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A God who looks like us

All Lily had to remember her mother were 10-year-old memories, a few scraps of biographic information and a paper bag tucked away in the attic for moth and rust to destroy.

In the paper bag Lily found a photograph, a pair of white cotton gloves stained with the color of age and a small wooden picture of Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

Lily recognized Mary though her skin was dark and her head was covered with a fancy gold scarf and decorated with red stars.

On the back of the wooden picture of Mary were words handwritten in unfamiliar scribe: Tiburon, South Carolina. In a moment this picture captured Lily; its mystery, its foreign familiarity, its invitation for adventure and promise of new things in a new town far from home.

Soon Lily found herself in Tiburon, seeking and hoping to answer questions about her mother and believing that Tiburon and the picture of a dark-skinned Mary was the answer to all of her questions.

Once in Tiburon, Lily went to the post office. It was here that Lily caught a glance of another picture of a dark-skinned Mary. It was the brand label for Black Madonna Honey.

Lily would find the Black Madonna Apiary—the bee farm—where she looked for answers and where she asked for refuge from May, June and August Boatwright, the owners and operators of the farm.  

Now, Lily was a 14-year-old white girl who had run away from home with her black housekeeper in the South in the summer of 1964. May, June and August were black bee farmers. Lily had indeed come far from home.

One day, perhaps compelled by a juvenile freedom to ask questions one would not dare, Lily said to August, “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I never thought of the Virgin Mary being colored till I saw this picture.”

August said, “A dark-faced Mary is not as unusual as you think. There are hundreds of them over in Europe, places like France and Spain.”

Lily continued, “How come you put the Black Madonna on your honey? Usually people get in a rut putting honey bears on them.”

August grew still, holding a jar in her hand and looking into the distance like she-d gone in search of the answer and that finding it had been the bonus of the day. August said, “I wish you could’ve seen the Daughters of Mary—the local black sisters—the first time they laid eyes on this label. You know why? Because when they looked at her, it occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what’s divine can come in dark skin. You see, everybody needs a God who looks like them, Lily.”

Everybody needs a God who looks like them.

How is it that you picture God?

A bearded man with light skin, flowing garments and comfortable sandals? This is God on The Simpsons. This God also has five fingers; one more than the Homer could muster.   

  Or, along the same lines, perhaps the svelte Santa Claus-type God that Michelangelo depicts in his ‘Creation of Adam’ fresco in the Sistine Chapel. God is an old man with a grey and white beard, flashing muscles, gritting teeth and piercing eyes.

This strong old man God is a recurring theme—in our language, in our prayers and in our understanding of God as Father.  

But not many of us look like this God do we? These images of God are particular representations of God that often mirror the powerful and mighty.

But God cannot be captured in an image however grand, however beautiful. Our images of God are ultimately not enough. They point to God, but they are not God.

In The Secret Life of Bees, in which August tells Lily that everybody needs a God who looks like them, the women cling to the Black Madonna, which was just the figurehead off an old ship, but, as August says, “The people needed comfort and rescue, so when they looked at it, they saw Mary, and so the spirit of Mary took it over.” 

Our images for God do a lot to tell us about who God is. We only have our words, our pictures and these are what we use to tell of God and God’s love. We know they aren’t complete pictures, but they give us glimpses and help us understand God, what God has done for us and who we are as God’s creatures.

Take another look at Michelangelo’s painting. Can you see God? God is seen as straining towards a limp Adam. This picture evokes a different side of God. God is seen as straining towards God’s creation—Adam—as one who cares for creation. Adam is seen as uninterested, lazy, bored. 

I like this picture of God, not because of what God looks like, but because of what God is doing. We are often tempted to think that we have to strain towards God for God to strain towards us.

This picture not only the mighty God we’ve imagined throughout history, but the God who is concerned for creation. 

God is a God who is straining towards creation; deeply caring, deeply concerned.

Not cool, not detached, but present and concerned.

Not far away, not separated, but closer than we imagine and closer than we can touch. 

In Jesus, we have a God who looks like us. 

Hear our text for today, it comes from the 11^th chapter of the Gospel of John: Jesus Wept. 

Jesus wept. Now, Jesus had been called to heal Lazarus, but arrived too late; Lazarus was already dead.

Jesus wept. What a different picture of God. In Jesus we have a God who looks like us: one who weeps over the death of a loved one, one caught up by the changes and chances of everyday life. 

Jesus wept. Jesus mourned the death of Lazarus. Jesus felt what you or I might feel at the death, illness or pain of an other or of ourselves. 

Jesus wept. God weeps with us when we weep; our suffering is God’s suffering.

In Jesus we have a God who looks like us. 

Jesus isn’t empathetic here; that is, able to understand, be aware of, sensitive to, and able to experience the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another without having the feelings, thoughts, and experiences himself. Jesus doesn’t understand us from a far.

Jesus is sympathetic: acting or having the capacity to enter into and share the feelings or interests of another, of you, of me. 

In Jesus, we have a God who looks like us.

In Jesus God so strained towards us that he became someone like us, like you, like me, able to understand us because he became one of us. But Jesus did not end there.

In Jesus our tears are turned to joy, sadness turned to dancing, death turned to life.  For Jesus became one of us, taking on our existence, our pain, our sin, our death not only to be sympathetic, but to defeat their power over us. No longer do these things have the final word. Jesus does. 

It is Jesus who called Lazarus through death to life. It is this same Jesus who calls you through death to life. 

This call doesn’t come at the end of our lives, but at the beginning, in our baptisms. Whether you were baptized as an infant, as a young child, an adult or perhaps are still not baptized—by the way, today is a great day to be baptized—your baptism is the end of the life that is under the command of sin and death. In your baptism, Jesus has the last word on you and that word is life, new life. 

All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We have been buried with him by baptism into death. But, just as Christ was raised from the dead, so we too are raised to new life.  

The life we now live we live with God, who is forever straining towards us, forever with us in our sorrow and joy and forever promising to be our God who looks like us, Jesus Christ.

Amen

Marc's mixed tape :: The Decalogue

The sign of life I referred to in this post:

But then again, there are signs of life, not all of which come from off campus.  There are folks who are just living.  Doing their seminary bit, being involved in the community, being parents, being friends, being whatever they are fully.  And I'm just going through the motions, baby.  Or so it seems.  There is not a lot of excitement on the horizon; no trips, no projects, no great endeavors.  Just life in front of me.  Life, love, friends...I forget that the greatest excitement in life is that which is ordinary, for it is what you get to do everyday.

Marc, or Marc Double O, as we call him, made this playlist:

Decalogue:
The Simple Way a Father Should Present Them to His Household

1. God's Top Ten
2. Don't You Want Somebody to Love? — Jefferson Airplane
3. President Bush sacrifices the  national lamb — Onion Radio News
4. Take a Chance on Me — Abba
5. Shout the Name of Jesus
6. God Damn Job — The Replacements
7. Some Days Are Better than Others— U2
8. Sunday Morning Coming Down — Kris Kristofferson
9. Parent's Just Don't Understand — DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince
10. Sobashiya Abazali — Amandla
11. An area dad swaggers proudly around the house after killing an intruder — Onion Radio News
12. ?
13. Hey Ladies — Beastie Boys
14. Soft Picasso — Vic Chestnutt
15. The Married Men — The Roches
16. White Collar Boy — Belle & Sebastian
17. Slow Justice — Paul Metsa
18. ?
19. Asking Me Lies — The Replacements
20. I Always Get What I Want — Avril Lavigne
21. An area man is just one Camaro away from having it all — Onion Radio News
22. Naked & Famous — Presidents of the United States of America
    
23. Jesse's Girl — Rick Springfield (Acoustic)
24. Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing — Sufjan Stevens

**Of course, the simple way a father should present them...is a reference to the introduction of the Small Catechism of the Lutheran Church.  In this case it's humorous rather then normative.

sweet things on sour days

• the miniature leaves that are beginning to bud on the trees.  so sweet, so delicate, so green
• a full sundog
• a blue sky
• My Brightest Diamond
• an email from my internship supervisor with this video clip.  Everything is better in German:
glumbert.com - Bush Pilot
• steak over gnocchi with shallots sautéed in butter
• discussion with a favorite professor and true colleagues around a pitcher of beer

Yesterday doesn't seem so bad after all. 

I Swear to the Stars, I'll Burn this Whole City Down

Colin, Jesse, Anna and I ventured to Madison, WI on Friday to see The Decemberists and My Brightest Diamond.  We had seen The Decemberists this past November at First Ave, but, alas, lead singer Colin Meloy was sick.  Though we enjoyed the random rendition of "You are my Sunshine," it was nice to have Colin in his gregarious form. 

We arrived in Madison 15 minutes before the show.  We thought it amp time to find a parking space and get to the show.  We were wrong.  Apparently, there is no public parking in Madison.  Neither is Madison a friendly town to navigate.  We looped around until finally we found a cavernous parking ramp under a hotel.  We arrived late and in the middle of My Brightest Diamond's set. 

From what I did hear, MBD was phenomenal.  As I have found myself from time to time, I was sitting on the edge of my seat in absolute awe.  Her voice is gargantuan and her body so small.  How can such power come from something so little?  She also played guitar like whoa.  She closed the set with Led Zeppelin's "Ten Years Gone."

What can I say about The Decemberists?  I love them.  So.much.fun!  Jesse has a nerd crush on Jenny Connelly.  I want her to play organ at my ordination.  Before they came on, they played what we think is the Russian national anthem.  Many in the crowd at Mad-Town sang along. 

When they sang "O Valencia," we decided then and there our trip's theme song.  Whilst we drove around in search for a space for Anna's hip and pretty Scion (yep, the box like awesomeness), she decided that if we don't find a parking space she would burn the city down.  We calmed down after a round of Bombay Gin and Tonics.  Mmmm.

Due to our lateness and the shabbiness of the Orpheum in Madison, our seats were the very last row in the very center.  Ours were the only seats in the vicinity so we had free range to jump, dance, sing...in our case, we decided to stand on the arm rests so that we could see the stage.

There are only two things I really need to say about the concert: one, they closed the set proper with "The Mariner's Revenge Song," a song which they had retired but joyfully resurrected; second, When Colin and crew came out for the encore, he said, "We're only going to do one song," to which I thought, "Harrupmh!"  Luckily for me that one song was "The Tain, parts I/II/III/IV."  Yeah, that near 19 minute epic.  Fantastic. 

I'm too apathetic today to write anything else, but it was great and fun and well worth the venture.

a light that scatters the darkness

I've been spending my week ensconced in endless media reports of the massacre at Virginia Tech.  The most helpful thing for me has bee the brief biographies of the victims on the NY Times.  On it you can link to the victims MySpace page, if they kept one.  At first this felt a little creepy, but it was important to me to know about the lives that were lost and the impact they had on the people and world around them.  Check it out.

The current intern at Sierra Evangelical Lutheran Church, Meta, wrote a nice reflection on her blog. 

The light shines in the darkness.

Common :: Love Is

“Dang it Dr. Lose, I just don’t get it!” I cry to myself after yet another Middler preaching class in which the class prepared amazing yet sophomoric focus statements (thesis statements that note the intention of the sermon, what it is about) and incredibly lacking function statements (statements of what we as preachers hope to achieve in our hearers,[1] the effect). 

Though it is a frustrating exercise, the understanding of focus and function are integral to preaching. In our main preaching text, The Witness of Preaching, Thomas Long notes that separating one from the other is so meticulous a task that it requires tweezers. Unfortunately my greatest exposure with using tweezers comes from playing and failing at the game Operation. Every time I try to remove “Writer’s Cramp” or “Water on the Knee” the same obnoxious buzzing rings out which tells me, “You’ve failed yet again, Falkman!” It is a difficult but ultimately important task. 

Rapper Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr, better known as Common, evokes in his songs the meticulous movement from focus to function. I first heard Common on 89.9 about the same time I read this about him and the state of rap in the March issue of Paste Magazine: 

“…Rap has undergone a violent sea-change during the last 10 years. The mainstream had space for politically voluble hip-hop in the early ’90s…. In the aughties,[2] rap remains socially charged, but its conscience has receded behind an iron arras[3] of nihilism, conspicuous consumption, misogyny and violence. Yet Common, an everyman rapping about love, spirituality, fidelity and social justice, has managed to flourish in the heyday of superhuman crime rap.”[4]

Common has a valuable lesson for ministers of the word. The words we use are to have an impact in the lives of the hearer. Words must not find their telos in themselves, but in the effect they achieve in the hearer. According to Common, words that seek their own end in the current moment quickly pass away and lose their sense of meaning and power. 

In the song “Love Is” off of Common’s 2005 album “Be,” I hear a song that makes the connection between focus and function, moving beyond what love is to what love does. It also offers as much hip-hope as he does hip-hop (sorry for the pun, it is not my own). The chorus, which repeats throughout, binds the song together and bids the hearer to love: 

How beautiful love can be
On the streets love is hard to see
It’s a place I’ve got to be
Lovin’ you is lovin’ me.

 I’m thinking of this song in terms of what it is we will preach in the coming years. I’m thinking of this song and it’s talk of love and am reminded of Susan Palo Cherwein, a hymn writer and poet, who has a list of words that she doesn’t let herself use too often—if ever. These are words that are too commonplace or words that have lost their meaning and effect. One such word is ‘love.’  

Love is a good word. How has it lost its meaning? How has it become a word that has found its telos in itself, devoid of meaning and power? In My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle would assert that love has lost its power because it has lost its action. She sings an important lesson:

“Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through first from him now from you. Is that all you blighters can do? Don’t talk of stars burning above, if you’re in love show me! Tell me no dreams filled with desire, if your heart is on fires, show me! … Don’t talk of love lasting through time make me no undying vow, show me now! Sing me no song, read me no rhyme, don’t waste my time, show me!”

By Eliza Doolittle and for the sake of the people in our congregations, we are being urged not only to use words which connect to our minds but also to use our words in such a way as to create or achieve a reality of which we speak. After all, you can’t interpret words apart from actions just as you cannot separate faith and good works or a flame from its heat.

Love is more than a word. Love is more than admiration of a beautiful thing. Love is a guts out, irrational giving of yourself for another. It is hard to see not only because it doesn’t happen too often, but also when it does happen, it generally includes sacrifices that one person makes for another. However we dress it up, there is a death there.

But amidst that death is exactly where we experience life. Life is ordered by love, in our families and congregations, with our friends and peers and under God’s care, we are called to love both attractive and unattractive. Human love is attracted to the attractive, but God’s love is attracted to the unattractive, for the love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to it.[5] God creates that which is pleasing to him and calls preachers, teachers and all Christians to hear it. It is not our hand that achieves this but the word we speak and hear. It is God’s word and it will not return to him empty (Isa 55).

We cannot predict what our word will create or the places to which it will bring us, but we are called to hear it, to preach it and yes even believe it to be true in and for our lives. We walk by faith and not sight. While we see love now, we often have to hold it in faith and hope. Love is hard to see, but it is a place we’ve got to be.

---

[1] I say hearers here, but I don’t limit hearing to a function of the ears. Many in our church hear with their ears and some with their touch.

[2] Aughties: The decade from 2000 to 2009. A play on the phrase "the eighties" and the word aught, meaning "zero".

[3] Arras: a tapestry of Flemish origin used especially for wall hangings and curtains; a wall hanging or screen of tapestry.

[4] Brian Howe, Paste Magazine, Issue 29, March 2007)

[5] Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation XVIII.

songs I heard

Being a passenger in my own car this morning on the way to school, I was able to fidget with the radio dial.  OK, so I would fidget with it anyway.  Anyway, we not only heard "Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye but also "The Beautiful People" by Marilyn Manson.  I had to laugh. 

Holy Week :: A Brief

It's Spring Break at Luther, which means one thing: Easter! 

My Easter Week, aka Holy Week went thus:

Palm Sunday at Mt. Olive:  Due to inclement weather we processed from the undercroft.  I wasn't going to get up for the 8am (because I knew I would be going to Redeemer at 10am), but when my alarm went off at 7am I couldn't fall back asleep on account of having the song "All Glory Laud and Honor" singing in my ears.  I was also treated to a Psalmody in a Mendelssohn setting.  Exquisite.

Palm Sunday at Redeemer: After rallying the kids to join the palm parade around Harrison, the neighborhood in which Redeemer is located, we entered into church with our palms and our songs and our prayers.

Way of the Cross at Luther: Led by Juan Antonio Machado and John Mann, this service of the stations of the cross was stationary; we stayed in our seats as we were given different visuals to feast on.  The readings and prayers were in Spanish and English.

Maundy Thursday at the bar: I think we were celebrating our internship news instead.  oops.

Good Friday at Our Saviour's: This is Colin's church.  We had a service on the 7 last words of Christ.  We heard from the Gospel text, then we heard from the newspaper (the news of the world), then we heard words of hope (from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Oscar Romero and others).  They did this last year and it is a treat.  Heartbreaking, but amazing.  Also, Marty Haugen played the piano for us.  Yeah, that Marty Haugen.

Easter Vigil at Mt. Olive: A three-hour service was long to be sure, but it was well worth it.  I got to be one of the readers--I read from Isaiah 55--once the lights went on and we sang "Now All the Vault of Heaven Resounds" David Cherwien made sure to keep all the stops wide open on the organ.  beautiful.  Afterwards, just the typical fare: champagne and caviar, salmon and asparagus. 

Easter Sunday at Redeemer: Just plain awesome!  So.much.joy!  Dinner at Anna's with her folks and Jesse.

And then I slept.

And the winner is...

Me!!!

I am going to Sierra Vista, AZ for internship!  Colin is going to Vegas, baby!!!

All good things!

Anna's mixed tape

Anna likes all good things.  She is hip and pretty and a very good friend.  Here is a recent burned disc I received from Anna titled, "Damn Jeni, I Love a Woman that Reigns."

1. Je ne Regrette Rien – Edith Piaf
2. The Greatest – Cat Power
3. By Way of Sorrow – Cry, Cry, Cry
4. Handle with Care – Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins
5. Jerusalem –Mirah
6. Steal Your Love – Lucinda Williams
7. I am Aglow – Sarah Harmer
8. Love is Here to Stay – Ella Fitzgerald
9. Every Little Bit – Patty Griffin
10. Peace and Hate – The Submarines
11. The Weakest Part – Yo La Tengo
12. On the Table – AC Newman
13. Get Me Away from Here, I'm Dying – Belle & Sebastian
14. Everything Happens to Me – Billie Holiday