God has kept his promise. He has brought back Israel, paid for her in blood coin, and through Israel, all of us.  God had promised a world so transformed that the faithful dead would rise from the dust and a new king would take the throne.   And there at an empty tomb was the down payment, the first fruits of that promise that God made to Abraham so long ago, I will bless you and through you I will bless all the nations.  So

Let all who seek You rejoice and be glad in You;

          Let those who love Your salvation (34) say continually,

          "The LORD be magnified!"

God can save. He’s saved before.  He’ll save again.  He’ll save all who are afflicted and needy.

*The painting is by contemporary American artist Phillip Ratner.  It is located in the Ratner Museum in Bethesda, MD.

A Meditation on Encountering a Dangerous God
[This is actually several years old, but somehow these 12 days of the Christmas season brought back the notion that God, as one of Lewis' Narnia characters says, "is not a tame lion."]

I come to Stony Creek on Sunday mornings expecting to meet the risen Christ. Sunday after Sunday I am not disappointed.   I hear Jesus speak in the beautiful singing of familiar songs, in the written Scriptures, and in the preaching.  I see His hands at work in the announcements about mission activities, fellowship opportunities, and joyous news of answered prayers. Most profoundly, I meet Him soul to soul when I kneel with fellow worshippers and commemorate His death and resurrection with bread and wine.  All in all, the time I spend at Stony Creek comforts and enriches me beyond measure.  Recently, however, my comfortable expectations about encountering God have been turned about.  Sunday morning is no longer quite so comfortable; indeed, its beginning to feel downright dangerous to me. 

Friday, April 16^th, I had the privilege of attending Temple Beth Emeth’s services commemorating the 6 million Jewish deaths in the Shoah -the Holocaust. The highlight of the service was the testimony of a “Righteous Gentile”.  The speaker, Anneke Burke told the assembled worshipers of her meeting with God. 

In 1940 she was a typical four-year-old Dutch girl, happy and carefree.  She lived in Utrecht with her mother, father, a seven-year-old sister and a baby brother. That fall the German Army forever changed her life. Her hometown was captured and put under occupation. Life with German soldiers strutting about was a bit strange, but not burdensome.  Then the identification of the Jews started.  All Jews were required to wear the Star of David sewn on to their clothing.  They were prevented from riding the streetcars.  German soldiers and sympathetic Dutch Nazis violated their shops and homes.  Soon the Germans began to round up Jews for deportation to work camps.  Anneke’s father and mother were God fearing, church going Protestants.  In the faces of their Jewish neighbors they saw the face of their Lord.  Moved by a profound sense of Christian duty, in 1942 Anneke’s father arranged with the Dutch Underground to hide a Jewish man.  When he went to make contact with the man and bring him home, three other Jews were also there.  All four Jews were brought to the safety of Anneke’s house.  Soon they were joined by four more Jews. For the next three years, eight of God’s children spent their days in one small bedroom.  They could go into the living room at night, but no lights were allowed.  The Burke’s even dug a tunnel under the house so that when the German search parties came, the Jews could hide in the tunnel.

Now the story so far sounds like a Hollywood movie - brave Dutch Christian resistance fighters, evil pagan Nazis’, frightened Jews.  You can practically hear the swelling music and feel your tears being jerked as the Allies liberate the town and the Jews walk arm in arm with the brave Christians into the sunlight for the first time in three years. 

But real encounters with God are never quite like Hollywood productions.  Anneke never knew the Jews were in the house all those years until her parents awoke her late one night in April of 1945 and invited her to the living room to celebrate the war’s end with a group of complete strangers.  Her parents simply could not risk telling their children about the human contraband in the front bedroom.  Jews, and those who hid Jews, faced deportation to work camps at best, and on-the-spot execution at worst.  Her parents closed off the bedroom where the Jews were hidden.  Anneke was told that the bedroom was her father’s workroom, and she would be severely punished if she ever entered that room.   The children slept, locked each night, in the attic for three years so their visitors could, with some safety, come out at night.  When wartime food rations for the five members of the Burke family were first divided up to feed 13 people and Anneke ate but still was hungry. Her parents told her all the food was gone. When Anneke heard strange noises in the house, her parents lied to her.  They said she was merely hearing things. When a thump on the wall made her turn her head, her parents sat motionless.  Three years of that sort of deception left Anneke deeply scarred.  She no longer trusted her own senses.  Anneke had to go through years of psychological counseling to heal from the experience.  She still, as a mature woman, experiences moments of doubt about ordinary everyday experiences because for three important years of her life the adults around her told her that noises she heard were not noises at all, that lights she saw under doorways were not real, and  that odors she smelled were just her imagination. 

God came to Anneke’s family in the form of eight Jews on the lam from Nazi death squads.  The Burke’s were obedient to the teachings of Jesus and embraced the desperate ones.  That encounter left Anneke scarred for life.  Her testimony has begun to change my perspective on Sunday worship at Stony Creek.  I still love the comfortable feeling of closeness to my Lord that comes from singing the old hymns, from greeting loving neighbors, and from the rhythms of the familiar liturgy.  But I also have read with new eyes the Biblical stories of encounters with God.  He's mighty, He's loving, but He's also dangerous.  Jacob, the tricky one, was crippled for life after he met God.  Hosea heard the voice of God order him to marry a prostitute and turn his quiet life into a living billboard advertising God’s indignation with a faithless people.  Peter, the cowardly fisherman, was led to death in a Roman prison because he saw and declared, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”.  Oh, I still pray each Sunday for the presence of the Lord, but after hearing Anneke Burke, I pray a bit more warily.  The God we worship didn’t hand over His own Son to torturers so Peter Freedman-Doan could warm the cockles of his heart with familiar Sunday morning rituals shared with good friends. He comes to us so that His will be done.