What I’d Give You

Andrea Vertel, Hungary, 1969

Happy New Year!

Merry 10^th Day of Christmas!

And blessings this Epiphany Sunday, the day in the church year when we celebrate the mysterious magi and their gifts, and remember that the forced journey of Mary and Joseph extended on to Egypt as King Herod assassinated baby boys in an attempt to thwart God’s plan.

I’ve been thinking of magi, gifts and migrants this Christmas season. Thinking of what we give, what we wish we could give, not just to those we know and love, but to those beyond the reach of our own human agency.

This Christmas eve our family reenacted the story found in Luke and Matthew: the narrative of Mary and Joseph, innkeeper and stable, shepherds and angels, magi and Herod.

We’ve reenacted that story for thirty years now, almost every Christmas eve. Some years there’s a baby to take the place of Jesus; some years we use a baby doll.  Some years the innkeeper is apologetic and gentle; some years indifferent and brusk.

Most years I’m an angel, draped in a white sheet, singing “Gloria.” My husband Whitney is invariably the narrator; his Bible is marked with spots to pause and sing, and he’s the one who organizes the cast, while my assistants and I gather props and costumes.

Our little pageant is a gift we give ourselves: a reminder that we’re part of a larger story. It’s a prayer that that story will take root in our youngest members. And it’s an opportunity to step away, for just a moment, from the focus on things and wrappings.

It’s an attempt to give what is never ours to give.

Those magi, traveling miles across dangerous terrain to greet an unknown king, brought gifts listed in Matthew’s gospel: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  We’ve all heard those words together, but most of us have no clue what frankincense and myrrh really are: tree saps, from two trees I’ve never seen. Frankincense comes from the deciduous trees of the genus Boswellia, and myrrh from some species in the genus Commiphora, both species native in northeastern Africa and the peninsulas of the Middle East.  

Frankincense and myrrh were burned in religious ceremonies, used for medicinal purposes, valuable in trade.  They’ve been found in tombs of kings. They were also used in embalming.  Not exactly an appropriate gift for an infant born in a manger.

Joseph Eugene Dash, 1925, Chicago

Did the magi bring them to signify the royalty of the one they came to find? Did they bring them to be used for healing, or worship? Were they given for their monetary value? Scholars have suggested that the gifts funded the family’s travel into Egypt as they fled Herod’s slaughter of the male infants of Bethlehem. 

Thinking of the magi’s gifts, thinking of my own gifts given and received, I’m conscious that our gifts are in many ways place-holders, or symbols, of what we’d most like to give.

The magis’ gifts signified honor, royalty, health and wealth, realities far beyond their reach.

My own gifts signify love, interest, affirmation, warmth, health, joy, peace.

That sounds a little grand. Yet, that’s what I’m thinking as I wrap a book about young scientists for a granddaughter interested in bugs and dolphins.

And what I’m praying as I mail off boxes of cookies to brothers far away.

The world is a needy place and what I have to offer is small.

A friend and her son were in a terrible car crash just days before Christmas. The call from the hospital as I gathered Christmas groceries reminded me how little I can do in the face of life’s realities.

Yes, get to the hospital as quickly as possible.

Yes, drive my friend home while her son was moved to a larger hospital downtown.

Yes – after some prayer and a few deep breaths – loan her my car so she could get to work, go see her son, somehow navigate Christmas with her four other children.

But what I most wanted to offer is light years away: complete health and recovery. Financial security. The knowledge that even in trauma, God is right there, closer than air, loving her, her injured son, the rest of her grieving family.

This past year I spent time helping launch an initiative in our state League of Women Voters to address injustice in our criminal justice system. I offered time, advise, research, creative energy. Others I know and respect offered more of all of those. Yet what we’d most like to give is far out of reach: real justice. Second chances for first time offenders. Restored families and communities. Equitable schools that make productive citizenship more attainable. 

In that effort, as in so many other arenas, what I have to give is very small, what I’d like to give is infinitely larger.

Milen Litchkov

I’ve posted about the park where I spend time, leading bird walks, hacking away at invasive vines that strangle native trees and shrubs. Our group put in two hundred hours this past year: a substantial gift, yet just a small fraction of what’s needed,  symbol and signifier of what we really would like to give: restored habitats for bird and bugs on a scale far beyond our reach. A globe set free from man-made hazards.

Some days I listen to the news and pray. Some days I leave the news off, and rest in the knowledge that the world isn’t mine to save, that the gifts most needed aren’t mine to give.

Last year, during Advent, I blogged about Tyler Wigg-Stevenson’s small, deeply encouraging and challenging book, The World is Not Ours to Save. I finished with a post called New Year’s Examen: What Have You Been Given? Reading it over, I’m more conscious than ever that the gifts I have to offer are shaped by my understanding of the gifts that I’ve been given. I wrote then: 

Praying through my own gifts, I find myself thinking of others I know and talk with, friends and fellow-travelers who read this blog or share life with me in other ways. Some have great gifts they’ve never recognized, amazing opportunities taken too much for granted. Some have suffered losses they count as deficits, which seen from another angle could be occasions to know God’s grace more deeply. Some struggle with fear or failures, unclaimed avenues into greater compassion or experience of mercy both received and given. Some focus so sharply on gifts not given they miss completely the gifts received in the unexpected spaces. Even as I think and pray of others, for greater insight into what’s been given, I acknowledge my own lack of sight: what are the gifts I’ve been given I still fail to acknowledge?  What pride, or fear, or misguided self-doubt keep me from fully receiving the gifts so freely given? 

For months now, I’ve been carrying a sentence in my mind: “What I’d give you if I could.”

There’s a practical, political level to that musing:

What I’d give you if I could:

• A new car to replace the one so badly smashed.
• A better-funded school, with smaller classes and more attention to kids with special needs
• Better housing.
• A more supportive, less-oppressive work place.
• A caring community that will hear you and listen.
• An end to the wars and droughts and famines driving so many millions from their homes.

But what I’d most like to give, if I could, goes beyond the practical or political, beyond the possible fix or potential solution.

What I’d give, if I could:

• An awareness of God’s love.
• Foundations in faith.
• Delight in creation
• Wonder and wisdom
• Assets and allies
• Confidence and courage

During this Epiphany season (from now until the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, February 10) I’ll be blogging about those things I would give if I could.

And praying about the smaller gifts I might give, signifiers, symbols, steps along the way.

May the blessings of Epiphany be yours!

May God's gifts dwell in you richly. 

Vojtech Cinybulk, Czechoslovakia    

Earlier Epiphany posts on this blog:

• January 4, 2015 Epiphany and Filoxenia: Entertaining Strangers
• January 11, 2015 A Jungle Gym Epiphany  
• January 5, 2014 Balaam’s Oracle, Magis’ Star  
• January 13, 2013 Traveling toward Hope and Freedom 
• December 28, 2011 What the Magi Found 

God’s Economy: Inescapable Network of Mutuality

For Christmas this year I received a book I’d been eagerly awaiting: The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden, by Doug Tallamy and Rick Darke. I’ve heard Doug Tallamy speak twice, once at Jenkins Arboretum, and again at a West Chester Bird Club meeting, and his first book, Bringing Nature Home, sits on the table beside my bed, its pages worn and earmarked.

Tallamy is an entomologist and Darke a landscaper, and both have spent years exploring the connections between plants, bugs, birds, and people. They write with passion and eloquence about biodiversity and its essential role: 

The ecosystems that support us - - that determine the carrying capacity of the earth and our local spaces - - are run by biodiversity. It is biodiversity that generates oxygen and clean water; that creates topsoil out of rock and buffers extreme weather events ike droughts and floods; and that recycles the mountains of garbage we create every day.  . . Humans cannot live as the only species on this planet because it is other species that create the ecosystem services essential to us. Every time we force a species to extinction we are encouraging our own demise.

I have been gardening for years now with Tallamy’s plant lists as a reference: adding layers of native shrubs, studying groundcovers that offer pollen to pollinators, leaving layers of leaves and piles of sticks in corners of my yard. Each year I have more species of birds and insects taking refuge in our suburban half acre. So far this spring, I’ve seen chipping sparrows, chickadees, house wrens and crows carrying nesting materials, and for the past week two busy flickers have been excavating a new nesting hole in a half-dead black locust tree.

As I garden, I think and pray about the news of the day: thousands dead in the slums of Katmandu. Protest and prayer in the streets of Baltimore.

My life is tied to the tiny bees buzzing around my foamflowers. It is also tied to the dead so painfully extracted from the rubble of Nepal, the angry, fearful young men gathering to grieve the death of yet another angry, fearful young man. 

One of the bloggers I follow, Sri Lankan Vinoth Ramachandra, friend of a friend and part of the senior leadership team for International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, wrote this week of the earthquake that has claimed over 7000 lives:

When the Indian Ocean nations were devastated by the tsunami of 26 December 2004, I raised the question: why is it that when hurricanes and earthquakes hit places like Florida or Japan, the loss of life is minimal; but that when the same disasters occur in Central America or South Asia, the devastation is mind-boggling? The answer is simple and straightforward: poverty. Or poverty combined with corruption and incompetence on the part of government officials. In South Asia, annual warnings about floods and cyclones are routinely ignored when the technology needed to save lives and property is readily available. Coral reefs and mangrove swamps (that absorb much of the impact of tropical storms and ocean surges) have virtually disappeared from our coastal belts. Building contractors frequently violate safety standards, even when building in earthquake-prone areas.

. . .  It is sinful human actions (including wrong priorities) that result in the heavy loss of life, much of which is preventable. Poverty and economic inequalities on the scale seen in our world cannot be blamed on God. They represent a violation of God’s will for humanity. . . Natural events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis are a painful reminder of our fragility, our interconnectedness with and dependence upon nature. . . .

There will always follow the clamouring existential questions and our feeble, stuttering human answers. But more importantly, what we experience is a sense of indignation that “the same thing” always happens and “the same people” always suffer; and a yearning for things to be different some day.

I live daily in the yearning for things to be different, the longing for a world where care of creation is valued above profit margins, where adequate housing, good jobs, safe streets are a reality for even the poorest of the poor Yet I know that reality is not mine to accomplish. I spent time earlier this year working my way through The World Is Not Ours to Save by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, who wrote at length of the prophetic vision of Micah 4.

Everyone will sit under their own vine    and under their own fig tree,and no one will make them afraid,    for the Lord Almighty has spoken.

As individuals, organizations, churches, communities, even nations, we are not capable of creating peace, restoring justice, or designing a world where there is plenty for all and no one is afraid. There is a sense in Micah’s vision of people, nations, coming on their own volition, “streaming” to an irresistible new way of life, choosing on their own to beat spears into pruning hooks, drawn by a compelling vision of something beyond human agency. 

We can’t force people toward that vision, can’t compel compliance to the ways of God.

As Wigg-Stevenson reminds us, “the world is not ours to save.”

Yet we are instructed to pray for peace, live in the expectation and promise of peace, to practice peace-making in every context and conflict.

That means praying for peace with those who disagree with us. Living as peacemakers in places of division.

Reading and praying about the events in Baltimore in the past ten days, it occurred to me that much of Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (written in April, 1963) reads as if written now, fifty-two years later:

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

I was seven when that letter was written, just a child dimly aware of the rumbling of racial discord, barely aware of the work an uncle was doing in registering African American voters in poor neighborhoods of New Haven.

I was a few years older when the Bronx erupted into riots, just miles from my home. I could see the smoke from fires from my bedroom window.

I was powerless then to intervene, to have a say, to act for change.

Am I powerless still, a half- century later?

In that same letter, King wrote: 

Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. 

In our current economic and political systems, we are valued as consumers: passive receievers of goods and services, silent participants in a market tailored to our individual needs and wants. We are disconnected from those who grow our food, sew our clothes, patrol our streets, decide our futures, implicitly endorsing supply chains and partisan elections that create great wealth for a powerful few and push the poor and powerless into more and more dangerous margins.

As I quoted Doug Tallamy earlier: “Every time we force a species to extinction we are encouraging our own demise.”

Even more: every time we force a class of people to the margins, we undermine our own well-being, push our world, both national and global, one step closer toward violence and collapse.

In God’s economy, we are called to be active participants, creators of sanctuary, agents of reconciliation.

As Wigg-Stevenson notes, while the world is not ours to save, “the corollary to the truth that we are not everywhere and everything is that we are somewhere and something. We inhabit the portion God gives us.”

What have we been given, that we can offer back to the need of the world?  

I grieve the social stagnation of the past century, and my own decades-long appalling silence.

And challenge myself, and other "good people of good will" to devote time to listening to other voices, then to pray, think, and speak against the appalling silence that undermines our mutual health and joy. 

From my friend and godfather to my granddaughter:
The Duhmanizing Gaze and Thug Life
What My 10 Year Old Daughter Taught Me about the Death of Freddie Gray 

From a woman of color in Washington DC:
Dear White Facebook Friends: I Need You to Respect What Black America Is Feeling Right Now 

From the Baltimore Sun:
Sun Investigates: Undue Force 

From Vinoth Ramachandra in Sri Lanka:  God and Natural Disasters 

From Martin Luther King Jr:
Letter from a Birmingham Jail

This is the third in a series on God’s Economy. Ealier posts: 

Fruit that Will Last, April 19, 2015

Gods’ Economy: Subtract or Multiply? April 26, 2015 

Advent One: Hope is Our Work

I’ve been spending time this fall with Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones.

You know the story, recounted in a well-known spiritual: God brings Ezekiel to a valley full of dry bones, instructs him to prophecy, the bones come together, “toe bone connected to the foot bone,” until the bones rise into a mighty army.  The moral: an exuberant “them bones them bones gonna rise again.”

Seen from a comfortable distance, it’s an encouraging vision: even very dry bones, scattered and forgotten, can rise to life again.

The Valley of Dry Bones, Ben Zion, 1952, New York

The view is a little different up close.

Several weeks ago I was praying for some situations that seem beyond impossible. Let me rephrase that: I was supposed to be praying. Instead I was reflecting on how little prayer I had left, and lamenting my investment in a series of obvious lost causes.

I was due to meet that day with a group expecting me to bring a word of encouragement, and I had none.

Sitting with my Bible, brain and heart empty, I found myself picturing Ezekiel in a valley full of bones.

Not just a few bones – lots of bones. In a dry, barren, lifeless place.

I flipped through my Bible to Ezekiel 37: 

“Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.” 

Ezekiel, the man, the prophet, is an interesting study. There’s a real person there, if you read the book carefully. He’s precise about when his strange story starts: 

In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River. 

And he’s precise as words allow about all he sees and hears, although he’s clear that the words available don’t quite fit, that his experience is beyond language. It’s all “like” something, like the appearance of something – several removes from what it really was: 

Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. 

In a book full of overwhelming sights and difficult instructions, Ezekiel reports as calmly as he can, with only small hints of his personal response. Twice he simply reports himself falling facedown; once he describes sitting by the river “for seven days – overwhelmed.”

But he says nothing of his emotional state in the valley of dry bones.

An alternative translation of Ezekiel 37, by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, offers insight:  

The hand of YHWH, the Breath of Life, was on me,
And in a rushing-breath YHWH brought me forth
and set me in the center of a valley -
Full of bones!
- And led me all around them, all around.
Here! - Very many on the face of the valley,
and here! - utterly dry.
And said to me;
"Child of Adam, earthling, can these bones live?"
I said - "Pillar of the World, Breath of Life -
You know-it-in-your-heart, and only you." 

Today is the first day in the liturgical year – the first Sunday of Advent. In the Anglican tradition, we’ll light the first of four advent candles, read the words of Mark 13:24-37, celebrate the promise of Christ’s second coming.

And we’ll speak of hope.

The hope of earthlings, children of Adam, waiting for the Pillar of the World, Breath of Life, to breath his life into our dead, dry bones.

My son, home for Thanksgiving, handed me a book he brought for me to borrow: “The World is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good, by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, founder of the Two Futures Project and now chair of the World Evangelical Alliance's Global Taskforce on Nuclear Weapons.

I’m only a few chapters in, but already I know can see that Wigg-Stevenson has spent time in the valley of dry bones, like Ezekiel, and like me, and has considered the question: can these bones live?

He describes a conversion experience on a back staircase in the Fairmont Hotel in LA, not long after a less-than-successful protest against nuclear weapons: 

I was willing to do anything.  But there was nothing I could do. This realization dropped me midstride. I saw a service stairwell to my right, slipped inside and crumpled on the rough concrete stair. And I wept in despair for the world I so desperately wanted to save from itself. 

Then, for the first – and, to date, the clearest – time in my life, I heard the voice of God.
God said: the World is not yours, not to save or to damn. Only serve the one whose it is. (18)

 If our hope is in ourselves, we are headed for burnout, disillusionment, delusion, despair.

The Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones, Gustave  Doré,
1866, Paris, France

Ezekiel, in the valley of dry bones, appalled by the very many, very dry bones, knew for certain there was nothing he could do. Yet, when God said “Prophecy,” he did. When God said “Speak,” he said what he was told to say.

And then, in a way, the story grew more alarming. 

So I prophesied as I was commanded.
And while I was prophesying,
there came a voice, and - here! a commotion! -
and the bones came together,
bone to bone.
And I saw - here! - upon them muscles;
Flesh arose, skin covered them;
But there was no breath in them. 

Which is worse: dry scattered bones, or lifeless bodies waiting for breath?

In a way, Advent is a celebration of this place in between: moving toward life, but not there yet.

The Kingdom of God is at hand. The Kingdom is still far in the distance.  

Peace has been proclaimed. Peace is nowhere to be seen.

The dead body is sitting up, but still not speaking clearly

The older I get, the more I invest in people and communities around me, the more clearly I see the depths of our dilemma and the more certain I am that the world is not mine to save.

I am not able to solve or even shake the entrenched racism and oblivious injustice that will put one in three African American men in prison, that continues to question the outrage of one more, and one more, and one more unarmed young man shot dead by those sworn to keep the peace.

My uneven boycott of slave-harvested chocolate, my uneven support of Fair Trade coffee, will never make a dent in immoral labor practices.

I'm not able to ensure safe food, water, air, for my own family, let alone this suffering, sorrowing world.

I can't heal the sick, restore broken families, fix broken systems.

As Wigg-Stevenson observes, in a moving chapter about a trip to Hiroshima to honor those who died there in 1944, 

The sin of the world is not some minor laceration. . . It is a vast and ragged puncture wound driven deep into the lungs and heart of creation itself. The divide stretches between us and God, and between every person and every other person. Even if we cared enough or were good enough to work in perfect concert to try to fix it (though we don’t and aren’t, and thus we won’t) we lack the capacity. The wound of sin is the very ground on which we live, eking out our unpredictable lives along its edge. (61) 

I look at the heritage of war, or slavery, or racism, I study the generations-long trail of abuse, deceit, abondonment, I listen to new stories of brokenness and ask:

The Valley of the Dry Bones, Abraham Rattner,
Urbana, Illinois, 1956

Can these bones live?

Honestly? From what I see? Is healing possible?

No.

Give up.

Forget it.

Yet, we’re told not to give up. We’re commanded to hope.

And not just to hope for a time in the future, but to speak, act, live as agents of that future wholeness alive in this fractured present.

In Ezekiel’s vision, God simply said “Prophecy.”

Ezekiel obeyed.

When bones, flesh, muscle gathered into lifeless forms, Ezekiel didn’t turn and run, didn’t shut his eyes and pretend all was well. He simply waited for the next instruction.

Then obeyed again.

Knowing the earth wasn’t his to save, he chose to serve the one whose it is. 

Then God said,
"Prophesy to the rushing-breath-of-wind -
Prophesy, you child of earth! -
and say to the breathing-wind -
Thus says the Pillar of the World, the Breath of Life -
From the four breathing-winds come, O breath,
And puff upon these slain, that they shall live."

 There are days I start out with no vision of what the next step will be, and then words are given.

There are times when I stand in the middle of dry bones and watch in wonder as they spring to life.

There are moments when the rushing-breath-of-wind breathes through the valleys where I live, and I marvel, and go my way rejoicing.

There are seasons when I simply wait in hope. This is one of those seasons.  

No king is saved by the size of his army;
    no warrior escapes by his great strength.
A horse is a vain hope for deliverance;
    despite all its great strength it cannot save.
But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him,
    on those whose hope is in his unfailing love,
to deliver them from death
    and keep them alive in famine.
We wait in hope for the Lord;
    he is our help and our shield.
In him our hearts rejoice,
    for we trust in his holy name.
May your unfailing love be with us, Lord,
    even as we put our hope in you.  (Psalm 33:16-22)

modification of Velden Floating Advent Wreath, Johann Jaritz, Austria, 2009
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Austria license.

This is the first in a four week Advent series.

Earlier Advent posts on this blog:

Advent One: Rethinking Portfolios, Dec. 1, 2013
Advent Two: Resisting Idols and Injustice, Dec. 8, 2013
Advent Three: Redefining Home, Dec. 15, 2013
Advent Four: Rejoicing in Mystery, Dec. 22, 2013

 Advent One: How Do I Know? Dec. 2, 2012
Advent Two: Outsiders In Dec. 9, 2012
Advent Three: Question. Fruit. Dec. 16, 2012
Advent Four: Sing Alleluia, Dec. 23, 2012

 Advent One: What I'm Waiting for, Nov. 26, 2011
Metanoia,  Dec 4, 2011
Voice in the Wilderness,  Dec. 11, 2011
Common Miracles,  Dec. 18, 2011
The Christmas Miracle, Dec. 24, 2011 

 Advent Two: John the Baptist,  Dec. 12, 2010
Mary's Song,  Dec. 19, 2010
Christmas Hope,  Dec. 24, 2010