All The Light We Cannot See (Book Review)

NaBloPoMo Day 7: Post the opening sentence of your favorite book. How long has this book been in your life?

 

"At dusk they pour from the sky."

 

So begins All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, as leaflets fall from airplanes to warn the inhabitants of St. Malo to depart the city in anticipation of the 1944 Allied attack that will set fire to this last German-occupied city on the edge of the sea.

 

This novel is, hands down, one of the best books I have ever read.  And I have read a lot of books.

 

When I made it the centerpiece of a sermon, I talked about how the sighted Werner, a young German boy, so smart, so gifted, is caught up in the Nazi war machine and cannot see, and then refuses to see, the truth of his life, while the blind French girl Marie-Laure sees with unflinching clarity. They are connected by a long-past history, which they discover during their brief encounter before the end of the war ~ a history which involves radio broadcasts, the orphaned Werner and his sister, and Marie-Laure's now-broken great-uncle and his brother, lost to another war. 

 

One of my friends, a science teacher, tells me that it's the radio waves that constitute the light we cannot see ~ something this non-scientist did not grasp at all. My friend says that it is all true: Werner sees but does not, Marie-Laure does not but does, and the radio waves light up the air across Europe, making death inevitable and life possible.

 

Each chapter is a brief vignette, boring through the characters and their lives to illuminate creativity, cowardice, expedience, and courage. People live, people die ~ in Germany, in Russia, in Poland, in France ~ and there is no discernible reason why one thing happens and another does not.  

 

The novel caused me to become interested in St. Malo (the fact that my son Josh had spent some time there ~ now a charming seaside city ~ with his French family when he was in high school made the events of the novel all the more poignant for me) and what happened to it when the Allies attacked, which was this:

I read this book at breakneck speed, so intent was I on putting it all together, and then re-read it very, very slowly, savoring each and every word.

 

This book came into my life only a couple of months ago.  Now that I've written about it, I think I'll start reading it again tonight.

Give It All Away ~ Sermon (Mark)

I softened this up as I was preaching it, wanting to give my congregation more kudos for its generosity in service.  But this version is close enough:

 

Today’s gospel story is one that many of us have read and heard many times, and so we may bring some preconceptions to it. To start with, we may read it in a Bible in which the passage is captioned with the title, The Widow’s Mite.  And so our first preconception may be that the story is entirely about a widow and her small and almost worthless coins.  Secondly, when we hear the word “widow,” that often brings a particular image to mind: most likely an elderly woman, someone who draws little attention to herself, someone who plays only a small role in the life of a community.  And finally, we tend to think of Biblical narratives as moralistic stories, stories which point out a quick lesson, easily understood – although perhaps not so easily followed.   

A widow, an old woman, and the admonishment to give your money away to the temple – or, in our case, the church.  It sounds pretty simple.

Let’s see what we can do to debunk this simple approach. 

In the first place, the story itself, on the face of it, is not merely about the widow and her mite.  That’s really Part II.  Part I is about the scribes, the temple leaders whose task it was to copy and preserve the scriptural texts and to prepare other documents needed for transactions in the life of the temple and the religious life of the people.  Scribes were leaders of considerable prestige, as they were literate – they could read and write -- unusual in that time and place – and they were in charge of the documentation of religious life.  They had a great deal of power, which they were frequently guilty of exploiting.  Look at how Jesus describes them: They “like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.”  They devour widows’ houses!  Before we even get to the widow, Part I of the story tells us that the officials in charge of religious life exploit those who are most vulnerable in their society.  They may take houses from those who cannot pay their taxes and are powerless to resist, they may insist upon huge mortgages against the homes of the impoverished and disenfranchised; they take advantage of those without husbands and sons to defend them.  It’s interesting, isn’t it, that this story is so often referred to as The Story of the Widow’s Mite?  Perhaps we need to re-edit our Bibles and call it The Story of the Arrogant and Ravenous Scribes.

Now, what about the widow?  When I began to think about widows and look for images of widows, I realized immediately that widows are women in all age brackets.  Of course, many women are widowed in their senior years, although few of them are self-retiring, or play small roles in the community!  But four of my friends have become widows in the last few years, in their fifties.  Military and war widows are often very young, in their twenties and thirties.  Some of you have been widowed young, and then perhaps widowed a second time when you were older.  (And I’m not intentionally leaving out the men who have been widowed – not at all!  But widowhood in Biblical times brought with it particular hardships having to do with gross gender inequities.  Women in Jesus’ times were entirely dependent upon male relatives – fathers, husbands, and sons – for income, status, and housing, so to be widowed was to be pushed into a dire situation.  Thus Jesus, and the prophets in the centuries before him, often emphasized the plight of widows.)

When I began to look for illustrations of this text, I found the same variety in the various depictions of widows.  In some paintings and pictures, the widow appears as an elderly woman; in others, as a young woman.  In one particularly striking piece, the widow is a beautiful young woman, looking confidently and directly forward, while surrounded by the scribes, elderly, white-bearded men who look as if they and their rules will crush her.  And in some poignant paintings, the widow appears as a young woman with a child, or even children, clinging to her.  There are many ways and stages of life at which widowhood can pose a threat to well-being.

So: We have the scribes, criticized by Jesus for their pride and their exploitation of the poor.  And we have the widow, who gives everything she has to the temple treasury.  And perhaps we conclude there: We say that yes, the story has a point.  It conveys a moral lesson, and that lesson is: Give away all that you have.  This poor widow becomes an example of sacrificial giving, and that pretty much wraps the story up.

Or does it? Is this story not about something beyond the individuals involved?  Is it not about systemic poverty and injustice, and about how we in Christian community are called to respond?

We as Christians have, in the last several decades, come to understand our faith in a way that is problematic ~ problematic for us, for Christian culture, and for the whole world.  We have developed an understanding of faith that is extremely personal, that is all about each one of us as individuals.  We talk about what “I” get out of church. We talk about what “I” want from my life of faith.  In some traditions, Christians talk an awful lot about “personal salvation.”  Sometimes we think it’s all about “Jesus and me.”  And we often interpret stories like today’s in that very personal sort of way.  I’m not like the scribes:  I don’t walk around showing off how religious I am; I don’t make gifts just so my name can appear on plaques,  and I certainly don’t cheat poor widows out of money rightfully theirs, or evict them from their homes.  In fact, if I’m like anyone at all in this story, I’m like the widow.  OK, I don’t give away everything that I have, but I do give generously and sometimes even sacrificially.  And if I don’t have much money to give, I give of my time and my energy and my gifts and skills.  When I look at myself in terms of this story, I come off pretty well.  

But this story, this story which we will now call The Story of the Arrogant Scribes and the Widow, is not just about the individuals involved.  It’s not just about me, or about you.  It’s about an entire system ~ about systemic injustice.  It’s about how individual choices, such as those made by the scribes, are supported by, and in term support, an entire system in which wealth is funneled to the wealthy, in which prestige of position places the unworthy on pedestals, and in which what trickles down to the poor is more poverty, poorer health, more prison time, less education.

Sound familiar?  That struggle continues, does it not?  In our neighborhoods and in our country and in our world?  It should be no trouble at all for us to envision a society in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer ~ and land in prison instead of in college.

The challenges of poverty and injustice are community problem.  They call for community solutions.  And yet, as that widow knew, community solutions depend on individual actions.  Community solutions depend upon individuals with the courage to step forward and to act.  Community solutions depend upon individuals willing to engage in what Professor Karoline Lewis calls “whole life living.”*  Community solutions depend upon individuals willing to give it all away.

What does that mean for us?  In many ways, we have been doing just that, engaging in “whole life living,” during the past several months. We have recognized that our calling, our vocation, is not to sustain the trappings of the church in a way that the scribes of our story were doing with their temple.  We have come to understand that faithful living as Christians does not mean spending large sums of money to maintain a building far too big for us, or to support worship and programming for a small group of people.  Small sums of money for a small group ~ sure.  But we were spending large sums ~ money that could go toward justice in our communities rather than for self-preservation.  And not just money – but time, and energy, and all of our gifts ~ we are called to put them all toward something far beyond ourselves.

We are giving up the institutional trappings of our lives of faith, the trappings symbolized by the scribes. And we have turned to God in trust that our future as people of faith is secure.  That, my friends, is “whole life living.”  As individuals we have taken courageous – and yes, painful—actions, to ensure that community will be transformed.  We are giving up things that have great meaning to us as individuals.  The widow gave up all that she had in the form of small coins; we are giving up what we have in the form of a building and its contents, in the form of worship and other events to which we are accustomed, in the form of relationships which will move to other locations and be changed.  But, like the widow, what we do will transform the faith community. 

We don’t know, any more than the widow did, how our decisions might transform community.  Her small act, noted and emphasized by Jesus, has spoken to Christians for 2,000 years.  Perhaps our acts, too, will speak in ways that we cannot predict today.

The widow, Karoline Lewis tells us, “embodies Jesus’ own ministry. She acts out Jesus’ own call. She believes that what she does will manifest itself in something beyond herself. In the end, that is truly discipleship . . .” and that is “the essence of God. God knows nothing else than to give God’s whole life.”

We, too, are called beyond our individual selves and our individual desires.  We are called into the whole community of Christ.  We are called to live as fully as possible as his disciples.  We are called to change the world through whole life living, to give away what we have, and to trust that God calls us to something beyond what we can imagine this morning.  Thanks be to God.

 

*Working Preacher for this Sunday.

Lament and Hope ~ Sermon (Psalm 42) ~ A Church Comes to a Close ~ 12

Almost every Sunday after the sermon, we say a creed or confession or statement of faith together.  We do that as part of our Liturgy of the Word, which is usually expressed in three ways: we hear the words of scripture, we hear those words interpreted ~ usually in the form of a sermon, and we respond to those words with our own communal statement of belief, affirming that have heard, and wondered, and believe ~ that what we have heard and wondered about has spoken to our hearts and minds.  And when we say The Apostles’ Creed, which we often do, one of the things we affirm is that we believe in the communion of saints.

The communion of saints – what does that mean?  Many of you grew up in the Catholic tradition, and learned that there are specific individuals whose personal holiness and connection with God is recognized by the church with the label of saint.  Even many of those of us who have always been Protestant have our favorite Catholic saints ~ mine include St. Ignatius, upon whose life of prayer I model my own, and St. Brigid of Kildare (Ireland), who was a great healer and teacher and administrator in the Celtic tradition, someone whom I admire tremendously.  But we in the Protestant church also honor as saints all of those who have gone before us in the faith ~ parents, grandparents, teachers, healers, helpers ~ all of those whom we have loved and lost.   

Today, All Saints Day, is our annual opportunity to remember those saints of our lives, and to remember them well ~ with their names read aloud, with flowers dedicated to their memories, with music to remind us of the important place they have in our lives, with sadness and longing, and with hope and a sense of promise.  It’s also an opportunity to be reminded that the communion of saints, those long gone from our lives on this earth, and those still together here, join at the table at which we will celebrate in just a few minutes.

That’s a bittersweet reminder, isn’t it?  Because, when we tell the truth, we know that we would prefer for our departed loved ones to be here, right here, with us.  We want them to be healthy, and living their lives ~ and here.  I’m sure that as we read the names of the saints of our church and our lives, and as we thought of names of those perhaps not listed, we all felt the heartbreak of having lost them, and wished they were still alive.  The idea of the communion of saints, living and dead, is a powerful one, but it’s nowhere near the same thing as the actual physical and living presence among us of the people we love.

And so . . .  we lament.

“What does that mean?” a few of you have asked me. “That word lament ~ what does it refer to?”

A lament is a song ~ a song of grief, a song of sadness, a song of longing.  It’s the sort of song that makes many of us uncomfortable.  We have been taught, especially in our society, not to feel sorry for ourselves, not to indulge ourselves, not to dwell on the painful aspects of life, and, most especially, not to express ourselves where loss, and death, and grief, are concerned.   Not even where the loss of a mother, or father, or husband, or wife, or child, is concerned.  Not even where the loss of a church is concerned. We are taught to put on a bright face, to put loss behind us, to get on with life.  We are so death-averse in our culture that many of us do not even know the word lament.  We do not know that there is a form of writing, a form of music, designed to express our sorrow. 

And yet the Bible, the book at the center of our spiritual lives, is filled with songs of lament.  There is an entire book in the Bible entitled Lamentations.  Fully one-third of the psalms are psalms, or songs, of lament.  We tend to flip the pages right past these words ~ we want to hear the stories of triumph, of power, of healing; we want to sing the songs of praise, of honor, of glory.  We want so much to avoid death, to pretend that loss is not a constant in our lives, to believe that heartache is not a frequent visitor to our homes, that we also avoid their expression in the Bible.

But the reality, as my friend Patricia Raube preached to her congregation last summer, is that we need songs of lament every bit as much as we need songs of praise: “Because we need all our emotions. . . .  Without them, we are not completely human. We are shut down, and we are cut off. And sometimes that seems like the safest place to be… until we realize that, in the immortal words of John Green, “That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.”  . . .  We need to feel our sadness. We need lament. Not all the time, not 24-7-365, but as part of the menu of full human expression, full human living.”

And so . . .the Bible offers us models for lament.  Models such as today’s Psalm 42, in which the psalmist cries out:

 

When shall I come and behold the face of God?

My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, 

 ‘Where is your God?’ 

 . . .  I pour out my soul:

 . . . .

I say to God, my rock,  ‘Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?’

 

Have you ever felt like that?  Have you ever felt disoriented[1] in your relationship with God?  Disoriented due to your feelings of anger, of frustration, of sadness in the wake of loss?  Some of you may be feeling that right now, due to personal losses of loved ones, of health, of other things upon which you have counted.  Many of you may be feeling that way due to the impending loss of this church. 

And if you are feeling such disorientation, such sadness, then your feelings are not denied, or avoided, or ignored, in scripture.  They are affirmed in scripture ~ they are given voice.  Because God does not ask us not to be who we are.  God does not ask us to hide our true selves, our very real feelings of loss and pain.

But ~ God does ask one thing of us in our sorrow.  God does ask one thing of us as we mourn our dead on this All Saints Day, as we grieve the loss of our church this month, as we contend with the other losses that each of us face.  God does ask one thing of us, and that one thing is: not to lose hope.

The hope that God offers us ~ it’s reflected in Psalm 42, and it’s reflected in our communion meal.

Psalm 42, like almost every other psalm of lament, gives voice to pain ~ and then it turns toward hope: “Hope in God; for I shall again praise God, my help and my God.”  One of the remarkable things about most of the psalms of lament is that they do not stop at anguish.  They do not end with despair.  They honor those feelings of anguish and despair ~ they honor and respect them as genuine expressions of the human experience.  But they don’t stop there.  They keep moving.  They move to hope. 

And so do we, because we are called through these words of scripture, and through the rituals of our worship ~ we are called deep into hope.  We are called to know that we will again praise the God who is our hope.  We are called to share a table first set two thousand years ago, on the night before it seemed that all was lost, and two nights before all was gained.

Lament is what we do when we face sorrow ~ when we lose our loved ones, when we lose our church.  We cannot move forward without singing our songs of lament.

But lament is not the end.  Lament is not where we conclude our journey of faith.  Lament is but a waystation on the road toward resurrection, the road toward that day when the entire communion of saints will again gather, not on either side of the barrier between life and death, but together, in God’s new creation.

And, this morning: Know both.  Know both, in the mystery of God.  Know that your longings are honored, that your sorrows are held safe, that communion is a promise, and that resurrection is assured.       Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

[1] See Walter Bruggemann, The Message of the Psalms (1984).

Disorientation

I spent last night at my seminary, from which I graduated five years ago, in one of the guest rooms on the first floor of my old dorm.  I was there for a continuing education event which took place last night and this morning.

In some ways, it was like old times.  I went with a friend, saw some friends from seminary days, and met some new people.   The dining room is the same, the food is the same, and at lunchwe talked and talked just as we had not so long ago. 

But seminary for me was unlike seminary for most people.  Josh died right at the beginning of my second year, and so my last two years were a dream-like experience.  A walking dead kind of experience  I'm pretty sure that I was insane ~ quite literally ~ with grief.  I remarked at the time that I felt as if I were wandering around on the surface of the moon.  "How would you know what that would be like?" someone asked me.  "I guess I wouldn't," I said. "But I'm pretty sure this is it."  It probably had something to do with complete isolation and lack of oxygen, appearances notwithstanding. 

Last night I looked out the window and recalled all those sleepless hours, night after night, when I would go out after midnight and walk in circles around the campus, trying to . . .  I don't know what I was trying to do.  

It was a strange experience, my seminary career.  I'm so sorry that it wasn't what I had anticipated, not after the first year.

But tonight I think: What if I hadn't returned?  (A lot of people thought that going back was itself the truest indication of insanity.)

I would have missed the conversations and emails I've had with friends over the past few weeks. I wouldn't even have those friends. I would have missed this whole life as a pastor that I've had, despite everything crashing and burning and going to hell, including me.  I would have missed so much. 

I would have missed my version of surviving.

I will never be that person who went off to school in the fall of 2007.  She is long gone, never to return.

But I find that this new one is not so bad.

A Church Comes to a Close ~11: Final Session Meeting

In the Presbyterian Church, the church council is called a session.  Ours has its final regular meeting tomorrow afternoon.

 

In my report, I provided an update on the nuts and bolts of the closing, and added the following, more important than any nut or bolt:

 

It has been my great privilege to serve our congregation with each of you for the past two years.  I so wish that the results as we know them right now were different ~ I do believe that in many ways we came close to transforming the life of the church.  And I am sure that the Holy Spirit has moved among us in powerful ways.  But God’s ways are so often not ours, and the Spirit may have been directing all of us toward something we have not yet imagined or understood. 

Nevertheless, from the most vexing maintenance problem to the most wondrous visioning questions, each of you has served the congregation with energy and intelligence and imagination ~ and distinction.  I am truly proud of and humbled by (can you be both things at once?) your courage, your willingness to try and try again, your honesty, and your determination to go out strong.

Well done, good and faithful servants.

A Church Comes to a Close ~ 10: Hindsight

 

 

It's always 20:20, isn't it? Although I confess, I haven't yet had the laser surgery that might afford me that vision, not where our congregation is concerned.

 

Let me state first that this is not a pity party.  My colleagues affirm that I have done well. My parishoners are grateful for the preaching and care they've received. 

 

But . . .

 

Every day I look around and ask: What did I miss?

 

Is there money hiding under a cushion somewhere?

 

Should I have walked through the building more often and looked at all that it contains in a material way (see previous post) and found a way to re-purpose it?

 

Should I have been out in the city more often talking with people and inviting them over?

 

Should I have shoved the congregation out the door to do the same?

 

Should I have stopped trying to address the endless series of financial problems and focused entirely on the congregation and neighborhood, building be damned?

 

Should I have insisted that we spend a month of Sundays worshipping in homes and cooking food together to give away so that people could have experienced an alternative form of being church?

 

Should I have spent more time teaching the various committee members how to do their work so that it didn't all fall on a few resolute leaders?

 

Should I have submitted that huge grant proposal to the Presbytery?

 

Should I have written an article each month for the local paper?

 

Should I have found a way for me to worship more, pray more, seek God more, and hear more?

 

I just don't know.

 

 

 

 

 

A Church Comes to a Close ~ 9: Please Don't Use!

Our administrative assistant and I are in the process of inventorying the contents of the church.  Last week, I made my way through most of the kitchen, and found what you might expect in the way of appliances, utensils, serving platters, and china and silverware.

 

I don't recall the china having been used since my arrival two years ago.  It seems that there must at one time have been at least 100, maybe 150, place settings of the white china, and possibly another 50 of the flowered china. We have used paper and plastic for everything ~ coffee hours, celebrations, and monthly free community meals.  As far as I know, the dishwasher ~ oops, forgot to add that to the inventory! ~ does not work, so using china would add substantially to an event's workload.

 

I knelt down to open a lower cupboard one day, where I discovered a store of dessert plates, on top of which rested a handwritten note stating that, "These plates have been counted and stacked.  Please do not use!"

 

I've been thinking about that note all week and what it says about the state of mind in the congregation.

 

What if it had said, instead, "These plates have been stacked and counted.  Ready for the next event!"

 

Or, "Clean and ready to use.  Enjoy!"