Most of what I write is glorified hand-wringing. I can admit
it. I know it won’t accomplish anything and I still do it. It’s a habit now, I
guess.
Thing is, I don’t have much in my own life to wring my hands
over. A new school year has just started and it promises to be pleasantly full.
I’m excited for all of my classes, excited that I get to be a TA, excited for the
church where I’m interning, excited that I get to keep working in the library,
excited that I get to continue to get paid to hang out with an adorably chubby
infant three days a week, and excited that I can still pop into a planetarium
or an observatory from time to time. The two big weights on my heart from last
year are gone and the indentions they left are filling back out. Old complaints
have been answered in wonderfully affirming ways. I have stretches of time
where I sit trying to remember what I forgot to worry about before realizing
that most of those worries are gone.
My Hebrew Bible professor last year taught us that the Bible
has writings that are both witness and counterwitness, stories that clearly show us a God of love and stories that challenge our understanding of God. Life
is full of moments of witness and counterwitness, full of times that feel like
blessings and times that feel like abandonment. I spend so much time
empathizing with the counter that I don’t think I’ve realized how lovely it is
to live in the witness.
Of course, we live in a world in which all things were
created good and now demonstrably contains things that are not and so we all
live in the counterwitness, whether we see it or not. We participate in the
counterwitness, whether we see it or not. And I think we have to see it. I
think we have to remember it. I think in this time of connection, those of us
with plenty must witness those in need and not turn away, no matter how great the
need or how real and seemingly indomitable the distance between us.
Still more important than our witness, however, is our
action and in most instances, the time for action has already come, though I
pray it has not gone. The time to stand against white supremacy is always. The
time to stand against racism in all forms is always. The time to speak out
against the laws and the systems the entrench these problems is always. The
time to change how we consume our resources could have been decades ago, but it
is also now. The time to change how we use our military might has probably been
from the founding of the country, but it is also now.
The time to love our neighbors is always and is now. The
time to embody that love is always and is now. The time to encourage another to
that love is always and is now.
I’ll be looking for the ways I can act. I hope you’ll join
me.
I love the indifference of the ocean, how my individual existence does not
matter at all to it. The ocean has no expectations of me, but the ocean accepts
me all the same, with my slow feet carrying a body both excited and uncertain
into the waves to be buffeted and tossed and encompassed and supported. I love
jumping the waves on the shoreline, splashing in the thin coating of salt water
on the sand, and I love springing up to ride the waves farther out from the
beach chairs and tent, the ones whose gentle height catch me and hold me
weightless for a split second. I even love falling from those, arms
outstretched and toes searching for a floor they may not find.
We have an agreement, the ocean and I. I get to stare at it, mesmerized by the never-ending waves, new and old at the same time, and it continues its existence, same as it ever was. It is easy to think that I could disappear in the ocean, in its vastness, and it would carry me and hold me, like a tiny ship transported by the waves, guided by the currents. Because what can I do to the ocean? How can I, whose eyesight is exhausted upon a millionth of its expanse, have any impact at all on this great thing?
Of course, we are this great thing as well, this enormous careless biological mess, and we have underestimated our power for harm because we have overestimated the durability of nature. It is an understandable mistake to make, in the face of such an awesome thing, that it would endure while we pass on in our limited days. And maybe we can’t destroy the ocean, can’t remove its waters from the face of the earth. We certainly cannot remove its being. But we forget that we are not the only life that the ocean carries and shelters. The creatures that teem in the seas, those we have the horrifying ability to destroy.
The ocean owes me nothing. The ocean owes us nothing. The ocean rises up when the storms come and the earth quakes and the ocean devastates us. There is a fallen cruelty in our tragedies, a deep pain that demands to be felt. The same water that brings serenity when it minds its bounds brings chaos when it oversteps them. The ocean overwhelms us. Even with all our knowledge, the ocean contains depths that we have not explored. Even with all our power, we have yet to change the tides. It’s funny. When faced with greatness, I talk about our limitations in terms of science and technology, as if they alone held the heights for which we reach.
I love the ocean. I love the happenstance of beauty woven into every crest and trough. I love being reminded of my fragility, of my dependency. When I am too important, when the weight of carrying me is more than I want to bear, the ocean reminds me of what is true. I can leave my running thoughts to hum to themselves on the beach while I count the waves. I cannot control the ocean. The ocean is frightening. And I love it.
For this I will lament and wail; I will go barefoot and naked; I will make lamentation... For her wound is incurable. It has come to Judah; it has reached to the gate of my people, to Jerusalem. We told ourselves a story. We told ourselves that there are different kinds of people out there, and that some of those people are more human than others, more deserving of freedom, more deserving of property, more deserving of rights and privileges, more deserving of rest and happiness. More deserving of food. Of shelter. Of care. Of love. We told ourselves that story so that we could perpetuate slavery, so that we could benefit from the work of others without having to treat their work and their bodies as we believed our work and our bodies should be treated. We told ourselves this story so that we could dismiss those with a different heritage from us. This story sunk down deep into us, into ourselves, and we fought to defend it and the systems built on it because we could not imagine a world without this story. We could not imagine a world in which all humans were truly created equal, in which all were truly human. We did not want to love others as we loved ourselves because to love requires sacrifice. To love requires uncertainty. To love others as we love ourselves means discomfort and labor. And so we let this great wound fester so that we could maintain other comforts and we feign surprise when it erupts, wracking our body with convulsions and fever. Alas for those who devise wickedness and evil deeds on their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in their power. They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance.
"Do not preach"--thus they preach-- "one should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake us." Should this be said, O house of Jacob? Is the LORD's patience exhausted? Are these his doings? Do not my words do good to one who walks uprightly? But you rise up against my people as an enemy; you strip the robe from the peaceful, from those who pass by trustingly with no thought of war.
Arise and go; for this is no place to rest.
I would leave. I know I would if I could. I would take with me those who do not deserve the hate that is thrown at them, the danger to their lives, and we would go somewhere else, start something new, and leave these people to their own pain. I would deprive the world of communion with me, or at least take the offer, the promise of brotherhood and sisterhood from those who march with torches and do not understand the pain they cause, the pain they perpetuate, the pain they seek to enliven with their fear and their hatred. I would run from them, if I could, these people who forgot the dream that we the people dreamed, who forgot that we endeavored to form a more perfect union and instead desire to rip that union apart, more committed to the mistaken comforts of a misunderstood past than the mutual care, labors, and, yes, dangers of continuing to seek that better union.
In the days to come the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills. Peoples shall stream to it, and many nations shall come... He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig tress, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.
The LORD is not just my God, my local deity whose powers can only reach my problems, whose concern only lies with my joy and sadness. The people of God learned as the centuries tripped onward that all peoples would come before the LORD and that when that happened, we would not stay as we are. Our instruments of hate would be turned into instruments of life. The death that our fear seeks would be out of our power and the life that our hearts yearn for will be given to us, to all of us, to every single person brought to the mountain of the LORD. No one will be able to rob another of the good inheritance promised to us. No one will be able to take our peace. When the LORD speaks, the LORD promises these things. When the LORD speaks, the LORD shows us the world as it was meant to be. There was never meant to be this fear, this hate, this death that we all hurtle towards, that we make, that we bring to each other.
Hear what the LORD says: Rise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the LORD, and you enduring foundations of the earth; for the LORD has a controversy with his people, and he will contend with Israel. "Oh my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me! For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery; and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. ...that you may know the saving acts of the LORD." The mighty things of this Earth witness what we do. Our action and our inaction do not go unnoticed. But what can I do when my heart aches so? What can I do in the face of mobs of hate? Will words of condemnation reach them? Will they hear when a voice from on high tells them that the redemption that was won for them was won for all, that with every shout they erect barriers and create divisions that were never meant to be? How can I show them that to destroy the separation they make costs Something very dear, a price paid in our past for the renewing of our future? Do they know that in their fear they are driving away the peace we all long for? How do I make them see through their pain the pain they bring every one of us?
"With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
I don't like being nervous. The slight nausea, the elevated heart rate, the forced yoga breaths I have to take because my lungs figure if my heart and guts are going to cut up and act the fool, they may as well too-- I hate all of it. And the headaches! I did not know that I clenched my jaw when I'm anxious, but man. It's a miracle my teeth haven't shattered under the stress. I despise how visibly tense I am too, everything reduced to quick bursts of movement before returning to a knot of clenched muscles, all the nervous energy channeled to one toe that thumps like a rabbit's foot until I notice and make it be still with thought and a stare. It is impossible to have any kind of poise or easy grace when every inch of you is two seconds away from the "flight" option of "fight or".
Thing is, I don't get all that nervous all that often. I am typically in situations where I'm either in charge or know how I fit into the social order around me and am aware of how to petition the people with authority, so I feel like I'm in charge in some way. That's why I like systems. I can learn them and participate in them and question them and endeavor to change them as needed. Where there is order, there is the potential for concrete and measurable change. It's a product of my time and place that make systems a soothing comfort for me, I think. It takes the pervasive empiricism of the Enlightenment combined with an entrenched trust in the mobility of the American dream to find comforting control instead of stifling helplessness in paperwork and meetings.
Now, I overthink things, that is true, and that's probably a symptom of nervousness, but that's just in my head. I can control that. I may have to run like six scenarios in my brain before I settle on a course of action and I may do that for things as simple as going to the grocery store, but I like to think of that as a factor of preparedness, especially when I'm in new situations, and let's be honest, I've been in new situations a lot in the past two years. Soothing mundanity has been hard to come by. A daily routine is hard to come by. And this is fine, or at least manageable, as long as I create the semblance of routine by walking the familiar decision-making paths in my mind again and again, day after day. And keep my calendar updated.
I never thought of myself as a particularly controlling person, because I can roll with the punches, as long as the punches are specific and small in scale and I can accommodate them into the larger plan. Let me say it this way: there has yet to be a punch that I couldn't eventually roll with. If your larger plan is flexible enough, or squishy, or buoyant, you can absorb a lot of blows. I can even change the larger plan as needed, though that's a bit of upheaval that I don't relish. Still, there's a process for that and we get through it. And I don't mind spontaneity. I have occasionally been spontaneous. It's just not my default position. Which, now that I say that, sounds pretty controlling after all.
And with that realization, the nervousness bubbles up again because now I've found something that I can't be and what if that's something you want me to be? It's not that it's a non-negotiable, it's just that my default state, the place that inertia is always going to draw me back to, is structure and organization and plans. Because if I don't have those, see, then I have to trust you. I have to lean on you. I have to allow myself to be led into a place I have no way of knowing I actually want to go. Trust is just a way of letting your structures be mine without being told just exactly what those structures are or if there are any structures at all. My independence rankles at that, never minding that my independence is a structure that I should have started questioning a long time ago, but I'm starting to think that I built my sense of safety on my independence and so trust is unsafe. A lack of control is unsafe. I do not want to be unsafe. Please don't make me move away from what I know to be safe.
See, I'm vulnerable. I put all of my vulnerabilities right here, in ones and zeroes rendered into letters for your eyes to see, miles away from me. I separate my vulnerabilities from my body and in that way from myself and I leave them around for people to peruse. Cut my chest wide open.
I don't often feel nervous. I don't often feel nervous about what I write. By and large, I can avoid situations that produce anxiety because there aren't all that many of them and they're mostly clustered together in a subset of human interactions that I can put in a box and leave ignored in a corner of the closet, to be taken out and examined well in advance of any situation that might cause them to breathe in deep and become a problem for me. But maybe they shouldn't be. Maybe they shouldn't be kept in the box, I mean. Maybe I should practice not being in control of things. Maybe I should figure out how to be nervous.
Maybe a little nervousness is worth it, all things considered.
(Editor's note: I feel like a giant tool bag uploading all of this.)
I preached a sermon a couple of weeks ago at my church back home. You may have heard me stressing over it. For the people who couldn't be there, but wanted to hear it anyway, I've uploaded a recording of it (thanks, Daddy!) and I've included the text of the sermon that I preached off of below, because video content is overrated.
I love the verses from 1 Peter that we just read. “But you
are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in
order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of
darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are
God’s people.”
I love the images in these verses, and the promises and the
challenges. It’s the last verse that always gets me thinking, though. “Once you
were not a people, but now you are God’s people.”
Who are God’s people? What does that even mean?
The Bible actually spends a lot of time trying to answer
this question, from the earliest books to the most recent letters and that’s
what I want to dig into today. But it’s a big question so let’s back down to
something more approachable.
Who are your people?
Take a few seconds and think about that question. Who are
your people?
Now turn to someone beside you and talk about that question.
Who are your people? What does that question mean? What’s your answer to that
question?
If I were answering these questions, I’d have to say that my
people are my family. They’re the first ones to name me and claim me and have
been there for me throughout my life. But they’re not my only people-- I have
lifelong friends who are always a message or a phone call away no matter where
in the world we are, and they’re my people too. As I’ve journeyed through life,
I’ve found more and more people to be my people, friends and coworkers and
colleagues who are excited about the same things I’m excited about and feel
similar calls on our hearts and lives.
And of course, y’all are my people. St. Luke’s is the place
where I was baptized, the community of love and forgiveness that helped raise
me to be a faithful disciple who walks in the way that leads to life. This is a
place that has been a waterfall of God’s prevenient grace in my life. Because
of my time here, I’ve always known in my being that the church is a
place I can belong, a place where I am loved and valued. That is one of the
most beautiful gifts we can give each other and I know not everybody has that
experience with church, so thank you for that, even if I don’t know you yet.
So. We know that people are important to us today. This
exercise of naming our people can be helpful for us in understanding ourselves.
As important as that is for us, though, it was even more so in the world of the
New Testament, the first century Roman Empire, but in a different way.
See, in first century Rome, who your people were defined you.
How you were related to other people defined who you were. It’s called a dyadic
personality. Who your people are is what sets others’ expectations for you. You
did what you family always did, or what your patron told you to do (or, if you were
a patron, what the people dependent on you needed you to do [or, if you were a
slave, what your master told you to do {or, if you were a wife, what your
husband told you to do}]). You defined yourself by your place in relation to
other people. You had to know your people, or you didn’t know yourself.
Take a second and put yourself in the shoes of a
first-century Christian. You’ve heard about Jesus of Nazareth from other
Christians, you’ve come to believe that he was the Son of God, and you’ve
allowed that belief to transform every part of your life. Maybe you’ve had to
leave your family and your community because they didn’t receive the Gospel the
same way you did. Because of Jesus, you’ve lost the very thing that defined
you. You don’t know who your people are anymore.
This is why we find the New Testament letter writers calling
their fellow Christians “brother” and “sister” left and right. For them, the
Church was their people. This radically redefined how they understood
themselves.
Now, the original hearers of the letter of 1 Peter would
have known all of this intuitively. They would have understood how being a
Christian redefined them. So when the writer calls them “a chosen race, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,” they would have received comfort
from that. These people, many of whom were already in poverty and had suffered
a second blow by losing a core part of their identity, were being given a new
identity. And not only that, they were called royal. Holy. God’s own. Words
reserved for people like the emperor.
Many of them also would have heard in these verses echoes of
the Exodus story, because, as you know, the early followers of Jesus and most
of members of the early church were Jewish. They would have known the story
that began with God’s promise to make a great nation of Abraham, carried
forward through Isaac, then Jacob and his twelve sons, who went to Egypt in a
time of famine. They would have remembered the stories of how the Hebrews were
slaves in Egypt and how God raised up Moses to demand their freedom from
Pharaoh. After the Passover, after crossing the Red Sea, after songs of
celebration led by Miriam, after water from a rock and manna from the sky,
Moses stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, about to receive the Torah from God,
and called those Israelites wandering in the desert God’s “treasured possession
out of all peoples” and “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation,” those that God
had borne “on eagles’ wings and brought to” God’s self. (Exodus 19) By using
the words he uses, the writer of 1 Peter reminds his listeners of these sacred
stories. He invites Christians into this larger story of who God’s people
are.
So that seems to answer the question. Who are God’s people?
The ones God called out of Egypt, redeemed from slavery, and brought to God’s
self. Biblical writers would have identified God’s people as Israel.
Except… the story is a little more complicated than that.
In the book of Joshua, almost soon as Israel emerges from
the wilderness and enters the land of Canaan, we get the story of Rahab, the
woman of Jericho who helped the Israelite spies. She and her household are
spared from the destruction of Jericho, and we are told “her family has lived
in Israel ever since.” (Josh 6:25) So apparently the people of God can include
Canaanites, not just Israelites.
We also find the story of Ruth, set in the time of the
Judges, before Israel had a king. Ruth is the
Moabite, not Israelite, daughter-in-law of Naomi. Naomi left Israel for Moab
when there was a famine and Ruth followed her home when she returned, but Ruth
is only related to the people of Israel by marriage. Yet at the end of the
book, we find that she's in the genealogy of David, the king whose rule defined
the glory days of Israel. It seems that Moabites can not only be among the
people of God, but even hold a place of honor in Israel.
Or what about Hagar? Long before Israel came to Canaan,
before there even was an Israel to
come to Canaan, Hagar was a slave belonging to Sarah, Abraham's wife. When she
flees because of Sarah's mistreatment, God appears to Hagar, the first woman in
the bible to receive a theophany. God promises to make a great nation out of
her son, Ishmael. If we count Abraham and Sarah’s descendants among God’s
people because God appeared to him and made him a promise, maybe we should be
counting the descendants of Abraham and Hagar, too.
It seems like maybe the definition of the people of God
could be wider than we thought (though some other books of the bible, like
Ezra-Nehemiah, would disagree with that). But even if we let some of these
outsiders in, the important thing is that they follow the Torah, the teaching
of Moses. That’s what sets the people of God apart from anyone else in the
Ancient Near East. It’s their covenant with God, the agreement between God and
Israel that determines what it means for Israel to be God’s people.
The prophets certainly had some thoughts about that. During
the time of each of the prophets, people in the two kingdoms of Israel and
Judah were disobeying the Torah, usually by oppressing the poor and aligning
themselves with foreign powers. The condemnation from the prophets could be
harsh. Take Hosea for example. Hosea, married to a faithless wife, named two of
the children Lo-ruh-a-mah and Lo-ammi, names meaning Not Pitied and Not My People.
He did this to show the elite of Israel how God felt about their abandonment of
God's ways. When they have turned back to God, it is then that God says, “I
will have pity on Lo-ruh-a-mah (not pitied), and I will say to Lo-ammi (not my people),
‘You are my people’; and Lo-ammi will say, ‘You are my God.’” (Hos. 3:23) The
writer of 1 Peter has Hosea in mind as he writes.
The Hebrew Bible takes so seriously the covenant between God
and God’s people that it understands world events as judgement for not honoring
that covenant and breaking God’s Torah. The most powerful example of this is
the way in which the Hebrew Bible talks about the Babylonian Exile. It impacts
many of the prophets and changes the course of their history. The prophet Ezekiel,
for example, sees a vision of God leaving the Holy of Holies of the Temple in
Jerusalem before the Babylonians strike, because of Israel’s faithlessness. The
entire book of Jeremiah responds to the trauma of this event. Psalm 137 says
“By the rivers of Babylon we hung up our lyres… for how can we sing the Lord’s
song in a foreign land?” God’s people were devastated by this loss of their
home and their sanctuary.
So it is after the fighting is over and the destruction has
come and many of the people of Israel are living in exile in Babylon that we
find these words from our passage from Isaiah.
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by
name, you are mine.
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; …
“When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, …
“For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your
Savior. …
“Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I
love you…
“I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the
west I will gather you…
“…bring my songs from far away and my daughters from the end
of the earth—everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.”
Again, God calls to God’s people. God calls to the ones who
have broken God’s will and not obeyed God’s law, who have disregarded their
sacred covenant with God and who now, they believe, are suffering for that
disobedience. God sees their brokenness, just as God heard them in Egypt and
God calls them by name. You are mine. I will gather you to me, everyone who is
called by my name, whom I created for
my glory, whom I formed and made.
Do not be afraid. I have redeemed you, God says. My people,
in your exile, in your suffering, remember that I have called you by name and
you are precious in my sight.
Now, these words that Isaiah speaks to the Exiles, we tend
to read as being about us. Same with the words from Hosea. The New Testament
writers did that too. Why? Because a world-changing event had happened in the
time between the prophets and the New Testament letters.
Jesus.
When the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us, how we
understood the universe changed. How we understood God changed. Jesus, by his life, death, and resurrection, tore the
curtain in the Temple in two and broke apart the separation sin had placed
between us and God. Jesus’ death and resurrection opens the gates for the
justifying grace that redeems even us, even me, and puts us back in right
relationship with God. He frees us from our slavery to sin and death. For the
people who lived closest in time to Jesus, he was new light by which everything
else was seen. The whole of scripture was opened up in a new way.
Jesus is the reason why the writer of 1 Peter is able to say
to us Christians, we who are the Gentiles of the Church, that we were once no
people but now we are God’s people. He’s the reason why the writer of Ephesians
says that in Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor
Greek and why the writer of Colossians can say that all things are held together.
Through Jesus, Paul writes in Romans, we are given a spirit of adoption, made
co-heirs with Christ who is the end, the fulfillment, of the Torah. Again, the
circle of the people of God has been drawn wider. We who were no people are now
God’s people, through God’s redeeming act in Christ. Now these stories we’ve
been talking about, these stories of God and God’s people, they’re our stories
through Jesus.
It is in our redemption that 1 Peter tells us that we were
called and claimed “so that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called
you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
How do we even begin to do that?
Well, there’s a straightforward answer here. We proclaim. We
aren’t shy to talk about Jesus, to tell the stories of God and God’s people,
including our own stories from our lives of faith. We all have our own darkness
that God has called us out of. That is what God does for us through grace. Our
job is to proclaim the light we now live in. As 1 Peter says, “Always be ready
to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope
that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” Let that little light
of yours shine some.
The writer of 1 Peter has other work for us too, work that
we find throughout the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels and letters of the New
Testament. He tells us in 3:8 to have “love for one another.” If you read the
sections in between the verses we read today, you’ll find instructions for how
to live in Roman society but you’ll also find that that love is radical. 1
Peter tells its hearers to honor, to love one another without a regard for the
different statuses the world placed upon them. The expectations of the world do
not tell the Church how to love. Those hierarchical person-to-person
relationships that were so important to self-understanding in the Roman world,
the writer upends them, telling both
husband and wife to have regard for each other. He tells us to “live as free
people”, people who “have a unity of spirit… sympathy… a tender heart, and a
humble mind”. What matters is our life and hope in Christ, the grace transforming
us into loving people.
And love we should. The circle of God’s people only grows as
wide as we allow it to. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is also the God
who saw and cared for Hagar, Rahab, and Ruth. This God is the one who calls to
the slave and the exile and knows their name. This same God calls to us in our
exile and our bondage. God knows our names and cares so deeply for us that God
couldn’t stay away and instead took the form of a servant so that all may be
free. The beautiful thing about our Bible is that it preserves these stories of
the ever-growing people of God, the story of God’s plan that has length and
width and depth enough to encompass all of us, every single person who has been
unexpectedly but undeniably called and claimed by God through Christ. It also
preserves the stories of all of the bumps along the way. May we learn, as God’s
people throughout history have learned, that God’s ways are bigger, bolder,
more loving and more marvelous than anything we can imagine.
May we hear the Word speaking to us so that God’s love and
grace may abound in the world.
I used to think my words were so precious. I mean, I write a
lot, so I know that statistically, they won’t always be great, but in the
moment, when I’m writing, every word seems important, like only this
combination of letters and symbols and spaces will be able to convey with any
kind of accuracy this deep emotion that I’m feeling or this vital thought that
I’m thinking. I type quickly, aggressively, loudly, because if I don’t, if I
don’t feel the clicking of the keyboard underneath my fingers, the words will
run away and this experience, or this construction of an experience, will go
undocumented, unremembered. It will be lost. And after all the typing and the
thinking, I do actually read it aloud to myself again, to tweak sentence
structure and fix some grammar, but I don’t alter the ideas. They came out through
my fingers all on their own and there’s no tweaking them once they’re in the
world. All I do is straighten their ties or dust off their shoulders.
This is not to say that I don’t think about what I’m writing
(though I myself have looked back over previous posts and wondered if that wasn’t
indeed the case). An idea will pop into my brain or an event or a conversation
with a friend will spark a thought and I’ll kick it around for a few days or
weeks in the back of my mind until it’s more or less shaped and then I’ll sit
down at the keyboard and have a go. It’s not a particularly efficient system
and it means that the posts that I write when I’ve set a deadline for myself
(or the papers that I write) can be hit or miss, or not as fully explored as
they should be. When all the honing of a thought takes place in the back of
your mind or in placing the words on a page, all you’re doing is presenting
some gussied up observations. I know that. I never claim to be rigorous. But in
putting them down on paper, I’ve saved them. I’ve preserved something that once
was… ephemeral? I’ve captured something that was once a combination of
sensations and electrical impulses and whatever else thoughts are made of and I’ve
given it a shape that someone else can hold onto, can observe, can use to build
another thing. It is not a useless thing, what I do, and in the moment, it
feels essential. Crucial.
But I’ve sat here at the keyboard for multiple days, looking
at the outline for my sermon, and I must've deleted two thousand words as I’ve
worked. The page is once again empty and I’m so frustrated at all the ideas I’ve
killed seconds after they’ve left me. Because I know what I want to say. I even
know how I want to say it. I know what I’m going to use to back up my points, I
know how I want to connect the dots, I know what I want people to take away. But
I can’t make it happen.
Because what if I’m wrong? What if I mislead people? What if
the way I understand the information I’m going to share is not the way anyone
else puts these things together in their mind? What if I’m confusing? What if I
wander? What if I piss someone off in the first sentence and they don’t hear anything
else that I’m saying? What if I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the
topic at hand and everyone will either walk away with a misconception or a
reason to dismiss me, laugh at me? It would be fascinating to me, this dual
nervousness about leading people astray and also about being mocked, if I wasn’t
so paralyzed by both aspects at the same time.
I’ve done hundreds of planetarium shows. Give me a dome and
an audience and the better part of an hour and you will walk away with an
appreciation for the night sky or space or your place in the cosmos. I can
answer questions, explain difficult concepts, unpack history, and do it all
with a genuine enthusiasm for the subject matter that shows, even after having
done this same presentation over and over and over again. I have yet to tire of
explaining how to find planets in the sky and how to tell the difference
between Mars and Antares or why the Moon changes phase or how we know what
galaxies are and where they’re at in space. Goodness, but I love that job.
But this job is not that job. I mean, every thought system
can be abused. We don’t really need a thought system to hurt each other; we
just use it to justify the hurt we want to cause, or feel that we need to
cause, or want to avoid responsibility for having caused. I know how problematic
the space race was. I understand how an exclusive focus on Enlightenment
appeals to rationality and empiricism have the potential to problematically
hamper our lives. I get human hubris and self-absorption and pride and how virtues
that are extolled can also be part of domineering power structures that are antithetical
to the care for the least of these that is so key to how I think life should be
organized. I get how careless enthusiasm for anything comes with problems. But I
am much more nervous about the problems that I can cause on Sunday morning.
Because this is my gospel, right? This is the thing that I know to be true. These are the ideas,
the hopes, the promises, the stories that have set me free and given me new
life and I need you to know that. I
need us to have a conversation around forgiveness and reconciliation. I need
you to see that you are loved. I need you to love. I need to share this
wonderful, weighty gift with you and I don’t think I can do it. I don’t know
that you’ll hear it. I know I’m standing in the way and I don’t know where to
move but I absolutely understand that I need to. I don’t know that I can afford
to do this wrong.
You know, I almost don’t want to put a label on it.
I can almost look away from the reoccurring pattern of moods
or emotions or chemical states of the brain that crop up month after month,
season after season, not so predictable as clockwork but like a reliable weed
growth in the front garden. It doesn’t look so bad, you know, not when there
are all the other flowers and bushes and shrubs to balance out the unwanted
undergrowth, but this garden is my life and I am the soil feeding these growing
things and more and more of the nutrients, the good things, the strength in me
are being sucked into these invasive thoughts and feelings that do not build
up, but only tear down. It doesn’t really matter how much rain or sun I catch
when the drops and sunbeams fall equally on the good and the bad in me. But I
don’t want to call the weeds depression. That would spoil the metaphor with
assumptions and pity and cures.
I can almost ignore the racing, bounding thoughts
that take over my mind, completely unbidden, when I need to leave the apartment
to go shopping or go talk to someone new or wait on a reply to an email or a
message or a text. I can almost entirely push away the quickly branching
train of thought that seeks to detail every potential disaster and trace all
possible futures to their most dramatic ending, derailing it before my mind
gets its hooks into it and carries all the rest of me along with it. I can
usually find some reasonable explanation for the bouncing feet, the
twisting of rings, the repeated gouging of my scalp, and the clenching of my jaw
when I try to stop any of those things. But I don’t really want to say that any of those things
are symptoms of anxiety. The solution for that particular problem surely means
slowing my thoughts down all the time and even if the side effects suck from
time to time, I like my mile-a-minute brain. It gets stuff done.
I can almost always walk away from the snide and weepy voice
commenting on my body that’s become a permanent fixture of my mental landscape.
It only occasionally comes out in conversations with friends, in moments of
weakness when I don’t want to be fishing for a compliment or laying this
particular bit of brokenness out in front of people but it slips out anyway,
like the truth behind poorly-constructed lie. I know I haven’t had as much
practice at silencing it as other women have, mostly because I was oblivious to
these head games in middle school and high school and probably college when you
were supposed to be noticing your body and other people’s bodies. I read a lot
instead. The voice has emerged with a vengeance, though, racing through the
weeds like some tiny troll, reminding me that I always knew I was ugly and
that’s why no one ever looked at me, that I’ve always been and always will be
too fat to be attractive to anyone, that no matter how much makeup I wear or how many better-fitting clothes I buy or hairstyles I try, there’s no covering up how truly terrible I
look, and even if there was, there’s no fixing the fundamental brokenness of the part of me that makes me worth something. But I don’t want to
call these lies body image issues because surely body image issues are much
more significant than this low-boiling desire to break every mirror around me
and scratch up every screen so that I never have to think about my reflection
again.
Besides, body image problems are for those other people, the
girls who genuinely are pretty and just don’t know how beautiful they are or
the guys who are plenty strong enough and misunderstand the importance of the
muscle they have. They’re problems for the people who have been robbed of their
confidence by the unkindness of others (or of society in general) or those who
place a too-high premium on appearance because no one else has exactly told
them where else their value could lie. I have no reason to have body image
issues, so I must not have them.
And depression and anxiety, those are conditions for artists
and actors and people with the money for therapy and Xanax. Who am I kidding
with all these descriptions of how I feel? They’re probably just stolen from
some book I forgot I read or song I forgot I listened to, written by somebody
who has actual problems, not just some casual sadness or occasional frightened
thought. That’s the great thing about mental health awareness month—deep, heartfelt
descriptions of genuine struggles are only a click and a share away and they’re
often written with such pathos that it’s nearly impossible not to empathize.
I've never been to talk to a mental healthcare provider, but more than likely they'd be able to see that my “depression,” if you want to call it that, was lifted from
a spoken word video on youtube or a twitter thread by someone who’s wrestled
extensively with these very real demons. My battle to get out of bed some
mornings or some… Saturdays must be fabrication on my part, an excuse to be lazy.
We all know how much I like to be lazy.
Except.
Except all those artists and actors and authors, those people
who use their platforms to open up about what they’re going through, they all
keep on telling me that depression lies. Depression tells me how unloved and
worthless I am and how things are never going to get better. Depression tells
me that my friends are only here because they pity me and that my family
doesn’t want to put up with my bullshit. Depression tells me that I certainly
can’t talk about any of this because if people knew how small and pathetic I
really am, they’d hate me even more than they already do. They’d know for sure
what a dumb disappointment I turned out to be, how weak I’ve always been.
They’d look at me and see the waste of potential and space and oxygen I embody.
That’s really where depression gets its punches in, in the blatant lies that
still manage to have a hint of truth: I might not be a waste of breath, but I
do waste my potential sometimes. I could always do more. Why don’t I do more?
A couple thousand years ago, Jesus went up to a man sitting by a pool and asked him if he wanted to be well. If I had been that man,
I too would have avoided the question and explained to Jesus that I wasn’t well
because of all the things happening around me. Jesus would have to sit down
beside me and say, “I didn’t ask about them. I asked about you. Do you want
to be well?” And I would have to think about that. Because I might look like
the man by the pool, but I feel like the man among the tombs, the one
who screamed and scratched and broke every chain meant to keep him safe from
himself, the one whose demons called themselves Legion. I don’t need Jesus to
ask me a bunch of questions and to try to pull a desire for wellness from me. I
need him to act. Lord, can’t you see how I bleed? Don’t you know how little
control I have over the things that writhe inside me? I can’t seek you out in a
crowd, can’t even grasp at the hem of your robe. I need you to find me,
to search out the one that you’ve loved and cared for and called by name
and show me a better way.
And let’s just admit that that better way is going to be
more involved than I want it to be. It’s a way, after all, not a fix. A better
way is going to be more than what I can do on my own and is going to involve a
community that understands at least part of what’s happening in my brain. A
better way will probably involve love and support from my family and friends
and yes, therapy of some kind, at least. I know that depression lies and that I
am worthy and loved and I know that there is healing in relationships and
community but I also know that I don’t know the lay of the land in my mind, not
exactly, and that if I’m going to actually make sustainable progress, I’m going
to need someone else who’s had some practice dealing with this specific kind of
problem before. Or even if this truly isn’t depression and anxiety, I still
have a lot to sort out about how I came to the place of asking these questions
at all. I’m not going to understand what’s going on just by letting these
thoughts ricochet off the walls of my mind day after day. It’ll do me good to
get outside of myself.
Which of course is what love is about, right? It’s what that
better way is—taking me out of my self-imposed solitary confinement and opening
me up to the care of and for others. Love takes many forms and that’s why we’ve
told these gospel stories for thousands of years: they’re stories about Love encountering
someone who has been torn apart from Love and refusing to pass them by and
leave them as they are. They’re stories that give hope that everyone, even
someone like me, could be, should be
set free and brought back to Love, where we’ve longed to be all along.
Let’s go weed the garden. I've been told does a body good.
