A blog update

You'll notice that the format of this blog has changed recently. It's come alive again, after a year's hiatus. I'm primary posting (bi-weekly) reflections that I give at our church's weeknight service. They're informal, because they're designed to be that way, but hopefully still capture some bit of truth and beauty.

Reflection: Inspiration

Sacred Text: "Be Your Note"

I have this habit of getting a bit grumpy, that I can feel distant from God too often. After a long day of working with data, I schlep home and feel tired. The spirit is not there, I am un-inspired.

The theme for tonight, was imagination, until I accidentally wrote a reflection about inspiration. Now tonight’s theme is inspiration. Breaking apart words can give shades of their meaning. Inspiration comes from the Latin word “to breathe”, and spiritus is the same word for breath as for spirit. Similarly in Hebrew, ruach. Thus the passage at the beginning of Genesis can be read “The spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters, or the breath of God, or the wind of God was moving of the face of the waters.”

This is why I love the Rumi poem: it has such vivid imagery of the spirit, the breath of God blowing through us.

I like the metaphor that God’s inspiration brings us alive. “God picks up the reed-flute world and blows”.

There’s mutuality in the metaphor: the flute/ the world makes no sound unless God blows through and resonates, setting us alive with sound. But so too for God: without us, the breath of God can blow this way and that and yet make no sound.

Rumi’s metaphor also points to a deeper truth about God. Many understandings of God seem to locate God outside of creation, as though God were watching the play that is humanity, and dipping in now and again to intervene in the plot. There are certainly voices in the Bible that promote this, but this vision of God is inadequate for me.

I need to be reminded of God’s mystical presence in the world: that the world is inspired by God. The presence of God is very much here—if I stop, if I look, if I listen, listen for the symphony—or is it cacophony—around me.

And if God is the breath that makes my note, then it is not a God that forces rules on me (do this/don’t do that) from afar: rather, the way I should live is a question about how I should be “be my note”, how to be the kind of person, the kind of community filled with the spirit of God. How to capture the breath of God and turn it into beautiful music.

Prayer is too is no longer begging someone— God— to intervene and fix things (Through who wouldn’t want that, it just doesn’t seem to happen). This Rumi helps me to think of prayer as getting in tune with God. In prayer, I come close to the spirit, bringing my needs to God, listening for God’s response. I try to let the breath of God keep flowing through me, “not trying to end it”.

And so, go up on the roof at night, go out into your yards or onto the streets. Sing your note, attend to the beauty of God flowing through you. Honor that spirit. Be your note, and God will show you how it is enough. And then listen to the singing around, the wonderful harmony of God setting each of us alive.

Amen.

Be Your Note: Sacred Text for Inspiration

God picks up
the reed-flute world
and blows.

Each note is a need
coming through one of us,
a passion,
a longing-pain.

Remember the lips
where the wind-breath
originated,

and let your note be clear.
Do not try to end it.

Be your note.

I’ll show you how it is enough.

Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul.

Let everyone climb onto the roofs
and sing their notes.

Sing loud.

--Jalaluddin Rumi

Labor

Sacred Text: Selections from Ecclesiastes

This week, I’d like to reflect on the place labor has in our lives. We celebrated Labor Day this past weekend, and it’s a good time to take stock of the role plays in our lives.

Labor, identified as our job or career, seems to play a large role in our identities: after all, our jobs are where we spend a large share of our hours. Yet even as Americans are working fewer and fewer hours—down, surprisingly, about 30 hours from a century ago, and even 3 or 4 hours less than in 1965, the work we do seems tightly connected to our identities.

Some of us are in jobs that are expressions of our identities, and some of us are in jobs that pay the bills so we can live out our lives outside of work. Yet the sacred text for today does remind us that our work is transient, fleeting, vapor: a caution for those who would focus on career to the exclusion of the rest of life, and a consolation for those whose work seems meaningless. When it comes to our lives, our work may be part—but is never all—of what we are created for.

There is another kind of labor to consider: not the labor for a paycheck, but the labor we are called to do as Christians. Jesus said that the harvest was plentiful, but the workers were few. He was, unfortunately, quite uncompromising when he called us to follow him: he said to take up our cross, to leave behind family. This seems like labor in the most negative sense: suffering, bearing burdens. But it is the same Jesus who told us that he would bring us life abundantly? Labor for the reign of God cannot be just drudgery—there must be some kind of joy.

The writer of Ecclesiastes, known as the “Teacher”, wisely reminds us all this—all our work, for money and for God— is hevel, which literally means mist or vapor, and is here used to stand for something like transience. It’s traditionally translated as vanity, but that’s not quite right. It’s more like transitoriness or emptiness.

The Teacher is telling us that all our toil—not just money, but even wisdom—is vapor. It won’t last. Our lives will pass, and we could spend them working hard, or becoming a success, and still it will pass.

Some might see this perspective as nihilistic—that nothing matters. But I think that is a mistaken reading of this text. We do “toil and strain”, our work is a vexation, and sometimes even late at night our minds do not rest. But still our life is short, and we’d better recognize that.

We were not created to be slaves to work, whether it be work for our own success, or work for the church, work for charity or work politics. Surely, we are called to labor, but just as surely we are called to enjoy the time we have: to take joy in our family and friends, to come home from work and to eat, and to drink, and to use our fine china.

In the midst of our toil, God invites (not demands, but invites) us to find enjoyment, even in such dark places where it seems impossible. There’s a story told in the book of Acts: the apostle Paul and Silas are in prison, and who knows where they will be brought or what will be done to them. And there, late at night, they sang songs of praise to God. I think the writer of Ecclesiastes would approve. In enjoying life, “God has long ago approved what you do”.

Sacred Text for Labor: Hevel

Selections from Ecclesiastes 2 and 9. NRSV, altered

I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me--and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is [hevel, vapor]. So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it. This also is [hevel, vapor] and a great evil. What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is [hevel, vapor].

There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from [God] who can eat or who can have enjoyment? For to the one who pleases him God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy; but to the sinner he gives the work of gathering and heaping, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is [hevel, vapor] and a chasing after wind.

...
Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the [husband or] wife whom you love, all the days of your [fleeting] life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.

Justice

Reading: Luke 4:16-30

The theme for today is justice. Talking about justice in church has always made me uncomfortable— I have some pretty strong political positions, which I think are closely connected to my faith, yet I know equally well-meaning people have differing positions. Unfortunately, the nature of the sermon (or here, a reflection) is not conversational, and there’s always the danger of using religion to end the conversation rather than to begin it.

My unease is unfortunate, because I think Jesus and the Christian tradition have a lot to say about justice and how we organize society. There’s a big movement afoot to “spiritualize” Jesus’ sayings, claiming that Jesus’ talk about coming of the “kingdom of God” applies only to the spirit (or only to the future). This moves far from the meaning that Jesus’ listeners and the readers of the gospel would have heard. When Jesus reads from the scroll of Isaiah, “God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,” he is not speaking of a salvation that will get them into heaven—he is talking about a change in the physical, social-economic-political reality.

You needn’t worry that I’ll launch off into Jesus’ 10 point plan for the next Presidential administration. Suffice it to say that there is plenty there in the gospels that makes claims on the kind of government we should have, though it’s pretty hard to figure it all out.

Yet if it is a mistake to think that Jesus has nothing to say about government, it is also a mistake to think that justice is only about what the government should do. Justice is built, not just legislated, and the Jesus movement lived out a radical justice.

The simple act of sharing a meal together, a tradition we will continue today, signified the unity of the body of Christ, and allowed Paul to proclaim:

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus “

I’ve grown up hearing these words so often that they seem trite. But consider: In the passage we just read, the crowd at Nazareth goes to throw Jesus off the cliff not because he was claiming that the words of Isaiah were coming true. The crowd was filled with rage because Jesus asserts the universality of the gospel—highlighting stories in the past in which the Jewish prophets went to Gentiles, and asserting it might happen again.

Focusing on the government as the only locus of justice can lead us to ignore how we can work for justice in our own lives. Participation in democracy is empowering, because we get to make claims on what kind of justice we want to see; yet it can seem disempowering too, because if we lose with 49% of the vote we can be tempted to inaction.

I’ve been reading about the history of the underground railroad in the United States. In the face of the abolitionist movement’s repeated legislative failure, seemingly “normal” people engaged in risky heroic actions. Free-blacks, Congregationalists and Quakers, and many others sheltered runaway slaves despite the danger of violent reprisals and legal sanctions under the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a federal crime to assist a runaway slave.

This example highlights the value of our community’s justice work. We may not be running an underground railroad at First Church, but we are running a Monday Supper for the community, volunteering at a domestic violence shelter, contributing to the wider church’s ministries through our OCWM offering, taking trips to the orphanage, working for same-sex marriage. Individually, we engage in numerous other justice ministries.

Sometimes, when I think about the kind of justice work we can do as individuals or as a church, everything seems too small to matter. But our actions add up, just as the actions of abolitionists helped add up to over 30,000 escaped slaves. This should both encourage and inspire us, to search for where God is calling us to work justice in our lives.