- The "hillside picnic" in Mark 6, when the crowd is anxious about having enough food, reminds Farabee of grocery-store raids at the start of COVID. For most of us, food insecurity was a frightening new experience. "In the end, the crowd is asked to sit down, and they are served -- and all eat are filled."
- "The first words spoken by a person to God in the Bible express fear" (Adam: I heard you...and I was afraid.) Stepping into the boat from the surface of the lake, Jesus says, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid." Farabee comments: "In the end, it is all we want to hear."
- In the Greek marketplace, Paul speaks the language of the Athenians. Farabee asks, "Where are you called to proclaim the Good News? In what ways will you need to 'speak the language?'" (I reflected that this blog is my way of doing that -- as I find God in the books and movies and musicals of secular artists.)
- God emptied himself and took the form of a slave, in Phil.2.5-7; those who want to save their life will lose it, in Mark 8.35. Farabee comments, "I don't think such a premise can be debated. It is unprovable. But this reversal is the way of life. So says Jesus. And I believe him." That's pretty close to being the only creed we need.
- Most of our sins are not as gross as David's murderous determination to rape Uriah's wife Bathsheba, but sin still "distorts our lives." To illustrate, Farabee tells how he broke a date in 6th grade when a more attractive girl asked him to the dance. Life went on, he said, "but my soul has never forgotten. Nor should it." Yet God still used even David, and God is still at work in us.
- Psalm 88 ends without hope. Farabee recalls a time when he served a congregation that rejected him, when he "could have prayed Psalm 88 over and over." He reassures us, "Don't skip over the darkness. God is still there."
- "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink...?" Jesus asks James and John. Seeing that everyone is able to be killed, Farabee asks just what "able" means in this context? Are we "able?"
- I never noticed what Farabee points out, that the Prayer Book schedules readings that celebrate the goodness of creation for Saturdays. "Our faith begins in the goodness of creation -- or it will lead us nowhere."
- The broken pieces of rejected pottery outside an artisan's studio seemed wasteful to Farabee, until he saw the finished products inside. This gives a different spin on Mark 12.10 (a quote from Psalm 118). The stone that the builders rejected could have been a first draft, a model, for something much better. "Trust God to turn waste into glory."
- Psalm 140.10 prays for hot coals to fall upon the enemy. Farabee says, we've wished that too. "Come on. Admit it. We get hurt or offended or maligned... and the bitter impulses of our souls bubble to the surface, searing out better selves." But remember another verse for the same day, 143.10, "Teach me to do what pleases you, for you are my God."
She finds physicality in prayer, as when Jacob "wrestles" all night with his inner demon, and Jesus is praying apart from his friends and "falling apart" with tears at Gethsemane. In the sweeping grandeur of the Exodus story, Belcher notices "grace notes of earth and flesh" when Moses and the Lord "find each other": the flock, the bare feet, the sacred ground, and a couple of basic questions, "Who am I? Who are you?" For Belcher, the familiar phrase "faith without works is dead" is telling us "faith is a body thing," not a spiritual feeling or intellectual belief, and mostly involves "welcoming and caring for bodies, our own and our neighbor's." transition to social ills - "wages cry out" in James 5.4 -- which I read after hearing a piece on "true price of immigration"
Other familiar scriptures are more comforting or more urgent when taken as physical realities, not metaphors. "I am with you," the Lord repeats three times to Jacob (Gen 28.15). Picturing Psalm 23, Belcher wonders how "goodness shall follow me all the days of my life," since she imagines the Shepherd leading us from the front. Is goodness perhaps something we leave behind wherever we go? When Paul assures the Philippians that God "will transform the body of our humiliation [to] be conformed to the body of His glory," Belcher isn't sure what Paul is imagining (and I bet Paul wasn't, either), but at least the apostle is telling us that our bodies are worth resurrecting. Again, God derides Jonah for mourning the withering of a shrub while thinking that God wouldn't care about the destruction of Nineveh, where there are 20,000 human bodies "besides many animals." (Belcher comments that the story doesn't say that love is more important than justice, but that justice can go beyond punishment and oppression.)
When Matthew takes Jesus to his home for dinner, Belcher notes how often Jesus's ministry involves just "sitting with" people who are usually avoided. I saw a demonstration of that when I played piano for a communion service that my church offered at a retirement home. After the last hymn, a woman asked me if I could play "You'll Never Walk Alone" because her sister used to sing it, and "she's being pulled off life support in Florida right now, as we speak." She wept. Mother Pat noticed, and simply sat with her and listened to her. (Meanwhile, I did find the song's chord chart on my phone and played it on the piano, softly).
Anger makes us "liable to judgment" in Matthew 5.22, but anger may also be a physical alarm in response to an injustice or a crack in a relationship. Take care of those when you feel anger, Belcher advises us.
On the same day that Belcher reflects on James 5.4, "wages cry out," I heard a story on NPR about "the true price of immigration." When we figure how underpayment of immigrant men, women, and children for their labor keeps down prices for goods and services, while we save taxpayers' money by cutting immigrants off from such services as English lessons and medical benefits, the thought that wages cry out makes a strong physical image for injustice.
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