Invitation to the Cross

As part of my Lenten observation this year, I'm taking a break from writing new blog posts and updating and re-posting earlier material. Today's post was first shared on April 1, 2012.  For another Holy Week post from the past, consider also Thank You for the Cross, April 17, 2011.

Black Crucifixion, Fritz Eichenberg, 1963, New York

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look,

he said.
The son looked. . .

On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it,
As though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
  (from "The Coming," R. S. Thomas)

There is something unsettling about the story of Palm Sunday. Crowds gathered to cheer a likely candidate, one of their own who could draw a crowd, who could take back Jerusalem from the evil empire, who could promote their agendas and ensure their safety.

It’s easy to picture the crowd. The objects waved might be different (flags? pennants? streamers?), but the energy is the same.

It’s not so easy to picture Jesus, riding the donkey through the crowd. Luke says, "as he approached Jerusalem he wept.”

Not normal hero behavior.

Did the crowd notice? Did they wonder why?

With the cheers of the adoring crowd echoing in his ears, Jesus went on to the temple, where he upset the economic order by throwing over tables: money changers, merchants of sacrificial doves, commerce sent scrambling. The accommodating (well-recompensed?) religious leaders were enraged: how dare he?

From there, he went on to tell a series of stories meant to alienate the insiders, the holders of power, those most convinced of their own righteousness.

Then the Passover meal, with talk of sacrifice and death, and the embarrassing scene with the bowl and towel.

Foot Washing,  Gunning King, 1936, UK

It’s an odd story, shifting from adoration, to alienation, to anticipated grief.

There’s nothing in the story that sounds invented, “mythic,” polished.

It’s told in each of the gospels with a sense of quiet amazement, with a raw honesty unexpected in religious text. Facts outlined, dialogue sketched, strange stories reported as the lauded candidate for coming king deliberately dismantles the grand expectations of friends, followers and crowd.

.Vinoth Ramachandra, a Sri Lankan who has written and lectured extensively about pluralism, world religions, and the uniqueness of the Christian faith, notes in The Scandal of Jesus: Christ in a Pluralistic World:

If you wanted to convert the educated and pious people of the empire to your cause, whatever that cause may have been, the worst thing you could ever do would be to link that cause to a recently crucified man. To put it mildly, that would have been a public relations disaster. And to associate God, the source of all life, with this crucified criminal was to invite mockery and sheer incomprehension! This was indeed the experience of the first Christians

This message, if true, subverted the world of religion. For it claimed that if you wanted to know what God is like, and to learn God’s purposes for God’s world, you had to go not to the sages, the lofty speculations of the philosophers or to the countless religious temples and sacred groves that dotted the empire, but to a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem. The world of the first Christians was every bit as pluralistic, if not more so, than ours- culturally and religiously. But for the Jews a crucified Messiah/Saviour was a contradiction in terms, for it expressed not God’s power but God’s inability to liberate Israel from Roman rule. For pious Greeks and Romans, the idea that a god or son of a god should die as a state criminal, and that human salvation should depend on that particular historical event, was not only offensive, it was sheer madness.

This message, if it were true, also subverted the world of politics. It claimed that Rome’s own salvation would come from among those forgotten victims of state terror. Caesar himself would have to bow the knee to this crucified Jew. It implied that by crucifying the Lord of the universe, the much-vaunted civilization of Rome stood radically condemned. The Pax Romana was a sham peace. Like all imperial projects, it was built on the suffering of the many. And God had chosen to be found among the victims, not the empire-builders. Little wonder that the Christians’ ‘Good News’ (‘Gospel’) was labeled a ‘dangerous superstition’ by educated Romans of the time.

Now, it is the madness of this ‘word of the cross’ that compels us to take it seriously. I am a Christian today because there is something so foolish, so absurd, so topsy-turvy about the Christian gospel that it gets under my skin: it has the ring of truth about it. No one can say that this was some pious invention, for it ran counter to all notions of piety. And nothing was gained by it. All who proclaimed it suffered as a result.

Ramanchandra goes on to explore further the subversive nature of the cross: it subverts not only our ideas of religion and political power, but of self, autonomy, family, tribe, national identity:

White Crucifixion, Marc Chagall, 1938, Russia

"When illustrating what it means to belong to the kingdom of God, Jesus takes as his paradigmatic examples those who had least status in his contemporary society. In a world where children had no legal rights, economic possessions or no social standing, he makes them the model for those who receive the kingdom of God (Matt.18: 1-4; Mark 10: 13-16). When, on the eve of the crucifixion, he washes the feet of his disciples like a household slave, and requires them to do the same for each other (John 13:3-15), he makes slaves the paradigms for leadership in the kingdom of God. If the kingdom of God belongs to people such as slaves, the poor, and little children, then others can enter the kingdom only by accepting the same lack of status. The cross brings all human beings, men and women, rich and poor, religious and irreligious, to the same level before God. It is at the foot of the cross, that all human beings, without exception, are revealed as the objects of God’s forgiving and re-creating love. This is the egalitarian politics of grace." 

Jesus doesn’t invite us to Palm Sunday, to a triumphal politics of power, a proud exclusionary religion of exceptional righteousness.

He invites us to the cross, to the foot of the cross, to align ourselves not only with him, but with every marginalized, forgotten, condemned person who ever lived.  He calls us to set aside status, entitlement, self-justifying argument, self-protective agenda, and find a new home in his family of grace.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, struggling to understand the call of the cross in the face of Nazi fascism, wrote: 

“The Cross is not the terrible end of a pious happy life. Instead, it stands at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” (from  Discipleship and the Cross )

Come and die.

Christ of the Homeless, Fritz Eichenberg, 1982, New York

Jesus said “greater love has no one than this than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. . . This is my command: Love each other.”

The Christian faith is more than words, buildings, organizational structures, theological frameworks, philosophical exposition, like-minded people sharing like-minded values. At its core, the Christian faith is a community of deeply broken, deeply loved people, knit together by allegiance to a dying friend on a distant hill, choosing each day to sacrifice personal preference and self-fulfillment for the needs of a deeply wounded world.

Come and die. Not great ad copy. Not a catchy campaign slogan.

Yet that call sounds across the centuries, and we can trace the outlines of history through the lives of those who have understood and answered that call.

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

Reconciling Righteousness

"You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time."
"And how long is that going to take?"
"I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps."
"That could be a long time."
"I will tell you a further mystery," he said. 'It may take longer."
— Wendell Berry (Jayber Crow)

We live in a divided world and the divisions seem deeper by the day. Are you friend or foe?  One of us, or one of them?  We keep our checklists handy: check the wrong box on any one of fifty issues and the walls go up, alarms sound. Dialogue is over.

The world Jesus walked in was surely as divided. Romans and Jews, Pharisees and Sadducees, men afraid to speak with or acknowledge women, lepers and other “unclean” living in isolation out on the margins.

Read through the accounts of Jesus’ trials and watch the deceit and manipulation as each group maneuvered toward preservation of power, with Jesus, the blameless one, propelled toward his death. He didn’t fit, wouldn’t affirm the checklists of any party. His very silence threatened those committed to their own authority. The solution was obvious: make the silence permanent.

The Baptism of Cornelius the Centurian
Francesco Travisani, 1709

The resurrection is the great rebuttal to that attempted silencing, to those confident in their own power, to those dependent on their own divisive categories. From the Acts of the Apostles to John’s Revelation, the New Testament shows the followers of Christ struggling to explain and live out the profound implications of his unexpected return, not just for themselves, but for the opposing groups around them, for the nations beyond their borders, for the earth itself, groaning under the weight of human folly.

Christ’s followers found themselves living into mysteries beyond their understanding. We read through their writing, looking for bits that are easy to remember, that line up neatly with our own preferred positions. But much of what they had to say, lived out across a backdrop of miraculous events, unexpected alliances, frightening persecution, leaves us baffled. We shrug, and go on with our own agendas.

Here’s one of those passages I’ve been puzzling over:

For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:14-21)

The Christian faith is often presented as a simple, personal transaction. If we say we believe in Christ, God forgives our sins, gives us eternal life, and all is well. No worries.

But this passage draws us into a net of relationship – not just with God, but with others, a wide mix of unsorted others. According to the Apostle Paul, this resurrection life demands our alignment with Christ in his love, in his death, and in his role as reconciler. He took our place on the cross, so now we take his place as ambassadors, agents of reconciliation.

But Paul goes further than that: as people of the resurrection, we are agents of God’s reconciling purpose, but even more: “we become the righteousness of God.”

St. Philip Baptizing the Eunuch
Theodore Chasseriau

That’s a startling statement. Most theologians take one look and head off into discussions of “imputed righteousness.” In fact, this passage about reconciliation and righteousness has itself become a point of less-than-righteous division: what exactly did Paul mean? Does your interpretation line up with mine?

I’m not sure Paul is talking theology here. To me, he’s concerned with a day-to-day, walk- it-out practical question: What does it mean to live as resurrection people in the broken, battered right-now world? How do we show God’s glory in these imperfect jars of clay? How do we live God’s power when we’re so worn down we have trouble standing?

And if Paul is using the term "God's righteousness" in a way that reflects his study of Torah, he's talking about relationships: How do we engage in consistently redemptive relationships that show, in action, the steadfast love and faithfulness of God himself? (For insight into translation difficulties check section 4 in this challenging discussion).

Miroslav Volf is a theologian who has inhabited these questions for decades. A Croatian who grew up in Serbia under Communist rule, a Pentecostal whose theological studies were interrupted by forced military service in Yugoslavia, he has struggled personally with the challenge of reconciliation, of forgiveness, and the call to love in a way that reflects God’s faithfulness. In Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation, Volf reflects on this passage in Corinthians:

"'So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.' When God comes, God brings a whole new world. The Spirit of God breaks through the self-enclosed worlds we inhabit; the Spirit re-creates us and sets us on the road toward becoming what I like to call a “catholic personality,” a personal microcosm of the eschatological new creation. A catholic personality is a personality enriched by otherness, a personality which is what it is only because multiple others have been reflected in it in a particular way. The distance from my own culture that results from being born by the Spirit creates a fissure in me through which others can come in. The Spirit unlatches the doors of my heart saying: 'You are not only you; others belong to you too.'"(51)

Volf talks about becoming selves capable of including and forgiving others, not just tolerating those with different ideas, cultures, values, but embracing them:

"Inscribed on the very heart of God’s grace is the rule that we can be its recipients only if we do not resist being made into its agents; what happens to us must be done by us. Having been embraced by God, we must make space for others in ourselves and invite them in - even our enemies" (129)

Is Volf right? Is our experience of God’s grace shaped by our willingness to extend it to others?

The resurrection men and women of the New Testament lived God’s embrace in a way that broke down century-old barriers between ethnic groups, that dissolved ancient hatreds between nations, that drew the most marginalized into the heart of community. Their faithfulness as agents of reconciliation shook the Roman empire, radiated across continents, rearranged social constructs and left a heritage of hope that still echoes across the globe.

Where does Christ’s love compel us today?  What new selves are we called to be? What will it cost us to make space for others?

We Are All One in Jesus Christ, Soichi Watanabe, 2009, Japan

This is the sixth in a series about the resurrection:

Risen Indeed: The Hermaneutic Community 
The Great Reversal: A Resurrection People 
Earth Day Shalom: Ripples of Resurrection  
Resurrection Challenge: Feed My Sheep
Resurrection Laughter 

Resurrection Women: Happy Mother's Day 

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Click on the ___comments link below to see comments and to post your own.

Risen Indeed? The Hermaneutic Community

Easter morning worship is the high point of the Christian year. I look toward it through the reflections of Lent, the fasting of Good Friday, the inner stillness of silent Saturday, with a sense of  anticipation.

Orthodox icon: Resurrection

Annie Dillard, writing of church attendance, asked:

"Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? . . . It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews." (Teaching a Stone to Talk)

I feel that most strongly on Resurrection morning. We gather to celebrate God’s power breaking through, the proclamation of life in a world of death, the promise of all-things-new in a world where we have been held captive far too long by the burdens and the boundaries of the old.

As a child, I attended a small, somewhat somber church. Our organist appeared to meditate before each change of chord. Our hymns echoed in a space too large for our meager few. But Easter morning we took part in a sunrise service with other congregations in a nearby park. I loved the trumpets, often off-key, and the exuberant songs sung together in the early-morning chill:

 Up from the grave he arose;  with a mighty triumph o'er his foes;  he arose a victor from the dark domain,  and he lives forever, with his saints to reign.  He arose! He arose! Hallelujah! Christ arose!

Watching adults I’d come to know and respect, I could see: they believed it. They sang with rare energy and conviction.

When my own children were small, we attended a much larger church where the rector (our lead pastor) encouraged everyone to bring bells and tambourines to the Easter service. At every proclamation of  “Christ is risen” we were to ring the bells, shake our tambourines or car keys. Our rector himself set the example, with exuberant banging of his tambourine, and our most staid and proper parishioners joined in the buoyant clamour. “Christ is risen!”  “The Lord is risen indeed!”

The Empty Tomb, Bertrand Bahuet, France

At my current church, sharing of space between two services led to the practice of renting a large tent for our contemporary Easter service. The worship community gathered to roll out carpet, arrange potted flowers, hang banners, truck in a large stone to remind us of the open tomb. As we gathered for the service it was with a sense of joyful awe: the community itself was a gift, those gathered were a gift, and we were there because we had seen, lived, experienced together the resurrection power we were there to celebrate.

Our worship itself can be an avenue to encountering God, and we have many in our church family who sat uncomfortably in the back row until God spoke to them in worship, until the resurrection power drew them further into the center of our celebration.

One Easter, as part of our worship, we prepared a visual way of sharing some of our stories. It still makes me cry to watch, as I reflect on the power of the resurrection in the lives of those I know and love.

I regret the few Easter mornings, a guest in other churches, where I’ve found myself listening to talk of “the ‘Easter story,” a weary myth passed down as part of a time-worn liturgy, metaphor for spring, occasion to speak of cocoons and butterflies.

“Go home,” I’ve felt like saying. If it’s just about spring, let’s go outside and pick tulips. I grieve that in far too many churches of my own Episcopal denomination, Easter will be celebrated with pomp, lovely music, and scant awareness of the power invoked and far too often ignored.

Without the resurrection, Christianity is just one more religion: a tattered set of rules, a philosophical construct patched together to shield us from our fear. As the apostle Paul said emphatically to the doubting Corinthians,

“If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God . . . And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. . . .If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Over the years I’ve come to value thoughtful affirmations of the logical, historical evidence for a resurrected Christ. C.S. Lewis’ classic Mere Christianity was helpful early on. More recently, Tim Keller has done good work in defending the resurrection in an accessible way, while N. T. Wright takes a more scholarly approach in the Anglican tradition.  (Both have written books on this, but summary articles and video are available online: Keller in Relevant Magazine, and Wright in a summary video.) For a wider view, Telford Work of Westmont University offers a helpful summary of approaches, with some useful links.

Christ Resurrected, Anna Kocher, 2006

For me, though, the proof of the resurrection goes far beyond logic and historical record. The resurrection is visible in human lives across continents, across centuries. Dig back through the stories of Augustine, Jerome, or Patrick, any of those early saints whose lives were upended by the voice of the risen Christ, calling them to lives of forgiveness, compassion and bold witness of the resurrection.

Or listen to the stories of  Brother Yun of China, who came to know Christ through the miraculous healing of his father and the subsequent discovery of a Bible long hidden in rural China after the Cultural Revolution had done its best to suppress all knowledge of the Christian faith.

Spend time with Christians from other places and stories surface: men and women who met Christ in dreams or visions; teens dramatically transformed by an encounter with the Father who will never leave them; healings on sidewalks in London, under trees in Africa, on hillsides in Bolivia: resurrection power still pouring out, sometimes through human hands and voices, sometimes through the voice of God alone.

Leslie Newbigin, missionary in India from  1936 to 1974, returned to the UK to find a skeptical culture dismissive of the Christian faith. Wrestling with the question of apologetics, he asked:

"How can this strange story of God made man, of a crucified saviour, of resurrection and new creation become credible for those whose entire mental training has conditioned them to believe that the real world is the world which can be satisfactorily explained and managed without the hypothesis of God? I know of only one clue to the answering of that question, only one real hermeneutic of the gospel: a congregation which believes it. Does that sound too simplistic? I don't believe it is."

Continuing in his discussion of Evangelism in the City, he noted:

“The hope of which the church is called to be the bearer in the midst of a famine of hope is a radically other-worldly hope. Knowing that Jesus is king and that he will come to reign, it fashions its life and invites the whole community to fashion its life in the light of this reality, because every other way of living is based on illusion. It thus creates signs, parables, foretastes, appetizers of the kingdom in the midst of the hopelessness of the world. It makes it possible to act both hopefully and realistically in a world without hope, a world which trades in illusions. If this radically other-worldly dimension of the church's witness is missing, then all its efforts in the life of the community are merely a series of minor eddies in a current which sweeps relentlessly in the opposite direction.”  

Over the years I’ve watched many people come to faith, and many fall away. Those who see their faith as a list of rules to follow or services to attend, who have seen the church as an arbiter of dogma or shared "values" more than community of grace, are not likely to remain.

The Risen Christ, He Qi, China

Those who have seen, experienced, become part of a living community convinced of resurrection power begin to live that power in their own lives, to share it with others, in ways that build hope, and faith, and deepen love. As walls fall down between rich and poor, educated and illiterate, racially and ethnically divided, as God’s people demonstrate the freedom that comes from full forgiveness and the compassion that springs up from the knowledge that all that’s needed is provided, as gifts are affirmed in women, children, the marginalized, the previously ignored, resurrection becomes visible, inescapable.

If the truth of the resurrection is held in doubt, it’s not our apologetics that needs attention, but our lives together as visible community of love. 

“Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about. . . . Our task in the present . . . is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day.”  ( N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church )

This is the first in a series considering what it means to be “Resurrection People.”

For others:

The Great Reversal: A Resurrection People

Earth Day Shalom: Ripples of Resurrection

Resurrection Responsibilities: Feed My Sheep

It’s also part of the April Synchroblog examining the truth of the resurrection. Here's a list of bloggers who contributed to this month’s Synchroblog.

• Marta – On Faith Seeking Understanding, Truth, and Theology
• Tim Nichols – How Would Life be Different if Jesus did not Rise?
• Glenn – Kingdom Come or Kingdom Now?
• Sonja Andrews – The Resurrection and the Life
• Josh Morgan – The Role of the Resurrection
• Abbie Watters – What if the Resurrection were a lie?
• Minnow – Resurrection Impact
• Leah – Resurrection – Or Not!
• Hey Sonnie – The Resurrection Hoax
• Liz Dyer – The Resurrection I Firmly Believe In
• Ellen Haroutunian – Is There a Christianity Without the Resurrection?
• Jeannette Altes – What if…
• Christine Sine – If the Resurrection did not happen, how would the world be different?
• KW Leslie – Supposing Jesus is Dead
• Travis Mamone – If the Resurrection was a Hoax
• Kathy Escobar – Jenga Faith
• Jeremy Myers – What if Jesus Did not Rise?

And for poetry and more resurrection art, visit Resurrection.

Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!



As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Click on the   __ comments link below to post.

#ONEMOM

Watch the video

I believe in moms. Average, every day moms. Busy, distracted, usually a little frazzled.

Which is why a link from an email this week, "It only takes one mom," brought tears to my eyes. Check it for yourself. Can you watch it without tearing up?

I believe everybody needs a mom: a sometimes practical, sometimes sentimental, always available female elder. My mom was my grandmother, strategically augmented by an aunt who was good at listening, some female teachers and professors who helped me get my feet pointed in the right direction, and a generous, gracious mother-in-law.

Everybody needs a mom. And every community needs a mom. Preferably more, but at least one: a doorbell (or cell phone) you can always ring, someone who knows what to do about a bloody nose, a baby who won’t stop crying, or those strange dots that show up on small children just to make their parents worry. Someone who wants to see every kid in sight grow up strong, healthy, cared for. 

My community mom, when my kids were small, was a neighbor named Sheila Allen. She had the answers. Even more, she had the time, and the heart, to open her door and life to young families around her.  When she moved away, she handed off to me: when the first desperate younger mom with a bleeding child appeared at my townhouse door, I thought of Sheila, and knew what to do.

Every community needs a mom, or five, or fifty. Every school, every church.

And yes, - we need dads too. More than ever. But that’s another blog post. So forgive me if you think I’m being sexist and let’s leave that for another day.

I’ve been reading autobiographies of two world-class moms. One, Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, environmentalist and political activist, died last month at the age of 71. The other, Leymah Gbowee, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just weeks ago, along with two other women, for her work in organizing a prayer movement that helped end civil war in Liberia in 2003, and inspired the of the first female president on the African continent.

Both women are far more than mothers. And both struggled with the challenge of caring for children while pursing the paths they found stretching out before them.

But if you listen to what motivated them and kept them moving through fierce opposition and threat of physical harm, it was love of their children, the children who would follow, and the world those children would find.

For Wangari Maathai, the first female Kenyan with a PhD in biology, the presenting challenge was deforestation and the attendant erosion, loss of clean water, and rural poverty. In the 1970s, still a young woman with small children, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an organization committed to planting trees and promoting the rights of women. Under Maathai’s leadership, the movement spread to other African nations and has been responsible for planting more than 30 million trees while helping nearly 900,000 women earn a modest income.

Along the way, Maathai spoke out for freedom in a repressive regime, aligning herself with mothers whose sons had been imprisoned for dissent, living as part of a rotating hunger strike for most of a year in All Saints Cathedral, the seat of the Anglican Archbishop in Kenya, along with a community of other mothers.

She also spent time in hiding, spent days barricaded in her own home, was tear-gassed, beaten, repeatedly imprisoned, consistently ridiculed and defamed. Her courageous work for women, freedom, and the environment helped lead the way to a freer, more democratic Kenya. In 2004, she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, a tribute to her work in "development, democracy and peace." When she died, the entire conservation community mourned the loss of “Mama Trees.”

Leymah Gbowee is younger, just 39, the mother of six children, three from an early, abusive marriage that ended as Liberia, Leymah’s home country, was plunging into civil war. After a period of chaos, in her own life as well as the life of her country, she volunteered to work with the Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Program at the Lutheran church she’d attended as a child. She was trained to work with boy soldiers, newly released from dictator Charles Taylor’s infamous “Small Boys Brigade,” young boys kidnapped and trained to attack schools, villages, churches, markets. Drugged and armed, the boys were part of a bloody regime that killed over 250,000 people in Liberia’s First Civil War, from 1989 to 1996.

Leymah’s work brought her into contact with a group of Mennonite peacemakers who offered her books, training, and experience in conflict resolution. In 1999, as Liberia was descending into its Second Civil War, Leymah was invited to the first meeting of the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET) in Ghana. Later, Gbowee wrote: "How to describe the excitement of that first meeting...? There were women from Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Togo -- almost all the sixteen West African nations.”

Gbowee went home to enlist other women in peacemaking and to begin an branch of WIPNET in Liberia. One night, she dreamed of a group  of women gathering to pray. When she told others of her dream, and asked who would lead such a movement of prayer, she was told the calling was hers. “The dream belongs to the dreamer.” 

She enlisted friends to help her invite women to pray for peace, reaching across ethnic lines, visiting churches to hand out fliers, approaching women in the markets, inviting Moslem women to join them because “Does the bullet know Christian from Muslim?”

The movement grew until there were thousands of women gathering to pray and sing, then to hold non-violent demonstrations and protests, dressed entirely in white, hair wrapped in white headscarves.

Through months of protest, demonstration, and prayer, Gbowee led the women of Liberia, finally convincing President Charles Taylor, in April of 2003, to listen to their requests. With two thousand women praying for her outside the presidential mansion, Gbowee stood in front of the ruthless dictator and delivered her message:

 "We are tired of war. We are tired of running. We are tired of begging for bulgur wheat. We are tired of our children being raped. We are now taking this stand, to secure the future of our children. Because we believe, as custodians of society, tomorrow our children will ask us, 'Mama, what was your role during the crisis?'"

Taylor agreed to attend peace talks in Ghana later that summer. More months of protest and prayer led to growing international pressure, which in turn brought about a peace settlement and the end of civil war, with Taylor resigning and disappearing into exile. In 2006 he was found and brought to trial for a long list of war crimes. That same year, Gbowee and the women working with her were part of a massive move to register women voters, resulting in the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first and so far the only elected female head of state in Africa.

Both Wangeri Maathai and Leymah Gbowee faced great personal danger, painful sacrifice, and the frequent sense of being in far over their heads. They lived in cultures where women were expected to mind the children and be still, in places and times where powerful, dangerous men made the rules, with little thought for the needs of the weak or poor. Yet, in their love and concern for the generations to follow, they stood strong and spoke out in ways that shocked those who watched them, bringing hope and courage to the women and children who joined them. 

Video of Maathai's Hummingbird Story 

On a recent speaking tour in the US, promoting her book and her continuing work for peace in West Africa, Leymah Gbowee often began, or ended, with the familiar gospel song “This Little Light of Mine.” She says, “For the past 16 years I have done nothing great; just let my little light shine.”

Wangeri Maathai, when speaking about her own work, often told the African story of the hummingbird, a small, seemingly powerless bird that did what it could in the face of overwhelming danger and difficulty. 

Little light, helpless hummingbird. As Maathai's hummingbird story concludes: “I may feel insignificant, but I will do the best I can.”

I confess, there are days when "the best I can" seems less than insignificant. Sign up with the One Mom's movement? Sure -but what will that help? Spend an afternoon with a needy kid? Sure, but what does that change? The dangers that confront us in the west are small compared to those faced by women like Maathai and Wangeri, but the temptations to cynicism, apathy, lack of involvement are great. 

"What I have learned over the years is that we must be patient, persistent, and committed. When we are planting trees sometimes people will say to me, 'I don't want to plant this tree, because it will not grow fast enough.' I have to keep reminding them that the trees they are cutting today were not planted by them, but by those who came before. so they  must plant the trees that will benefit communities in the future. I remind them that like a seedling ,with sun, good soil, and abundant rain, the roots of our future will bury themselves in the ground and a canopy of hope will reach into the sky."  Wangari Maathai, Unbowed, p. 289

I'm praying for that canopy of hope, and looking for ways to plant seedlings that will take root. And thankful for those amazing moms, who changed their part of the world through their faithfulness to the next small step.

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

This Story Isn’t Over

Our first church home- Woodland Presbyterian
42nd and Spruce in West Philadelphia

 Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;

  his love endures forever.

Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story—

     (Psalm 107)

I spent time this weekend with friends I’ve known since I was first married. Two I met when I was twenty-one, the other a few years later. We explored leadership together in our church in West Philly, spent time in a young mom’s Bible study together, watched each other’s kids, wrestled with life in the city. Our husbands ran together three mornings a week, played golf together on Philly’s Cobbs Creek Golf Course, and have met one weekend a year for over twenty-five years now to play golf and share their lives. We’ve been to the weddings of each other’s children, and have prayed for each other through life’s changes and struggles.

It’s wonderful to spend time with people who know our story, and who know the story isn’t over. We live in a culture with a twitter-length attention span. Anything that lasts more than half an hour seems like forever. So what do we do with stories that take decades to unfold?

No wonder so many people feel like the hard patches they go through will never end. When their careers stall out, they feel like they’re over. When marriages hit hard times, as every marriage does, they feel like they’ve come to an end. Those long days taking care of small children seem eternal, and the countless difficulties children face become defining boundaries: “Life will always be like this.” “This will never change.”

Our old West Philly neighborhood- 46th and Baltimore, 1983

But things do change. Unexpected avenues open out from seeming dead ends. Children caught in destructive whirlpools can suddenly swim free. Some marriages unravel, but others, with work, prayer, hope, large doses of faith, can blossom into new life just when that seems most impossible. As Ezekiel reminds us, dry bones can stand and walk.

The young friend and her children who came to stay with us just two weeks ago have moved on to an unexpected next chapter. That story isn’t over. Neither are the stories of my friends, their children, or my own.

With another group of trusted friends, I’ve been working through Dan Allender’s book and workbook about the story God is writing in our lives. In To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future,  and the accompanying workbook, To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future, Allender suggests that God is writing our lives, and invites us to write with Him. He challenges his readers to look closely at the chapters that have gone before, to examine the places of pain, defeat and struggle, and to see where God may be leading, to celebrate the ways He’s been at work.

A friend who wanted to do this asked if I would help launch a small To Be Told story group. At the time I was busy, but when my schedule became clearer, I came back to the idea. How hard could it be to write chapters from our lives, share them with others, and see where God is leading?

Turns out it’s far harder than I thought. I’m great at compartments, and at stashing those dark, unfinished parts of the story in cupboards where I don’t need to see them. 

But the story isn’t over, and as I rummage through experiences I’ve thought I left behind, I see patterns repeating, places where fear and unresolved pain keep me from moving as freely as I’d like.

 

Here’s one of the assignments from the To Be Told workbook: “To your well of stories [a list of personal scenes to explore], add scenes where you saw redemption and where it was absent; where great suffering occurred and where nondramatic, routine suffering occurred; where there was peace and where there was resolution. In other words, add stories of shalom, shalom shattered, shalom sought, and denouement” (58).

Sound easy?

Here’s a follow-up question: “”Which stories are you avoiding?” (59)

It’s interesting: in a group of friends, there are some stories we tell, some we avoid. Some challenges we’re willing to share, some we'd rather set aside. Unexpected questions open long-forgotten doors. An honest story from one friend can prompt deeper, more honest stories from others.

According to Allender, “Stories are meant to be told. . . . Telling them is a gift you give others, By telling your stories, you offer a bit of yourself in a world of small talk, pager messages, and email. You offer others a glimpse of what it means to be human and of the struggles that are common to us all, and you invite others into community” (122).

I don’t know the end of my story, or of anyone else’s. I do know the story isn’t over, that obstacles that seem insurmountable can become occasions to grow, that experiences that seem too painful to face can be places where we meet God and see His hand most clearly. I know as well that community is essential for all of us. As we share what it means to be human, we see as well what it means to be loved.

Allender recounts the story of C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. “Orual, Queen of Glome, reads her complaint against the gods. She has been unfairly, even cruelly, treated, she says. She tells the story of her life, and after a while she realizes that she has been reading it over and over again. The silence that meets her accusations enrages and then silences her. Then she realizes that the response was there all along. “’I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer, You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?’”(136, Lewis Till We Have Faces 319)”

As I’ve begun to work through unresolved scenes of my life, I’ve come to see God at work in surprising, yet familiar ways. And as I’ve heard chapters and stories from my friends’ lives, I’ve been struck at how God uses even the most difficult things to shape us, teach us, remind us of Himself.

Makoto Fujimura,  Fire and Rose are One
Collection of Howard and Roberta Ahmanson

     What we call the beginning is often the end

     And to make an end 

          is to make a beginning.

     The end is where we start from. . . .

     A people without history

     Is not redeemed from time, 

          for history is a pattern

     Of timeless moments.

       (T. S. Eliot Little Gidding V)

    And all shall be well and

    All manner of thing shall be well.

       (T. S. Eliot Little Gidding III)

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments.