Remembering Whose We Are

Psalm 147: 1-11, 20c

Re-member-ing what has been torn apart and then restored is our context for Psalm 147, a psalm composed after the Babylonian exile (147:2 The Holy rebuilds Jerusalem; the One gathers in the exiles of Israel).

Often enough, attending the psalms in devotionals and worship, I have found people rushing through, reading the words aloud with no meaning given to them. They are words, or a song, and holy words, so we should say them and be about them. While there are communities that endeavor to read neutrally so as to best allow what the Holy is saying come through the words, I find myself more filled with awe and gratitude and reverence when I pause and attend to the meaning as I read the psalms out loud.

Psalm 147:1 begins us with an affirmation of praise. Hallelujah! It is good to chant hymns to the Holy One; it is pleasant to sing glorious praise. Sitting in the sanctuary, meeting these words, with whatever is going on in my life, I want to meet those words with meaning. When I’m in trouble, I’m given a chance to find a Hallelujah moment, to remember I am not alone wherever I go, however I find myself. When I’m full of wonder, I have a chance to lift up my heart with thanksgiving. However I am, the affirmation of praise is an invitation to remember my whole self and be refreshed and renewed.

Many of us will meet exile and plenty of troubles in our lives, before we arrive in the hour of prayer, and after. Psalm 147 and psalms like it give us the marvelous opportunity to remember who we are and whose we are.

Wholeness in Exile

Isaiah 40:21-31

How do we pass wholeness to the next generation when we ourselves have been torn apart? How do we teach and live into the wisdom that calls us, and live into the covenant that we belong to still when we struggle to remember and disentangle our fears and learning from trauma? When our memories falter, how do we live faithfully?

The prophet Isaiah, sending a message of consolation to the people who have endured captivity for a generation, is speaking to people who struggle with feeling forgotten, abandoned, and, often, condemned. Isaiah speaks to the generation growing up in and born in captivity, the ones without the sense memories of home, that most beloved of places, where we meet the Holy in joy (Psalm 84). Isaiah speaks to the ones whose lives are formed by exile and slavery rather than the responsibilities of freedom. Tired ourselves, we can fear that the Holy is tired of us (Isaiah 40:27).

Exile and alienation remain a common experience, spiritually and psychologically, as so many of us grow up displaced, or with the place we would call home desecrated and difficult to thrive in.  How do we grow faithfully and find healing and hope? How do we meet the Beloved right where we are?

Isaiah reminds us in our separation and exile that the Holy is everywhere, bigger than our prisons and our walls, bigger than any border we might throw up and any chasm that separates us from others. Not only that, but we are cared for by the Beloved, one who cannot grow tired, one whose wisdom is bigger than our knowing, one who bears us up even in the middle of our troubles.

We are ever meeting the Beloved right where we are, whether we are at home or in exile. Part of the work of faithing is knowing who we are and whose we are, which we do singing the songs of reassurance and thanksgiving, remembering the good history and the difficult times that came before, in being wholly present with the Holy Presence.

Authority & Accountability

Mark 1:21-28

Just imagine it – one day you’re doing something you know how to do really well, and people are loving what you do, bunches of them hanging out to soak it up, and heading back to the rest of their lives encouraged and inspired to share their gifts for goodness. And right in the middle of that someone comes in and has a tantrum or works really hard to undermine your ability to share your gifts and seeks any way they can to ruin and distract.

That’s what happens to Jesus in this story from Mark. Jesus is teaching and a guy starts shouting and disrupting. The crowd seems silent, leaving it to see if Jesus has authority to hold this disruptive person accountable and reincorporate him into the community as a whole.

Some of us might not have to try very hard to imagine this scenario. We’ve lived it. Perhaps more than once, perhaps we even live it regularly. Perhaps we’ve been sharing our particular gifts, perhaps we’ve been the larger community grooving and then disrupted too, perhaps we’ve been the disruptor and disrespecter. There are times for disruption – Jesus does that too – but when someone’s or some community is sharing their gifts for goodness, giving thanks and worshipping, and finding their way to living faithfully is very rarely that time. We can disrupt respectfully, but that is not the scenario Mark is relating. So this week let’s stay focused on disrespectful disruption while communities are working and learning together to live more faithfully.

But Jesus doesn’t disrespect the disruptor. He does insist that the disruption cease – not without more challenges and crying and difficulty. Once we’re in the habit of being disruptive, resentful, bitter, and cynical it is really hard to stop, to learn how to be generous again, how to contribute in constructive ways, how to use and free our gifts to sustain goodness. But Jesus gives the disruptor and the community as a whole that chance to learn, by insisting that the disrespectful disruption cease, but not ejecting the person. We call that accountability, community, merciful justice, steadfast love, and forgiveness.

We live in neither our own authority nor that of Transforming Love when we are silent and refuse to hold one another in merciful justice, forgiveness, and generosity. That does not mean we endure endless disrespect: we are failing in steadfast love to not invite each other to be blessings rather than curses. And because we are not Jesus, we as a whole community – when we’re leading, when we’re following – have to do that work of loving accountability. Otherwise we’re handing the power of authoring life for good or for ill to bullies, to people possessed with their own bitter sense of power, and to our own fearfulness. Living faithfully, we are called to be part of and to be transformed in Love. That’s going to mean some difficult, messy, uncomfortable, and saddening times in relationships with our suffering world and with our suffering souls.

In the community guided by Love, none of us can be off the hook for the work of being a community and growing communities of peace and transforming love in this life.

We are given the blessing of the right to dignity, but it is up to us to call one another to live with dignity and accord that to others. We are not entitled to live lives free of challenge, difficulty, or disrespectful disruption and disappointment. Jesus didn’t live that way. Elijah didn’t live that way. Esther didn’t live that way. Hagar didn’t live that way. Why should we?  

Love transforms us when we’ve putting it into action during particularly challenging events and times. That’s very good news and cause for thanksgiving.