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Arcade Fire. The Suburbs

I read an article in the NY Times some years back that when the makers of Sesame Street released Seasons 1 and 2, they had to attach a warning label that it is not suitable for young audiences.

Virginia Heffernan writes, “The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.” (“Sweeping the Clouds Away”, NY Times November 18^th, 2007)

“The Suburbs,” the newest album from the Montreal—via Haïti and Houston—band Arcade Fire, is brought to you by the letter M. The album is full of alliterations surrounding the letter M. They seem to come in three-syllable units: Modern Man, Millionaire, Month of May, Mountains beyond Mountains.

We've lost our innocence. We've lost our meaning. The Arcade Fire has its finger on the pulse of this quickly fleeting and fading heart of people in the First World West.

"This place has changed so much since I was a little child. Pray to God I won't live to see the death of everything that's wild." –City with No Children

I still remember an ad campaign for the General Motors Company. They were hawking a newer, bigger and better version of the Suburban Futility Vehicle, the Yukon Denali, evoking images of nature and wildness. Their tagline: "It's not more than you need, just more than you're used to." Not too long after GMC declared itself bankrupt.

The bubble burst.

"When we watched the markets crashed, the promises we made were torn." –Half Light II (No Celebration).

lll

"Vanity of Vanities. All is Vanity; a chasing after the wind." –Ecclesiastes 1

Qoheleth, the Teacher and writer of Ecclesiastes wrote these words well over 2,000 years ago. They still ring true. The Hebrew word he uses over and over again is hevel–translated smoke, vapor, steam, cloud–something that doesn't last; something you can't hold onto. Another way to translate it today in this market is bubble. The dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, and now the oil bubble. Vanity of Vanities, everything is a bubble and bubbles always burst! There is nothing to hold on to anymore, nothing that will last.

“Hope that something pure can last.” –We Used to Wait

Arcade Fire redefines hevel in this album as sprawl, the house of hubris built by those who bought the lie that "it's not more than you need, just more than you're used to." The sprawl has been brought to us by cheap oil prices allowing for single drivers in massive vehicles on 4 lane hi-ways.

“First they built the road, then they built the town. That’s why we’re still driving around and around and all we see are kids in buses longing to be free.” –Wasted Hours

Sprawl is perhaps one of many symptoms pointing to a larger illness in society today. We feed chickens so much food that they cannot stand up. Cows are stacked upon cows in order to supply our demand. Most of the food in our supermarkets is made with genetically modified organisms. Is anything real anymore?

“Strange the new half-light can make a place new, you can’t recognize me and I can’t recognize you. We run through these streets that we know so well, and the houses hide so much. But in the half-light none of us can tell they hide the ocean in a shell. Our heads are just houses, without enough windows. You say you hear human voices but they’re only echoes.” –Half Light I

Even though the world is getting smaller, more and more people are separated. Garages are attached to houses now so that you don’t have to talk to or see your neighbors. Let us not forget that one of the chief ways that we talk about sin is in language of separation: from God, from each other, from the world.

“All the kids have always known that the emperor wears no clothes but they bow down to him anyway ‘cause it’s better than being alone.” –Ready to Start

We’ve bought into the fake empire and now bow down to the wrong idol so as not to be alone.

lll

To make the album, Arcade Fire laid down tracks on a 24-Track Tape, pressed it onto vinyl and then recorded it to a digital location where from they burned cds and made a "Deluxe Digital Package" for instant download. It is humorous that out of that whole process the word "package", connoting something tangible that you can hold in your hands, describes the digital life of the album.

But the album is something you can hold in your hands. It carries meat and substance. To me it takes their seminal song "Wake Up" (Funeral, 2004), and pitches a tent with its themes and meaning: Wake Up! Life is slipping through your fingers; "listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it life?" (Mary Oliver). Rococo, the 4th track, is the first real and noticeable echo to "Wake Up."

"They will eat right out of your hand, using great big words that they don’t understand they’re singing rococo rococo rococo rococo….They seem wild but they are so tame"        –Rococo

Even its music resonates–though in a muter way–there is a graspable lift within the polysyllabic assonance and consonance of the songs title: rococo rococo rococo rococo ro-coco, RO-CO-CO! What does it mean? I don't know, but I can feel it when I listen to it. And I like it, even if it is a destruction of what we’ve built up.

“They build it up just to burn it back down.” –Rococo

Musically, this album is tops. The devastating string arrangements by Owen Pallett on Half Light I and its response in Half Light II are compelling. The album’s other part one and part two duo, titled Sprawl, offers one of the other points of notice. Régine’s powerful yet not forceful voice.

Régine Chassagne sings with great vitality against the threat of suburban settling (and some would say borrowing from Blondie’s Heart of Glass).

“If the world’s so small, that we can never get away from the sprawl. Living in the sprawl, dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains and there’s no end in sight, I need the darkness someone please cut the lights.” –Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

The lyrics, along with Régine’s haunting voice, are an echo in the tradition of laments. It should be noted that the sub-title of the song, Mountains Beyond Mountains, is also title of a book about Paul Farmer, a doctor who provided medical care to people who could not afford it, most notably in Haiti, Régine’s home country (see Haiti from Funeral).

My favorite line:

“They heard me singing and they told me to stop. Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.” –Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

No. Thank you. As Wendell Berry writes, “do something that doesn’t compute” (Mad Farmer Liberation Front).

Arcade Fire attempted and succeeded in building something tangible, something we can hold in our hands: a full album with substance and death as well as just plain enjoyable music. Is it as good as Funeral or as deep as Neon Bible? Not in the same way, but it makes its own way and one worth taking. It is an aural and physical reminder that life lies beyond what we possess, what possesses us and its always a good time to just waste time. As Annie Dillard says, “Don’t save and afternoon, spend it. You can’t take it with you. Go into the gaps.”

Lastly, this is an album to exiles from the location of exile. Walter Brueggemann noted that people of faith are exiles in this world in Cadences of Home. None of us is home and we all feel it.

“The last defender of the sprawl said, “well where do you kids live?” Well sir, if you only knew what the answer is worth, I’ve been searching every corner of the earth.”

–Sprawl I (Flatland)

lll

“People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.”

Chasing After the Wind, a sermon

Strike a match and a flame is born.  You can see its light flicker and burn down the stick leaving a blackened curve of a remnant.  Blow it out and smell and see a waft of sulfur and smoke stream in the air.  But the smoke will not remain, it being without any real substance or anything you can grasp onto. 

            The Hebrew word for smoke in the bible is hevel; it means breath, vapor, cloud of steam, puff of smoke and points to two deeper meanings: 1) it is without substance. You can't grab onto it; and 2) It is not lasting. Now we see the puff of smoke; in a few seconds we will no longer be able to detect it.

            Whether you detected it or not, this word hevel or smoke or here translated as vanity comes 9 times in the short Old Testament reading. Vanity is fleeting and transient; without substance or permanence.  Vanity is the perspective from whence the author sees life. 

Perspective is when an experience provides a moment of clarity and visual acuity in which we are able to see what is important in life.

Vanity of Vanities!  All is Vanity.  A chasing after the wind. Our reading jumped us all over the first couple of chapters of the book perhaps to give us an overview of the writer’s honest, albeit cynical, assessment of life. 

            To further summarize: life is work, work is toil, wisdom is futile and death is inevitable.  (ROLL EYES) Would somebody please tell the guy that he is writing for generations of faithful people who would like to have a little more hope and meaning in their lives, thank you very much?!  I mean, we’re supposed to be preaching good news, not what we already know and experience.  The life of faith is supposed to offer us an alternative for the way things are with death and war and hunger and poverty and disease and all of those things about which we feel so powerless! (PAUSE)

Perspective is when an experience provides a moment of clarity and visual acuity in which we are able to see what is important in life.

The first time I preached on this text was the first time I ever preached.  I was a senior at Augsburg College, just returned from an educational trip to Mexico and pondering the wise sayings of Ecclesiastes, especially meaninglessness and the powerlessness of doing anything in the world. Life is short and filled with toil and that which we endeavor to do: work, study, encountering the world seemed to end up in the same place: with nothing changed.  There is nothing new under the sun, so the writer says.  “The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow.  All things are wearisome; more than one can express.”

The point of the sermon was that although life may seem meaningless, we are not meaningless to God and while there is nothing new under the sun, Jesus is a new thing, and gives us new life. While I had good and thoughtful help from Phil Quanbeck II and had a good sermon in hand, the perspective of it seemed a little dark and sobering.

But it happened that day that my niece, who was about 2 years old at the time, was in the audience and once she saw me up front and not sitting with her, she wrestled her way out of her dad's arms and came, crawling and crying up to the place where I was sitting.  In a second I bent down and scooped her up and there she sat in my arms through the hymn, the reading and finally the sermon.  While I was testifying to the meaninglessness of life, I had to admit that, at that point, nothing seemed meaningless. 

Perspective is when an experience provides a moment of clarity and visual acuity in which we are able to see what is important in life.

On Monday Evening I received a phone call telling me that the 6 youth and 3 chaperones, who were on their way home from their mission trip and great work in Kokomo, Indiana, were in a serious van accident.  Everyone walked away with generally minor bumps and bruises, cuts and contusions.  Everyone walked away.  What happened was that the rear passenger tire blew while they were in the passing lane.  Kris dutifully and masterfully slowed the vehicle down, keeping it from hitting the semi-truck in the next lane.  With the blown tire, the van went right into the ditch, where the van rolled one and a quarter times.  It is amazing and some have said a miracle that no one was hurt too badly and that all walked away. (PAUSE)

It is a fearful thing to be on the cusp of a tragedy. It is hard not to think about what might have happened.  We stare blankly and start to see how wide the valley of the shadow of death really is.  In such events, life seems much more as fragile and as short and as fleeting as a breath or vapor or cloud of steam or puff of smoke.  Annie Dillard, my favorite author says it this way, “That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise.  Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.  But at the same time we are also created.”

Talking to the kids and parents afterwards and hearing Kris’ reports on the day, two themes I heard over and over again were: 1) God kept us safe—it is a miracle we all survived—God was with us in that ditch; and 2) Life means so much more now.

One parent told the kids, “Well, go out now and serve because you were saved for a reason.” Which was a rich paraphrasing of what God told Abraham: “You are blessed to be a blessing.”  Life was seen for what it is: a gift and a fragile thing and it has taken a new meaning and purpose and focus.  Perspective is when an experience provides a moment of clarity and visual acuity in which we are able to see what is important in life.  (PAUSE)

While we may give the writer of Ecclesiastes a hard time for his honesty and cynicism, we must read the rest of the story and hear his perspective: to eat and drink and be merry—that is, to live your life, live it fully, live it while you still can and give thanks to God who both gives life and cares for life and is with you throughout life, even through death.  Or, as the poet Mary Oliver says, “Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one, wild and precious life?”

Dig in, spend time, don’t save it. You can’t take it with you.  Invest in your kids, invest in yourself, invest in your community.  This is not smoke.  This is not vanity.  These are good gifts given by God who has created us, giving us life.  These are good gifts given by God who saw it fit to send his Son to encounter life in this world and redeem its brokenness through death and resurrection.  These are good gifts given by God who sends to us the Holy Spirit to be our guide and comforter and perspective.  A perspective that what we receive in God gives us a vision not of smoke that is here today and gone tomorrow, but a vision of what is invested here and now in faith is harvested fully in God’s kingdom.  What we do here and now matters, what we do here and now has a future in God, our vision, wisdom and ruler of all.

Amen.

_________________

Sources:

James Limburg Encountering Ecclesiastes, A Book for Our Time

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"

Clouds :: For the Time Being

Why date clouds?  Why write about clouds? Why not!  It's quite impossible for me to say that I'm re-reading Annie Dillard's For the Time Being as it is constantly being opened and read in brief pericopes as interest and insight open my mind.  The book is 204 pages divided into seven chapters, each of which divided into 10 trains of thought:

Birth + Sand + China + Clouds + Numbers + Israel + Encounters + Thinker + Evil + Now

It is a treasure that asks hard and honest questions of God and faith and existence as it examines the vast universe and the singular life.  Can one life matter?  Annie Dillard writes, resoundingly, YES.  Facing death as an inevitability (our human condition), does it render daily and fleeting things, such as clouds, as useless?  No, their value and meaning are increased.  She writes:

Digging through layers of books yields dated clouds and near clouds. Why seek dated clouds? Why save a letter, take a snapshot, write a memoir, carve a tombstone?

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, p47

The Creator Loves Pizzazz

In the dialogue and often diatribes between creationists on one side and evolutionists on the other, the politically correct and often repeated maxim of truth is: “it’s not the how or why, but it’s the who, namely God.”  Since that has already been well-established, I’d like to venture to the dark waters, to the Why and the How, under the belief that there is some middle ground here and that by limiting our conversation, we limit our understanding of not only who God is, but what God is doing in the world.

First the Why, which has never been said better than by Annie Dillard, author, ecologist, theologian:

“Of all known forms of life, only about ten percent are still living today.  All other forms—fantastic plants, ordinary plants, living animals with unimaginably various wings, tails, teeth, brains—are utterly and forever gone.  That is a great many forms that have been created.  Multiplying ten times the number of living forms today yields a profusion that is quite beyond what I consider thinkable.  Why so many forms?  Why not just that one hydrogen atom?  The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font.  What is going on here?  The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle.  Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: the creator loves pizzazz.”         

Think about it: the creator loves pizzazz.  The creator desired for creation to come forth, and it was so.  We are here first and foremost by God’s choosing, God’s initiation, God’s will.  Which leads us into the second, the How…

I found myself steeped in an incredible book this week from a professor who, at the end of his career, has taught me and, at the start of his career, taught Pastor Pike.  We both share a deep respect for him.  Dr. Terrence Fretheim, Old Testament scholar and writer of God and World in the Old Testament, shares with us his knowledge, his understanding, his 40-year career of studying creation, our genesis, with great depth and wisdom. The buzzwords for Dr. Fretheim are relationship and community.

1.    God uses already existing matter in creating
God created the light and then the separated the light from darkness, then cleaved the ground from the sky and the water.  A little later on in chapter 2, we hear that God came down and stood upon the ground, upon creation, stooped down to the earth, took up some dirt into his hands and formed Adam.  God got dirt under his fingernails and human beings were created out of an already existent creature, in this case, dirt.

2.    God calls upon already existing creatures to bring about new creation
God invites creation to participate.  We hear God say, “Let the waters bring forth”…and the waters brought forth.  Creation is the subject of the creating verb.  What’s more is that a non-human – water – is the one bringing forth new creation.  Non-human creatures are called upon to enable future creativity.  This points to God’s power in self-limitation, holding back and allowing creation itself to participate in creative activity. 

3.    God invites the divine council to participate in the creation of the human
God discusses the creation of humankind with creatures that are not God.  In Genesis 1:26, when God says, Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness, he is thought to be speaking to the divine council, the heavenly assembly that goes to work with God and for God.  God appears to be a social being, one who works within a community.  To be made in the image of God is to be a social, relational, communal.  Genuine interaction and interdependence are a characteristic of God’s creative activity.

4.    God involves the human in still further acts of creation
The number one word associated to God in the first chapter of Genesis is create.  It would make sense, then, that those made in the image of God are called also to create.  God leaves it to the human to continue creation.

The future of creation, which is ultimately, we trust, in God’s hands, is presently and for the time being primarily in ours.  Creation is still happening!  But what will the future hold?  And why does this understanding, this belief about the way things have come to be have anything to do with the way things will be?

In one of his most seminal works, Martin Luther says, “what we believe actually affects what we do.”  The human vocation, founded in our creation in the image and likeness of God, is to model the creative actions of God.  We humans were made in the image of God, called to be God’s representation, God’s figure, God’s hands in the world and if we believe that God created the world as a power-mongering, non-relational, distant or transcendent God, one who creates without effort, from the outside, then we are more likely to take our vocation for dominion of the earth as ones called to subdue through force and conquest.

But if we take a step back, catch a glimpse of God’s vulnerability in creation, which by no means take away from God’s “God-ness,” if we open our eyes to see a God who is vulnerable and at the same time powerful and strong, present yet somewhat distant, mysterious and still somehow known, somehow both inside and outside of creation, we will see that our vocation, our calling to be the image of God in the world is as humans who work with and for creation as if our lives and our futures relied on it, because it does.

Human beings are given responsibility for creational development, bringing the world along to its fullest possible potential. God uses you to bring about his future, and what you do, what we all do, matters to God. 
As such, the rhythm that takes place in God’s song is creation, redemption and new creation.  The new creation that God is working for, that we are moving towards, takes into consideration that which happened in between God’s original creation and God’s future new creation, which breaks into the world as news of redemption, gospel truth brings new life, abundant life, full life.

God’s creation is built to go somewhere and it takes into consideration what happens in the meantime.  What happens to us now, what we do now, matters, not only to us and to others, but also to God.  You matter to God.  What you do and who you are matters to God, the one who will remember you when you are long gone, when there is no one left to remember you.  God, who works his future, works his will out from your present, out from your past.  This matters, this makes a difference.  This is a great well of grace, for God is with you and for you and perhaps despite your best efforts, God is always working the best for your life and the future of creation, and thanks be to God, the creator loves pizzazz!

Church: Hard Hat Area

I don’t suppose it takes much for Sierra Vistans to imagine violent wind.  It’s almost commonplace here.  In Minnesota, we’d call this kind of wind “shears, or a tornado…” In Sierra Vista, we call it a Friday. 

Friday was another “Red Flag” Day, meaning high winds and the high probability of messy hair, runny noses and vacant skies.  I learned this, of course, when I called the police when I thought someone had broken in to a friend’s home, where I was charged to tend their house, plants and cats while they were away.  Imagine my surprise when I arrived to find a wide open door and no cats in sight.  The culprit turned out to be no marauder, but the high winds that blew open their door. 

The wind we experience is like the wind that was heard when it swooped into Jerusalem on that day of Pentecost so many years ago.  The same wind that rattles our windows, fills our air with pollen, knocks down our trees and bursts open locked doors, this rushing wind is like the wind that howled and snapped through Jerusalem, filling the house where the apostles were staying.

I’ve learned that one needs to be prepared for windy conditions.  A beautiful day can be ruined by the violent winds that bear blowing dust, which has a way to seep into unwelcome places.  A cool day can be made frigid and unbearable by wind.   Windbreakers, allergy medicines, sunglasses, hats and other such supplies are needed to survive.

The same ought to be said for the church, the place where we come to hear God’s living word.  This living word is at work in and for both us and the world and is not our own word, but God’s word; this same God of whose will it is said is unsearchable, unknowable and always unexpected.  This same Spirit that blows where it will, and hearing the sound of it we know neither whence it comes nor where it goes.

The faithful have to be prepared for all possibilities, for nothing is impossible for this God.  We have to be suited for the conditions of faith and life in the church.  Of course the opposite seems to be reality.

My favorite author, Annie Dillard, says this:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely evoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to [spend] a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”  (Teaching a Stone to Talk, 52).

I can just see it now, instead of church signs that read trite slogans to entice people to join in, what if the church sign read:

Church: Hard Hat Area

It would evoke excitement, curiosity, adventure and awe.  What will happen if we faithfully pray, “Come, Holy Spirit,” What will happen next?  Where in the world might the church put its stakes down, invigorating and energizing creation, changing lives and welcoming strangers, working with God, in Christ and by the
Spirit’s power to grow the church by growing in God’s grace.  Church: hard hats area.  Come Holy Spirit.

When the Holy Spirit came, it brought with it divided tongues as of fire, each one resting on the head of the apostles.  Tongues, or languages, rested on each and they were able to speak.

When the Holy Spirit swooped in with a rush of sound that was like a violent wind, and the devout Jews of every nation once scattered but now gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Pentecost heard it, they rushed to the house where the apostles were staying and heard the gospel in their own language. 

Parthians looked into the house expecting to see other Parthians, Pamphylians expected to see other Pamphylians, Cyrenians expected other Cyrenians and so on and so forth, but instead they saw a bunch of Galileans, poor, somewhat dirty and not well dressed.

Doubt surrounded those faithful people when they saw who it was speaking in their language.  As we heard in the reading, they thought the apostles were drunk.  But Peter, reminding them that it was 9 in the morning, told them that the spirits they were filled with was not wine, but the Holy Spirit.  He reminded them of what the prophet Joel had said.  Read Acts 2:17-18 (note that the Greek reads youth/elders).

When these foreigners heard the gospel in their native language, when the devout people of God heard of God’s mighty deeds in the language they’d heard since birth, faith was kindled and the church was born.  On that day the church grew from 120 members to over 3,000.

The church then is where the spirit is poured out upon people, where men and women constantly prophesy or preach, where youth have visions and the elders dream dreams, and everyone hears the gospel in his or her own language.  This is the church at its best, but it’s not how the church is usually defined, at least not these days.

So then, what is the church?  We call this place our church.   This A-framed roof with red pews and white and wooden beams. This gathering place where we meet on Sundays for worship, or Wednesdays for Confirmation or Thursdays for quilting, or Tuesday mornings for exercise. 

As Sierra Evangelical Lutheran Church, we’ve celebrated 50 years as a called and gathered community.

But a church is more than some pillars, plaster, prayers and pews.  The church is not just a place, the church is not just a building, the church is people gathered together, people serving one another, people lifting up their voices and praises to God in worship. 

Martin Luther says it this way: The church is wherever the Word is properly preached and the Sacraments—Baptism and Holy Communion—are properly given.  What’s more, the church is wherever people hear and receive God’s word of grace, mercy, forgiveness, justice and love, born on the cross and empowered by the resurrection as a word for them, as a promise for you. 

The church is a body of believers – not a building.  It’s not just the place we come to, dressed well and cleaned up, for our once a week check-up or check-in.  The church is anywhere two or more believers share God’s word, where two or more pray, where two or more gather in Jesus’ name.  The church follows you home on Sundays and into the world the rest of the days of the week.

I was reminded of this facet of the church earlier this weekend.  I saw the church in thin, white paper bags that blew in the breeze, the violent wind of Sierra Vista, on these bags were the names of victims, survivors, family members who died from and lived through the always unexpected condition of Cancer. 

In memory of Max G. and in honor of his friendship…In memory of Ross M., Tom S., Karin E., Guy H., Ned G…

In honor of Faye T., Pat T., Mary T., Shirley G., Carolyn L., Bobbie & Jon H., Lou M., Nancy G-E., Ingemarie F., Hal & Gerrit D., Julie M., Carolyn G., Bill H. and Greta S…just to name a few.

I saw stories of the church on each of those thin, white bags.  You see, when people have faced the largest crises and the deepest sorrows, the church, the body of believers comes together to keep vigil in prayers, in hot dishes and in presence.

And the church extends beyond our membership rolls.    Some of the names that I read on those thing white bags, I cannot share for hospital privacy policies, but names that nevertheless were lifted up by the faithful of SELC in donated prayer shawls, prayer shawls with beautiful strands of yarn knitted with love, prayers and concern for whomever would receive them. 

Church: Hard Hat Area

    The church is a hard-hat area because the church is always at work.  You shouldn’t know what to expect, for we are not members with ownership or entitlement, but we are co-workers and surprises lurk around every corner.  You can’t always see it or touch it and it might show up in the most unexpected places, somewhere where our right hands are hidden from our left hands, where faith is not yet sight, but where God is breathing his Spirit, in and for the world, in and for your life.  Get your hard hats, there’s work to be done.

treasured words

This is a nice reflection piece with this week's Old Testament lesson, Isaiah 11:1-10.  It's also fitting while swimming in the changes and chances of life.

From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 25th anniversary edition (1999), page 9:

That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise.  Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.  But at the same tie we are also created.  In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?"  It's a good question.  What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms?  Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction?  If the giant water bug (cf. 139) was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?  Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator's once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus (cf. 146).  Is this what we think happened?  Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey?  "God is subtle," Einstein said, "but not malicious."  Again, Einstein said that "nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning."  It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem (Ps 139:5).  In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God "set bars and doors" and said "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further" (Job 38:9-11).  But have we come even that far?  Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?

Also, listen to Josh Ritter's Thin Blue Flame, posted below: "Only a full house..."

Dots in Blue Water

An audio clip from NPR's Morning Edition from January 2005, featuring Annie Dillard, recorded a couple of weeks after the Tsunami that rounded out the year 2004.  Listen here.

The reading is loosely taken from For the Time Being, written in 1999 and updated for the year 2005.  A current read of mine, see pages 48, 107, 130, 131. 

On April 30, 1991--on that one day--138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh.  At dinner that night I brought up the catastrophe.  My daughter was then seven years old.  I said that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.

"No, it's easy," my daughter  said.  "Lots and lots of dots in blue water."

She was too young then to understand the supreme importance of each individual.  Those tsunami victims in Bangladesh years agoand these tsunami victims now on the shores of the Indian Ocean were not dots, sweetheart, they were beloved daughters like you, they were beloved sons.  They were partners in love and fathers and mothers; every adult knows this. 

It has been a stunning time for us adults these past six decades since the war.  Nothing is new, but it's all as fresh for every new crop of people as this year's winter-killed grass.  What is eternally fresh is our grief, what is eternally fresh is our astonishment, what is eternally fresh is our question, "What the Sam Hill is going on here?"  And incidentally, is anyone running the show?  Does such omnipotence mete out moral justice by hurling hurricanes here or there or pointing  tornadoes or terrorists at towns.  I think we cannot find anyone to make a credible case for such a proposition. 

After all, even we mere people hold the individual precious, or does an individual's significance weaken with distance like the force of gravity?  Well, would I exchange two Sumatran lives to save my daughter's life?  Lord, I probably would.  We eat at restaurants while innocent people starve in Haiti.  They starve in Haiti and the Sudan too and we reach deep for as much as we can possibly spare and double that to haul humans out of the whirlpool while there is hope.

A newspaper headline said, "Head Spinning Numbers Cause Minds to go Slack."  But, surely we agree our minds must not go slack, neither must our hands.  We the living now enter the surf to form a human boom like a log boom.  We try to encircle and enclose and bring in and burn or save the dots, all the dots.  Those Indian and Indonesian dots.  Those dots dropping everywhere in Iraq right now; the starving dots, we do not go slack, we secure the boom, we hold tight to other hands in the water, we save and rescue as many dots as we can whether we can see the people flail in front of us or not.

A note on 30 April 1991:  Dillard was born 30 April 1945; that the tsunami occurred on her birthday speak to her remembrance of the events.