Here’s what we got from Thomas (at right in his Bell ower study) after his vibrant and powerful sermon on April 10. Savor it!

Sermon for the last Sunday in Lent

10 April 2011

Ezek. 37:1-14 * Ps. 130 * Rom. 8:6-11 * John 11:1-45

· Intro: Undoing the lectionary

o Lectionary is based on the principle that events in the Old Testament prefigure those of the New Testament. Whether typologically (Isaac/Christ) or in terms of prophecies (Isaiah, “and a little child shall lead them.”) NT as fulfillment.

o Pairing of Ezekiel with Lazarus story asks us to understand this prophetic vision in terms of the Christian Resurrection.

o However: note in New Oxford Study Bible: “This vision has no direct connection with the Christian doctrine of resurrection.” à The rationalist/historicist in me would say: “of course not”: this is a Hebrew book written by someone who lived 500 years before Christ. So what would it mean to take it on its own terms?

o I want to start, somewhat heretically, by thinking about what we loose when we understand Ezekiel’s amazing vision only in the light of the Lazarus miracle, or even the Christian Resurrection more generally.

· Valley of dry bones as metaphor

o Jerusalem sacked late 6^th century BC. Ezekiel is speaking to Hebrew exiles who are loosing hope: this is explained clearly in the last section of the reading: “these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.’”

o Earlier Ezekiel berates the Israelites for following false gods, and, indeed, their spiritually skeletal state could be attributed to their sinfulness. But it’s not only that: God appears to be absent from their lives: they are on an alien soil—or a soil that has been made alien to them.

o What are bones?

§ Memento mori (fleetingness), yet enduring

§ We say “I feel it in my bones,” but bones themselves are strange, seemingly dead things within us: reminder that our bodies are not our own.

§ Metaphor for empty cultural forms (?)

o All that remains of the Israelites is some kind of dead thing:

§ Some kind of bare essential thing that exists in a society that makes it recognizable as a society.

§ Perhaps it is language itself: the Hebrews still have their language, but it is as if they are forgetting how to put the words together in a way that allows them to remember that they are God’s people.

· First prophecy

o It is language itself—Ezekiel’s language—that causes the bones to come together: he prophecies to them.

o The bones cannot have been completely dead: they can still hear.

o Bones come together but still not fully alive

§ Aaron Todd’s elbow: put back together by doctors but still had to exercise.

§ Israelites: first step is to assemble them: reconstitute them as a community: separated they can do nothing. But this is not enough.

· Second prophecy

o “Prophesy to the breath, O mortal.” I don’t know what this means. It’s mysterious.

o Question in science about what makes something living: unanswerable.

o Perhaps (and this is just a guess) “prophesying to the breath” is purposefully mysterious: means something like “acknowledge the existence of something unavailable to the means by which we traditionally establish certainty: something fundamentally intractable to our desire to circumscribe the mysterious forces of the universe through knowledge… The breath, or the spirit, is, after all not something we can constrain—it does not require a lapse into Christian teleology to acknowledge as true Jesus’s words to Nicodemus when he says that the wind goes where it pleases.

o To speak to this uncontrollable spirit: prayer: to embrace the wild, uncontrollable love of God: to even call it “love” is, perhaps, too constraining.

· Summation of the vision:

o Easy to see why this would be paired with Lazarus and why we read it right before Easter, but

o The danger of reading Ezekiel only in terms of the Christian Resurrection is that we might not realize exactly what it is the text is trying to get us to realize: that the graves Ezekiel refers to are not those in which the Israelites will one day be buried, from which, in some kind of grisly spectacle, their corpses will one day in the future arise and be reconstituted: rather, they are the graves God’s people already inhabit—the graves we inhabit—right now, even as we live our lives.

o The kinds of graves that cause us to see each other not as living members of one another, but as alien and dead.

o Broaden this to include what is traditionally taken to be the ecological, even the “non-living” world.

o Reading Ezekiel’s text poses a challenge—and a danger—for us: we can take it two ways

1. It is a literal vision of some kind of future, supernatural event—like the seventh voyage of Sinbad—where skeletons get up and walk around. I would suggest that this reading trivializes it, makes of it a kind of fairy tale that finds its Christian analogue in cartoonish notions of an afterlife of clouds, pearly gates, harps, etc. This is the version painted on the walls of the Sistine Chapel which, as beautiful as it is, suggests that the resurrection and the eternity toward which we strive are things that are to come, things outside of time rather than (as I believe Ezekiel intends it) a potential that exists radically within the deepest core of every moment of our lives. Something for which we were best not sit around waiting.

2. Rather, Ezekiel’s vision is a call to arise from the graves where we are, even as we speak, rotting away and will continue to rot for as long as we placate ourselves with the same fairy-tale notions I have just given. As such, ironically enough, Ezekiel’s text itself can become a potential grave insofar as it offers itself to us as an end rather than a beginning—as a story we might trot out once a year without allowing ourselves to enter into it or it into us. When we arise from that grave, it is not just we who come alive, but the text also; or rather, we find that we are the text and that it is we and that we are alive in one another.

· The kind of resurrection Ezekiel is talking about is an invitation into a mystery, not an answer to a question. The moment we allow it to ossify into the latter is the moment we cease to participate in it.

· This is not just about how to read the Bible. The modern world we live in offers a capitalist parody of resurrection—the fetishism of commodities—whereby dead, material things seem to be brought to life as substitutes for the real relationships we ought to be having with one another as a community.

· Here I’m reminded of something Frank Innes told me about the Pepsi slogan, “Pepsi makes you come alive” being mistranslated for an African ad campaign as “Pepsi will raise your ancestors from the dead.”

· The point is, the world is full of things that masquerade as resurrection stories that, insofar as they encourage us to be passive and complacent and merely accept them as such, actually become the very death from which Ezekiel calls us to arise.

o Revision of original statement that we loose something by understanding Ez. in terms of the Christian resurrection

o For Ezekiel is equally dead if we lock his text into its own historical moment: to refuse to read it as anything other than a metaphor for a particular tribe of exiled people in the 6^th century BC.

o One of the challenges the Lectionary has for us who, after all, call ourselves people of Christ and the Ressurection is to understand how Ezekiel lives in our own stories: but also how our own stories live through it.

o In fact, if there is a danger of taking Ezekiel too literally, there is also the danger of reducing it to mere metaphor—metaphor too can have a distancing effect, unlike the intimacy of entering into an act of faith.

o I think this is just what the Gospel calls us to do. John’s words are much less metaphorical: unlike the abstract valley and the anonymous bones of Ezekiel’s vision, John’s story has a place (Bethany) and people with names (Mary, Martha, Lazarus, Jesus). In fact, it’s very hard to read this passage and imagine that John didn’t mean us to take it absolutely literally.

§ There’s even a moment where Jesus must correct what the disciples take to be the figurative language of Lazarus “falling asleep.” “No,” he tells them “plainly,” “Lazarus is dead.”

o How do we understand this? From what depths of our will power can we, realistically, ever summon the suspension of disbelief that would be necessary to take John’s story (written down a long time after it was supposed to have happened) as evidence for a bodily resurrection?

o To be honest, I come up against this passage in the same way I encounter Ezekiel’s prophesying to the winds: utter confusion. I don’t know what to say (elaborate on this).*

o The story itself offers us several models of faith:

o Good old Thomas who seems to give up right away: “Let’s go and die too.”

o Martha, always the diligent student, says she knows that Lazarus “will rise again in the resurrection, on the last day.” Like Martha, we could hold out hope that it really is possible for the dead to rise again on the last day. Interestingly Jesus responds, “I am (present tense) the Resurrection and the life.”

o Mary seems more real somehow: although she repeats Martha’s words when she tells Jesus that if he had been there her brother wouldn’t have died, she significantly falls short of echoing Martha’s faith that “even now she knows that God will give him whatever he asks.”

o And then there’s Jesus’s response—the shortest verse in the entire Bible—in which words themselves fail and he simply weeps.

o Here is really where my sermon should end because I think this failure of words might be just the point. We spend a lot of time talking about what we believe, in the hopes that by talking, we might understand. But there’s the danger that by understanding—of being certain—what we believe might stop being alive—a matter for continual engagement. Being certain is, in a sense, about controlling.

o Some words by Thomas Pynchon:

Doubt is the essence of Christ. Of the Twelve Apostles, most true to him was ever Thomas. … The final pure Christ is pure uncertainty. His become the centrall subjective fact of Faith, that risks evr’ything upon one bodily Ressurection …. Wouldn’t something less doubtable have done? Some few tatters of evidence to wrap our poor naked spirits against the coldness of a World where Mortality and its Agents may bully their way, wherever they wish to go…? (Thomas Pynchon, Mason Dixon, p. 511).

o Belief isn’t just a matter of what we tell ourselves. One of my favorite scholars, Juliet Fleming, talks about the massive and confusing changes in religious doctrine in seventeenth century England, which was a world in which people didn’t always know what they believed, but (she says) this was “not because they were confused, but because belief might be lodged in practices beyond or beside our knowledge of it.”

o Niels Bohr and the horseshoe

o Living “as if.”

o This final time before Easter is, I think, a time not so much for awaiting the certainty of an eventual resurrection but, rather, throwing oneself into the radical uncertainty that might just be the resurrection: not a closing down, but an opening up: not an end, but a beginning.

End with one more vision of the Resurrection:

“>At the round earth’s imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
‘Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that’s as good
As if Thou hadst seal’d my pardon with Thy blood. (John Donne, Holy Sonnet 7)

I sure hope you’ll join us this Saturday and on Easter Monday when our Composer in Residence, Scott Ordway, unveils his latest composition for us, Festival Mass, written as part of our fabulous program called New Music for Sacred Places. We’ll hear part of the Mass during the Easter Vigil on Saturday. The New Fire will be kindled and the Vigil begin at 8 PM. Then on Easter Monday, again at 8 PM, the entire Mass will be heard in a full evening’s performance at our neighbor, Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral. More information follows below.

World Premiere Performances of Scott J. Ordway’s Festival Mass

St. Mary’s Church, Hamilton Village and Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral are pleased to present the world premiere performance of Philadelphia composer Scott J. Ordway’s Festival Mass, a new, large-scale composition for soloists, choir, organ, and chamber orchestra. The evening-length work will be conducted by the composer himself and feature the Choir of St Mary’s Church, the Choral Scholars of the Philadelphia Cathedral, and players from the Curtis Institute of Music. Soloists Sara Ann Mitchell (soprano), Julia Teitel (mezzo-soprano), and Ricardo Torres-Cooban (baritone) will travel from Boston to sing the premiere.

This exceptional collaboration among local and regional artists both amateur and professional takes place under the auspices of the New Music for Sacred Spaces Project, a program created and operated by St Mary’s Church, Hamilton Village, the Episcopal Church at Penn. The program aims to encourage and support composers and performers to collaborate in creating new music for use in Philadelphia’s architecturally and sonically remarkable sacred places, often (as is the case at St. Mary’s) by the congregations and in the context of liturgical practice.

In fact, the Festival Mass was written specifically in the context of the Great Vigil of Easter, an ancient liturgy that begins the Easter season for Episcopalians. Pats of it will be sung in St. Mary’s Vigil in its historic sanctuary on the Penn campus on Saturday, April 23, beginning at 8 PM.

The Project has created a major new avenue for the commissioning and performance of new works, five thus far. Ordway’s evening-length Festival Mass marks the end of a highly successful inaugural season.

In 2010, New Music for Sacred Places has been supported by the American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter, the University of Pennsylvania, Partners for Sacred Places, Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, and St. Mary’s Church Hamilton Village.

From the composer:

It is a great privilege, but perhaps a greater challenge to compose a full setting of the Mass in the twenty-first century. In addition to the myriad technical challenges attendant upon any large-scale work, one must inevitably reckon with the communicative aspect of the text itself and all of its far-ranging implications. Regardless of one’s own spiritual background, the Mass is one of western philosophy’s great texts of supplication, of yearning, of hope, and of redemption; its familiar lines contain the language of a great universal aspiration to know better how we might live.

My response to this immortal text reflects my struggle to understand its meaning, its implications, and its place in our culture. The work is highly dramatic, at times quite intense and at others very meditative. In the breadth and scope of its expression, it might better be described “an opera about god”.

Scott J. Ordway (b. 1984, Santa Cruz CA) is an American composer and conductor of contemporary music. His works have been performed and broadcast throughout the United States and in Europe and he has conducted more than 30 world premiere performances in recent seasons, most by young American composers. His output is diverse, including his two symphonies, numerous chamber works, and sacred and secular vocal music, as well as experimental or improvisatory pieces in collaboration with sound and video artists and live music for film. From 2007–2008 he was music director of the Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, and from 2008–2009 was in-residence at the Boston Conservatory as Associate Conductor of the Juventas New Music Ensemble. He is presently a Benjamin Franklin Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Ordway has worked with members or graduates of the Juilliard School, Curtis Institute of Music, Opera Boston, New York City Opera, and Oregon Bach Festival. He is a published James Joyce scholar and the recipient of grants or awards from the American Composers Forum, American Music Center, Oregon Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, University of Pennsylvania, University of Puget Sound, and University of Oregon.

He graduated with high honors in composition from the University of Oregon (MM, 2008), and in English literature at the University of Puget Sound (BA, 2006); he has studied conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music and at the University of Oregon. His composition teachers have included Samuel Adler, David Crumb, Robert Hutchinson, Robert Kyr, Jim Primosch, and Jay Reise. He presently lives in West Philadelphia.

Several months ago, my colleague and friend, the Very Rev. Renee McKenzie Hayward, with whom I share leadership of the Antiracism Commission of the Diocese of Pennsylvania, asked me to join her in a presentation about our work to the Episcopal Church Club, a venerable institution that meets monthly here in Philadelphia. We decided that I would try to establish a little historical context for the work we are doing; and then she would talk about that work itself, and our future. What follows are my remarks, delivered today, which uncharacteristically I wrote out and which I thought might interest some of you who have been companions and/or observers of this ministry over the years. This is also being sent out to St. Mary’s Constant Contact List by email. If you’d like to be on that list, email Doug Watts at St. Mary’s, st.marys@verizon.net.

I’ll be happy to read and respond to, if I have time, any comments you may have.

Be well. Blessings in this Holy Week.

Jim Littrell

Remarks to the Episcopal Church Club

The Rev. James H. Littrell

Vice-Chair

The Antiracism Commission of the Diocese of Pennsylvania

April 19, 2011

For the memory of Paul Washington, Margaret Moore and Mamie Wiggins, and in gratitude for the life-giving spirit of the women at the Church of the Holy Apostles and the Mediator in Philadelphia, who at a time when I was wounded and tired invited me in, knew me, loved and cared for me, and finally healed me.

One thing alone I charge you, as you live, believe in Life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the Great End comes slowly, because time is long.

–The last instruction of W.E.B. Du Bois

Good afternoon, my friends.

Thanks for your hospitality and for your dedication to the important work of educating Episcopalians and our friends about much of the important ministry that goes on under the extraordinarily broad rubric of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.I especially want to thank Penny Cutler for her invitation to my colleague and friend, Dean Renee McKenzie-Hayward, to speak to the Club today about the work of the Anti-Racism Commission of the Diocese and Renee for her invitation to me to share this podium with her.

I have never in my life more enjoyed and learned so much from a collegial partnership than from the one I have shared with Renee in the leadership of the Commission for the last seven years. It’s just as safe to say that Renee’s work in the Diocese has created a new, vigorous, and prophetic path for all of us in relation to that thorniest and most difficult of American issues, race and racism.

Our idea for today is that I, being much Renee’s senior, will give a brief but pithy overview of the development across time of the work of anti-racism in the Diocese.Many of you share that kind of seniority with me, and so will remember, no doubt, our prophetic predecessors in the work, and all of the ups and downs, steps and missteps, rough places and plain, that constitute, I believe, the slow and painful progress we have made as a diocese toward becoming an anti-racist diocese—we say that is our mission as a Commission and an essential part of our mission as a diocese—over the last half century.None of us exists or works in a vacuum—historical or ontological. There is much to remember and learn from our history, and I’m going to aim especially at the last half century, beginning about 1962.

Before that, of course, there were markers of change in our common life.We remember and celebrate the determination toward freedom, equality, and self-determination that led to the establishment of what we now know as the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in 1794 and the ordination eight years later of Absalom Jones as the first African American priest in the Episcopal Church. (It’s important to remember, lest we be subject to a mistaken sense of false progressive pride for the prophetic vision of our forbearers, that not until 1864—a full year after the Emancipation Proclamation—were African Americans in general and the St. Thomas delegation specifically given a vote in our Diocesan Convention.)In the Commonwealth, as Lorene Cary reminds us in The Price of a Child and historical markers throughout Philadelphia attest, agents of the underground railroad were powerful, courageous witnesses against the evils of slavery, which persisted all around them.Born in 1868, W.E.B. Du Bois—in my own view the most powerful analyst of and voice against racism ever heard in our nation—became a model and challenge for all of us who would, however haltingly, try to do this work. Though some of his views (particular his early notion of a ‘talented tenth’ in the Black community) changed and evolved over time, the findings and related assertions in his first ground-breaking book, The Philadelphia Negro, researched and written during the two years he lived in our city in the mid-1890’s, are as cogent and challenging today as they were more a century ago. Of the role of the black church in American society, Du Bois said, in a remark that provides important context for the angry conversation that is going on in the Diocese right now—all these years later—that blacks who attended church went for a social gathering first and religion second. Du Bois said that church “introduces the stranger to the community, it serves as a lyceum, library, and lecture bureau—it is, in fine, the central organ of the organized life of the American Negro.”This is exactly the assertion, or at least part of it,that my friend and colleague Jane Cosby and others make in their passionate argument for sustaining the black parishes of our diocese even when they cannot and may never be fully self-sustaining.Paul Washington, about whom more in a moment, used to say the question was not whether the Diocese could afford such parishes but whether the Diocese could afford not to have them.

In Du Bois’s Wikipedia article, his biographer David Levering Lewis is quoted as saying, “In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism—scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity.”We who work toward a diocese that is actively anti-racist continue precisely that enterprise.I remind people over and over that the work of changing the institutions that mark and sustain racism in our diocese will take all of us the rest of our lives, and then some.Ours will not be the quick turn-around or the two- or three-year transformation.And yet…

I arrived in the Diocese, a wayward Quaker-Presbyterian hybrid recently become an Episcopalian, by way of the welcoming and imaginative invitation of a bishop some of you may remember, Robert L. DeWitt. Let’s move quickly, then, to 1962, that year I mentioned earlier.Remember that the ‘Philadelphia Negroes’ of DuBois’s time were now a much larger part of Philadelphia’s population, thanks to the great northern migration of the 30’s and 40’s, during and after which a deep-rooted civil rights movement had birthed and become a powerful voice for racial justice here in the city of brotherly love.All that powerful witness is detailed in a great book I commend to you called Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia by Matthew Countryman.

As I came into the Diocese, Paul Washington’s prophetic ministry at the Advocate was just three years old.He, David Gracie, Sue Hiatt, Mattie Humphrey, Barbara Harris, John Elliott Churchville, Bishop DeWitt and others became a powerful team; but the captain of the team, at least in our Diocese and in the Episcopal Church, was Paul.His is the voice I first heard and still hear, at any rate.DeWitt provided him, and me, and many others, with his increasingly wise counsel and unwavering support.But it is the face of Paul I see in subsequent years, though often side by side with DeWitt.Paul asked the important questions that moved Bob DeWitt from a pastor to the privileged to a prophet and pastor to the disenfranchised.So it is Paul who is the chief marker for me for the last fifty years, as the Diocese, led by a series of often unwittingly prophetic bishops and laity, engaged and re-engaged with the ugly realities of a racist church and society.

Here are the names of some of the people and chapters that for me mark that long and continuing Diocesan struggle:CORE. SNCC. Chester.Girard College. The Jungle.The1964 Race Riots. ESCRU.The Black People’s Unity Movement.Jesse Anderson.The Union of Black Clergy and Laity.Mohammed Kenyatta at the Church of the Holy Trinity.The Black Economic Development Conference. Freedom Schools.Black Panthers, herded by police, naked against a wall. Frank Rizzo. Reparations.The Restitution Commission. Barbara Harris.Women Ordained at the Advocate. MOVE.Wilson Goode. Lyman Ogilby, Brooke Mosely,Jane Cosby, Allan Bartlett, Frank Turner.Curtis W. Sisco, Margaret Moore, Mamie Wiggins. The Committee to Combat Racism.

The struggle and the work that I’ve witnessed and participated in these last 50 years has been halting and often exhausting. From time to time it has been nearly dormant, mostly I think because of exhaustion.Yet… the work has always continued.Remarkably, too, the work has mostly focused on what I believe to be its most tenacious and deceptive form, the racism that’s embedded—often hidden—deep in the very fabric (and in their underlying assumptions, the threads of that fabric, as it were) of the institutions that shape and define us: our Constitution and Canons, our governance and governing processes, our assumptions about and requirements for ordained ministry, our hiring practices, our parish self-definition and life, an ancient history that constantly reaches into the present moment, determined sometimes it seems to drag us back, the shape of our political life, and even perhaps in our most cherished diocesan programs: DCMM, a coalition almost frozen in time that we use to define and institutionalize aided parishes, for instance, or the rural and romantic ideal of a diocesan camp planted in the southern border country, not long ago a Klan wilderness. But also embedded in our core faith and its documents are other fundamental institutional values—justice, compassion, our mutuality as God’s children.In our baptismal vows, our creed, in the Eucharistic feast we all share, in the scripture which is the living Word of our God—are vital pointers to our future, and to the immense unflagging work we still have to do.

After the 1960’s and 70’s, I recused myself in many ways from antiracist work and turned my attention and then my ministry to the struggle for lesbian and gay civil rights and then to a 14-year ministry in the epidemic world of HIV/AIDS.(Though it’s important to know that all these struggles contained embedded racism and had in common a determination to seek just and love mercy.) I returned to active, organized work against racism in the Diocese at the invitation of Richard Smith, who was in the early years of the last decade chair of what had come to be called the Committee to Combat Racism.We were a small, aging, often disheartened group, but we struggled on as best we could.Then there arrived this remarkable person among us.The Rev. Renee McKenzie Hayward had come to the Diocese to be Rector of Calvary, Northern Liberties, a parish that many of us had pronounced dead, quite prematurely, as it turned out.For most of her life a Baptist, she came to us with a Ph.D. from Temple, from the Diocese of New Jersey, which (in spite of the destructive internal turmoil that then marked that Diocese in some of the same ways our Diocese is marked today) had made huge, concrete progress in its work to create what Renee called “an anti-racist diocese.”

She brought us energy, new focus, and a passion for what we were up to, and suggested an engaging model for doing that work. From her energy and passion, we supped!Soon I was sent with two other Committee members to New Jersey to investigate and experience this model at work.We reported back, renewed and excited, from that transforming experience; and so we embarked.The last six years have moved us into new territory.That is the story Renee will tell you.There could be no better successor than she to the powerful witnesses whose mantle she has taken up, and I will go to my grave a better man and a better priest for her company with me on that way.

A short bibliography for these remarks:

W.E.B. Du BoisThe Philadelphia Negro.

Paul Washington with David Gracie.Other Sheep I Have: The Autobiography ofFather Paul M Washington.

Randall Kenan. Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.

Lorene Cary.The Price of a Child.

Matthew Countryman.Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia.

Michelle Alexander.The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Alice Walker. Her BlueBody Everything We Know: Earthlng Poems, 1965-1990.

June Jordon.Directed by Desire: Collected Poems.

Thomas J. Sugrue.Sweet Land of Liberty: the Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.

The history page of the website of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas,http://www.aecst.org

The website, The Black Past, remembered and Reclaimed, http://www.blackpast.org

Texts: Genesis 12: 1-4a; Psalm 121: 1-8; Romans 4:1-5 & 13-17; John 3:1-17

One of the things I learned from the readings this week was that just because one is late does not mean one is too late. Abram and Sarai in their seventies were not too old to be immigrants and parents. Nicodemus long after dark was not too late to have a conversation with Jesus that night. And as the beautiful poem, Psalm 121, says so eloquently it is never too late for God, “he who watches over you will not fall asleep”.

I’ve often thought of Lent as a period of penitence, and self-denial, but at this year’s Ash Wednesday service something shifted as Father Jim talked about washing the ashes off as part of completing this sacrament. I started to saw this as a period of being drawn closer and closer, a process of forgiveness and welcome, getting free, rather than self-indulgent mourning. Today’s texts have me thinking about grace, about getting another chance. The figure in our readings that I most identify with is Nicodemus so I’m going to talk most about him, but first a few things about Abram.

The Genesis account about the calling of Abram is fundamentally an origin story and, as a literature professor, I’m interested in it as a narrative that a people told to make sense of their beginnings, and as the pretext for later writings reflecting back on it. It is an origin story we share with our Jewish and Muslim cousins, and in the version passed down to us, Abram receives this incredible proposal: leave your country, your kindred, your father’s house, in effect all that would provide security and the conditions for a rewarding life…and travel to some unspecified land where “in you and the families of the earth shall be blessed. Paul parses this story, counting on it being as familiar as family lore. […did you hear the one about how great-great-great grandpa Abram the wanderer dragged poor ole grandma Sarai and young nephew Lot out of their hometown, Ur…?] As a former legal scholar (Pharisee) like Nicodemus, Paul loves getting into the nitty gritty of the logic in his argument. He insists on the fact that if something is “reckoned” it is different from what is owed, and that the righteousness of faith is a gift graciously extended, rather than earned.

Abram did an incredibly hard thing, he gave up all that was comfortable, familiar, reasonable, and accepted a call to wander around on the promise of fertile land and family life. Ten years later he would still be (at 85 years of age, as the story goes) a childless man. And he had to wander around without a map or a concrete sense of what was coming. The story paints a vivid picture of a terrifying adventure, and the wonder of Abram’s patience and courage in its midst. I think of the lesson of Abram and Sarai as an invitation to leave what we know and go towards God, to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. What comforts might we be called to let go of, as we turn, repent, to enter the kingdom of God, and to cultivate the habits of living that are a blessing to all?

Nicodemus is a character I immediately identified with. As a professor, I understand his devotion to study, attention to details, intention to stay up to date on the most reputable and influential schools of thought. This is a guy who is still working at the end of the day, haunted by the imposter’s syndrome that many of us suffer, the fear that he doesn’t know quite enough. The fact that Nicodemus comes at night seems less to indicate shame or secretiveness, than diligence. He’s interested enough in what Jesus has to say that he comes to seek him out at the end of the day. If Nicodemus is anything like Penn faculty, he thinks of himself as affable, approachable, the exception to the stereotype of pretentious snobby Ivy League types. He earns a very comfortable living and he is aware of the cachet of his prominent position. Nicodemus expects, perhaps, that Jesus will respond warmly and generously when he discovers that such a prestigious interlocutor recognizes his authority. Instead, Jesus cuts abruptly to a rather cryptic formulation: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

It was so easy for me to identify with Nicodemus frustrated reaction here. For a scholar of the humanitie this is a hard saying indeed. It’s often translated as “be born again” and I can tell you that in my field of work there are few better ways to cast doubt on your reasoning capacities than to admit to being anything that remotely resembles a “born again Christian.” Nicodemus objects because it is also not logical. You don’t have to be a Greek poet like Heraclitus to know that water does not flow past twice, and time does not flow backward. How can an old man be born again? What Jesus has thrown at Nicodemus, and at us, is a metaphor. A metaphor is simply a way of conveying an idea by means of another idea, image, comparison. It literally means to carry over, and I think here we see Jesus carrying over the understanding of the call of Abram, no longer physical aliyah or immigration into (someone else’s) territory, but instead a kingdom of God with a fundamentally new ethic of human and spiritual relations, an ethic of sacrificial love.

What I love about this metaphor is that it evokes the womb, women’s bodies and the incredible sacrifice of pain that a mother makes to give birth to a child. Nicodemus gets that part of the image very viscerally; he asks “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” However he doesn’t quite grasp (at least not yet) the significance that being born is a passive activity. If physical birth is an event that occurs through the agonizing contractions of a mother’s uterus, this other kind of birth, in the spirit, is one that also comes through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Jesus seems to break it down for him, “Don’t be astonished that I say to you, you must be born from above. The wind blows where it chooses…it’s always in motion, you don’t know its origins or its destination…and that is how it is with those born in the Spirit.” It seems to me that this Spirit-birthing is also an act of sacrifice, the passion that we celebrate in communion, but one that is always ongoing. The wind, the ruach, the spirit of God is always blowing, always birthing us from above. Certainly we cannot birth ourselves. This is one time the passive voice is absolutely essential. We must be birthed. We must be born. From above.

Jesus spells this out for Nicodemus and it runs so counter to Nicodemus’s commitments at this moment in his life that he finds Jesus unintelligible. Jesus seems to scold him, almost to shame him. How can one of the most educated and respected scholars of Jewish thought in his day be stumped by this country teacher’s metaphors? Metaphors are funny things. They are prisms that allow us to see things differently, to shift our sight and our insight in new directions, new angles of incidence and encounter. As someone who loves poetry, music, stained glass, I’m so thankful for the ways that God speaks to us through these indirections. In an academic environment suspicious of religious conviction, I am often full of doubt, and ashamed of the harm done in the name of the gospel. It is in fact often the testimony of metaphors, parables, and beauty that allow me to “believe” (if by belief we mean inspiration, a breath that gives the courage to move into new and unmapped territory like Abram, Sarai and Lot).

The last two verses of the gospel are familiar to the point of cliché. Reading this week, I particularly notice the word “world”. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The story of Nicodemus is a story about shifting perspective. God is not after due diligence, per se. We aren’t called to stay up ‘til 3am working on a paper about “Repetitive Birth as a Mechanism of Salvation.” We are invited to set aside the questions of who’s good and who’s bad, who’s good enough, and who’s slacking and instead, to join the Abrahamic tradition, the tradition in which Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. And to live inspired, continually birthed by the Spirit. Inspired to do what?

Well I want to dip into a reading that isn’t part of our lectionary for today. One of my favorite sayings is from Deuteronomy 26, and it is an example of something God asked the Israelites to do multiple times…remember their identity by telling their story. They are told to institute the festival of first fruits, which will include presenting the tithes of their harvest by announcing to the priest, “My Father was a wandering Aramean and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous.” In other words, God commanded them to learn to tell a good story. What really struck me as I looked at this moment grounded in the story of Abram the wandering Aramean was that the tithed produce was to be given to “the Levite, the alien, the fatherless and the widow.” The Levites, of course are the lineage of priests, and as such are people of privilege and prestige. And here they are put on the same footing as the alien, the orphaned, the widowed. Regardless of how or why, these are people who are not in a position to earn their living on the land or to build up security, and God calls for his offering to be redistributed to them. When I remember that Paul wrote in his epistle to the Hebrews that we have a high Priest in Jesus, this passage begins to resonate for me with Jesus’s teaching that whatever we do for the least among us we do for him.

So who are the least among us? Much has happened in the last week since we were here together, and there are many spectacularly vulnerable people in the news…the people of Japan…of Libya…of Bahrain. And there are the people whose suffering is ghostly in its absence from our news. The people of the Ivory Coast… of Haiti…the one in six Americans unemployed or working part-time while they seek full-time employment. Hydro-fracking recently approved here in Pennsylvania is threatening the clean water supply of millions, and funding for our public universities was just eviscerated this week. We live in Philadelphia, which, according to a 2008 Pew Research Study has the highest rate of incarceration in the country that has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Nationwide, 1 in 9 African American men in my age range (20-34) is behind bars, compared to 1 in 106 white men. We live at the epicenter of the crisis of racially unjust mass incarceration. It’s hard to know where to begin…beyond prayer. **One book I’d recommend for more information on this is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

I’d like to use a graphic that showed up on several of my friends’ facebook pages these past couple weeks as an icon for such prayer (and prayerful action). When I went to hunt down it’s source I was amazed to discover that it apparently originated with a group called the “Christian Left” (http://i.imgur.com/tlG0Y.jpg.) I won’t read the whole chart, but I think a few lines will capture the ethos of this statement. One column listed the cost of various government programs at risk, and the other column listed the value amount of specific tax breaks for the wealthy.
$11.2 b (Early childhood programs)
$11.5 b (per year cost of recent tax-cuts for millionaires’ estates)

$8.9 b (Low income housing programs)
$8.9 b (cost of allowing mortgage interest deduction for vacation homes est. 10-yr cost)

$2.5 b (Low income Home Energy Assistance LIHEAP grants to poor families)
$2.5 b (Tax breaks for oil companies (write offs for drilling and oil well costs FY 2012))

The chart ends by comparing the $44 billion cost of all programs at risk combined with the $42 billion lost by extending one year of Bush tax cuts top tax brackets in FY 2012.

It is not my place to prescribe any particular political position, although it’s clear where my own leanings lie. That notwithstanding, I do think this chart poses a question that we as people of the Abrahamic tradition, justified by grace, cannot afford to ignore. If we live in a society that has abandoned its most vulnerable members to poor schools, poor nutrition, poor legal defense, and poor health care, our experience of God’s grace demands that we act decisively and adventurously for justice.

Nicodemus makes two more appearances in the gospel of John. When Jesus is brought before the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus speaks up reminding his colleagues that their laws demand a fair hearing for anyone charged with a crime. He is shouted down and heckled as one of “those Galileans.” While his efforts to speak up for justice before the judicial structures of his time was ignored, Nicodemus took civic action impelled by his encounter with Jesus. His were halting steps in a similar direction to twentieth century believers like Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, and Daniel Berrigan.

By the time Jesus was crucified Nicodemus had understood what it meant to be birthed from above. Witnessing the death pains of Jesus our brother he saw what I imagine Julian of Norwich would call the birth pains of Jesus our mother. And he understood that he had an opportunity to draw near to Jesus by joining with Joseph of Arimathea to take Jesus’s body and bury him in a tomb Nicodemus had purchased. What other acts of mercy Nicodemus was born into we don’t know. What we can and must discover, however, are the acts of justice and mercy that Christ has inspired us, who are continuously born anew into his body, and through his spirit, to begin. It is never too late to start figuring out what part of the project of justice we are called to, one halting step at a time. There is always time to begin to be with Jesus, the Word incarnate. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

Tsitsi Jaji earned her Ph.D. (2009) in Comparative Literature from Cornell University with concentrations in African, Caribbean and African-American literature in English, French and Spanish. Her dissertation was entitled Africa in Stereo: Comparative Black Acoustic Imaginaries In Poetry And Film From Ghana, Senegal And South Africa, and she is currently building on this material towards her first book. She has published articles and/or book chapters on Nafissatou Diallo, Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, and most recently Keorapetse (Willie) Kgositsile (Comparative Literature Studies 46:2), as well as a handful of poems in obscure but treasured small press journals.

Originally from Zimbabwe, Dr. Jaji has conducted fieldwork throughout Southern and West Africa, with generous support from the TIAA-CREF Ruth Sims Hamilton Fellowship, and has been a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a Society for the Humanities (Cornell) Mellon Graduate Fellow, and a member of the Telluride Association.

Tsitsi considers teaching and mentoring important ways to return the tremendous support she has received along the way.

Her primary research interests continue to be transnational black cultural relations and exchanges, the relationship between music and literature, theorizations of listening, and Africana expressions of feminism. On occasion she revisits a former self as an Oberlin-trained pianist, and she helped herself through university as a church organist and musician and as a jazz pianist and singer; however her primary commitment is to literary studies, which she believes can be transformative by training the imagination and powers of observation and empathy.

We all know how important it is to have close friends. Jesus had some very close friends who were not among the twelve disciples. They were Lazarus and his two sisters, Martha and Mary. He went to their home for meals and part of his ministry was conducted from their house.

They were such close friends of Jesus that when Lazarus became seriously ill Martha and Mary sent an urgent message to Jesus telling him, “Come quick! The one you love is sick.” They figured that Jesus would come to them right away and by his healing touch make Lazarus well as he had so many others. But Jesus didn’t come until four days after Lazarus had already died, and the two sisters were deep in grief surrounded by the village mourners.

When Jesus did show up, both Mary and Martha at different times went to him and said, “You know, if you had been here Lazarus wouldn’t have died.” And Jesus told them what he told his disciples the first moment he heard that Lazarus was sick: “This situation is going to reveal God’s glory.”

Soon after Jesus arrived he went to the tomb where Lazarus’ dead body had been placed four days earlier, and he ordered the stone to be rolled back from the entrance. The sisters protested that they would be overwhelmed by the stench of their brother’s rotting corpse, but Jesus called out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” And the dead Lazarus, still wrapped in grave clothes, came out very much alive.

The story of the death and resurrection of Lazarus, which is told in John 11, is, as Jesus said, a sign story. Even though this story is about Lazarus, the story points beyond itself to Jesus’ death and resurrection.

That is what sign stories do.

They point beyond themselves to tell us deep things about God. That is what Passover does for the Jews. It is the re-telling of the story about God’s people being delivered from Egyptian slavery through the slaughter of the Passover lamb. But the story points beyond that drama to reveal deep things about our covenant God. Passover is a sign story.

Communion is a sign story. When we stand at the Lord’s table and say, “on the night that Jesus was arrested and betrayed, he took bread and broke it, and he took the cup” — the telling and the enactment of the Last Supper points beyond itself to tell us something important about God’s love for us in Christ.

Sign stories. That is what the gospel from John 12 for this week does.

It is a simple story: a dinner in the home of Lazarus and Martha and Mary, several of Jesus’ disciples are there. They are having this dinner party in honor of Jesus, probably to celebrate all that he did for Lazarus and this family.

It was customary in that time and geographical area when you hosted a dinner to wash the feet of your guests. Walking was their main mode of travel, walking in sandals or barefoot, and their feet needed cleansing and refreshment. So, Mary washes Jesus’ feet.

But John makes it very clear, as does Jesus, that this is more than just a dinner. What Mary does is more than just wash Jesus’ feet. What she does is a sign. The story points beyond itself to reveal something important about God and what God is doing in Jesus Christ.

We are invited to look closer, beneath the surface of this story. John does not want us to miss the significance of what is being revealed here about Jesus’ passion.

Passover is near. Good Friday is near. The crucifixion is near. Jesus already told his disciples that this was coming. He told them many times, “The Son of Man will be killed by the religious leaders, and raised on the third day.” But they didn’t understand the significance of what he was telling them. They brushed it off. “Don’t be ridiculous!” they said. “Why would you get yourself killed? What a waste of a wonderful leader! No way! We won’t let that happen to you!” They didn’t see Jesus’ passion and where God’s love was taking him.

Like Judas, they just saw on the surface. He looked at what Mary did and said, “What a ridiculous waste! Why wasn’t this perfume sold and given to the poor?” Yet he cared nothing for the poor; he was a thief! His words had nothing to do with Jesus’ compassion or love. He only saw the surface meaning of Jesus’ life.

From here on out the rest of the Gospel of John — chapters 13-21 — are about Jesus’ passion. This section of John’s Gospel is called The Book of Jesus’ Passion. It’s not just another tragic story of a great leader getting murdered. It is about God’s passion; it is about God’s love. So, John places this important sign story right here, hoping that we won’t miss the significance of what’s coming.

John gives us this story as we journey into Holy Week. Don’t miss the significance of Jesus’ passion. Look deeply into the story of Mary’s passionate act. It is a sign story taking us deeper into the reality of God’s passionate love for us in Christ.

March 7 was Oscar Party night. The Academy Awards have become a fun opportunity for people like me and my friends to watch all the big stars gather with their beautiful clothes and beautiful bodies. But underneath it all it is an honoring of the art of film-making. It is an honoring of the art of deeper seeing that can come to us through movies.

When everything is woven together just right — script, sound, costumes, casting, directing, editing, special effects (everything for which they give awards) — through this drama we are given a deeper seeing into the reality of the war in Iraq, or the stark reality of loneliness; we are given a deeper seeing into domestic violence. That is what a well-done movie can do; the story can immerse you more deeply in reality, take you beyond the surface pieces that make up a movie and touch you in a deep way.

This very simple drama in John does that; it takes us beyond the surface pieces to the passion of Jesus Christ. So we are invited to take a closer look. What’s happening here?

After all that happened to Lazarus you can imagine how much it meant to this family to have Jesus in their home now and to serve him. When Mary bent down to do the customary washing of feet she took this outrageously expensive vial of perfume that could have been a family treasure. She broke the alabaster neck of it and poured it onto Jesus feet and the whole house was filled with the powerful aroma of it.

When we are told by Judas that this perfume could have been sold in the market for three hundred denarii that’s a lot of money! A denarii was a day’s wage in those days and three hundred denarii was a year’s salary. I have heard that the average salary in San Carlos is between $90,000 and $115,000. Let’s just say it’s $100,000. Can you imagine having a special dinner guest over and anointing him in some way with a bottle of $100,000 perfume?

What Mary did was beyond extravagant! It was this outpouring of love and gratitude that knew no bounds. She loved and appreciated Jesus so much, and sometimes when you really love and appreciate somebody you just can’t do enough to let them know it.

I think it’s important, too, as we look deeply into this story to acknowledge that there are definite sexual overtones to what Mary did. I’m amazed that the commentaries that I read didn’t bring any attention to this at all. Maybe they were afraid to. But this scene is loaded with sexual overtones.

First of all, Jesus and Mary are both single adults of marriageable age and available. That automatically creates a dynamic right there. As you know there are many ways to be sexual with one another that are not about sexual intercourse or pursuing sexual intercourse. Just a look or a touch that isn’t overtly sexual can be because we are sexual beings and never stop being sexual beings.

Also, in Jesus’ day a woman was not allowed to let her hair down in public because there was something about that act that was considered sexual. Women didn’t wear their hair short; they wore it long. Once they moved beyond girlhood they always wore their hair tied up or back. To wear it down in public marked you as an immoral woman, a loose woman.

When Jesus arrived at the house for dinner Mary went to him with this family treasure in her hand and this deep love in her heart. Once he was seated she bent down and took his dirty and tired feet into her hands. She touched them and washed them and massaged them in a way that communicated the esteemed place of honor he held in her heart and in this family.

Then she broke open the flask and poured this fragrant ointment on his feet. Everybody in the room immediately was filled and moved by the fragrance of it. Then she loosened her hair and let it fall to her shoulders. She bent low to the floor with her face on the ground so that she could wipe Jesus’ feet with the looseness of her long hair. The scene is charged with passionate love!

But this scene isn’t really about Mary. It is pointing beyond itself to Jesus and his passionate love.

The Bible is not shy about using sexual imagery to describe God’s love relationship with us. Not at all. In Scripture God tells Israel, “I am your husband,” and Israel is talked about as God’s faithful or unfaithful wife. The verb for knowing God in the Old Testament is the same verb as knowing someone sexually. In the New Testament the Church is talked about as Christ’s bride and Christ as the bridegroom and our relationship is described using the language of a marriage union, sexual intimacy.

It makes sense. For what is sexual intercourse at its best but this extreme vulnerability, nakedness, a complete whole-person physical yielding to an intimate union — out of which comes the miracle of new life? Sexual intimacy and marriage language are the Bible’s favorite metaphors for talking about God’s passionate love relationship with us.

What Mary does here is a passionate act. And it points beyond her to the rest of what is going to unfold for Jesus. He is going to bend down to serve his disciples. He is going to take the greatest family treasure he owns, his own life, break the neck of the flask of his own life blood because of God’s great love and passion for you and me.

Jesus is going to make himself completely vulnerable, stripped naked, nailed to a cross. He will become one with our nakedness and our humility on the cross — and out of that passionate act will come the miracle of new life that will never end.

His death will look like a complete waste of a good life. But this story of Mary tells us differently. Jesus’ journey to the cross is the greatest act of self-giving intimate love ever, and out of it God gives us the miracle of new life.

Passover is near. Holy Week is coming. What will we see? What will you see?

Hopefully, through these sign stories we will see the passionate love of God — through the sign story of Lazarus’ death and resurrection — through the sign story of Passover — through the sign story of the Lord’s Supper — through the sign story of Mary’s passionate act of love.

“The whole house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment.” May the whole church and your whole journey through Holy Week be filled with the sweet fragrance of God’s passionate love for you.

Image credits: (1) VisbleKingdom.com and (2) Resources for Catholic Educators.

I’ve been spending this week with one of my dearest friends from Zimbabwe. I was born and spent my childhood there, and share with many people of my generation vivid memories of the immense hopefulness and joy of the years immediately following independence in 1980. And like millions of Zimbabweans who have moved away in the wake of economic and political upheavals, my friend Elinore and I carry with us a jumble of feelings about our present “diaspora”: a deep longing for home, a sense that what we remember as home no longer exists, a strange guilt at having left our loved ones to struggle there, and a stubborn nagging conviction that God will restore the fortunes of our little piece of Zion. And this week we have spent hours trading stories with each other, many about our joint adventures as teenagers playing in orchestras and rolling our eyes at our teachers, and many more about things we didn’t share back then. We haven’t seen each other in 13 years, and haven’t spent more than a couple days together in 17 years. It took a tragedy to bring us together again, and before I arrived at her home I wondered how it would feel to resume our conversation, and perhaps even whether we could.

Jacaranda trees in Montagu Ave,

[Harare], Zimbabwe 1975 by Graham Bould

Last November her son passed away in a terribly unexpected way. When he was born she asked me to be his godmother, and over the last nine years I’ve followed her stories about his funny expressions, unique culinary creations, and inappropriately hilarious skype icons. I always imagined that I would come and visit them in person, just as soon as I saved up enough money for the trip to their new home in Sweden…and it always seemed like too much of an extravagance, the thing I would do the next summer, or after graduation, or after I had paid off my student loans. And then the news came that he was gone. I am not sure what was more devastating, knowing that I had missed out on the chance to know him any better than through our brief electronic correspondence or knowing that my dear Elinore was going through such an excruciating loss so far away. We have spent lots of time on skype since then, and this week we finally can be together. Some of our time has been spent looking through his creations: everything from astonishingly detailed storybooks about space to an odd little angel he made for his Mum which now perches atop a cupboard she has made for his memories and creations. And while fingering his things and talking quietly of the horror of discovering his death released heavy tears I have been astonished by how much time we have also spent laughing, recognizing in each other the girls we were, reminding each other of the mad exploits that sealed our place among the ranks of the arch-nerds in high school. And filling in the gaps about life since then: the bitter struggles of illness, relationships, homesickness. It has been a profoundly healing time. For Elinore, but also for me. A time to heal from an ache that I did not even know was ailing me.

This lent has been an odd season for me. I began it deciding to come to one of the short day-time impositions of ashes rather than the evening gathering where there would have been more people. Nothing came to mind to give up, and so after deciding that Facebook was probably the greatest distraction in my life, I announced on my page that I would be curtailing my online presence for Lent. It was clear within about 36 hours that I had not been granted the grace to keep this vow. And since then I’ve come to see that friendship, sustained through online applications or expensive plane tickets to Sweden, is one of the ways through which the Great Love that Julian of Norwich sometimes called Our Mother Jesus is revealed most poignantly. I remember the many stories of intimate friendship in our tradition: Jonathan and David; Elizabeth and Mary; Jesus and Mary Magdelene. And I think that in enduring friendships we truly taste and see how good communion with that Mother Jesus might be. I am thankful beyond words for the friendship I have known with Elinore. And I suppose if there is a ‘message’ in this reflection it is an invitation to see what may be revealed to you in the great mystery of friendship.

I always used to enjoy giving things up for Lent. It was a chance to prove to myself that I cared enough about whatever religion meant to me in those days to deprive myself arbitrarily of some small but enjoyable thing for forty days. The decision of what to forgo was often arrived at in a somewhat haphazard manner-usually involving my forgetting until a week into the season and then choosing something from among the several pleasures in which I happened not to have indulged up to that point-but once the decision was made, I was pretty good at sticking to it. Easter always brought with it some measure of pride to make up for the humility to which I had willingly submitted myself: not only had I made God happy by conserving, in however small a way, the planet’s precious chocolate supply, but I had exercised Restraint and, in the process, proven that I could reign in my appetites-that I was in control.

Fasting Buddha, at the Lahore Museum. 2nd Century AD

This strikes me now as precisely the wrong attitude to have taken toward a season meant to teach us that we are all but dust. However much we might think we can, by an act of sheer willpower, declare our independence from the world, Lent calls to us as persistently as a box of delicious, forbidden chocolate and reminds us that we come from the very earth we walk upon and, in reality, probably have about as much agency. If there is a value to renouncing something, perhaps it is that doing so gives us the chance to experience firsthand the failure of our resolve.

But that can’t be quite right either; if Lent is meant to remind us of our human limitations, it won’t let us escape from the responsibilities and the powers we do have to make decisions that might have a positive effect in the world.

In thinking about whether or not to give something up this year, it struck me that, forasmuch as it is meant to inspire a sense of humility and, perhaps, of connection to those who go without on a daily basis, there is actually no greater luxury than that of being able to choose to forego something. It might be right to say that only within a culture of prosperity could a virtue be made out of not enjoying the things one is otherwise in a position to enjoy. And yet, it is a luxury that seems, oddly, to be available to everyone, no matter how poor: indeed it sometimes seems like rich people have less interest in taking advantage of their increased capacity for self-imposed privation.

Lent is full of paradoxes: it is supposed to remind us that we’re mortal and that our sense of being in control is an illusion while at the same time it calls us to do something; it presents privation as a luxury, and one that seems more often to be indulged in by the poor. I actually don’t know what Lent means: that is, I’ve been sitting in front of a blank computer screen for some time trying to think of a neat way of summarizing what Lent means to me, and I’m getting nowhere. However, if there’s one thing that I think Lent really challenges us to do without, it is the certainties we spend the rest of the year holding onto, consciously or unconsciously. We’re sometimes told that Lent is a time to learn about oneself, but perhaps it is time when we enter into reflection without the expectation that anything will be revealed. There are very few times when we aren’t responsible for coming up with an answer for things, but it strikes me that we might take this opportunity to explore possibilities of being that don’t involve being able always to explain what we’re about. And it is the kind of uncertainty best dwelt on, I would suggest, over a nice box of chocolates.

Last week’s Sunday school session was about the Hebrew concept of “midbar” (wilderness). The wilderness of the Old Testament is a place where wonderful and terrible things happen. Here is an excerpt from last week’s lesson:

For many of us, when we leave our familiar school or home to go somewhere new like a new school or camp – it is really difficult. Nothing is familiar – schedule, people, food – nothing. It is scary. You may want to go back, even if where you came from wasn’t that great. But even though it was hard and there may have even been some tears involved, most of the time it turned out pretty well. (Even if the new place did not turn out so well, you probably learned a lot about yourself in the process.)

Midbar is Hebrew for “wilderness.” It was a scary and frightening place. It seemed empty and lifeless compared to Egypt. Even though the Israelites were free, they did not like it. But something very important happened there in this empty place, away from the “comforts” of Egypt. The people of Israel met God there.

The art project asked children to draw a time in their lives when they struggled, or were in a wilderness or didn’t know what to do (or were tempted). You can see the outcome on the Parish Hall bulletin board. Some of the kids drew pictures of staying alone in a tent at camp, jumping off a big rock into a lake, or realizing that the teacher in a classroom is in charge, and that it doesn’t always work out to challenge the teacher. But the lesson reminds us that “God is Always with You, Even in the Wilderness”.
One child brought up the “Footprints in the Sand” poem. [http://www.wowzone.com/fprints.htm] She described it to us and reminded us that “…when we see only one set of footprints, that’s when God carries us through the hard times.”

I’ve decided that for my Lenten practice this year I’m going to do something a little unusual, but I hope it will be fruitful. My Baha’i friend suggested this on SoulPancake (http://bit.ly/ckuxf1 Rainn Wilson’s– aka “Dwight Schrute” of The Office’s– blog)

Now, the opportunity: Draw on your innate creativity and make a collage that represents your soul over the past year.

No one else can tell your story like you can. Here are some guidelines to help you get started:

1. Make a list of your highlights, low points, and learning experiences of 2009.
2. Find some old magazines, bits of paper, small objects or photos and cut out the images/words that resonate with the experiences on your list.
3. Layer the images and words and attach them to a surface (using glue, wire, tape—whatever).
4. Upload your collage here, and tell us how it felt to tell your story using art.
Can you muster the courage to share the life of your mind, soul, and emotions?
So, I’m going to do that project. And, I’m going to continue to work on prayer, because I’m starting to feel like it’s really effective! Eventually, I’ll post the outcome on my blog: http://grandforet.blogspot.com/

My soul has been through a wilderness in the past year. It was a wild and transformative place. I feel like I have found a path, and felt God’s presence too. I hope that a visual description of my journey will be helpful, and prepare me for living the miracle of Easter.

P.S. If you are looking for a great movie about the life of Jesus that is appropriate for kids ages ~ 4 yrs and up, I recommend “The Miracle Maker” [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0208298/]. It’s claymation but visually amazing with a wonderful voiceover cast. It would be a great preparation for Easter during Lent for kids. A central character is Jairus’ daughter who was healed by Jesus – kids can relate to her.

Next Week…Thomas Ward

‘Everyday death always threatens the everyday, but we depend on our death-denying routines to return life to normality’. (p. 26)

On Luke 23:43: ‘What does it mean to say these are criminals?’ (p. 38)

Citing Rowan Williams: ‘God is in the connections we cannot make’. (p. 39)

‘Our attempt to speak confidently of God in the face of modern skepticism, a skepticism we suspect also grips our lives as Christians, betrays a certainty inappropriate for a people who worship a crucified God’. (p. 40)

‘Our salvation is no more or no less than being made part of God’s body, God’s enfleshed memory, so that the world may know that we are redeemed from our fevered and desperate desire to insure we will not be forgotten’. (p. 44)

MAKING LENT, WEEK ONE, PAGE 2
‘In spite of the current presumption that Christianity is important for no other reasin than that Christians are pro-family people, it must be admitted that none of the Gospels portray Jesus as family-friendly’. (p. 50)

‘Jesus’s being handed over, Jesus’s obedience even to the point of death, Jesus’s cry of abandonment makes no sense if this is not the outworking of the mystery called Trinity. This is not God becoming what God was not, but rather here we witness what God has always been … The cross, this cry of abandonment, is not God becoming something other than God, is not an act of divine self-alienation; instead this is the very character of God’s kenosis – complete self-emptying made possible by perfect love’. (pp. 62–3)

‘This is not a dumb show that some abstract idea of god appears to go through to demonstrate that he or she really has our best interest at heart. No, this is the Father’s deliberately giving his Christ over to a deadly destiny so that our destiny would not be determined by death’. (p. 63)

‘We try … to compliment God by saying that God is transcendent, but ironically our very notion of transcendence can make God a creature after our own hearts. Our idea of God, our assumption that God must possess the sovereign power to make everything turn out all right for us, at least in the long run, is revealed by Jesus’s cry of abandonment to be the idolatry it is … In truth we stand with Pilate. We do not want to give up our understanding of God. We do not want Jesus to be abandoned because we do not want to acknowledge that the one who abandons and is abandoned is God. We seek to “explain” these words of dereliction, to save and protect God from making a fool out of being God, but our attempts to protect God reveal how frightening we find a God who refuses to save us by violence’. (pp. 64–5)

‘If God is not in Mary’s belly, we are not saved’. (p. 76)

‘”It is finished” is not a death gurgle. “It is finished” is not “I am done for.” “It is finished” will not be, as we know from the tradition of the ordering of these words from the cross, the last words of Jesus. “It is finished is a cry of victory. “It is finished” is the triumphant cry that what I came to do has been done. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled work. The work that is finished, moreover, is the cross. He will be and is resurrected, but the resurrected One remains the One crucified. Rowan Williams reminds us of Pascal’s stark remark that “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world.” This is a remark that makes unavoidable the recognition that we live in the time between the times – the kingdom is begun in Christ but will not be consummated or perfected until the end of the world. Williams observes that Pascal’s comment on Jesus’s on-going agony is not an observation about the deplorable state of unbelievers; it is instead an exhortation to us, those who believe in Christ. It is an exhortation not to become nostalgic for a supposedly lets compromised past or take refuge in some imagined purified future, but to dwell in the tension-filled time between times, to remain awake to our inability “to stay in the almost unbearable present moment where Jesus is.”‘ (pp. 83–4)

‘We are told in John 1:18 that without the Son no one can see the Father. Von Balthasar, therefore, reminds us “when the Son, the Word of the Father is dead, then no one can see God, hear of him or attain him. And this day exists, when the Son is dead, and the Father, accordingly, inaccessible.” This is the terror, the silence of the Father, to which Jesus has committed himself, this is why he cried the cry of abandonment. He has commended himself to the Father so he might for us undergo the dark night of death. Jesus commends himself to the Father, becoming for us all that is contrary to God. Christ suffers by becoming the “No” that the salvation wrought by his life creates. Without Christ there could be no hell – no abandonment by God – but the very hell created by Christ cannot overwhelm the love he has for us’. (p. 97)

‘Christ had no Christ to imitate’. (p. 99)

Lilly Friedman doesn’t remember the last name of the woman who designed and sewed the wedding gown she wore when she walked down the aisle over 60 years ago. But the grandmother of seven does recall that when she first told her fiance Ludwig that she had always dreamed of being married in a white gown he realized he had his work cut out for him. For the tall, lanky 21-year-old who had survived hunger, disease and torture this was a different kind of challenge. How was he ever going to find such a dress in the Bergen Belsen Displaced Person’s camp where they felt grateful for the clothes on their backs?

Fate would intervene in the guise of a former German pilot who walked into the food distribution center where Ludwig worked, eager to make a trade for his worthless parachute. In exchange for two pounds of coffee beans and a couple of packs of cigarettes Lilly would have her wedding gown.

For two weeks Miriam the seamstress worked under the curious eyes of her fellow DPs, carefully fashioning the six parachute panels into a simple, long sleeved gown with a rolled collar and a fitted waist that tied in the back with a bow. When the dress was completed she sewed the leftover material into a matching shirt for the groom.

A white wedding gown may have seemed like a frivolous request in the surreal environment of the camps, but for Lilly the dress symbolized the innocent, normal life she and her family had once led before the world descended into madness. Lilly and her siblings were raised in a Torah observant home in the small town of Zarica , Czechoslovakia where her father was a melamed, respected and well liked by the young yeshiva students he taught in nearby Irsheva. He and his two sons were marked for extermination immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. For Lilly and her sisters it was only their first stop on their long journey of persecution, which included Plashof, Neustadt, Gross Rosen and finally Bergen Belsen .

Lilly Friedman and her parachute dress on display in the Bergen Belsen Museum

Four hundred people marched 15 miles in the snow to the town of Celle on January 27, 1946 to attend Lilly and Ludwig’s wedding. The town synagogue, damaged and desecrated, had been lovingly renovated by the DPs with the meager materials available to them. When a�Sefer Toraharrived from England they converted an old kitchen cabinet into a makeshift Aron Kodesh.

“My sisters and I lost everything – our parents, our two brothers, our homes. The most important thing was to build a new home.” Six months later, Lilly’s sister Ilona wore the dress when she married Max Traeger. After that came Cousin Rosie. How many brides wore Lilly’s dress? “I stopped counting after 17.” With the camps experiencing the highest marriage rate in the world, Lilly’s gown was in great demand.

In 1948 when President Harry Truman finally permitted the 100,000 Jews who had been languishing in DP camps since the end of the war to emigrate, the gown accompanied Lilly across the ocean to America. Unable to part with her dress, it lay at the bottom of her bedroom closet for the next 50 years, “not even good enough for a garage sale. I was happy when it found such a good home.”

Home was the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington , D.C. When Lily’s niece, a volunteer, told museum officials about her aunt’s dress, they immediately recognized its historical significance and displayed the gown in a specially designed showcase, guaranteed to preserve it for 500 years.

But Lilly Friedman’s dress had one more journey to make. Bergen Belsen, the museum, opened its doors on October 28, 2007. The German government invited Lilly and her sisters to be their guests for the grand opening. They initially declined, but finally traveled to Hanover the following year with their children, their grandchildren and extended families to view the extraordinary exhibit created for the wedding dress made from a parachute. Lilly’s family, who were all familiar with the stories about the wedding in Celle , were eager to visit the synagogue. They found the building had been completely renovated and modernized. But when they pulled aside the handsome curtain they were astounded to find that the Aron Kodesh, made from a kitchen cabinet, had remained untouched as a testament to the profound faith of the survivors.

As Lilly stood on the bimah once again she beckoned to her granddaughter, Jackie, to stand beside her where she was once a kallah. “It was an emotional trip. We cried a lot.” Two weeks later, the woman who had once stood trembling before the selective eyes of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele returned home and witnessed the marriage of her granddaughter.

The three Lax sisters – Lilly, Ilona and Eva, who together survived Auschwitz, a forced labor camp, a death march, and Bergen Belsen – have remained close and today live within walking distance of each other in Brooklyn. As mere teenagers, they managed to outwit and outlive a monstrous killing machine, then went on to marry, have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and were ultimately honored by the country that had earmarked them for extinction. As young brides, they had stood underneath the chuppah and recited the blessings that their ancestors had been saying for thousands of years. In doing so, they chose to honor the legacy of those who had perished by choosing life.

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In Memoriam

In MEMORIAM – 63 YEARS LATER

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated with the German and Russian peoples looking the other way!

Now, more than ever, with Iraq, Iran, and others, claiming the Holocaust to be ‘a myth,’ it’s imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.