When God feeds us

In dire straights

1 Kings 19:4-8 includes one of my favorite lines of angel dialogue in all of scripture:

“Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”

The angel is saying this to Elijah, who is throwing himself a big pity party by not eating and hiding out in the desert.

Elijah is feeling pretty dismal about things because his life has recently been threatened by a very powerful woman: the Phoenician Queen Jezebel. (When I was in junior high, my religion teacher referred to Jezebel as the “Quicked Ween,” and that is how I always remember her.)

Jezebel has vowed to kill Elijah, and Elijah — frightened and alone — runs into the desert, hides under a tree, and asks God to take his life.

The gift of self care

What really hits me about this story is how God responds to Elijah.

When Elijah wakes, an angel has come to give him something to eat and drink. The angel says: “Get up and eat. Otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”

The angel doesn’t give Elijah safety. He doesn’t say that Elijah’s life will be spared.

He also doesn’t give him a solution. He doesn’t tell Elijah what to do next.

What the angel brings to Elijah is self-care.

“Take care of yourself,” the angel is telling him, “because you have a long way to go. And if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t have the strength to get through.”

The text tells us that Elijah did get up and eat, and in doing so he was given the strength to travel for “forty days and forty nights,” which is scripture’s way of telling us he journeyed for a long time.

Who knows if it was some kind of super-food the angel brought him that sustained him for so long? Still, I think perhaps the lesson here is the wisdom of the angel’s message: You cannot give up here. You have to keep going. And you have to take care of yourself to get there.

So Elijah starts with the basics: he rests, he drinks, he eats.

Otherwise the journey will be too much

Too often we can be like Elijah, looking to God for the wrong gifts — for safety or solutions when there are none.

Too often we, too, need this gentle wisdom to tend to ourselves — our hungry and tired bodies, our discouraged and frightened souls — before we embark on long and difficult journeys.

When we fail to care for ourselves adequately, we find it is just as the angel has said: the journey is too much for us.

When we are caring for ourselves, we are heeding the wisdom of God, we are opening ourselves to receive enough strength to make it through the next leg of the journey. When we give ourselves grace, we are truly stepping into the grace God has already given us.

Even if an angel isn’t the one to show up at our side with food and water and a reminder to rest, we can be that messenger to each other. That, after all, is part of what it means to be the Body. We take care of all our parts, especially the ones that are tired and hungry, because we are all on a journey together.

Rend Your Hearts

A Holy Season

Lent has begun.

This season of ashes and repentance, a re-orienting back to God. A journey like a long, quiet path that leads to the Passion story and the resurrection.

It is one of the church year’s most beautiful, sacred seasons.

Last week a friend of mine, who grew up in the Christian church but has long since left the hallways of traditional churches, told me that she still celebrates Lent. It is a holy and special time for her, one that she marks faithfully every year.

When someone asked her what it is that draws her about the season, she closed her eyes and breathed, trying to decide how to express the spiritual depth that Lent represents to her. It is difficult to put into words the things that are most spiritually significant to us.

Returning not Restricting

These words of the prophet Joel, traditionally read on Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lenten season, offer a powerful statement of the meaning of this time:

Rend your hearts, not your clothes.
Return to the Lord your God for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. (Joel 2:13)

So often people think Lent is a time for self-restriction, for giving something up, denying oneself pleasure. But I believe that focus misses the true core of Lent, which is about the heart.

“Rend your hearts, not your clothes,” the prophet writes. Don’t worry about whether your sacrifice looks sufficiently meaningful to the world. Don’t worry about whether you’re making it to evening prayer every Wednesday night. Don’t worry about how much meat or sugar or coffee you consume.

Instead, rend open your heart and offer your deepest vulnerability to a loving, gracious God. The word “repent,” which we so often connect to some kind of emotional guilt, simply means “to turn around.” To re-turn. To notice which way your heart is facing, and quietly, gently, re-turn it toward God.

My prayer for you, my friends, is that this Lent season may be a time of returning, not restricting. May it be a time of reflection and healing, a time of moving deeper into the heart of the God who ever moves deeper into yours.

- – -

What does Lent mean to you? Have you ever “given up” something to celebrate Lent? If so, what did you learn from the experience? What are you hoping to explore this season as you rend your heart and re-turn toward God?

Following the Church Year

It’s Advent, my friends! This is one of my favorite parts of the church year.

A note on the lectionary

I write a lot of reflections on the lectionary readings around here, but I realize that the term “lectionary” might be pretty unfamiliar to some.

So, a quick explanation:

Many Protestant churches around the world use the same lectionary (set of readings) to determine which scripture passages are used each Sunday. There have been a number of different versions of Common Lectionaries over the twentieth century, but the version we use now — the Revised Common Lectionary — has been in use for about 20 years.

[Click for a list of which churches use the Revised Common Lectionary]

Each week the readings generally include a passage from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Epistles, and the Gospels. Since there are so many passages to get through, the readings rotate on a three-year cycle. (We’re about to start Year B.)

There are all kinds of good websites that list the lectionary readings and offer commentary each week. Here are some I like to use:

• Protestants for the Common Good: Biblical Words
• UCC Weekly Seeds
• The Educational Center: Bible Workbench (with parallel readings)
• Vanderbilt Divinity Library: Revised Common Lectionary (with art and prayers)

Over the past year, I have used the lectionary readings as my personal Bible study, and it has been a deep, rich, and challenging experience. I hope you will consider exploring the lectionary calendar as part of your own personal faith journey!

Advent: Waiting on God

The whole cycle of the lectionary begins at Advent: the season that precedes Christmas. That means that this week, the first week of Advent, is actually the first week of the whole church year.

This Advent, I’m planning to write on the theme of waiting. Advent is an expectant time of darkness and quiet. It feels very distinct from the time that comes after Christmas, after Jesus has been incarnated and born into the world. I’m looking forward to sitting with the scripture readings for this season and soaking up their blessings.

I hope you will join me in walking through the next few weeks. And tell me: How do you celebrate Advent in your household, family, or church tradition? What is your favorite season or holiday of the church year?

Shepherds and their sheep

For thus says the Lord God:
I myself will search for my sheep, and I will seek them out.
As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep,
so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places
to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness…
I will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them with good pasture…
I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep,
and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God.
(from Ezekiel 34:11-15)

Ending the year with sheep

Today marks the final Sunday in the liturgical year.

Next Sunday begins the season of Advent, and the cycle of readings and hymns that mark the passing of the church year will begin again.

I am delighted that the final lectionary readings for this church year are about one of my favorite scriptural topics: SHEEP!

I learned a lot about how to think like a sheep back around Easter. But this passage from Ezekiel focuses more on the role of the shepherd.

How to know a sheep

We know that sheep are easily able to recognize their shepherd — they know the shepherd’s voice. (I learned this week that sheep are also adept at recognizing human faces!)

We learn here that the shepherd is able to recognize the sheep as well! He knows each sheep well enough that he could pick out his flock from a scattered collection of sheep.

I assumed that shepherds were able to know their sheep because they would mark them. But I did some reading about shepherding and learned that most sheep keepers actually recognize their sheep as individuals – they know their unique faces and their personalities.

The whole flock has a dynamic that is familiar, like a family. It doesn’t feel the same when one of the sheep is missing.

God, our shepherd, knows us as his flock. But God also knows each of us as who we are, our very hearts and desires, our very ways of being.

How to rescue a sheep

Ezekiel 34 opens with a scathing critique of the “shepherds of Israel” who have failed to take good care of their sheep. God is not satisfied, however, to leave his people in such poor care. “I myself will search for my sheep,” he declares. “I will seek them out.”

Because the Shepherd-God knows each sheep well enough to recognize them, his promise here is that he will go find them and re-claim them when they have been led astray by these less conscientious shepherds.

The Quaker Isaac Penington wrote:

Oh come to the fold; Oh scattered sheep, come to the fold. Wander no longer from mountain to hill; but remember your resting-place, the old resting-place of Israel, even the mountain of the Lord’s house, where Israel may lie down and feed in peace, and no ravenous beast can disturb.

Here’s the thing about sheep: they can’t find their way home. They’re not stupid, they’re just not very good with directions. They might even know they’re lost, but they can’t remember the way back to their safe pasture without the guidance of their care-taker.

The Psalmist writes:

I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek out your servant! (Psalm 119:176a)

When the sheep have been scattered, the shepherd comes to them. He comes and stands in the midst of their chaos and calls out to them. They recognize his voice and re-gather. He will not leave to guide them home until every one of them is accounted for.

Even in places of darkness, the shepherd and the sheep can hear one another and find one another.

We cry: Come get us, God! Come rescue us when we have wandered into dark places and cannot find our way back to safety. And Shepherd-God hears us. If we listen, we will hear the call to re-gather with our brothers and sisters. If we watch, will we see the way back to richer pastures.

O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.
(Psalm 95:6-7)

What do you know of God’s intimate knowledge of you as an individual? How do you seek to deepen your relationship with the Shepherd-God, that you both may know each other better? In times of darkness and scattering, how have you found your way home?

Considering the Occupation

This morning as I walked to work, I stepped over a chalk drawing on the sidewalk of Oakland’s Chinatown district. “Currency causes chaos.” it said. “Tax the rich!”

And I was reminded that Wall Street is currently being occupied. By… someone. Of course, anyone who has ever been to Oakland knows it is a long way from Wall Street. But this chalk drawing is here because the occupation is spreading.

Someone is occupying Oakland, California, too. Along with almost every other moderately sized city across the country.

“Is this lawful,” we are asking, “for us to pay these taxes?”

“Is it fair?”

—

And the lectionary text from a few weeks ago is scathingly relevant, and I spend my lunch break sitting on that same chalked (and apparently occupied) sidewalk reading about the pharisees coming to Jesus to ask that very same question: “Should we pay these taxes?”

They think they have created for Jesus a catch 22 which will at last reveal his mortal weakness of inconsistency.

“Is this fair?”

The pharisees asked Jesus. I wonder, to whom are we asking these questions? What answer are we hoping to hear? What trap are we laying with our language and our anger and our action?

—

And I hear Jesus’ answer as though it is spoken straight to me: “Show me the coin used for the tax.”

What should I bring? My most recently filed 1040 form? A $5 bill? The daily stock market report? A plastic Visa card? A series of digitized 1s and 0s?

More than ever, his request highlights the nonsense of it all. What is this thing money that exists enough to cause a man to set himself on fire for the injustice of it, yet it exists not enough to be presented in its true physical form?

Fair, indeed.

I can see his look of disappointment… That I have chosen to trap him with this – with symbols and images, with the myth of power.

“Whose image is this?” He asks. And all I can think is: “Not yours.”

Why am I giving power to an image that is not my Lord’s? Why am I worshipping it? Saving it? Holding it? Desiring it? Protecting it? Believing in it?

—

“Give to Cesar what is Cesar’s, and give to God what is God’s,” says Jesus.

Let the empire occupy itself.

I think of Joshua saying Chose for yourselves who you serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. We will give to God what is God’s.

I sit on this sidewalk and begin listing those things in my life that belong to God: my self, my time, my life, my energy, my thanks, my praise, my love, my hope, my commitment.

And I realize there is little left for Cesar.

—

I get up and vacate the sidewalk. Someone else will come along soon to occupy this space. And they can choose for themselves who they serve. But as for me…

—

My friends, here is what I’m taking away from this Gospel story:

Religion is not for systematizing.
Religion is for meaning-making, for understanding, for relationship.
It is not for production, or profit, or protocol.
It is for transformation, for undoing, for rebuilding.
Religion is not a weapon but a salve
to heal the wounds of confusion and greed.
Give to the empire what is of the empire,
but as for those of us who serve the King,
we are otherwise occupied.