Making a Home in Scripture

 St Aidan's, Photo A.M.Clark.  Episcopal, Transgender, and Rainbow Flags Flying

A Sermon for the Installation of the Rev. Dr Cameron E. Partridge as Rector

St Aidan's Episcopal Church, San Francisco

September 9, 2017
Joshua 1:7-9;  Psalm 146; 2 Cor 5: 17-20; John 15: 9-16



I first want to say just how lovely it is to be here. Thank you Cameron and Kateri, to Bishop Andrus, and all of you for the great adventure of being in this church together. There is always a need for the church to celebrate, but there is something particularly striking about doing so at a time when there are so many people in this world who are struggling and fearful. With the entire state of Florida and the coastal south awaiting hurricane Irma, with whole islands in the Caribbean already destroyed and Houston still unsure of what it will take to rebuild, with the news this week about DACA, an earthquake in Mexico, brinksmanship over North Korea as well, it can feel almost out of sync to celebrate. So I just want to honor that the realities of the world are much on our minds and hearts, and that our celebration happens in this world, not out of it.

I recently re-read Jeanette Winterson’s Memoir,  Why be happy when you can be normal.  Cameron actually lent it to me when it came out five years ago—one of the tragedies of not living in the same place anymore is that I don’t have him around to lend me books. I’m the one who requests things from the library and end up getting new books nine months after they’re published. But it popped up on the “available now” list of kindle books from the library and I was excited to look at it again.

Winterson is a novelist. All of her books have the most wonderful magical realist sense about them, when people invoke the laws of physics to explain their feelings for each other but then go out and walk on water when they need to go home. Her imagination was hard won: she was adopted as an infant by a Christian Pentecostal family and emotionally and physically abused. She grew up in Northern England—not as far north as St Aidan and Lindisfarne, but far enough from London for it to seem like another country. There were only six books in the house, nearly all of which were either the Bible or Biblical commentary.

Photo A.M. Clark

Her mother talked about how it had been the devil who had led her to the crib to adopt Jeanette instead of another child. When Jeanette is caught in bed with a girlfriend at age 15 her mother arranges for the two of them to be unmasked in the congregation as abominations to the Lord. They are each put through a three day exorcism. Still, Jeanette has her own books and her own life. When her mother finds the books (hidden under her bed, she discovers about 72 of them make for one layer before starting another), she burns them all—there are advantages to sticking with the library—but by that point the damage was done. She had read the books, she had known love with her girlfriend. The genie was out of the bottle. Jeanette knew that the world was wider than the confines of her mother’s violence. And once her own books were gone, she decided she could write her own. Word by word, she quite literally wrote herself into a new story.

Jeanette Winterson does not, I am guessing, identify as a Christian these days, but her story is a resurrection story. The way she talks about stories as salvific and love as redeeming resonates deeply with how we are called to see Scripture and love one another in this world. As the book of Joshua invites us, this is how we figure out what it means to walk forward, not to stray to the right or the left, to keep God’s word in your mouth. This is what she writes:
 

The intensity of a story releases into a bigger space than the one it occupied in time and place. The story crosses the threshold from my world into yours. We meet each other on the steps of the story. Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home –they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space (60).

As Christians, we meet inside Scripture. It is our home. As we grow and our lives change, we understand the world anew and as we understand ourselves as part of it. In Scripture, we move into the world where Jesus turns water into wine and transforms suffering into wholeness. Where we sit with him on the way to Jerusalem, being called together as friends, eating at the table as one body and of one blood. Where St Paul calls reconciliation to us, telling us that Christ has entrusted this ministry to us. We enter Scripture and see where the young adult worried about her DACA status feels the power of community marching in the streets, bold and strong, as the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea. Her feet are dry.  Where those who rejected hear Jesus say, "Come! Come to the table and eat  your fill. There is enough for everyone." Where those who have nothing are given everything. Where our hands help to prepare the feast. All of this happens in Scripture, and we bring it back with us in and out of time.

In and out of time, each of us.
Most importantly, we don't do this work alone. It’s all fine and good to talk about The Church or The Body of Christ most generically, but the work of the Christian faith is done in the context of actual people in actual places in actual parishes. As God pitches a tent with humanity in the particular time and space of Jesus, so, too, St Aidan’s and Cameron are given to each other as you are camped together here in this time and place. You have been called uniquely together to answer a particular call, but you are part of a lineage of Christians who have done this work for hundreds of years, each in their own way.

The idea of lineage is important, as clergy and people, particularly in these days. White supremacy did not just appear. Xenophobia did not only just emerge as a good strategy for consolidating power and whipping up fear. The denial of climate change isn’t the latest technique for making more money in the short term and leaving the consequences for later. You know this, and this is work you were already doing. Cameron knows this, and it was work he was already doing. Where you sit today is to join your work together, in this particular time and in this particular place, to listen for where God is calling you to go together.

This is who you are: you will be people of peace and justice and witness. You will be a place of welcome and grace for those who perhaps have not had such an easy go of it in other places. And it will not be simple. You will each disappoint each other. But inside your love for each other and for God’s creation, the shimmering reality of God’s love, of friendship with Jesus and all God’s people, will be the beating heart under your feet.

I want to finish with Winterson’s words once more. She's talking here about happiness, but also the limits of it. There will be plenty of happiness. You will have moments of transcendent joy and absolute hilarity (which I hope for you, because Cameron’s laugh, as you have probably noticed, is possibly the most infectious laughI have ever heard). But it’s not just about happiness. It’s not just about getting the budget met, or the auction organized, or getting more kids in Sunday School to grow the congregation. Those are important, but they’re not the whole story.Here’s what Winterson says.

If the sun is shining, stand in it –yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass–they have to –because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is lifelong, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning –a meaningful life... The pursuit isn’t all or nothing –it’s all AND nothing. Like all Quest Stories. When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can’t change... But you can pack for the journey (24-25).
 
All blessings, all prayers, all hope, to you, Cameron and St Aidan’s on this journey. Amen.

Grace in the gaps between us: Christmas 2015

 Grace in the gaps between us

One of the best known stories from the Christian scriptures is, of course, the story of Christmas. Whether rendered in plastic or clay or straw or glass, you can buy a nativity scene almost anywhere. You don’t have to be a Christian to recognize this old, old story, and have your imagination caught by its meaning: even in these dark days of winter, hope endures, born in the form of a tiny child. Jesus brings together heaven and earth in tiny newborn hands.  I love that we in the cold Northeast receive this gift at this hard time of year.

Looking more closely, though, we also have the opportunity to invite a closer look at the Christmas story, the part that you can’t see in those manger scenes.  Like everything, it’s more complicated than it looks. Here’s the trouble: the Bible doesn’t say just one thing. There are four different accounts of Jesus’ life, and each one says something different about where he came from and why his life was important.

The shepherds only show up at the manger when the author of the Gospel of Luke tells the story. The magi, wise ones from the East, visit Jesus after his miraculous birth takes place in a house (in the book of Matthew). The Gospel of Mark mentions not one word about Mary as visited by the Holy Spirit or Jesus’ birth—he just starts off right away with Jesus’ ministry as an adult. The Gospel of John offers a fourth account, talking about Jesus not as miraculously given to Mary, but the one through whom the whole world came to be, the Word of God. No manger or house, in that one, no Holy Spirit and a young girl, or her profound declaration of “yes” to God.

So what gives? Why couldn’t the church have gotten its stories straight? With something as important as the birth of the one we call our savior, shouldn’t we at least have one answer about where he came from? We can try to harmonize the accounts like we do in our greeting cards, but I think we miss something when we impose an order that’s not there. Those shepherds are important, but not the whole story.  They symbolize the birth of God at the margins, in the outcast—the pregnant homeless teenager. Those wise ones, coming from the East, symbolize the universal nature of God, the fact that sometimes truth is recognized by those outside your own kin.   We need shepherds and kings, cosmic Christ and Jesus just appearing out of nowhere.

I don’t know how these many different stories sounded to the earliest Christians, but I believe in our world now the message of these different ways of believing couldn’t be more timely. In a world rife with religious strife, what we all need most is some humility.  We need, crucially, to remember that it could be otherwise—there could be many truths, many different ways to understand.  God speaks many languages and tells many stories to God’s people.

As an Episcopalian, with my planned-out worship in a big stone church, I need to remember that the storefront Pentecostals also know Jesus. As a Christian, I need to remember that my Muslim brothers and sisters also know One God, Creator of heaven and earth.  I need to remember that in my human mind, I can’t know how all the stories come together: not the stories of my own faith, and not where those stories touch the sacred stories of others.   I need to remember the mystery of love, and the grace of God that fills in the gaps between us.

  

Printed in the Waltham News Tribune Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2015.

More Christmas is here--listen in on my sermon from our service at Christ Church on Dec. 24!

Inky Love

Baby Isaiah and my old tattoo

Two ½  years ago, I had a rather large tattoo on my right arm done by Holly Azzara at Always and Forever in Watertown, Massachusetts.  It’s a mommy tattoo—my kids’ names, flowers, happy swallows.  Like children, it took up more room than I expected—neither population has any sense of moderation.  I had initially planned for it to incorporate the female symbol I had tattooed on my arm when I was 19, but Holly was unimpressed, and advised me to start over on the other arm or cover it up.

But I didn’t want to cover it up.

I wrote in this space then about why—the sentimental value of seeing the same image on my arm at my wedding, nursing my newborn children, graduating from college —that tattoo is in all of those pictures. It’s become lopsided and faded, but it’s me. It’s possible that I am also becoming a little lopsided. 

Until, until. I started to plan my next tattoo.  My first plan was to get a great blue heron. They symbolize a connection to place and wilderness that’s hard to come by so close to the city.  I’ve written tons of poems about the heron in the pond by the cemetery across the street from my house, and in the summer they fly over from daytime feeding grounds at the tiny lake to the west.  They’re beautiful and shadowy, motion and stillness at the same time. Grey, black, muted blue.   

At the end of the day, though, a bird is a bird. And while I may still get the heron done,  there was another image I couldn’t get out of my mind.

There is a woman (at least I see her as a woman) looking out with clear eyes and calm gaze. The green beneath her feet suggests the round earth under her. She is love. Just love. She has kind of a square face and looks like she’s seen a lot. But the way she looks out is just clear compassion. Total and complete love.

I sat opposite her window when I was on sabbatical in 2012 at Grace Medford, where my husband is t  So just over two weeks ago (10 months after the original decision was made), after 6 ½ hours of needle time, here she is.

he rector, which was when I was planning the mommy tattoo. And she just wouldn’t let me go.

And you can still see my old tattoo, shadowy in the background.  I have an appointment for January to go over and fill in any spots that didn’t heal properly, and maybe hide that a bit more. But I kind of love it.

The line in the original window from 1 Corinthians—“The greatest of these is charity”— you’ve heard at every wedding—is in the background, but I went for the Latin “Caritas” just on the top instead of all the words.  I have mixed feelings about Latin—you know, there’s that whole central tenant of Anglicanism that talks about worship in your own language—but I am setting those aside in favor of the wider Christian history of it. 

Getting ready to preach recently, I found another place in Scripture where this image resonates.

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.'" He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth." Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

It’s an astonishing and tragic moment: he comes up to Jesus and bows down, offering deference and respect. “We can imagine that maybe he’s expecting to be told he’s doing well; he says he has kept all the commandments. But something unanticipated happens—Jesus looks at him, and loves him.  In that loving glance, Jesus sees him and knows him, and tells him what he’s missing. The man was looking for approval, not grace. Certainly not this kind of love that will change his life.  So he leaves.  For his security, and a deeper grief than he’s ever known.

This, it seems to me, is as clear a picture of hell as we ever see in the New Testament. Never mind all that stuff about the eternal fire where the worm never dies. This is the real thing.  All of the promises of God’s eternity so close he could touch it, and instead he turns his back.  Giving in to his fear, he can’t listen to his sorrow.  He walks away.  Even Job knew he was talking to God in the depths of despair, but the rich man has nothing.  Just his money. And he will find out that that’s not enough.

Jesus looks at him and loves him.  That’s what this woman is doing— this look in her eyes is so astonishingly clear, so generous, you can see her looking at you and loving you for who you are. And all of your anxiety, all of your perceived need to prove yourself or justify your status—it just melts. And you imagine that this is what love is.  With all the transcendent hope in the world, I want to say yes to it.

What about all the other stuff? the lilies and stems are Christ Church Waltham. The anchor is just cool, but we have one of those, too)

In Memoriam: Paula Tatarunis

Last week, I celebrated the ten year anniversary of my time at Christ Church, Waltham, where I came to work in 2015 when the bishop asked if I’d be interested in an appointment at a little church west of Boston. Ten years later, I still love these people. I cry at their funerals and their baptisms, trying to thread the needle between having my feelings spill all over everything and being a human person with real relationships. This past weekend was a tough one—a beloved sometime-parishioner died after a seven months long struggle with a series of medical catastrophes from an AVM in her brain.

After having joined with astonishing vigor in 2006, over the years, Paula came to find that she and Jesus were working through some differences that felt irreconcilable to her. The amount of translation she found herself needing to do to be in church was just too much. The mystery of God for her was silence and stillness, out taking pictures of dead weeds. God was harder to find for her in the particularity of Jesus and the practices of church community.  We emailed off and on throughout her sojourn away, and she turned up on Sundays once in a while.  Last December as we were emailing afterwards she said it felt good, but that she felt like her vocation was in the “outer darkness.” Naturally I chose the prologue to John part for the Gospel at the funeral—“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” She had a lot of light.

The funeral was marvelous. We had amazing singers, full incense and fiery processions. I did cry, sniveling through “Let all mortal flesh keep silence” after communion, a hymn that I love and a particular favorite for a person who was, as her husband said in his euology, “the most beloved misanthrope there ever could have been.” She was indeed happiest when fleshy mortals were silent. 

 A few people have asked, so here’s my sermon. (you should also look at her blog--www.paulashouseoftoast.blogspot.com, which is BRILLIANT).

…

In Memoriam, Paula Tatarunis, 1952-2015

There is a section in one of the addenda to the Episcopal Book of Common prayer politely titled The Burial of one who does not profess the Christian faith. You can have whatever reading you want at a funeral, and it really doesn’t matter what part of the Bible it comes from. So the headings are not important. But when I was putting things together to talk with Darrell about what to do today I just kind of caught on that expression. To profess the faith. To believe it, to say it out loud, to identify. Paula’s relationship with the Christian faith was just never as simple as professing it.  When she was preparing for confirmation, Paula made a comment about how the cross inscribed on her forehead when she was baptized as a child had endured there, without her knowing it, an invisible claim made by God on her. That claim followed her and held her, when at moments she would have professed something pretty different from the traditional creeds of the institutional church.

Whatever she professed, Paula’s faith, however, I would trust to pray me out of the belly of any whale, as our first opening acclamation from the book of Jonah said. Paula’s faith was in unfathomable beauty and grace and clarity and vision and justice and peace. Paula’s spiritual life was that of a theologian, as in the classical understanding that defines theology as “faith seeking understanding.”  Paula’s faith was always, always, always seeking understanding. And as I think about her faith, she was one of the most Christian, most theologically grounded person I’ve ever met.  She did not simply believe, as though a crowd of people in a stone building saying words together could make them true.  She interrogated and imagined and made poetry out of the most random shards of life. She wrote in her blog once about Jesus as the chimera of eternity and history.  The chimera of eternity and history. She was never sure of how, exactly, to believe in Jesus—but I am sure she knew him.

What has come into being in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

It might be a little weakly transparent to use imagery of Word and light at the funeral for a poet. It might a tad too obvious to talk about how Words and Light are part of the reality of God at the funeral of a poet and photographer.  The work of poetry and photography is to hold time still, just for a moment. It’s to say “Look, here! Something important is here!”   But that was part of how Paula was a theologian. I remember once when we setting up for Good Friday services. We set up a huge wooden cross next to the baptismal font for Lent, and part of preparing for Good Friday is to cover all the crosses with black veils. So you cover it and tie it at the bottom under the cross bar. And the first year we had the big wooden cross Paula asked me what I thought.  This was not long after the photographs had been released of the atrocities in Iraq and I kind of shook my head and said, “I think it looks too Abu Ghraib.” And she said “Well, is that bad? Isn’t that the point?”   Which, of course, is exactly the point. She got it, whether or not she always claimed it. The point of Good Friday is to say that God is able to face the worst of humanity, not to shy away from it, but to enter into our violence and say that it does not have the last word. The violence and suffering of the world are always defeated by the love of God.

Paula had an amazing gift for the particular, for the things of life in this world.  When Paula found her way into helping with the altar guild, a solitary ministry done for the community, but completely alone—she said it was her anchoress work, like Julian of Norwich having visions in her little church hermitage.  She took it on with such astonishing precision and understated grace that when she left, suddenly everyone realized how we’d all be unconsciously leaning on her to straighten us out behind the scenes. Where was the screw that somehow transforms a paschal candle into an advent wreath?  Everything, though, came from this amazing core of dedication and rigor.   She would get here at 8am in a blizzard, just in case someone else showed up for church and I needed help (not many did).

This piece from John this, too, is a story of creation and origin. It’s not Jesus born in a stable, and it’s not Adam and Eve walking in the garden. Those stories tell us one thing, and this one tells us quite another.   This one reminds us where we have come from, and the One to whom we belong. The one whom Paula sought and sought and wanted and desired after, who sought and sought and desired after her. This is the scandalous story of the Christian faith—that God chooses humanity and pitches a tent here with us, in the person of Jesus. Jesus turns over tables and casts out demons and heals and does all of these wild things with all the wrong people.  And the powers of empire and the world just cannot handle it. You just don’t act like that with no consequences. The world does not work that way. It still doesn’t. 

 And all the power of the empire that can’t imagine such love nails him to a cross. And the love doesn’t stop. His friends see him. He eats with them. They find him when they are together. And this love that couldn’t be defeated by death continues. In them, and through eons and days and over years through shadows, and brings us here. To this love and grief, terrifying and beautiful. The same love that moved mountains is the love that catches us, and catches Paula.  It is that invisible seal on her forehead, the crown on her forehead, and the bond that will keep our hearts and hers united in God’s love forever.

 September 19, 2015.

Christmas Eve 2013: On vulnerabilty, holiness, and human statues

 “Do not be afraid.”
This is what the angels always say. They said it to the shepherds, overwhelmed by flashes of lightning. They said it to Joseph, telling him to still get married, even though his wife was pregnant. They said it to Mary herself, to whom the invitation for the Holy Spirit to come upon her certainly could not have been an easy choice.

Do not be afraid. Everyone in our story has been told not to be afraid.

The world that Mary and Joseph and those shepherds lived in was pretty different from our own.  They were all on the margins, Jewish people living in an occupied land. For the shepherds, even more so, they were viewed as being particularly untrustworthy, living as they did outside the bounds of polite society, instead keeping the company of sheep. There is not a lot of cleanliness or polite society to be had spending your days with a flock of wooly animals out in the field.  None of our protagonists tonight would have fit in very well in a world like our own. They didn’t even fit in in their own.

And that’s exactly the point.
There’s a universalism that is implied in these texts—if God could be born of a girl like Mary, if a guy like Joseph could go against his culture and his family and marry someone who would waddle, rather than glide smoothly down the aisle—if the shepherds were the ones who would declare that there is peace on earth now, who would say that God’s goodwill extends to everyone—then certainly, certainly, there will be room in that manger for us. In my sermon on Sunday, I talked about all the questionable people in Jesus’ lineage through Joseph—he was related to prostitutes, liars, and adulterers—and those are the ones that the Gospel of Matthew included!

Theologically, we can probably get on board with the idea that the core message of Christmas is that this miraculous child of God and child of humanity is born for all of us. If I asked each of you, you’d probably say, “Yes, Christmas is for everyone.” Yes, of course, it doesn’t matter who you are. Salvation for all. Sure.”

What is in question, I suspect, in many of our own hearts, is whether this child is actually born for us.  Do we believe Titus—I mean, who ever reads Titus—do we believe him that the we are heirs of the hope of eternal life, do we believe that it’s not because of our righteousness but only because of God’s good nature that we are reconciled, saved, treasured, beloved—is that really for us?

I don’t always behave as though it were, and I wonder if you don’t, either.

There is a lot about our culture that’s different from that of the shepherds and Mary and Jesus.  But what we all have in common, I’m guessing, is fear. What we fear might be different, but we still fear.

I think one of the scariest things for all of us is our vulnerability. As a parent, I feel vulnerable on behalf of my children. As a priest, I feel vulnerable on behalf of Christ Church. I’m vulnerable as a spouse, as a daughter, as a friend.   I’m vulnerable standing right here.

The common denominator for each of these is the simplest, hardest thing: it’s love.  I love my children and I fear for them. I love this church and I worry about the leaking roof and the pledge income. I love my parents as they are a little greyer and a little slower with every visit. I love my husband and trust him with everything I have, but I also know that he is human and we will both disappoint each other. Love is about vulnerability.  It’s being willing to show up, to be judged, to admit your need.

This week, I heard an incredibly moving TED talk by the performer Amanda Palmer. She’s become controversial over the last year for beginning to just give away her music; she invites people to pay, but they don’t have to.  She says that we need to stop talking about how to “make” people pay. Instead, we need to let them.  It can be up to each individual to offer their gifts, whether a couch for the band to sleep on or ten dollars for a music download. Let the artist do their art, and let the people give from their gratitude. Let them be in relationship with each other. Whether, as she says it is, this is a way to run a music business, I don’t know—it does sound a lot like church, this relation of trust and love, creativity and hope.

She says that some of her courage for this came from her work as a street artist, when she spent time in Harvard Square as the Eight Foot Bride. So she stood there, and people would drive by and say, “Get a job!” and, despite that that was her job, she said that she had the most amazing interactions with people, standing there on a crate, painted white in a long dress. She said that when someone came by, they’d put their dollar or whatever in the hat, and she’d give them a flower and look at them. She’d really, really look at them. And she says that sometimes, someone would look back, and there would be this astonishing moment of gratitude: thank you for seeing me. Thank you. No one ever sees me.

This shared vulnerability, of her standing there, being seen, of the passersby seeing her and engaging with her, I think, that’s what holiness is. Palmer talks about the art of asking—how terrifying and wonderful it is to admit that you need something.  You want to be seen. You want to see. You want to acknowledge the other.

That vulnerability of love is the core of what this day is about.  It’s about us seeing each other. It’s about God seeing us. And it’s about us seeing God. Every place where love happens, every place where we trust each other with who we are, it’s holy.

At point of Christmas isn’t just God becoming human. It isn’t just all of us coming together with those shepherds for a night of wonder and awe.  What happens at Christmas is all of this, and more. At Christmas, God—God Godself, offers us an example of the vulnerability of love. God offers God’s very self to us, in this soft, needy, human form, and shows us. This is what love looks like. Love looks like trust. It looks like need. It looks like hope. 

Joseph and Mary ask for a place to stay.  It’s holy.

The shepherds are amazed at what they’ve seen. It’s holy.

Mary ponders in her heart. It’s holy.

The angels say “Don’t be afraid.” It’s holy.

This day, this day when the power of God becomes vulnerable, this day, the power of God comes in this tiny child. This day, we open ourselves to each other.  This day, we refuse to be separated. This day, we won’t be afraid.  This day, we, too, will be holy.

Sermon for Lent 4: The Arms of God

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32: The Story of the Prodigal Son

The video referenced in the sermon can be found on youtube:  The Artist is Present

There are a lot of stories in Scripture that are sort of blinding in their familiarity. Certainly, the prodigal son is one of them. You can tick through the stock interpretations pretty fast—we’re all sinners, God loves us anyway. No, we’re the older brother and we’re well-behaved but embittered, and God’s kind of a jerk.  No, God is a jerk, but that’s because we’re worse, and it’s supposed to be about how limited and petty we are, which makes God look good by comparison .  Everybody’s buttons get pushed somewhere. 

Every time this comes around in the lectionary—and this is the third time, since I think we were in “C” the year I started here—every time, Marcia reminds me how much she hates the story and how unfair it is. And of course it seems unfair. It is unfair, if you hear it as being good being its own reward. Hogwash. Being good is fine, but it’s not just fun for the sake of it either.

The thing about a parable, though, is that we’re not supposed to take it at face value like that. A parable isn’t a tidy allegory where all the pieces fit together, where we can assign everybody a part and ask them to read out loud and enunciate clearly. I mean, who would you be? You’d be the younger or older brother at every other moment, left for dead because you’re so bad or practically walking dead because you’re so good.  We can to oscillate throughout our hours, nevermind how much we change in a lifetime.

But what if we tried to stop reading the parable just about us?

What if we stopped, just for a minute, gleaning information about ourselves, looking for the judgment or the acquittal? What if the prodigal son isn’t about the son at all, or even the brother? What if it’s all about the parent, running through the field, wondering if his eyes could be deceiving him because the sight is such a wonder?

This week, I watched an astonishing video from a performance piece by Marina Abramovic. Abramovic is a superstar of performance art, the kind your grandmother warned you about, where you pay money to watch someone starve themselves for a month or cut themselves with a knife.    

Having done all those things, in 2010, for 2 ½ months she sat in a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and invited anyone who wanted to to come and sit across from her. For however long they wanted, people could just sit. In silence. And she’d look at them. And they’d look at her, for as long as they’d want to. A lot of people came to see her and sat down and cried. Then, they’d put themselves back together, and then someone else would come.

I don’t know why it came around now, but this week a facebook friend posted on his page a video that came from this endeavor, now three years old, of Abramovic being surprised by her former partner, another artist whom she’d worked with, whom she hadn’t seen for over twenty years. They had been deeply in love and pushed all kinds of artistic boundaries together, but eventually felt called to go their separate ways. Rather than a final cardboard box in the trunk, however, when their relationship was over they walked the Great Wall of China from opposite ends and met in the middle, in order to say goodbye.   That was in 1988.  It was over, and they agreed they’d never meet again.  

22 years later, in 2010, she’s doing her biggest show ever at the Museum of Modern Art.  And all kinds of people come—whoever has the patience to wait their turn—ordinary people, famous people, all bringing their own anxiety and their own pain to the meeting, but largely anonymous. But then Ullay comes.  He’s in his sixties, but well dressed in fancy jeans and a red shirt.  Between visitors, she looks down and collects herself, and as she’s doing this, eyes closed, he sits down, stretches his legs as though to calm himself, and settles down. He’s clearly self-conscious.

And she looks us and smiles a little, and she smiles a little, and he kind of shakes his head, and the camera focuses on her face and she begins to cry, slowly, and it goes to him and he looks, and shakes his head a little, and then she moves forward and extends her hands over the table. And her hands are out, just for a split second, and you hold your breath and you don’t know what he’s going to do.

And he takes her hands. And everyone has been so well-behaved, but they all start to clap—they can’t hold it in. They have witnessed something deeply profound.  And they just sit there and hold hands, and then he gets up and she covers her face with her hands, and the next one comes.

That is the moment that this parable is about.  Hands extended, she reaches into space, not sure what will happen. 

In the story, the son comes home, fearful and ashamed. He comes planning to ask his father to treat him as a hired hand, to give him just enough to live on. I am no longer worthy enough to be called your son, he rehearses.

But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.

That moment that is the prodigal son coming home.

Where there is so much reality, so much emotion just poured into this one moment. And all the crazy stuff, and all the drama, and all the time that Marina Abramovic spent being the premier performance artist of Belgrade and New York, those nights spent setting her fingernail cuttings on fire—all of that stuff just falls away.  No longer worthy to be called anything, because the moment doesn’t call for naming or definitions. There is only the truth of a relationship that was so powerful only a landmark visible from space could contain it.  And there’s redemption, and forgiveness, and no, they’re not going to go back to how things were—the younger son isn’t going to be put in charge of the farm, after all—everything has changed—but the truth of their connection has not. 

So, too, the truth of our connection, God’s desire for us burning hotter than the sun, reaching out God’s arms for us.

This is how Henry Nouwen describes it:

 "Here the mystery of my life is unveiled. I am loved so much that I am left free to leave home. The blessing is there from the beginning. I have left it and keep on leaving it. But the Father is always looking for me with outstretched arms to receive me back and whisper again in my ear: 'You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.' " (quoted from The Prodigal Son, excerpted at Spirituality and Practice)

What does that change for you?  Where is your heart moved toward love, away from judgment or self-satisfaction?  For whom do you receive the gift of God’s compassion, believing it for yourself, being freed to offer it to others?

'You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.' " Amen.