I'm way behind. (Blame it on my new poetry blog First Verse, as a poem a week takes more time than I anticipated.) After a quick selection from November and December 2021, I'm digesting the issue for February-April 2022, which was especially rich.
November's meditations were contributed by Robert Two Bulls, who describes himself as "Oglala Lakota, Episcopal priest, artist, husband, and father." Reading in Hebrews 10.24 the admonition to "provoke one another to love and good deeds," Two Bulls tells how, in his early days in the priesthood, he was assigned a mission he didn't want, to provide housing for needy families in DC's inner city. By the end of that year, he knew he had "been provoked by others 'to love and good deeds.'" He asks us to think if we've ever been provoked that way. Did we answer the call? "It's not too late," he adds.
My favorite meditation from Two Bulls begins, "I have never run a marathon and I'm certain I never will." He's responding to 2 Peter 1.5-6 -- "support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness." One's own spirituality, he writes, is a combination of beliefs, practices, and feelings that are exercised with some mix of "prayer, meditation, contemplation, and fasting." Telling us we need "persistence and stamina," he asks, "Which spiritual exercise needs a little more practice?"
In December, meditations came from a young freelance writer Cara Meredith. She struggles to relate our culture's jolly Christmas season to the harsh and even scary warnings from Old Testament prophets that our prayer book assigns for Advent. When Amos says prepare to meet your God, she advises us that he's not imagining a baby in a manger (Amos 4.12). God's threat to pursue the wayward Israelites wherever they try to hide seems scary too, until Meredith relates it to The Runaway Bunny, a children's book in which the mother tells her son, "If you run away... I will run after you. For you are my little bunny." Even in Amos, Meredith "can't help but see love squeezed into the center of the text."
Catherine Healy, rector of St. Paul and the Redeemer in Chicago, applied her experiences hiking and biking to Luke's account of the Transfiguration: going up on a mountain isn't easy. When we long for a transcendant experience, we should remember that "mountaintop" moments are often preceded by years of work. She asks us what steps we're taking to prepare ourselves to go "up the mountain." One of my answers would be, I'm writing this. Another would be, I bike 1-3 hours a day with media off -- just me, the world, my cascading thoughts, and God --listening, questioning, redirecting.
The whole time I was reading Healy's work, I was preoccupied by an upcoming visit with a valued friend, our first since we discovered deep differences in our ways of seeing current events. Healy addresses that situation in her meditations. After we read the story where Jesus dispels the crowd that was ready to stone a woman, Healy identifies with the crowd. She ticks off ways that she herself gets ticked off at others and admits she's frightened that others will "turn that laser beam of judgment" on her. Yes, that's how I feel. Jesus disarms the situation with compassion, in the sense of showing that he knows what all the concerned parties are feeling.
Partisans were tearing things apart in the time that Paul wrote Romans 14.1-23, and Paul isn't so concerned about what they do or say so long as their "choices give honor and thanks to God."
Identifying with Jacob as he prepares for a rough reunion with Esau, I was interested in Healy's quotation from George Fox, the original Quaker. When we meet someone with a different belief system "who tries to do what is right and true," Fox says we should listen to hear, not in order to answer what they say, but to "answer that of God in everyone." [Shortly after writing this page, I wrote a poem about the Jacob-Esau reunion, Angels Never Know.] A related reflection on Proverbs 3.17-18 tells us that the wise person "may not win every fight, but they will know what is worth fighting for."
I did post a separate article after I read Healy's reflection on the Good Shepherd. See A Sheepish Admission.
Mary Lockey wrote meditations for March. She lives with her family in North Carolina, where she's on staff at a community college. She attends Grace Church.
Lockey puts Scripture in dialogue with our culture. There's politics. The governor Pilate is puzzled when Jesus tells him, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18.36). His followers will not be fighting Pilate, Jesus says, meaning, "That's not how we do things here [in the Kingdom of God]." She asks her reader, "Do you meet the world differently because you follow Jesus?"
Then, there's sports. Paul's "pressing on toward the goal of the prize of the upward call of Jesus" reminds Lockey of a certain little league baseball game when the catcher, her neighbor's son, paused the game to confer with the pitcher. Her neighbor explained that his son was probably calling for a fast ball, because the next batter was an "easy out." Then the batter hit a double. After the game, the young catcher explained to her, "Sam got hit by a pitch earlier. I could tell it hurt. I didn't want him to be afraid, So, I told the pitcher to let him get a hit." So, no, winning is not the only thing.
Many striking meditations tell us that to own our fears, sadness, doubt, and even anger with God, are not signs of weakness, lack of faith, or illness.
Lockey hears something I've missed in the lovely line, "Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning" (Ps. 30.6). A neighbor used that phrase to console Lockey's mom after the death of Lockey's sister and brother. But Lockey's mother wept night after night for a long time. Lockey observes that the psalm doesn't say we should hurry through the night to get to the morning. "There is no morning without night." I'm reminded of the cathartic moment in the animated treasure Inside Out when the character Joy accepts Sadness.
Lockey's meditations happened to coincide with the first weeks of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. About putting your trust in God when you're afraid (Psalm 56.3), Lockey writes, "God does not want us to pretend that we are fine when we are not." Like her mother, who could not allay her daughter's fear of thunder but stayed with her during a storm, "God wants to be with us ... even when we are deeply afraid." She didn't know when she wrote that how a Ukrainian comedian who had played President on TV would grow before our eyes into the role of real-life President. Sleepless under intense bombing and clear-eyed about Putin's wanting him dead, Zelenskyy stayed put in Kiev.
Lockey notes that Jesus was led by the Spirit not "to" the wilderness -- to be left there alone -- but "in" the wilderness (Luke 4.1). So even when Jesus felt hungry and dry, we are assured that the Spirit was there.
Complaining, the psalmist in Psalm 44 asks God What have you done for Israel lately? Lockey asks her readers, "Have you ever wanted God to wake up?" Yes. "How often do you think God wants you to wake up?" Good question.
When the apostles in the water-swamped boat wake Jesus, he seems peevish (Mark 4.40). "Perhaps Jesus's frustration isn't because they woke him up but that they didn't wake him sooner. How often do we depend on ourselves to weather life's storms, turning to God only when we are in over our heads?"
How can Jesus be fully human, fully divine? Lockey finds an answer in Mark 7.29. Jesus has gone aside to rest when the Gentile woman importunes him to heal her daughter. Lockey writes, "He is tired. He needs rest. A woman intrudes and annoys him persistently. He takes a stance, listens, then changes his mind and heals the Syrophoenician woman's daughter. Fully human. Fully divine."
Lay minister Patrick Kangrga, who wrote for April, serves as director of youth ministries at St. James Episcopal Church in Jackson, MS, where I worshipped for 17 years. I believe his meditations resonated with me for reasons beyond that connection.
A passage about God's hearing the suffering of the Hebrew slaves (Exodus 2.21) has special relevance for Kangrga, who is half Japanese and half African American. He writes that he has become more aware of how a system can benefit some races and disenfranchise others. Like seeing how a magic trick is done, he writes, "the mystery has been dispelled, and the trick has lost its power over me."
On April 9, a day for commemorating Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Kangrga connects that martyr's words to Exodus 10.23, about God's plague of darkness: "[The Egyptians] could not see one another... but all the Israelites had light where they lived." Persecuted by the Nazis, Bonhoeffer wrote to fellow-believers, "We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer." Kangrga imagines the suffering of the Egyptians, most of whom were not themselves oppressing God's people, and wants "to shed more light on ... those who suffer in the darker parts of our stories and history."
Kangrga draws on the Japanese art of Kintsugi, mending pottery in a way that draws attention to its cracks, "a broken pot made more beautiful by its brokenness." He's riffing off Psalm 31.12, "I am as useless as a broken pot," but he's also thinking ahead in Holy Week to what emerges from the brokenness of Jesus, the disciples, and the world. [Kintsugi figures prominently in a book Art + Faith. Read more in my blogpost (01/2022)]
Reading about the Last Supper in John 12.2-5, Kangrga reflects on time. At the moment when Judas tells the woman off for the money spent to anoint Jesus that could have gone to the poor, we are also aware of the future, when Judas will betray Jesus. Similarly, in Holy Week and in all our lives, Kangrga writes, "I am ever experiencing the life, death, and resurrection of Christ while attempting to live out my Christ-likeness."
For Good Friday, Kangrga combs the day's Gospel for examples of power. The Pharisees and the soldiers use power to arrest Jesus; Peter uses the power of the sword against a servant; Jesus uses power to heal the servant; Pilate uses the power given him by the emperor, but bows to the power of the mob. "Jesus died at the hand of those who mismanaged and abused power, but he lived in a way that shows how power can be loving, grace-filled and life-giving." Kangrga asks us, "How can you use your power and privilege in life-giving ways?"
Kangrga draws on his experience as youth minister in his reflection on Luke 24.41, where the resurrected Jesus asks the disbelieving disciples, "Have you anything here to eat?" Food and fun can bring joy, and that's essential to dealing with doubts and problems. Good advice to remember when your committee faces a thorny issue, that food and some kind of game or puzzle can open up the group to being creative.
Finally, Kangrga takes on the hatred expressed in Psalm 5. It's misinterpretation to see psalms like this as condoning hatred, he writes. "These are prayers in which people are actively working out their understanding of God and their own salvation." I'm aware that some of the psalms are curses, actively calling on God to cause harm to enemies, and lust for revenge animates a lot of the imagery in Revelation, but Kangrga is right. To state it in the form of a meme that I saw recently, Hatred is Biblical, but it is not Christlike.
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