Reflectionary

They Call the Vineyard Moriah

I know, it's Wednesday, and I probably appear to have nothing to say about this week's texts. It happens that I have some ideas brewing, but I took part of the day off today since there are activities at church all weekend, and I wanted to be prepared in case I felt crummy the day after taking methotrexate. There was more Scorching Ray today, and #1 Son tells me there is no saving throw against that spell. You just have to hope the opponent will miss. So maybe next week I'll be luckier.

Meanwhile, we are watching Season 3 of Lost with The Princess, who was too young for the show when it first appeared in 2004. Tonight we saw a favorite episode, Catch-22, a flashback episode for the amazing Desmond, played by Henry Ian Cusick.

If you're not a Lost fan, you may know him better as Jesus.

I think it's safe to say he is our favorite guy on the show.

(Because we are reluctant to publicly admit how much we like Sawyer, okay?)

At any rate, he is part of my favorite couple on the show, and I love his story, and his accent. Catch-22 shows Desmond at a younger age trying to make it as a monk.

No, I'm not kidding.

Here he is with the first guy to call him "Bruthah."

And in a moment of deep connection with this past Sunday's text, the monks Desmond joins (temporarily, he washes out by drinking the expensive wine himself) have a vineyard called Moriah.

Desmond asks why they call it that? He offers a critique of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Why would God ask such a thing only to leap in at the end and solve it all?

Brother Campbell points out that otherwise it wouldn't be much of a test, would it?

And so they call the vineyard Moriah, that place where testing occurs, where last-minute reprieves do occur, where the angel of the Lord speaks to you clearly in your own darn language and you don't turn the other way thinking you are being tempted by Satan or, worse, your own weakness.

Yes, this story is still on my mind.

I'm approaching chronic illness from all sorts of angles, trying to maintain my sense of humor, employing a little denial when necessary to have some fun, yet also asking, why the heck did this happen now? Why a course of appetite-encouraging prednisone after losing so much weight? Why joint pain and stiffness when I was working so hard to get in shape?

Abraham, up on the mountain with the boy he waited for, must have wondered, too.

Desmond has to make a choice about saving one person at the risk of sacrificing another, but because it's Lost, the basis on which he makes the decision turns out to be faulty. Still, he makes the choice that is obviously right and risks having something else bad happen.

(He hardly ever buttons up a shirt, but that's another matter entirely.)

Of course, I've watched season 4, and I know that the real lesson of Desmond's story is that love is more powerful than time and separation and the efforts of bad people and the exigencies of weather and geography and crazy magic Craphole Island.

Abraham, despite having his child nearly snatched away, does indeed become the patriarch of not one, but two, peoples, so I guess that's a happy ending, too, in a broad sort of way.

Me? I'm on Moriah, wondering when in the world that ram is going to appear in the thicket, turning the story over and over in my mind and heart, because it will not let me go.

Of Margins and Edges

(Proper 8   Genesis 22:1-14)

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am."

He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you."

My Southern Baptist grandmother was quite a character.  Full of drive and optimism, she wielded a powerful charm that made you want to do things her way.  After she was widowed in her late fifties, she undertook a search.  What was she meant to do with the rest of her life?  Following a brief foray into spiritualism, Grandmother Galliford returned to her more traditional roots. She went to India on a mission trip with a friend, then spent several years in Japan, as a Laubach Literacy volunteer.  I have a number of her books on my shelves: novels, devotional books, even a self-published account of her trip to India. 

But the book I treasured most, now so worn that pages fall out when it is opened, was a copy of “Good News for Modern Man.”  I remember seeing it for the first time in her apartment and wondering how part of the Bible had ended up in paperback, with a cover that looked like a newspaper! Because it showed the names of newspapers from around the world, “The Times of India” and “The Times of Japan,” it seemed to be especially hers, my world-traveling grandmother.

Grandma Galli explained that the word gospel meant Good News.  When I got to have her copy years later, I was excited to find that she had made notes in the margins.  It has always intrigued me to find her handwriting beside passages that have a special meaning for me, and even more so when her notes are found in the margins of passages that are hard to understand, words that take me to the edge of my relationship with scripture and with God.

This week I’m working on a sermon about the story of Abraham and Isaac going up the mountain together, and as that father and son step toward the summit, they take me to the edge, to the tiger mother place in me eager to refute a God who would ask such a parent to sacrifice a child, ready to take on all comers who want to insist on the inerrancy or inspiration or literal acceptance of scripture. Clearly there is more to it. Clearly, I say! Clearly there are cultural contexts we are missing, or human hand-prints all over the text. I become vehement, and that usually results in a note in the margin of the page, perhaps a word, perhaps a string of exclamation points, or even a lopsided question mark.

Somewhere I need to leave a note for my children saying I would never sacrifice you! Or perhaps I need to think about what I have worshiped along the way that might have led me to do just that, and make a note to myself.

What do we find at the edges of ourselves, of our faith, of the pages we write with our lives?  At the edges we find the margins, of course: the place where we might make a note for ourselves or leave a message for someone else to find. And perhaps it is in those edgy margins that we find out how to be God’s people, here and now.

Family Values?

Here's a little taste of the gospel lesson coming up for Sunday:

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 10:39-45, New Revised Standard Version)

Do you ever read this and wonder what happened to the guy who said "Blessed are the peacemakers?" You have to admit, the gospel is full of what seem on the surface like mixed messages. Peacemakers were blessed in Chapter 5 of Matthew, but in Chapter 10, Jesus is bringing a sword and setting us against each other, in a mighty roar of conflict!

And if it sounds bad to us, in this era of mobile families, in our time when estrangement is commonplace and we almost expect people to complain about their parents, imagine how it sounded at a time when keeping your family ties meant everything.

Only the worst sort of people would have broken up a family. Women, especially, would never have done so, would never have risked alienating their mothers or their mothers-in-law. These were the people who made sure they had a roof over their heads, who kept them safe, who gave them what little status they had in the culture. Sons did not turn against their fathers; that's why the story of the Prodigal Son was so shocking!

But Jesus tells us clearly, he has come to upset the way things have always been.

I think it might be useful for church people to think about something in our faith community on which we rely, something we love, something we would never want to see changed, and imagine life without it. How might letting go of the thing we love make us understand or serve or simply love Jesus better?

I'm going to ponder this.

Where to?

(Thinking about Genesis 12:1-9, Proper 5A)

With a brand-new college graduate at home, we've been thinking a lot about the seasons of transition in our lives. I ask every day about a different friend: "What are her plans?" or "Remind me, what did he study?" One is going to London and some are already in New York, since Brooklyn is the Hiptastic University Post-Grad Housing Lottery.

And although I read a farewell email to the Hiptastic Parents' e-List that described turning the basement into an apartment for Junior, I think it's safe to say few are staying close to home. If they did, we would wonder why.

 

One of the scripture lessons this week sees Abram being called by God to go out into the wilderness, to be the patriarch of a new people.

Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (Genesis 12:1-3, NRSV)

God asks everything of Abram, and Abram, God bless him, goes.

 

He goes although he cannot predict what will happen next.

 

He goes although in his time and place sticking with your family meant everything, and only the worst and least responsible sort of people would have thought about doing otherwise.

 

Sometimes being faithful to God takes surprising turns, at least in the eyes of other people.

But here is the part we may forget, as we are packing our young things off to big cities or graduate programs, giving them one last piece of advice:

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him.  Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. (Genesis 12:4, NRSV)

Moving faithfully and surprisingly belongs not only to the young. Responding to God is for all of us, even when it might mean the inconvenient packing up of electronic equipment or whatever modern day equivalent of chattel would go with you (yarn, books, stuffed animals?). I continue to grapple with how to be faithful, with a fond hope that I can be that faithful person while living on this same street that I have loved for the past ten years, in this small and wonderful city that has been home for twenty-one.

And if moving a family feels like a challenge, how do we move forward in the life of a church, with our attachments to place and decoration and habit and memory and people?

It seems easy for the young. I moved to New York City at 21 and lived in a little room. I took my clothes, a dozen of my favorite books and my Smith-Corona typewriter.

Can we grown-up people, can whole communities, pare down to the necessities? Can we, when God says "go!" simply answer, "Where to?"

She's a Young Thing

(Lent 2A    Genesis 12:1-4a)

When I was a little girl growing up in Virginia, I used to watch my daddy shave every morning. He would sing to me, and although he did not have a tuneful voice, he sang with gusto. His friends called him Billy, and not surprisingly, "Billy Boy" was part of his repertoire. I'm sure he didn't meant to sing me a song that would create an image of the feminine that was decidedly non-adventurous. "She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother"--that line idolizes helplessness (as well as pie-baking). My father was in an odd place, a product of his time in some ways, born in 1920 into a world in which unmarried ladies never left home. I knew very well, at 21, that if I did not leave then, I might never leave.

I went to New York City for a year, and I lived in a "women's residence" run by the Ladies Christian Union, though I must say the employees seemed neither to be ladies nor particularly Christian. From there I went home to prepare for a wedding, and it was as if I had never left. My big adventure had brought me into a more dependent relationship than I had ever imagined.

Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. (Genesis 12:1-4a, NRSV)

I followed when my husband took a job in a land far from my home. I remember the response of friends and extended family was all amazement and shock! How could I go so far away? But my husband did not want to stay among my people, to be always identified with my well-known father, and so we went.

I went determined to make the best of it. After all, I was married to him.

But I learned that sometimes we have to leave the familiar places to find out who God wants us to be. For me that did not involve another geographic relocation (although there were many moves ahead in our new hometown), but rather a spiritual relocation. It came to seem that my choices were to go back, both literally and figuratively, to my father's protection, or to curl up and die, or...or to trust God and strike out for the land God would show me, a landscape of the heart and soul in which I was not a young thing who could not leave her mother, but a new creation, a person of strength and will, a person whose talents could be put to use on God's behalf, if I could only leave behind the interior world in which I was only a passive would-be muse to the Charming, and Not-So-Charming, Billys.

Your Eyes Will Be Opened

It's just about the worst story ever, this fairy tale about Creation that puts the blame on Mame. Or Eve, as the case may be. It's hard for me to get past that. I'm thinking again of my 12-year-old daughter, and the world she inhabits, and the world I hope she will inhabit, and I do not want it to be influenced by this old school notion of WOMAN as troublesome and manipulative and deceitful.

As you can see, I have to let a few things out before I can read this story the way I read most stories in the Bible, looking for myself in them, analyzing them the way I might a dream.

But perhaps it's good to remember that knowledge will not kill us; it will only compel us to look at who we really are. It may hurt, but it will not kill us.