Lent Six: Follow

The first words I learned in another language were these: 

He decidido seguir a Cristo,
He decidido seguir a Cristo
He decidido seguir a Cristo,
No vuelvo atrás, no vuelvo atrás.

I learned the words from missionaries on sabbatical from Peru who visited the little Bible camp in the Catskills where I spent my childhood summers. They taught us about life in Peru, shared stories of their time in the Andean mountains, and taught us to sing that song in Spanish.

I already knew the words in English:

I have decided to follow Jesus.
No turning back, no turning back. 

I was probably nine or ten at the time. My family attended a small Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, not far from the denominational headquarters in Nyack, New York, so I already knew quite a few missionaries. One of my grandmother's closest friends was a single woman who spent most of her life planting churches in Ethiopia. From my tiniest years I had heard the stories of Nate Saint, Jim Elliot and the three other young men who died in Ecuador in 1956, killed by indigenous warriors. 

I was reminded of all that a few weeks ago when my husband, Whitney, gave the sermon at our church, on the text of Mark 8:31-38. He mentioned Jim Elliot and a comment scrawled in Elliot's journal, a line I heard often as a kid, again at the Christian college I attended: "He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."

In his sermon, Whitney reflected on the ways he has tried to follow Jesus. That's been a core foundation of our marriage: attempting to find out what it means to follow, commitment to follow even when it costs us. 

Those verses from Mark suggest cost is part of the calling: 

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?

Looking back on the decades since I first sang those words, I find I have always gained far more than I lost in any attempt to follow Jesus. In the moment, the sacrifices seem real. In retrospect, they're incredibly small compared to the growth and gain in wisdom and joy along the way. 

This week, Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and the celebration of resurrection, is always an odd one for me. We wait in that space between hosannah, grief, and unexpected new life.  

We walk with the disciples between obedience and worship, doubt and betrayal, fear, disbelief, then greater faith and understanding.

We wave our palms, throw them down, wrestle over who will be most faithful.

We assume we're the ones who will get it right, who will always follow, not matter what. Then, if we're listening well, we come face to face with how far we got it wrong. 

In this week, we hold our hearts open to the space between: between death and resurrection, between kingdom of this earth and kingdom to come, between being known and fully knowing, between judgement and everlasting love.

In all of that, Jesus invites us to follow.  

I decided to do that long ago but I'm still learning what it means. 

I'm sharing Whitney's sermon here. And sharing a few more words of that childhood song, words I never learned in Spanish, but have done my best to live in English, always aware that, like those early disciples, I often get it wrong:

The world behind me, the cross before me;
The world behind me, the cross before me;
The world behind me, the cross before me;
No turning back, no turning back. 

This is the sixth of a Lenten series:

• Lent One: I said to my soul, be still
• Lent Two: All things new
• Lent Three: Walking in between
• Lent Four: Resting in Mercy
• Lent Five: Stillness and Sunshine

Other Lenten series:

2015: 

• Ash Wednesday: Confession Booth
• Lent One: Embracing Hunger
• Lent Two: Eluding Privilege
• Lent Three: Exploring Power
• Lent Four: Expecting Suffering
• Lent Five: Escaping Blindness
• Lent Six: Encountering Contradiction

2014

• Leaning into Lent
• Lenten Sorrow : Lament and Nacham 
• Lenten Silence: Charash, Be Still
• Lenten Sweetness: Tasting Towb
• Lenten Submission: Rethinking Hupotassō
• Lenten Song: Remembering Ranan 

Lent Five: Stillness and Sunshine

Christ in the Wilderness, Moretto de Brescia,
Italy, ca 1515

It's been a very windy March. Sticks and branches fly in my woodsy back garden; wind wails around the
eaves in the middle of the night. I"m not a fan of wind. I've seen trees uproot or snap; I've been blown off-course on open water. The wind reminds me of storms and wild seas and of how small and often helpless we feel in the challenges that confront us.

Yesterday was the first day of spring. The wind stopped, the weather warmed, and the birds in my yard spent the day calling back and forth about bird houses and tree cavities, planning their homes for the next few months. 

I spent time picking up sticks, pruned an apricot tree, then found myself on my hammock, listening to the nearby murmuring of birds, staring up at the bright blue sky.

A sermon early in Lent set me thinking about this brief passage in Mark 1:12-14:

Immediately the Spirit drove him into the desert. He was there for forty days, tempted by Satan, among the wild animals, and the angels attended him. 

That word, Spirit, in the Greek is pneuma: wind. And that word drove can also be translated impelled, compelled, ejected, expelled, thrust, plucked. 

So the wind this March has reminded me of the ways the Holy Spirit compels us, the ways the Spirit has compelled me. Sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully, often into places of challenge, adventure, unexpected growth. Looking back I can see the wind of the Spirit moving in my life. At the time, it often felt scary. From the other side, I'm thankful to have been compelled beyond my own small, safe assumptions.

But yesterday, soaking in the bright, strong sunshine, it occurred to me I've been viewing Lent, and Christ's time in the wilderness, from exactly the wrong angle. 

Maybe that wilderness wasn't a desert so much as a place of quiet, solitude and rest. Maybe the Spirit doesn't always compel us into adventure, but sometimes into quiet restoration, restful preparation.

And maybe those wild beasts Mark mentions weren't threatening or scary, to Jesus, but companionable. I often find rest and grace spending time alone with backyard chipmunks and squirrels and robins and bluebirds. It's not hard to imagine Jesus even more at home with leopards and caracals and the red-necked ostrich that once freely roamed the Negev.

Maybe the forty days weren't all deprivation and testing, but instead, primarily, a season of soaking in stillness and sunshine, enjoying the company of creatures and angels, an experience known to hermits and mystics willing to spend time alone in silence. 

I've thought sometimes in this past year of the inner hermit in some of us. I spent much of my life as a serious introvert: reluctant to speak, happier alone or with one or two than with groups. That inner hermit has surfaced strongly during the past year of enforced solitude. I've wrestled with that, wondered over that. I'm aware that everything upended a year ago will soon be upended again, as we're pulled back into social contact, back into face-to-face encounters. 

My husband Whitney and I have been waiting for Covid-19 vaccination appointments as our county officials wrestle with the reality that our region of PA is far behind in receiving vaccine. But yesterday a friend shared a link to a mass vaccination site a few counties over, and Whitney and I now have appointments for April 1, Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. We're celebrating. Waiting. 

There is so very much we don't know about what comes next. My redistricting reform fight will be resolved in one way or another within the year or so. Whitney's job is changing and may change more in the months ahead. We're balanced on the edge of return to normal, on the edge of retirement, waiting to be compelled by the Spirit toward the next big adventure, or the next big storm. 

A few weeks ago I mentioned a Josh Garrells CD that became the sound track of my past few years. Farther Along was the first song that drew me in. Another, Beyond the Blue, speaks of wind, of letting go, of learning to see and hear beyond what's visible:

Wisdom will honor everyone who will learn
To listen, to love, and to pray and discern
And to do the right thing even when it burns
And to live in the light through treacherous turns
A man is weak, but the spirit yearns
To keep on course from the bow to the stern
And to throw overboard every selfish concern
That tries to work for what can't be earned.
Sometimes the only way to return
Is to go where the winds will take you
And let go of all you cannot hold onto
For the hope beyond the blue. 

For now, maybe the call is to wait in stillness and sunshine. To soak up these next few weeks of spring. To let go of what we can't hold onto. To live in the light, knowing there are treacherous turns ahead.

So lift your voice just one more time
If there’s any hope may it be a sign
That everything was made to shine
Despite what you can see
So take this bread and drink this wine
And hide your spirit within the vine
Where all things will work by good design
For those who will believe. 

Lent Four: Resting in Mercy

It's a year since the world turned upside down. For me, this week marks the anniversary of the
decision to cancel a large rally planned for March 23, 2020. Fourteen buses were scheduled, 600 people had registered, volunteers had been working for months on signs, tee shirts, registration. Legislative visits were scheduled, materials ordered. Plans were well underway for a rally even larger than one we held in 2018, the largest in our state capital in years. 

A call from a volunteer raised concerns about the risks of gathering hundreds in the capital rotunda. "What if someone on the top floor sneezed?" That one question set the wheels in motion. The next day an email went out, explaining the decision to cancel. A day later the capital event office called to say the capital was closed. A year later, it's still closed to any public gathering. Rally signs and tee shirts are still in boxes in volunteers' garages.

Sometimes our plans are taken away in a breath, a moment, a simple sentence. 

I wrote. that week a year ago, about mercy. 

During Lent, my church, like many others, begins each worship service with the decalogue: a reading of the ten commandments, with the refrain, after each: Lord have mercy.

It’s a reminder, a prayer, a confession.

Lord have mercy.

In the Prayers of the People we repeat the same refrain:

For the aged and infirm, for the widowed and orphans, and for the sick and the suffering, let us pray to the Lord.

Lord, have mercy. 

For the poor and the oppressed, for the unemployed and the destitute, for prisoners and captives, and for all who remember and care for them, let us pray to the Lord.

Lord, have mercy. 

For deliverance from all danger, violence, oppression, and degradation, let us pray to the Lord.

Lord, have mercy. 

We said those words again today, ten times: Lord have mercy. 

I've prayed those words more deeply in the past year, at so many times when I don't know what to pray. For my own health, and the health of those I love. For our family, our church, our country, our world.

Lord have mercy.

What strikes me now, reading back on my words from a year ago, is how much my experience of mercy is tied to my willingness to ask and my willingness to give. I find myself surprised at what I wrote. It's a lesson I seem to see and forget, a refrain I hear when I pause long enough to listen. 

In the New Testament, the word translated “mercy” is the Greek word “eleos,”  from the same root as oil, “oil poured out”. Again and again, Jesus was asked for mercy and extended it in healing, in forgiveness and finally, in his greatest act of mercy, in conquering death through his own death and resurrection. 

In this fractured time, my heart turns toward that image of God carrying us, like frightened children, in strong arms of mercy.

We don’t deserve it, can’t earn it. We fight against it until overcome by grief or fear.

Lord have mercy.

The word carries mysteries: how can mercy intervene when our best efforts fail?

In the beatitudes, the first lengthy teaching Jesus offered, he said “Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy.”

At first sight, this looks like a contradiction: if mercy is something unearned, then why does it seem conditional?

That word “eleos”, like oil poured out, suggests a way of understanding this: when we allow ourselves to be channels of mercy, we experience it more fully, see it more clearly.

When we refuse to offer mercy to others, we shut ourselves off from mercy itself, like rocks hardened to God and to each other.

Looking back at this year we've traveled through, I find myself wondering if if I've grown in experience of mercy. Am I more merciful to others? More aware of God's mercy to me? Are those even the right questions? 

I quoted last year from Denise Levertov's poem, "To Live in the Mercy of God," including this: 

.

       . . . not mild, not temperate,

God’s love for the world. Vast

flood of mercy

           flung on resistance.

Reading back over the poem today, I find myself resting in the opening image: 

To lie back under the tallest

oldest trees. How far the stems

rise, rise

         before ribs of shelter

                                       open!

There is so much we don't know, certainly can't explain.

What if we're invited to simply lie back, as under a tall, tall tree, knowing its roots go far below us, seeing its branches far above us, held in a space of love and mystery. What if this year, this life, are leaves blown by the wind, while we ourselves are held in a vast flood of mercy that far exceeds all understanding. 

We will be sorting through the wreckage of this year for a very long time to come. There are sorrows to grieve, stories to be told. It will take mercy to do that work. Mercy to come to terms with all we've lost and failed to learn. Is that work ours to do? I'm not really sure. There is a great deal I'm no longer sure of. 

My prayer, a year ago, was this: 

In this time of loss, anxiety, uncertainty, fear, may we set down our resistance, pray for God’s mercy, live in God’s mercy, act as agents of that mercy we so desperately need. 

My prayer, today, is simply this:  

Lord have mercy.

 

Lent Three: Walking in between

In 2016 I helped start Fair Districts PA,  my husband Whitney and I took an amazing two week trip to Scandinavia, he left his job of 20 years, and much of what I had planned for my own future turned upside down. For us, it was a roller coaster year of highs, lows, and lots and lots of questions. 

A friend had burned me a copy of Josh Garrels' Love and War and the Sea in Between and gave it to me because she thought I'd like it. She was comfortable sharing it because Garrels had repeatedly made the album available for free download. At first there was only one song that resonated; Farther Along, a remake of an old familiar gospel song:

Farther along we'll know all about it
Farther along we'll understand why . . . 

The following year I found myself driving, often, to places I'd never been, listening to that one song, over and over. For the first time in decades we had no clear income, and I wondered if I should be looking for a paying job instead of volunteering all my time on a hopeless cause like redistricting reform. I was facing into my glossophobia, a fancy name for fear of speaking in public, an affliction I first encountered sitting in the back of my junior high auditorium, wanting to audition for the school play but too afraid to walk to the front and stand on the stage and speak. 

I was struggling to be obedient to a call I couldn't quite decipher.

Looking for a card table to put a projector on in a large historic church while hundreds of people waited for me to speak.

Standing at the podium in a large, new high school auditorium staring out as the room filled and an expectant audience waited. 

Driving across the state to Erie, where I was greeted by a TV reporter, then stood in a crowded auditorium while the library technician struggled to make my powerpoint work. 

Asking internally: Why? How did I get here? What am I doing? Why? 

I had never heard of Josh Garrels before my friend gave me that CD, but I wore it out, listening to him wrestle with questions that echoed the questions in my head:

Tempted and tried I wondered why
The good man dies, the bad man thrives
And Jesus cries because he love 'em both
We're all cast-aways in need of rope
Hangin' on by the last threads of our hope
In a house of mirrors full of smoke . . . 

Somewhere in there Whitney went back to work, first part time, then full-time, working harder, longer hours than ever at American Bible Society. Somewhere along the way my fear of speaking evaporated and I discovered a person apparently hiding inside me all along, cheerfully confident and ready to lead a growing grassroots movement. Somewhere in there that CD no longer worked and one of my daughters burned me a new one to replace the first. I wore that out as well. 

Meanwhile the questions never vanish: where is God in all of this?

The past year has put us all in that space: asking, wondering, waiting. I've been playing that song again, always hearing parts I never quite noticed before:

Where did i go wrong? I sang along
To every chorus of the song
That the devil wrote like a piper at the gates
Leading mice and men down to their fates.
Some will courageously escape 
The seductive voice with a heart of faith
While walkin' that line back home. . . 

The pandemic of course raises more questions than our hearts can handle. Why does God allow such suffering? What could/should be done for so many facing illness alone, isolated and fearful, so many dying in hospital beds without family at their side? The recriminations, the second-guessing, the weariness. 

But equally wearying: the political maelstrom, fury and folly. Followers of Christ led astray by pied pipers of partisan paranoia. The seductive voices of self-protection, of the way it was, of who "WE" are, with an ever shifting "we."

I get hard pressed on every side
Between the rock and a compromise
Like truth and a pack of lies fighting for my soul.

I've been reading the Gospel of Mark this Lent, traveling the road with Jesus and his disciples. I find myself resonating with the constant bewilderment of crowds and disciples: who IS this Jesus? What does he mean? What is this kingdom he speaks of? What is this death he insists is coming?

That's the walk we're called to. To live into the questions. To hold them lightly. To admit we don't know, won't know all the answers any time in this life. Pain and suffering are real. Evil is real. Joy and glory and beauty are real. 

There's so much more to life than we’ve been told
It’s full of beauty that will unfold
And shine like you struck gold my wayward son
That deadweight burden weighs a ton
Go down to the river and let it run
And wash away all the things you’ve done
Forgiveness, alright . . . 

Skipping like a calf loosed from its stall
I'm free to love once and for all
And even when I fall I'll get back up
For the joy that overflows my cup
Heaven filled me with more than enough
Broke down my levees and my bluffs
Let the flood wash me

Garrels challenges me. His work defies punctuation. His style defies category. But in some ways that seems to be the point. He invites us to that space where heaven breaks down our levees and our bluffs, our definitions, our assumptions, our need to control, to explain, to hold God on our terms. 

The daughter who supplied the replacement CD bought me another for Christmas, with another of Garrel's CDs, his own pandemic versions of familiar gospel song: Peace To All Who Enter Here. 

As I listen to both, as I pray and wait and walk out my faith in this hard, too-long in-between time, I am reminded, again and again, that my categories are too small. My heart is too human. My assumptions don't meet the needs of the day.

I may feel like spring will never come, but it's already leaping up under melting snow, in patches of mud, despite the biting northwest wind: beauty, bird song, new life, a new season.

And in far deeper ways, God is at work in the dark, the cold, the sorrow. I may see no way to bridge the political divides, but God's spirit is at work, already changing hearts and minds as only God can do. There may be no family members holding the hands of those who die, but God is already there, in every room, speaking words of love and welcome to fearful, lonely hearts.

This may be a hard, long, painful chapter in the unfolding story, but it's not the last chapter. We already know: the story ends in joy. 

So put your voice up to the test
Sing Lord come soon
Farther along we'll know all about it
Farther along we'll understand why
Cheer up my brother live in the sunshine
We'll understand it all by and by