When Little Things=Big Things

An encouraging bit of news (\in-ˈkər-ij-ing—literally, having to do with making the heart bigger) came in the Science page of the NY Times this week. Elizabeth Sheehan, founder of Containers to Clinics was preparing to take their first clinic to the Dominican Republic. Their ‘clinics’ are made of two old shipping containers which together house two examining rooms, a laboratory and a pharmacy. Very portable. Easy to redirect. They will be on their way to Haiti now if they can get a medical team assembled.

Elizabeth Hausler, who is an engineer and founder of Build Change went to India to learn more about earthquakes following the devastating quake of 2001. She learned that earthquakes rarely kill people: poorly constructed buildings kill people. She also learned that post-quake rebuilding has usually been done by governments and big nonprofits and has usually been done ‘top-down.' She reports “Contractors would swoop in and build a bunch of houses for people and leave.” Homeowners are often not involved. Houses are too often wrong for the country, the climate, the culture. The main door might open to the street in a place where people are more private and prefer the main door to open onto a courtyard. “If a door is in the wrong place, then the homeowner is going to knock a hole in the wall — and that’s not good for the structure.” Dr Hausler was able to help rebuild in Indonesia after the tsunami and in China after the Sichuan quake. In both places she helped aid officials work with local governments and local homeowners. Dr Hausler now plans to help in Haiti, to which I quietly say, Thank you, God.

The Gospel this Sunday pulses with amazing phrases. “Bring good news to the poor.” “Proclaim release to the captives.” “Let the oppressed go free.” We don’t all do this in the same way, or in the name of Jesus or of any other religion. Nevertheless for whoever does it, and does it well...Thank you, God

Up and Down and Up Again

We’re moving into the liturgical seasons of great contrasts: Epiphany to Lent to Easter. Up and down and up again. Our own seasons rarely match up with liturgical season and yet our lives eventually do as we follow Jesus. We find inspiration and desolation and consolation. We feel strong, we feel weak, we feel reinvigorated. We cultivate spirituality because it’s enjoyable sometimes, we cling to it because life terrifies us sometimes, we simple rest in God sometimes because gradually we come to trust God almost no matter what. It helps to pay attention to these seasons year after year after year.
It’s early in Epiphany now. We’re climbing, reaching the highest point, the mountain of Transfiguration, the week before Ash Wednesday. Then we descend slowly until we reach almost to hell on Good Friday. Suddenly Jesus speaks to us again on Easter in a closed room or a cemetery garden and we can hardly believe we’ve lived to see such Life. It’s quite a journey.

Home by Another way

After Epiphany...

After Epiphany--after feeling inspired and empowered--it might be nice to coast a bit. Alas, not to be.

The lesson from Isaiah doesn't speak of rest but of challenge.

Thus says the Lord...
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.

Mostly, I'd rather the Lord be with me on the banks of the river instead of in the river. And with me toasting marshmallows around the fire instead of leading me into the fire itself. But being in the river and in the fire is part of the grace (and reality) of our baptism.

The Epiphany season journey of the Magi is one way to look at the One Great Journey. We're called by something irresistible and wonderful and we choose to go and are given light to find the way.

The experience of Israel uprooted and dragged away is another way to look at the One Great Journey. So many things happen in lives that land us in places we really don't want to be.

God promises to be with us in both places. Both in inspiration and desperation, and the wonderful and terrible challenge is to open our tender and vulnerable hearts equally in both places, which requires courage and practice.

We'd rather grace come all by itself, without any effort on our part (isn't that what grace means?). Yes and no.

As Norman MacLean writes in A River Runs Through It, " all good things -- trout as well as eternal salvation -- come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."

In the Spirit of the Season

The Poor sent empty away

Hardships of the Hacienda Days

Bolivians struggle to recover from past, imagine a better future | By Donna Stokes

A high altitude grasslands where the Frasquía community graze their young alpacas and llamas. Mount Illampu is in the background with snowcapped peak.

Frasquia, Bolivia - (from Heifer International) Maxima Callisaya-Mamani sits wrapped in a wool blanket on the ground outside her small adobe home in Frasquía, a village in northwestern Bolivia. Near her sits her adult son, Ponciano Flores-Callisaya. Dark clouds descend from the towering snow-capped mountain Illampu in the late afternoon. “Soon it will snow,” Maxima says, cinching her blanket a bit tighter around her shoulders.

The Hacienda Days

Maxima talks about the hacienda days in Bolivia when large foreign agricultural firms moved in and made the indigenous people work the land as indentured servants.

“In the old days, we used to work from dawn to dusk,” she begins. “We had to carry fertilizer [manure] for the bosses of the hacienda. It was a lot of work for us. We were too tired. We had to do everything for ourselves from nighttime until dawn. We didn’t have time to do things for our families; we just had to work for the boss. Sometimes we didn’t have food ourselves.

“It was slavery. Sometimes the pay was to give you a tiny piece of land to grow your own food on, but it was basically bondage. Everyone told us the bosses would say, ‘you live on my land, so you’re obliged to work my land for me. I stole it from your forebears now you have to work on it.’ It was a feudal arrangement. During the hacienda times I had five sons and five daughters. Ponciano is the oldest.”

From Subservience into Poverty

Beginning in 1952, agrarian reform in Bolivia outlawed coerced labor and introduced a program returning property to the indigenous people, though much of the redistributed land was not as productive, Maxima says.

“My children have all set up around [Frasquía]. Now they’re living in poverty and need a lot of help to progress. We don’t have money to purchase fertilizers for our crops. … In the times of hacienda we didn’t use fertilizer and we had average production of [good-sized] potatoes. They were big and healthy. The earth was relatively new then and was plowed with oxen. We didn’t use chemical fertilizers. We used manure as fertilizer on that ground in order to produce better.

“Now that we produce less, though, we live poor,” Maxima says. “Although it’s our own land we are poor.”

Hope for Future Generations

Maxima’s son Ponciano explains the difficulty in raising crops at this altitude of nearly 14,000 feet. “We do subsistence-level agriculture,” he says. “I stay here because I have to stay here. I have nowhere else to go. Sometimes the rain and hail come and there are a lot of pests. It’s hard to make a living.”

Maxima agrees. “If we had to work, even with stones, we would work with stones. If there was any work to be done to earn more money we would do it.”

Ponciano talks about how Heifer alpacas and llamas have helped his family survive in this stark landscape by providing wool and cooking fuel, and on rare occasions, meat. “It’s safe,” he says of raising animals, “because often crops fail. The frost will kill them. Hail also falls and we don’t have much food for the family.” He concludes, “In this region the best kind of production option is animals.”

The gift of an alpaca helped Maxima and her son. But thousands of other families still live in desperate poverty. You can help.

Rejoice! (you brood of vipers)

This Sunday at St. David's is IG Sunday (IG = Intergenerational). One Sunday a month the kids give us a chance to see other ways of doing church.

What a great couple of texts from Zephaniah and Philippians we'll work with. A kind of Antiphonal Song between God and God's people. In Zephaniah we hear about this outrageous song--God rejoicing over us with singing. If we could film this and post it to Youtube it would surely go viral.

In Philippians we are the ones encouraged to rejoice, to rejoice in God. The ability to rejoice all the time is apparently made more likely by a practice of not worry at any time.

And surely there's some way of working in 'You brood of vipers!' Rejoice, you brood of vipers. Be quiet, you BOVs, so you can hear God singing joyfully to you! Don't worry, you BOVs, and peace will enfold you!

I think the kids will have fun with this. How about you?

Baruch's Uncertain Help

By the Rivers of Bablylon, by Lika Tov

Baruch was written before Jesus came. We read it this week because it asks such helpful Advent questions. What have we done to get in such a bind? Why is it so easy to forget hard lessons learned we swore to remember? How can we live faithfully now?

These questions and the particular history of Baruch's six chapters speak very well to our present reality and quandary. The book was probably written in the last centuries before the common era--although it purports to be written many centuries before by an eye witness to the fall of Jerusalem and the captivity in Babylon (by Baruch, Jeremiah's secretary and friend). It's not a particularly original work-- it mostly cribs from other Hebrew scriptures. It's part of 'our' bible, but it's not exactly sacred scripture--it's 'deutero- canonical,' kind of second team. At a time when good Christians are nostalgic for certainty, we get to read a book written not by whom nor for whom nor when it was claimed.

Yet all this is part of the book's gift to us. By taking what is given and doing his best to speak to present needs, this author models how people have always worked passionately, wisely, and creatively to hear what the Spirit is saying to God's people.

Baruch's answer to the above questions (What have we done to get in such a bind? Why is it so easy to forget the hard lessons learned we swore to remember? How can we live faithfully now?) is that returning again and again to Wisdom and scripture--to both what is written and remembered and what is experienced and discerned--trusting deeply in God's help--we continually discover that God is continually making for us a way.

Advent Thumbnail

Though the sun sets cold and sullen
and the moon comes dull and red,
we can all work toward a future
where the light of God still spreads.

A verse for Christ the King

"Attend neglected ones, the lost, the least;

the poor," Christ says, "approach on bending knee.

In these you find the majesty you seek,

and all you do for them you do for me."

MH, Songs for the Cycle

Christ the King

The always insightful Bill Loader ends his reflection on John 18.33-37 like this:

This subverted image of kingship, given us in the account of the crucifixion, belongs at the heart of Christian faith and community - and at the heart of God. In that sense it represents the kingdom, the kingship of God. Jesus’ ministry interprets his death and his death interprets his ministry. So this is not a passivity which surrenders, a kind of discipline which learns to find fulfilment in being a doormat through some brave self-persuasion that such behaviour is noble or blessed. It is the transforming compassion which gets on the donkey and rides into Jerusalem. It is an engaged spirituality which lives not from abject obedience to a heavenly king, but in common initiatives of creativity and hope which constitute the being of God.

It is so good to celebrate the feast of Christ the king in the context of the passion. Obsession with power so easily 'rescues' Jesus (and God) from all of this and makes the resurrection the point of return to power from the embarrassment or the stunt of incarnation. The military Jesus makes an appearance quite soon and people forget kingship is a broken metaphor which has legitimacy only in its subversion. Our task is no less today to proclaim the kingdom of God, a kingship not of this world - but here and now.

Loader's full commentary is here.

Sacred Reading

Nature is so replete with divine truth, it is silent concerning the fall of man and the wonder of Redeeming Love. Might she not have been made to speak as clearly and eloquently of these things as she now does of the character and attributes of God? It may be a bad symptom, but I will confess that I take more intense delight from reading the power and goodness of God from "the things which are made" than from the Bible. The two books, however, harmonize beautifully, and contain enough of divine truth for the study of all eternity.

John Muir, Letters to a Friend

The End of the World as We Know It

We're getting to the time of year when the readings get apocalyptic. Over the past few years these readings bring to mind Bart Ehrman--religion professor at UNC, once Evangelical, now agnostic--whom I heard several years ago on "Fresh Air" talking about how he lost his faith in part because of passages like these. Particularly ones in the Gospels.

He thinks Jesus expected the Apocalypse during or just after his life. And, because this didn't happen, it changes the way we relate to Jesus. Simply--how can Jesus be God Incarnate and be wrong? And perhaps more to the point, what use is Christianity if the savior it points to cannot save?

Even if Dr. Ehrman is right about Jesus's apocalypticism, and he may by wrong (this is a question that probably never will be answered with certainty), it says a lot more about the nature of certain ways of 'faithing' than it says about Jesus's faithfulness incarnating God.

I don't much like apocalypticism either--particularly when it comes with images of Jesus as King. Jesus seemed always to be running from those who would make him king. And always to be running toward bringing God's kingdom into reality through loving, courageous action.

Read the post below this, Michael Garrett's short bit of wisdom about the re-framing of questions. Perhaps our answers befuddle us because we need a bit more skill with our questions.

Reading for 7 Creation

Asking the right questions, instead of asking for the right answers, allows us to know the function rather than the effect of our choices. The following is a commonly posed question that reflects one’s outlook on life: “Is the glass half empty or half full?” This question presupposes that the answer can be only one of two possibilities. However, the Truth of Opposites, as I heard one elder put it, poses a different question altogether: “Is the glass the right size?” ...This is just one example of the way in which we limit ourselves through our perception of choice.

Walking on the Wind by Michael Tlanusta Garrett (A native of Cherokee)

The Widow of Zeraphath

Years of drought and crop failure and God 'commands' a widow to feed Elijah. How do you think that command came to her?

When Elijah speaks to her, she doesn't seem to know anything about it. Yet she takes the makings of what she expects to be her and her sons last meal and shares it.

Why? How do God's commands come? What constitutes a tipping point between self-protection and generosity?

How does that work?

Creation Cycle Reading

…All over the West, as in all of America, the old folkway of property as an absolute right is dying. Our mythology doesn’t work anymore.

We find ourselves weathering a rough winter of discontent, snared in the uncertainties of a transitional time and urgently yearning to inhabit a story that might bring sensible order to our lives—even as we know such a story can only evolve through an almost literally infinite series of recognitions of what, individually, we hold sacred. The liberties our people came seeking are more and more constrained, and here in the West, as everywhere, we hate it.

Simple as that. And we have to live with it. There is no more running away to territory. This is it, for most of us. We have no choice but to live in community. If we’re lucky we may discover a story that teaches us to abhor our old romance with conquest and possession.

--William Kittredge, Owning It All

A Poem for All Saints

Where I’m From
--George Ella Lyon

I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush,
the Dutch elm
whose long gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.

I’m from fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.
I’m from the know-it-alls
and the pass-it-ons,
from perk-up and pipe down.
I’m from He restoreth my soul
with a cottontail lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.

I’m from Artemus and Billie’s branch,
fried corn and strong coffee.
From the finger my grandfather lost
to the auger
the eye my father shut to keep his sight.

Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments—
snapped before I budded—
leaf-fall from the family tree.

A (Broad) Song for All Saints

The roots of all things interweave
and grow so close together
that when we pull the crowding weed
the wheat is also severed.

The hummingbird that works its wings
to hover near a flower
will aid the wind that drives the cloud
that forms the distant shower.

Along with God we co-create
a vast, connecting story
and shape a common destiny
and trail a common glory.

The world is one community,
bound root and soul forever;
and if we are to grow at all,
we all must grow together.

Suggested tune: St. Columba

The Grace of the World

Wendell Berry gives rich gifts....

5 Creation

This we know...
All things are connected
like the blood
which unites one family. . . .

Whatever befalls the earth,
befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life;
he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
he does to himself.

Attributed to Chief Seattle