Swaddled.

Luke 2:1-20

Come winter, the common painted turtle will paddle her way to the bottom of of the pond. She has spent her summer and fall basking in the sun on a rotting log, soaking in all the warmth her body can handle because she knows that this day is coming. She has no brilliant plan for surviving the cold. She has no secret den, she’s stored no acorns nor accumulated reserves of fat or layers of thick, soft, fur. All she has is the murky bottom of a shallow pond and her stillness to get her through the winter. So she takes one last deep breath and swims deeper, sculling her way through roots and tangles, until she finds herself at the end, at the very bottom, and it is there that she buries herself. She pulls inside of herself, and, as author Gayle Boss describes, she “settles into a deep stillness.” It’s this stillness that will be key to her survival. She must be so still that breathing becomes unnecessary, and it’s a good thing, because soon this iced over pond will be out of oxygen. She has to still herself into a near death, and find a place in herself “beyond breath” as Gayle describes it, in order to survive. And there, as the winter rushes above her, she waits. Still. Silent. This is her work. Her one task. She loses oxygen, the stress breaks down her muscles, and to balance out the lactic acid collecting in her heart, she must leach calcium from her bones, her shell. To move would put too much strain on her body, and it would kill her. Gayle says, “It’s this radical simplicity that will save her. And deep within it, at the heart of her stillness, something she has no need to name, but something we might call trust: that one day, yes, the world will warm again, and with it, her life.” 

When both my sons were born, it took them about three months to fully unfold themselves. Once outside the confines of their ever-shrinking womb, they didn’t quite know what to do with all this space, with all these arms and legs flailing and kicking and reaching. Always happier wrapped up tight in a receiving blanket, the unpredictability of their bodies were tamed, held close, quieted. We swaddled our first far too long than was probably good for him. But we couldn’t get him to quiet down for rest, to settle in to a long sleep without wrapping him up like a burrito, arms tight to his chest, fingers curled near his chin, and a bright green binky in his mouth. We’d joke that we had to bind and gag him before he’d go to sleep. We tried, a couple of times, to get him to sleep without the swaddle, but every time the hypnic jerks - the sleep starts - would wake him, and we’d be back to square one, nursing, shushing, swaying all over again. At first, my boys wanted to be swaddled all the time. Eventually, as they discovered their arms and their legs, as they learned that they can be used to reach and grab and kick, they enjoyed exploring their space. But still, come bedtime, the safety of the swaddle would soothe them to sleep, and hopefully, keep them there, at least for a little while. In the morning, they both would babble and fuss until we came to get them. And both of them, after every waking, would smile when they saw our faces hovering over the crib, and then we’d undo the wrappings and both arms would shoot up and out, and they would give themselves the most glorious of stretches. 

Buried deep.

Wrapped tight.

There is comfort and safety in stillness.

There is also sacrifice. Maybe some fear. 

A waiting.

A deep trust. 

The winter will end.

Momma will come back. 

This warm embrace will get us through.

With the whole world swirling in a cacophonous chaos all around her, while the rulers are upending people’s lives, while the angels are shouting and singing, while the shepherds are staring in bewildered awe, while the animals are shifting and sighing in their stalls, after Mary’s one last anguished push, she takes her baby and brings him to her chest, where they help regulate each other’s breathing, both wide-eyed at the new world all around them. 

And then, Mary takes her baby and swaddles him. Wraps him up tight. She “esparganōsen"ed him, in the Greek. A unique verb with a very specific meaning, it literally means “to wrap a baby up in bands of cloth.” It’s a word used only to describe this action. It’s a verb that is only used twice in the whole of the Greek New Testament, and both of these uses are right here in our Luke narrative. This is Jesus, wrapped up tight in bands of cloth, a symbol of comfort and stillness when the world out there seems too strange, too big, too overwhelming for our new and flailing limbs. This is Jesus, wrapped up tight in bands of cloth when any number of terrors and heartbreak could come sneaking in around the bend. Does Luke mean to remind us of the bands of linen that Jesus will too soon be buried in, that he will leave behind in the tomb just a few short years later? Does he intend to - ever so subtly - draw the line between Jesus’s birth and death? Jesus comes to us wrapped in bands of cloth, and he is buried this same way. This is the first thing that happens to Jesus’s earthly body. And it’s the last. This is how the shepherds will know the miracle has happened: they’ll find a baby, “espargenosen”ed, and lying in a manger. And this is how Peter knows that the Lord has risen: he finds the cloths left behind, and the body, gone. So much will happen to Jesus in the thirty short years between. But it begins, and it ends, with a swaddle, with a burial, with a deep, deep stillness.

I just read an article that said that if your pastor isn’t preaching about how we must trust a girl’s word about her life, about how this narrative calls us to welcome the refugee, about the corrupt nature of oppressive political systems, about a child in need receiving support from the wealthy, about how God shows up for and identifies with the marginalized, then your pastor hasn’t preached the gospel on Christmas Eve. And I think this is absolutely true. Jesus is born in this specific place and this specific time to show us that God cares about specific times and specific places. Jesus is born in a world where the poor are oppressed and the rich benefit. Jesus is born a homeless refugee with peasants for parents, worshipped by a rag-tag bunch of dirty night-shift shepherds. And Jesus is found in all these places and people still. 

But first, he comes to us still. Wrapped up. 

And then at his death he bares it all in utter vulnerability, cloths torn from his body, naked and open to the pain and the sorrow and the corruption of this world.

And he leaves us, at least, for awhile, swaddled in those wrappings, back to where it all began.

And we cannot hear the call of the oppressed, we cannot hear the cries of the burdened, we cannot see the pain in the eyes of the refugee, or the addict, or the minimum wage factory worker, or the cancer patient who has used up her health insurance allowance and her life savings just to stay alive, if we don’t start where Jesus starts. Wrapped up. Buried deep. Centered into a deep, deep stillness.

It’s from that centered place of stillness, that focused place of trust, that place where our entire survival depends on the hope that we will be able to make it through these winters of injustice and horrors and corruption and greed. From this space of stillness we can survive. From this space of stillness, we can then be in a place to know how to fight for the abused, how to hear the cries of the broken, how to respond to the anger and frustration and staunch individualism - which are just responses to pain - all around us. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean passive inaction. This doesn’t mean burying our heads in the sand and just waiting for better days to come. It means that when we feel threatened by the world around us, we go deep, we go down, deep into our centered selves, where we slow our breathing, where we listen hard, where we wait and watch for the cracking of the ice. 

This is what Mary does, when all this chaos is happening around her. She’s just had a baby, she’s had very little time to recover. There’s no soothing nurse offering her those juice cups with the foil lids, there’s no retractable bed, no sitz bath, no discrete discarding of the stained hay and ruined sheets. She’s surrounded by smelly men and barn animals, and she takes all that has happened, all that has been said, and she “sumballo”s it. She gathers it up. She meets it. She encounters it. And then she “syneterei”s it. She ponders it all. She takes it in. Literally, she “keeps it all close together.” She wraps it all up tight, she goes deep, she finds a stillness, and holds it all there. The world goes on. The shepherds wander home raising the flasks, singing drunken songs, toasting and praising their God. The rulers keep signing their edicts and counting their money and executing the dissenters. Joseph starts making plans for the trip home. The men who will one day execute her son make backroom deals and shake hands with corruption and raise another glass to their emperor, or their bank accounts, or their god. Meanwhile, Mary, with all of her thoughts wrapped up tight, and Jesus, swaddled and safe, fall asleep, finding a still quiet in themselves that they will need in order to survive the days to come. 

Somewhere, a turtle is buried in the mud, using all her energy just to survive until the spring. 

We wrap ourselves in trust, we swaddle ourselves in the quiet, we wait and listen for the next step to take. This is the first experience of God after his birth. He will topple empires. He will heal the sick and mend the broken. He will teach and resist and embrace and delight. But first, he will be swaddled. He will be stilled. 

Let us do the same.

Thanks be to God. 

 

Angel or Bad Brisket?

Luke 1:39-55

So often with sermon writing, as with life, I wonder, is this thing, this creeping feeling crawling up from the bottom of my stomach a sign that I am about to take a wrong turn, or is it just crippling self-doubt? Is God trying to warn me of something — am I about to fall off a cliff — or am I just frozen in fear and uncertainty, unwilling to sully the perfect blank page, terrified to take the risk because I just might fail? Is it God telling me not to cross that bridge or sign on that dotted line, or am I lulled into a kind of complacency because of my fear of messing up? If I have a bad dream, is God trying to tell me something? Or, as my therapist likes to remind me, maybe I just need to cut back on the pizza right before bed. Or maybe, this nervous, jittery, uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach is just a bad case of heartburn. And maybe I need to stop taking myself so seriously.

But for real, I mean, how do we know the difference between “Warning! Don’t eat that bag of romaine!” And living in fear that every head of lettuce is out to get us? I think that’s something we’ve really had to struggle with during this whole pandemic. Does getting vaccinated and wearing masks mean we’re living in fear, or are we doing what is necessary to protect ourselves and the least of those in our midst? Or, for instance, are we called to make sacrifices in our consumption for the sake of our planet, or is this climate change stuff just a bunch of insecure fear-mongering? Do we trust that the sun is going to come back after all these days of disappearing, or do we feel, deep in our bones, that the sun really is withdrawing from us, that we need to hunker down, bundle up, settle in for a long, long winter that may never end? 

Every sermon I write, I wonder, “did I listen well, did I get it right? Or should I just tie the millstone around my neck and jump into the sea right now?” When we go out in public and I ask my kids to wear their masks, am I being careful and considerate, or am I being just another one of those overprotective helicopter moms? And just because the sun has come back every year, one tiny minute at a time starting with the winter solstice, how do we know, really know, for sure, on this the third shortest day of the year, that this year will be the same? 

When my son, Jonah came home from band practice the day before the big concert and told us that they sounded awful, — the percussionists couldn’t get their beat together, and the woodwinds couldn’t stop squeaking, and all you could hear was the brass trying but failing to find the right note — how did his band teacher know that it was all going to be ok come showtime? Was he just delusional that these kids could get it figured out in less than 24 hours, or was there something else that told him to keep going, to trust, to believe that it will all come together in the end?

What is the difference, really, between uncertainty and expectation? Between “yeah, that visit from the angel in my bedroom in the middle of the night was just my fevered delusion from that leftover brisket I shouldn’t have stretched over into the next day,” or “could it really be that I was visited by some otherworldly spirit and now I’m carrying the Son of God in my womb?” I mean, at least at first, pregnancy and food poisoning would have pretty similar symptoms. Are the signs between doubt and hopes, between insecurity and a God-given warning, between blind optimism and a confident faith really, all that disparate? If we’re puking in a bucket the day after we get a “visit from an angel” and after we should have passed on those oysters, how can we know what’s real? If we’re not sure that they’re ready, how can we let all those sensitive, delicate sixth graders onto the stage? If there’s no discernible difference between December 20th and December 22nd, how do we know that the sun really has returned?

It’s such a fine line between hope and doubt, between assurance and delusion, between self-doubt and a justified warning, between testing the limits and going too far.

Mary gets these words from God through the angel Gabriel that are completely astonishing. Otherworldly. Life changing and life threatening. And walking that fine line between miracle and pipe dream, these words are given to Mary, and, as she walks that tightrope between confused hope and astonished doubt, whether the choice means her life or her death, she says, “yes.” 

She says yes to the delusion. 

She says yes to the expectation. 

She says yes to the new life that very well might bring about her own death. 

She says yes to the “uh, yeah, so that’s not physically possible” and she says yes to the “ok, well, let it happen just as you say.” 

And she wakes up the next morning in the quiet darkness of her room with this woozy dizziness and a nauseous belly and she wonders, “did I say yes to the angel, or did I just say yes to the stew with the leftover brisket?” Maybe she wakes up the next morning wondering, “what is really real”? 

So Mary sets off, immediately, on one of her many road trips in the Gospel of Luke. 

I mean. Can you picture it? A teenage girl in first century Palestine takes off on an eighty mile journey, presumably alone, to find her cousin, to see for herself, to find the really real. She packs her bag with a change of clothes, her toothbrush, her teddybear she still sleeps with at night, and all Twizzlers and Snapples and Flaming Hot Cheetos she can carry. She’s not sure if she should take her raincoat or her sunglasses, so she grabs them both as she calls out to mom, “be back soon!” and races out the door. She walks to the nearest highway, sticks out her thumb and waits. When the trucker stops to ask where she’s headed, she says, “to the hills outside of Judea, please” as she throws her bag on the floor, hitches up her skirts and climbs up into the cab. “What’s a pretty little girl doing out here on the highway all alone traveling to the hills of Judea for?” He asks her. He says, “I heard there are some real loons there. One old man said he was visited by an angel, was told that his old lady was gonna have a baby, and he hasn’t said a single word since. He walks around with a slate and some chalk telling people what to do. Then, the old lady locked herself in her house for five months, just so’s she could be alone. Turns out, the old lady is preggers after all! But rumor has it that they’re not even going to name the baby after the old man, say they’re gonna name it “John” for some strange reason. They’re nutters over there, I tell ya.” “Yeah, well, I’m going to find out,” she tells the trucker. 

She’s fallen asleep against the window when the truck’s Jake breaks startle her awake. “Well, little lady, we’re here, whatever that means” he says. “You seem a little tired, you sure you’re ok?” He asks as she climbs down from the cab. “I didn’t sleep well last night, but I’m not sure why. I’m here to find out. Thanks mister,” and she slams the door.

She’s in the town center. Merchants are selling their wares, donkeys are braying, little kids are trying to gather a flock of chicks. She needs to get out of the middle of the road, but she’s not sure, left, or right? Other folks in the town are wandering in pairs, whispering to each other. They stare at her with wide eyes, as if she’s got her head on backwards or something. They look like they’ve seen an angel or a ghost, and Mary can’t tell which. “Excuse me,” she asks the wanderers, “I’m looking for Zechariah’s house.” The first shakes her head and starts to walk faster, the second bursts into a kind of maniacal laughter, and the third shows her his collection of magical gems, crystals and talismans, promising her a good deal. The fourth stops. Looks her right in the eye. Mary thinks, “She’s either crazy, or she knows something.” The old lady says, “You’ve got a question, don’t you? I’ve seen that look before. Take a right at the Arby’s. Go six more blocks. It’s the house with the overgrown lawn and the wildflowers and the rusting pickup truck on blocks in the front. Can’t miss it.” 

“Uh. Thanks.” Mary says.

She takes one step, thinks “crazy.” Takes another, and thinks “possible?” She steps again, “delusion.” And again, “maybe?” With each step she sways, “crippling uncertainty?” or “God’s voice?” “Bad dream,” or “a spiritual vision?” “Overactive imagination?” “Angel?” “Bad brisket,” “hope.” “Doubt,” “new life.” “Certain death,” “the sun is coming back.” “Real.” “Unreal.”

There’s no one in the yard.

She hears the creaking of a rocking chair, swaying back and forth, back and forth.

The door is wide open.

“Elizabeth?” She calls out through the threshold.

She’s never met her second cousin before. Will she be mad that she’s just shown up on her doorstep? Is this old lady really going to have a baby? Are the stories true? Will she even know who she is? How is she going to get back home? She’s hungry. Twizzlers. No. Cheetos. No. Twizzlers. She lurches toward the bucket collecting rainwater from the gutters.

“Faithful follower of God?” Or “Lunatic”?

“Like Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel?” or “hallucinating laughingstock?”

“Carrier of the messenger of God” or “aged senility?”

“Impossible pregnancy” or “bad brisket?”

“Virgin birth that will change the course of history forever,” or “death by stoning as soon as she gets home?”

She wipes her sweaty face with her veil. She looks up from the bucket. She thinks she’s going to have to go another round when she sees a giant, full belly poking out of the doorway. And then Elizabeth’s face as she peers past the threshold. 

Of course. Yes. Of course.

It’s real.

She’s real. 

The baby is real.

Elizabeth rejoices at the sight of her. “Mary! Is that you?”

Mary totters a little as she tries to stand up, she’s still dizzy, still woozy, still feels a little green. She steadies herself on the bright, real, stuccoed wall of Elizabeth’s house. She feels the warmth of the sun that it has absorbed throughout the day. She says, “yes, Elizabeth. It’s me. I’m here. I’m here.”

We can never be truly sure. Things can go either way. Miracle or tragedy. Laughter or tears. Squeaking woodwinds and offbeat drummers, or successful sixth grade band concert that doesn’t sound too bad after all. Crippling self-doubt, or being receptive to the word of God. One last short day, or an endless round of darkness. 

But Mary discovers what is real by going out and looking for it. By giving herself some space. Eighty miles and three months of it. Mary discovers what is real by asking the questions. And Mary discovers what is real by connecting with another. She discerns the truth in community. In the reality of flesh and bone and pregnancies and the grounding of sun-soaked stuccoed wall. As soon as Elizabeth hears her voice, as soon as Mary calls out to her, “are you here?” Elizabeth knows. The child inside her knows. Elizabeth struggles herself out of the rocking chair and waddles as fast as she can down the hall to see the mother of her Lord. There it is. The confirmation of the real, in the form of a young peasant girl with a sweaty brow and sick-stained shoes, calling out to her, asking her, “is this real? Could it be?”

And with joy and laughter and relief they embrace. 

They know the heartbreak of the real that is coming for them, that will soon be here before they know it.

But for now, they rejoice in the truth of each other. 

They get a little punch drunk about what all this means. 

They get a little woozy at the potential of it all.

Mary’s so relieved she starts to sing, right there in the yard around the wildflowers and the weeds.

“God is here. 

This is real.

God pays attention, even to me.

This will never be forgotten.

God will embrace the doubters and the wanderers and the seekers of the real.

God will scatter all those who think they’ve got it all figured out.

God will raise up the humble and bow down the proud.

God will upend our entire social structure.

The hungry will have enough, while the rich will be fed with justice.

Nothing will ever be the same."

Go. Look. Wander. Ask. 

Wait.

Ground yourself in the earth.

Find yourself in relationship.

God is born there.

Thanks be to God.

"What, then, should we do?"

Philippians 4:4-7

Luke 3:7-18

 We drove in separate cars across town. It’s a blur to me now. I don’t even remember what part of town. The parking lot was small, so we had to park right next to each other. She gathered us at a conference table. We sat next to each other on one side, and she sat on the other. I remember that it felt strange that the office was so open and sunlit and cluttered. Dan wrote out a check for $300 and I stared behind her head at the Xerox machine while she talked. This was just a preliminary payment, the cost of the twenty minute appointment to discuss our options about the possibility of potentially hiring her to be our mediator who might make things easier through our divorce. “Of course, you’re both going to need your own separate representation as well, which you will need to factor in to the cost to get this done,” she said. “Wait. What?” I said. Or maybe Dan said it. “Can’t you just file the paperwork and represent us both together? We have no assets. We’re not looking for a fight. We just want our kids to be ok.” “Oh no,” she said. “I will be a third party that will negotiate between your individual lawyers.” 

Assets. Representation. Lawyers. Custody. Retainers. Court. Separation. Hearing. The words swirled inside my head. The room, the Xerox machines, the wall calendars and the partitions and the file cabinets began to spin outside my head.

How in the world did we get here?

What was even happening?

No. This isn’t the right thing for us. I don’t know what is the right thing. But it’s not this.
The world was ending. I knew that. What I didn’t know, was what we should do about it. 

What, then, should we do?

There were lots of scripts out there for how to divorce. I’d read and heard about how sometimes things just don’t work out and sometimes it’s just best for everybody to cut one kind of tie in order to keep others intact. Famous people, pastors, theologians, therapists, motivational speakers and writers, people I admire and love, they’d all gone through the hard, hard work of navigating this road, they’d written about it with heartfelt sincerity, they’d gathered up the good and shown the grace of God through it all, they made the path almost bearable, or at least relatable for those of us who would follow behind them. They’d shared their stories of survival. I thought that following them was the hard, but right choice for us. But as Dan slid that $300 check across the wood grained laminate, I had this strange and sudden conviction. No. No. This is not the right road for us.

But what, then, should we do?

There were no famous stories of miraculous repairs for us to lean on. No memoirs to pave the road on how to get from broken relationship to new, healed, whole reunification. Sure. There were self-help books. Therapists who’d written on how to divorce-proof your marriage. There were the quiet whispers of rumors and tales of relatives who had weathered such a storm and come out on the other side whole again. But I wanted a story. I needed someone to have lived it and breathed it and had bushwhacked the way through the unmarked territory, leaving a trail for the rest of us to follow. But it wasn’t there. Only a giant mountain we had to climb that we didn’t think was even possible to climb but that we felt we should at least try to climb, even though we had no map, no trail, no gps to tell us where we are, let alone where we were headed.

What, then, should we do?

Crowds have gathered in the wilderness, have traveled the roads as they turned from stone, to gravel, to dirt, to a simple narrow trail through the brush and the trees, they have followed the sidewalk all the way to its end, they have come to their very end, to be baptized by John. They’re at the very end of themselves, and, as a last resort, they come to the end of the world only to be told by John that, yes, indeed, it is the end of the world. They’ve got nothing left but their regrets and their pain and their generational trauma, and John says to them, “yes. You’re right. This is the end. Don’t rely on your ancestry or your heritage or your 401k or your political status to get you out of this mess. You are at the end of it all.”

“What then, should we do?” The crowd asks.

“Teacher, What should we do?” the tax collectors ask.

“And we, what should we do?” The soldiers ask.

They are at the end of it all, and they know it. They are at the end of their rope and all they know to do is follow the trail until it ends somewhere in the wilderness and ask for advice from a crazed metaphor-obsessed, locust and honey-eating, camels’ hair-wearing, preacher with questionable lineage who wanders around the desert ranting about vipers and stones and axes and fire. They’re so desperate they go to him for advice. They’re so far at the end of their rope that they ask him, “What then should we do?”

“Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise,” he tells the crowd.

“Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you,” he tells the tax collectors.

“Do not extort money from anyone. Quit using threats and false accusations in order to pad your paychecks,” he tells the soldiers.

Now to us, these commands make sense, at least, to some extent. We like how they look on paper, at least. It’s good to give what you have. It’s important to have a fair and just government. We shouldn’t be threatened by soldiers who have sworn to protect us. And these commands make a lot of sense in the context of the Jewish tradition as well. Share. Don’t steal. Don’t make false statements. It’s all ten-commandments stuff.

But if we look at these commands more deeply, if we think about the worldview in which these crowds and tax collectors and soldiers are hearing these instructions, they are being asked to act much more radically than we in our capitalist, post-industrial, democratic society take to be the norm. For these subsistence farmers, for these tax collectors trying to appease the state and keep their families fed, for these soldiers whose very survival and position in battle depends upon who they can pay off, John is telling them to do something that is not only specific to their unique situations, but also is quite radical to their understanding of their way of life. He’s telling them to live according to a completely different set of assumptions, he’s telling them to make decisions based upon an entirely divergent set of values, he’s telling them to travel a road that they have never seen before. He’s asking them to live in a way that has never been modeled for them before. At least, not modeled for folks who want to live long lives with some sense of security and not find themselves hanging on a cross outside of the city crucified by the Roman regime. Don’t make waves. Do what has always been done. Work with the system, not against it. Make the moral compromises. Accept the status quo. And maybe, you’ll be safe. Maybe, you’ll have a future. Sounds kinda familiar to our modern day lives after all.

Except these folks have reached the end. They’ve followed all the rules and they’re still hungry. They’ve worked the system the best they can and they’re still living in fear. They’ve sacrificed their bodies and their honor and the loyalty for the good of Caesar, and here they are, at the end, looking for self-help advice from a ranting preacher who insults them and tells them that it’s very very likely that they’ll be thrown into the unquenchable fire.

They’ve made a mess of their lives and they’re handing over their last $300 to a third party mediator who tells them that things are just going to get a lot worse.

What, then, should we do?

They start to think that this guy’s got the answers. This guy’s the one we’ve been waiting for. And like that divorce lawyer who has some idea of the wilderness that lay ahead for us, John tells the crowd, “I’m not the guy. Someone else is coming. I’m not even good enough for him. He’s coming, and things are just going to get wilder.”

They go to him and they ask, “What then should we do,” and he basically tells him that they need to go deeper into the wilderness, they need to go where they’ve never thought to go before, they need to go to a place in themselves where they will have to imagine the world, not as it is, but as it could be. And there’s no map for how you get there. There’s no atlas. No compass or elevation lines or geographic coordinates or script for how this has been done before. But it has been done before. Now. It’s your turn. Stop. Repent. Do it differently.

What then should we do?

Rewrite the narrative.

Live according to an entirely different code.

Do the thing that doesn’t make logical sense.

Instead of hoarding all your extras, give them away.

Instead of pocketing some for a rainy day, just take what you need.

Instead of getting what you want through fear and intimidation, just do your job and recognize that it’s enough.

Stop looking out for number one, and maybe, by looking out for someone else, you might save yourself as well. 

Defy the “rules” that society tells you you must follow.

Stop taking the path of least resistance. 

Refuse to be a victim of “how it must be because that is how it’s always been.”

Do something, no matter how tiny, to buck the system, to resist the powers, to do something a little differently than it’s ever been done before.

Do the thing you’ve never personally seen happen. 

Do the thing that is probably impossible.

Blaze a new trail. 

Write a new script.

Say, “Wait. Let’s not do this now. Let’s take some more time.”

“So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” 

That last line in our Luke passage is hilarious to me. “So with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” Uh, being thrown like chaff into the unquenchable fire is good? Being called a “brood of vipers” is good? Axes and fire and winnowing forks is good?

But see, the good news isn’t that everything always turns out the way we want. The good news is that we are not stuck in a narrative. We are not stuck with a script for how things must go. We are not stuck. We can stop where we are. We can say, “No. I don’t want this. This isn’t right. There has to be another way. I don’t know what it is, but it has to exist.”

That’s what repentance is. Turn around and do it differently.

Stop going down this road, and take a new one. Maybe you’ll get it wrong again, but you might learn something new from the experience. Or. Maybe. you’ll actually get it right this time. 

Or maybe you’ll still end up sitting across from an overpriced mediator regretfully signing the divorce papers. In some cases, this is truly the best outcome. But like Paul, who is stuck in his own prison, you will have tried, you will have looked, you will have gone where you weren’t even sure existed, and you will have been given the peace to know that the Lord is near, even if things didn’t turn out the way that you wanted them to. Even if you have to divide the assets and negotiate the custody and you feel like you’re getting tossed into the fire with the rest of the chaff, you will have a peace from God that surpasses all understanding. A peace that says, “you tried, you went where you didn’t think you could go, you bore your heart and took the risk and you let yourself desire what you truly wanted, and even if you didn’t get to where you wanted to go, “The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” 

Or maybe you’ll take one step in to the wilderness, dip one toe into the river, and find some healing there. Maybe you’ll find enough healing to take the next step. And then the next. Maybe you’ll turn around one day to find yourself someplace totally new that you never thought even existed, and you realize that you - through the grace of God - were the one who wrote your own story, who listened to God who told you, not how this story must end, but how it could end. Maybe you’ll find yourself eleven months later going as a family to pick out the family Christmas tree. Maybe you’ll be putting too many marshmallows in your hot chocolate as you sit across from each other at your scarred, but shared, dining room table.

Either way, when we step out into the unknown, when we decide that we are not going to be swayed by the scripts and outlines and stage directions from some other abusive and dominating narrative, whether it turns out with the happy ending or the broken heart, or, as is most common, a combination of both, when we go where God is calling, even into a heartbreaking wilderness, God is near. We will rejoice. 

Thanks be to God.

Extinct Woodpeckers, Divorce, Broken Hearts: Yeah. I Went There.

Mark 10:2-16

 The ivory billed woodpecker is gone. Wildlife officials working for the US government have declared it, and 22 other species, officially extinct. They’re gone. That’s it. The nation’s largest woodpecker, the one called the “Lord God! Bird” because of its sheer size and beauty is no more. 

For most of us, I expect, we hear this news and we sigh and we go on with our days. After all, about 150 species go extinct in our world every day. It’s just the sad reality of our time. But, for me, if you remember my first sermon I ever preached, the ivory billed woodpecker has a special place in my heart. For me, this “Lord God Bird” was a symbol of the resurrection. They’d suspected that this bird was quickly reaching extinction in the ‘40s. But in the early 2000s, there began to be sightings. Amateur birders claimed to have seen the bird while canoeing through an Arkansas swamp. They reported the sighting on some birding chat rooms online, and this caught the attention of some scientists from Cornell and Louisiana State University, and that started the manhunt, or the woodpecker hunt, rather, for this rare and special bird. I was enthralled that maybe, just maybe, the ivory billed woodpecker had made a comeback, had experienced a kind of resurrection, no matter how small, and that these scientists who have given their whole lives to finding evidence of the existence of this bird were really people of faith, people who believed, and searched, and gathered evidence, and just went out into the swampy wilderness, day after day, with nothing but the sheer hope of resurrection as their guide. 

And now, it’s gone. No more federal funds will be committed to the discovery and survival of this bird. No more resources will be used to participate in the resurrection of this bird. That’s it. Just like that. It’s done. I have a tattoo of the bird near my right shoulder, and now, everyday, I get to look in the mirror and wonder, was any of it real? What do I do now that there is no resurrection where I so needed it to be? What do I do now that this bird has etched its way into my heart and my life and my symbology and into my very flesh? 

What do we do when our resurrections, don’t, well, resurrect?

For some of us, we just change the rules, right? Oh, well the bird may be gone on this earth in this life, but I’ll get to see the ivory billed woodpeckers in heaven. God must have needed another bird-angel. Or we live in denial: the bird’s not really gone; if I just wait a little longer, resurrection will come; it’s always darkest before the dawn, after all. Or if we work a little harder, invest a little more, believe a little better, the bird will come back. Or we make it metaphorical. The bird can still be a symbol of resurrection because even though it’s gone, it still lives inside our hearts. Or we rush to a replacement: the pileated woodpeckers are so similar to the ivory-billed, we can just shift our attention to them. Or we move on, distracting ourselves with all the wonderful stories of different animals who have begun to thrive after they were on the brink of extinction. We can avoid the pain by beating ourselves up for not doing enough to save the bird. Or we spiral and lose hope and give up because all living things are destined to the same fate as the ivory billed woodpecker. We can push the pain away by thinking about how selfish we are for wanting this bird, when the whole world is still full of hundreds of thousands of avian creatures.  Sometimes, we just suck it up as a fact of life, sort of apathetically accepting that extinction is the way of the world and we’d just better get used to it. We throw up our hands, accept our helplessness, and say “It’s no use crying over spilled milk…or extinct woodpeckers.” Or we say, “well. It’s all in God’s plan,” as if God has willed the extinction of this bird for some greater, unknown purpose. 

I hope you can see by now that this isn’t just about extinct woodpeckers. It’s about how we turn ourselves inside out in order to force a resurrection, to make something good out of something that’s just bad.

It’s about all those little and big deaths that we suffer in our lives. All those times when we hoped and prayed and sacrificed and begged for a resurrection, and then, it didn’t come. What do we do when we put all our chips down on red and the roulette wheel comes up black? What do we do when there’s nothing at the end of the rainbow, when there’s no true love’s kiss to awaken the fair maiden, there’s no spring tulips come back around and the monarch doesn’t erupt from it’s chrysalis, triumphant? What do we do when the degree never leads to the job, and the children make awful choices and the hurricane destroys the last of your carefully scrapbooked memories? What do we do when we fast forward five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from the white dress and the fancy tux and the “I do’s” and ten dollar a plate chicken dinners straight to the divorce? 

We do our best to cope. And often, that means running away from the pain. Often that means finding someone or something to blame. And often that means creating rules so that it can be someone’s fault if it happens again.

Maybe that’s why I wanted to take on this landmine of a passage for today. Because when I read it, my main emotion was just deep, deep sadness. Maybe that’s because of my own almost-divorce. And maybe it’s because, so often, we turn painful experiences and difficult choices into issues of morality so that we can point fingers - at others, and at ourselves - rather than fully experience the pain of the whole gosh darn broken thing. The thing didn’t resurrect because it, or us, or someone, didn’t deserve it.

We turn brokenness into a morality issue. We turn pain into who was right and who was wrong. We are so afraid of heartbreak that we try to find the reasons why an awful thing has happened so that we can prevent it from happening again. Or so we can blame someone for it. Or we can build walls of ethics and rules and laws in order to keep the devastation out. The good guys earn their happiness, while the bad guys get what they deserve. We take anguish and grief as “opportunities” to grow, to come back stronger, to learn our lesson, to know better so that we can do better. We try to resurrect what’s gone, rather than sit still and feel the pain of it.

Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? Does this fit into our worldview of right and wrong? Is this acceptable behavior, or is this guy worth condemning? What’s the law? What’s the rule? How do we know if this broken relationship is our “fault” or not? Is this a crime worth punishing? How do we know if we’re doing it “right”? How can we know if we’re on the right side? Give us the rules so that we can prevent the pain, or ignore the pain, or blame someone else for the pain, or distract us from the pain. What’s the line we can’t cross? Tell us, Jesus. We don’t want to hurt anymore. If something isn’t resurrected, we need to know who or what to condemn.

The ivory billed woodpecker is gone. And it’s never coming back.

And there are lots of reasons for that. We didn’t do enough to save it. And extinctions just happen. We live in a broken world. Death is a part of life. People hurt each other. Relationships fall apart. We show up and we do our best and sometimes it’s still not enough. We are cruel. We stop communicating. We are abused. We outgrow each other. We are forced in to things that we never really wanted. 

And Jesus’s response to these pharisees who are looking for rules and answers and the right letter to fill in on the multiple choice test is to take them back to the beginning, back to what God intended, so that they can maybe just get a hint of how far away we’ve strayed from God’s original plan. Maybe by going back to the beginning, we can see that it was never about rules; it was always about relationship. About connection. About intimacy and vulnerability. Two becoming one flesh. 

I don’t hear Jesus responding to the pharisees with more rules. I hear him responding to them with story. I don’t hear him taking a stance on gay marriage or prescribing that the battered woman stay in the abusive relationship. He’s not telling us to keep folks from communion or kick them out of the church. I just hear the deep deep sadness that comes from what happens when God intends one thing, and we go off and do the other. And that happens inside and outside of marriage. I hear how painful it can be to take something that is so a part of you and have to separate yourself from it. I hear that so often our heartbreaking reactions to heartbreak are just to make more rules and draw more dividing lines so that we can pretend like we can protect ourselves from that heartbreak. I hear Jesus saying that it’s our nature to harden our hearts and try to run away from the pain with rules and blame and consequences and strict definitions, but what God wants is soft, mushy, messy hearts. God wants malleable and moldable hearts. Hearts that change and grow, not because of laws, but because of relationship. 

And when Jesus is pressed on the matter by the disciples, I hear him saying, again, “yeah. It’s all messed up. We’re all messed up. We’re broken and we hurt each other and even when we try to start over there are still scars; there are still wounds.” Jesus isn’t saying, “sure, go ahead. Divorce is a good thing.” But he’s also not saying, “yup. Here are the rules. You’re doomed if you make these choices. So straighten up and get in line.” I hear him lifting up an issue away from morality and into the life changing and world-shattering realm of heartbreak. 

You are not evil. 

You’re just hurting.

And we are all doing the best that we can.

And still. And yet. We make choices out of that hurt.

And well. It hurts.

We can point our fingers and shift the blame and learn our lessons and edit the rulebooks later. Maybe there’s a place for going back to the black box and examining how all this happened. Asking “why,” even when it is unanswerable can be cathartic. 

Getting justice for crimes done is our way of maintaining a civil and somewhat organized society.

But God doesn’t hang out there. God’s not as easily found in the laws or the definitions or the boxes. God is pretty clearly present in the messy work of the heart. God’s in that muddy bayou, mourning the loss of the ivory billed woodpecker. God’s in that pain that you feel when you think about all the things in life that didn’t quite work out the way you planned. God didn’t want those bad things to happen to you, either. But God is with you in it.

The beautiful and the frustrating thing about kids is that they have such messy, malleable, wild, and untamed hearts. They feel. They enter in. They test boundaries and they break the rules. We are the ones who teach them to blame. We are the ones who teach them the rules they must follow. We are the ones who rush them through heartbreak by giving them whatever they want, or by explaining away or distracting them from or invalidating their feelings. But kids, before we get our hands on them, are all messy, fleshy, in-the-moment relationship. They are vulnerable and needy. They are laughing one minute and crying the next. They mourn the squished ant and the felled tree. They let themselves be devastated by the lost balloon and the fallen scoop of ice cream. They sit in their sadness and their joy and their confusion and their testing and their boundary breaking and God meets them there. 

“Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom fo God as a little child will never enter it.” 

What do we do when we don’t get the resurrection?

Throw a fit.

Have a tantrum.

Mourn.

And also laugh and be silly.

Play games.

Break rules.

Live with your heart leading the way.

Be present to what is, to what is here, inside you, right now. God is there.

The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

Thanks be to God.