Rend the Heavens: Advent Day 16

Rend the Heavens text: My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, “Where is your God?” as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. These things I remember... Psalm 42:3-4

Prompt: Visceral

I still feel the impact of the text to me like a punch in the stomach. The words rejoicing at the results of the election, followed by words accusing me of being "intolerant" if I was not also rejoicing. My failure to accept what one believed to be the work of God caused maligning of my vocation, my work, all I'd ever done in Christ's name. I still feel the horrible weight of blocking a number and wondering what I needed to do legally to be protected. And who else might I need to protect?

Heavy, heavy hangs the head that remembers emails from another, telling me that a "bloodless election" was something for which to be grateful. As though the cries of those harassed, physically beaten, or killed before and after were nothing- just the background noise of democracy. 

Each cabinet name put forward feels like another brick, encasing freedom and truth and justice. I have no confidence in the confirmation process. I long for the days of a thumb in the scale, when the truth is that the scales of honesty, transparency, and community have been kicked over and beaten. 

There are people who look to me for good news, for hope, for food that is not tears... 

How can I tell them that we are now in the place for which we have been preparing to be? The place where we may give up our lives to gain our souls? The place where each taste of body and blood matters because our faith must deepen so that our actions become bolder and more fierce? The time in which we must become ever aware of having to account for our actions before the throne? 

Visceral, you say? Visceral, you ask? 

The body keeps the score of each spiritual punch, intellectual slap, psychological kick. And yet I rise again. The ultra-marathon of living the Way of Christ happens in the body, in the Body- one step at a time. 

Rend the Heavens: Advent Day 7

Rend the Heavens text:  And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” John 1:21

Prompt: For Pete's sake

Once, in a sermon for a preaching class in seminary, I portrayed Martha speaking to Jesus about not coming when her brother, Lazarus, had died. The professor didn't like the sermon because he said, and I quote, "It was too angry." 

I have spoken about that moment many times. 

Too angry? Too angry at an untimely death? Of someone Jesus loved?

What's too angry? 

What is too angry with Jesus? 

Are we too angry when we want a little more clarity on the when and where this is all coming down? 

Are we too angry when we are ticked about the unfairness of grace, even as it includes us?

Are we too angry when the heavens seem silent about injustice, war, and pain? 

Are we too angry when we wonder why the second time Quirinius was governor was the right time, but not the first time Trump was president?

Are we too angry when we are grieved to silence toward the Divine at untimely deaths and powers and principalities that seem run amok? 

For Pete's sake, what's too angry? 

Because I'm not sure that I'm actually there. Because I still breathe, I still speak, I still pray, I still hope. 

So, no. No. I am not yet too angry. 

And I'm pretty sure Martha wasn't either. 

Rend the Heavens: Advent Day 6

Rend the Heavens text: May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor. – Psalm 72:4

Prompt: Yearn

God in heaven, what would this look like?

You withstood David’s murder of Uriah and his adulterous tendencies, allowing the defenseless Bathsheba not only to be raped, but to experience the death of her child.

You allowed Solomon to conscript his own people for the building of the temple- a building meant to honor you, but raised on the backs of people with choices take away.

Constantine was permitted to use your name and your story for the shaping of his own plans and expectations, forever altering how those who follow you would be viewed- within and without the Way of Christ.

So many have hung their harps on the willows, unable to sing your songs.

So many have screamed to the winds for you to dash the descendants of their enemies against the rocks.

So many have wept and wept and waited for joy in the morning that did not come.

Can you not feel the yearning of your creation? Do you not feel our strain and grief for healing and resolution and all that you have promised?

“How long, O Lord” is too stale a question now? We peer into the depths out of which we cry, listening to our own echoes, and wonder if you are there are at all? If you are planning to act ever? If you have forgotten your covenants, your end of all the bargains, your own character?

I yearn not to be your defense lawyer, your apologist, your witness.

I long to be overwhelmed by your power, your action, your holy fury.

Lord, hear our prayer.

And in your mercy, answer us.




Originally written for and posted to RevGalBlogPals.org

Rend the Heavens: Advent Day 3

This prompt was originally scheduled for 11/29, but I'm catching up.

Text: Floodwaters will never again destroy all creatures. Genesis 9:15b (CEB)

...and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. Genesis 9:15b (NRSV)

Prompt: FR(ACT)URED

You can add up the parts 
but you won't have the sum 
You can strike up the march, 
Every heart, every heart 
to love will come 
but like a refugee. 

Ring the bells that still can ring 
Forget your perfect offering 
There is a crack, a crack in everything 
That's how the light gets in. 

Anthem- Leonard Cohen

There's a fancy church word for the moment in communion wherein the presider asks God to send the Holy Spirit into the elements: epiclesis. It is in this invocation or calling down that one asks, in front of all gathered, for power of the Holy Spirit to come into the bread and the product of the vine (juice or wine) and to bless them. 

Even though epiclesis is part of my (Lutheran) tradition, it is not something that I think of that often in presiding. There's a fair chance that when I utter the words of institution themselves, I may not

actually ever invoke the epiclesis. This is because I am not sure that God is ever actually apart from what God has made. 

I believe that God is the ultimate farmer- having given blood, sweat, tears, and love to all that has been made. Destruction of any part of creation weighs heavily on the divine memory. In as much as I believe the flood was God's decision to start over (which is to say that I don't really think that), I also think that those who told this story perceived that action was deeply out of character for One in whom all creation exists and moves and lives and has being. 

In truth, I think the fracture- the lifting up and breaking of the bread- is the true epiclesis moment of holy communion. Not any words that I might say, but the moment where there are no words. The moment in which all our eyes are drawn to something that God has created from air and soil and seed and vocation... and which we break. The fracturing is where the light comes in, where the Spirit's power is most visible, where we comprehend that things all apart, but God- and God alone- brings the healing. 

God allows creation the full run of the leash of free will, much to God's regret (in my opinion). But the flood promise, the covenant after the receding waters, says that there are limits to how much destruction God will allow. When we see the fracture in the clouds- the mix of light and mist that creates the rainbow- we remember God's promise. More importantly, God remembers God's promise. God remembers that there is too much, too far, a pain too great- for the Divine to bear. And so never again. 

When we look at the fractured world, do we see and perceive the grief of the Divine being? Are we speaking rotes words, believing we are calling upon the Spirit... when, in truth, the Spirit is always with us- pouring through the cracks in everything, revealing how the Light gets in? 

Rend The Heavens: Advent Day 4

Due to having surgery this week, I'm starting a little behind on this daily devotional. I'll catch up days 1-3 at some point. See the prompts here.

Text: And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. Matthew 24:31

Prompt: SHUT UP

Yesterday, I had my uterus removed. After several years of pain and bleeding and messiness and discomfort and solutions that only created more problems, we did the thing that would make it all

stop. We removed the source of the problem. 

"Shut up" is the utterance we think of- possibly a little rude- when we want someone  or something to stop talking or making noise or creating a distraction. 

I wanted my uterus to shut up. It had served its purpose for me (growing two healthy babies) and now it was dysfunctional and its noisiness was disruptive and painful. 

Since I didn't often mention the pain I was experiencing and since I am only 35, people have asked if I was emotionally okay with having a hysterectomy. Was I grieving the removal of an organ that was ... was what? For me, being a woman was not tied to having a uterus, but I can see and perceive in the larger culture that ways of being are tightly defined, narrowly constrained, and the more clearly defined by parts and labels, the more comfortable most people are. 

However, comfort as a noun is not something to which Christians are called to aspire. We are called to comfort- the verb form. We are called to open our eyes, ears, minds, and hearts to God's work that is beyond definition and comprehension. We are led to "paths as yet untrodden and through perils unknown". Along the way, we are to comfort. Comforting others does not mean offering platitudes or promises that are hollow at best and lies at worst. 

Offering true comfort means shutting up and listening. Shutting up and showing up. Shutting up quietism and releasing the fire within our bones. 

I was not defined by my uterus and now I am not defined by not having one. On the day of the trumpet sound, I will not have to account for the parts I had or have. Instead, my words will be shut up as I account for my time. Will it turn out that I sought to be comforted or to comfort? 

Will it turn out that I shut up long enough, loudly enough to hear where I was called to be and to offer the comfort that can only come from God?