Hyper-Local

 Three years later...

I have moved to the farm.  First-person singular. I have moved to the farm.

My beloved is on the Next Great Adventure.  His death eleven months ago changed everything and nothing.  Friluftsliv Farm was Wayne's dream, but it has, over the years and months, become my dream.  Wes Jackson, in his lovely collection of essays, has been instrumental in helping me to  begin the process of "becoming native to this place."

Wayne's cousin, Enander Johnson, then his daughter Laurie and her husband Bill Kuehn,  have farmed my father-in-law's half section of beautiful central North Dakota farmland for more than half a century.  This spring, one evening in early May, I walked the farm's southern field where hard red spring wheat had just emerged.  Our winter had been almost snow-free, following on a dry year in 2020 where we'd had about half the precipitation we would normally have expected. Farmers said they'd never planted into soil that was so powdery-dry.

 

We were still in the Easter season of the Christian liturgical year. And the pretty Easter hymn to a French Noel tune ran through my head: 

    "Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
    Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
    Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
    Love is come again like wheat that springeth green."

 

And then the spring turned into summer, and the drought continued.  By June we'd had a couple of wind storms that evoked the "Dirty Thirties" and were a perfect example of why no-till farming conserves soil. 

We made it to July.  I sent my 94 year old father-in-law photos of his adjacent fields of his wheat and corn. 

 

His back was giving him trouble and he didn't feel up to the half-hour drive from his assisted living facility to the farm to see in person.  Meteorological records indicated that this season was the driest in his long lifetime.  And there were more hot days and more days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this summer than any other summer in the decade I'd been in North Dakota.

 

And yet, in comparison to some other wheat in our area, this wheat was pretty nice.  Beans had been in the field last year, and an early frost ended their growth cycle earlier than usual; this meant that those beans had not had the time to pull all the moisture out of the ground.  Maybe that was part of the reason that this wheat was doing okay.

Mid-July, my father in law had a fall, and his life just kind of unraveled.  His back hurt so badly that he could not stay at home.  Lying flat in the hospital, he ended up with pneumonia.  If he was still he had little pain.  If he moved at all he suffered.  His Living Will indicated that he didn't want any extraordinary measures, and he agreed that he preferred not to be moved to a bigger hospital with an intensive care unit. His nine grandchildren all phoned and told him they loved him.  He heard them and told them that he loved them.  He began to sleep.  My brother in law and I sat with him and held his hand.  He went Home peacefully, as one of his grandsons told him again how much he loved him.  

In his younger years, Weyburn and my mother in law had been missionaries in India.  St. John's Gospel quotes Jesus saying: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24).  Don and I gave thanks for Weyburn's fruitful and rich life.  We planned and scheduled a service in September to give thanks for Weyburn with family and friends.

Don returned to Detroit. I returned to a more routine schedule.  The wheat was getting ripe.  The week after Weyburn died, Bill moved the combine onto Weyburn's field.  

Laurie took this picture and you can see how it was dry and dusty in the field.  But the sky was clear and blue after weeks of haze and smoke.   

The next morning, as Laurie and I strolled through her farmyard on our daily walk, I noticed a small puddle of plump and beautiful grains of wheat on the ground.  Was that possibly the same wheat that had just been harvested, I asked her.  It was, she said.  And she pointed to the grain bin where Weyburn's wheat had just been deposited.  I asked if she'd ever been able to bake a loaf of bread from wheat she had grown on her farm.  She hadn't, but thought it would be possible to get some.  Later that morning I had a five-quart ice cream pail of wheat that had been in the field less than 24 hours earlier.  

While I talked on the phone with my daughter later that afternoon I cleaned the wheat by hand.  It was virtually weed free and, apart from a little bit of dust and a couple of insects, the only things I had to pull out were a couple of teaspoons of what Bill calls "white caps," the very tips of the wheat stalks that sometimes break off and thus retain their hulls.  

It was time to mill the grain.  Normally, my Mockmill sees beautiful grain that I purchase 35 pounds at a time from Breadtopia, a midwestern company that supplies all kinds of products for making bread.  I once used it to mill grain from the field of a friend who grows organic wheat.  This was a first, though, to be able to mill wheat that I had watched grow from tender green grassy leaves.  

I mixed this very special flour with equal parts by weight of high protein bread flour.  (1000 g bread flour, 1000 g fresh-milled wheat flour, in this case the variety of wheat is called Ingmar.)

I added in warm water (1450 g warm water), stirred it in, covered it, and allowed the mixture to rest for an hour or two. This process is called "autolysing."  It can help the dough to rise better and be more flexible.

 

 

To make the kind of wild-yeast sourdough bread I wanted, I then added salt (40 g sea salt), the wild yeast culture (100 g of each culture), and a little more (about 100 g) water.  (I have two different cultures.  One is the one I started myself and the other came from a friend's mom, who claims to have got it more than 40 years ago from a guy in Alaska who had used it in a logging camp kitchen for 30 years. If this story isn't true, it should be!  I don't honestly see a difference in the product when I use one or the other, but I just kind of love using both.)

 

This mixture all gets combined by hand.  It is a tactile joy to mix this dough and feel it come together. But it is not a process one can do with one hand while making pictures with the other!

It starts out like this:

 Rather than kneading as one traditionally does with dough that will go into bread pans, one does this process called "stretch and fold."  The gluten develops and at first you just make the dough into a ball and let it sit and relax as it rises.  The little yeast organisms are releasing carbon dioxide and the glutinous dough stretches and holds those bubbles.  

When the dough relaxes after 20-40 minutes, it's time for another stretch-and-fold.  In between, I make supper or check emails.  Often I will do 3 to 5 stretch-and-folds over the course of 3-4 hours.  Then it's time to put the dough into the bamboo baskets, called bannetons, for its final overnight rise on the counter and in the fridge.  

Here are a couple photos of the stretch-and-fold process.

 

I flour the countertop when I'm ready to shape the dough into loaves.  I dump the dough out onto the counter and divide it into 3 big loaves and two smaller ones.  

The process of shaping the dough into loaves also involves folding, like you'd fold a letter.

When the dough is ready for its final shaping, the "skin" of the dough is stretched tight and tucked underneath so you have a ball with a smooth exterior.

 It's popped, smooth side down, into the banneton. The surface that you see below will become the bottom of the loaf when it is baked.

A great use for grocery bags!  Each loaf goes in its own grocery bag and it doesn't dry out while it's proofing.  Usually I'm doing this process fairly late in the evening, so in the summertime the loaves go directly into the refrigerator and they will rise enough in 8 to 12  hours to be ready to bake in the morning.

The loaves go the next morning in a very hot oven--about 500 degrees Fahrenheit.  What helps them rise and get the glorious crusty outer surface is plenty of steam.  They get that either in a Dutch oven that is preheated along with the oven for at least half an hour, or from a steam pan (a pan of water that boils) on the bottom shelf of the oven, while the loaves bake on a pizza stone. 

 This loaf baked in the Dutch oven with its cover on at 500 degrees for the first 20 minutes. Getting a loaf properly into the dutch oven is the primary reason I usually prefer to bake on a pizza stone.  I have terrible luck putting the loaf in properly.  The Dutch oven is VERY hot and you have to be careful not to burn yourself.  I'm sure there's a technique for doing it efficiently, but I have not found it in ten years of baking bread this way. After 20 minutes or so the cover comes off and I reset the oven temperature for about 435.  The loaf stays in the oven for about 20 more minutes, until a thermometer probe inserted into the middle of the loaf reads 205 F.   

I have the luxury of two ovens, so I can bake in both ovens and use one for the dutch oven and one for the pizza stone.  

 The water bath comes out after about 15 minutes and the temperature of the oven is dropped to about 435F. The loaves bake about 20 more minutes until they reach an internal temperature of 205 F.  And then comes the hard part: waiting for them to cool enough to slice into the loaves!

I sent this picture to Laurie so she could choose a loaf.  She chose the one on the bottom left.

It was such an honor to bake bread from wheat that Laurie and Bill had planted, cared for, and harvested. 

 Laurie ate her first slice just with butter.  But then she made a ham sandwich. 

Weyburn always insisted on having a loaf of my bread in his freezer, and he had a slice every other morning for breakfast at his assisted living place.  (He ate oatmeal the other days.)  I imagine that, as a boy, he may have had bread from flour milled from the wheat in his father's field.  But today that is a rare treat indeed.  It is only in the last few years that it is relatively easy to find and bake with single varieties of flour and know where the grain was grown.  I love being able to buy and mill grain from Breadtopia. But last week's baking experience was really exceptional.  You could say it was Hyper-local. It was Ingmar wheat grown on Friluftsliv Farm, Turtle Lake, ND,  by Bill and Laurie Kuehn, for Mary Johnson, harvested on August 4, milled August 5 and baked August 6, 2021.  We eat this bread with deep gratitude to Wayne Johnson, my late husband, who built and equipped the wonderful kitchen in the house at Friluftsliv Farm, and his father, Weyburn Johnson,  and Weyburn's father and grandfather who sought to be good stewards of this land since they homesteaded here in the 1880's.  And we remember the Mandan people who loved this land for centuries before colonization. 

Laurie and Bill have promised me some more of this wheat.  I hope I can bake bread to share at the lunch after Weyburn's memorial service next month.  Weyburn loved Jesus, who once called himself the Bread of Life.  That was the relationship that nourished Weyburn's soul.  I can't imagine a more fitting tribute than breaking bread together to nourish our bodies from Weyburn's last crop.

 

29 August, 2018

Seven years after my first entry!  Still living a life that is focused on bread... I think...
I moved to ND from Florida in the fall of 2011, last contributed an entry to this blog in 2015.  I had my hip replaced that September.  Americans elected Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. Sam (2014), Anna (2013), Simone (2016), and Sylvia (2017) have all married since 2013.   Sam and Anna brought us new daughters in 2016 and 2017.  Simone is completing a PhD. There are now five granddaughters and a grandson on the way. Paul is in a significant relationship and working in a "grownup job" with decent pay and benefits.  In the summer of 2017, I went to quarter time at All Saints' Church because of financial distress at the parish, and took on a 3/4 time appointment as interim lead pastor at Vincent United Methodist Church.   I retired in 2018 from All Saints' Church, and completed my interim at VUMC on the 30th of June.  Wayne and I have made significant progress on the house we're building in Turtle Lake. 

It is a beautiful, if spare landscape, surrounded by a dozen acres seeded 16 months ago in cover crop mixture comprised of ten species.  We wanted to see what would come up again on its own.  We weren't quite able to get anyone to graze their livestock on it this year.  We think sheep or goats would thrive.  The mixture is designed both for the health of the soil and for forage.  We plan to have a fence on the perimeter next year.

There is a mix of sunflowers, radishes, beans, peas, clover, millet, oats, and alfalfa in the cover crop.  There were turnips in the original mix, but they seem not to have re-seeded this spring. There are quite a few lambs' quarters mixed in, as well as dandelions, surprisingly few thistles, some absinth wormwood, and a bit of soybeans and wheat that have moved in from nearby fields or germinated from previous years' crops.  It's been fascinating to watch what has successfully re-seeded in this area despite a pretty dry summer.

And I'm hoping to get more acquainted with the land and with what grows there.  This farm, which we hope to be regenerative and sustainable, is the next thing that is calling us.

HOWEVER, there is a chance that I may do one more stint as an interim pastor, this time for the Lutherans, before I settle in to being "retired," before, that is, I move on to my next call, the call to be more literal about "rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves..."

These things are quite connected.  I was (I pray!) helping to feed people as a pastor: feasting on the Word through preaching, feasting on the Word through the Eucharist.  I'm still passionate about feeding.  Now I'm making bread.  In the last few years I've gained some skill and experience in making wild yeast levain bread from heritage grain flours.  I'm learning what I can about ensuring that the land that has been in Wayne's family for 130 years is increasingly fertile and healthy, so that it can feed us humans.  I'm hoping to grow, mill, and bake with grains we grow on the farm.  I'm hoping to share meals with people who visit us. 

The Urgent vs. the Important

It's easy to say that it's essential, if we want to live a good and full life, that we must not let the urgent things in our lives squeeze out the important things.   It's easy to say this, but it's often hard to live this way.

As a priest in a parish that is quite tiny so that I am what passes for the secretary as well as the Priest in Charge, this is especially true.  I try to make a bulletin that is attractive and has some sort of decent and interesting and relevant art on the cover.  But really, if I let this urgent and deadline-driven task take precedence over the regular study of the Bible and regular and wide reading that make for better preaching, I have probably let the urgent rule over the important.

Pastors used to have a room they called their "study."   Now we have offices.  I love the small room in my house, where, surrounded by books and a desk and a comfortable chair or two, I can meet a parishioner, confer with my clergy colleagues, or spread out reference books.  But I'm afraid it would be pretentious to call it my "study," because I don't make the time that I should for this important but seldom urgent work.

Today I have some time to study the first chapter of John's Gospel.  We will be reading John 1:43-51 on Sunday as our Gospel reading.  On the Sunday after Christmas, we always read the prologue to John, the first 18 verses of this chapter.  And in Advent, we read verses 19-28.  As much as I love our three year lectionary, it's a weakness of the Revised Common Lectionary that we read the Gospel of John in segments over the course of the three years, but focus in each of the three years on one of the Synoptic Gospels.  On the other hand, it might be terribly tedious, if we had a 4 year lectionary cycle, to have to preach from John every week.  The narrative and discursive rhythms of John don't easily lend themselves to being carved into short liturgical readings.  The creators of our lectionary recognized this and there are some VERY long, but magnificent gospel readings from John in Lent during Year A, for example.

So… I'm taking time to delve into tho 1st chapter of John, reading from The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford, 2011) where, in her introductory essay, Adele Reinhartz writes that John's Gospel "presents a sublime vision of a future salvation that is also in some inexplicable way already a present reality."    Yes. Yes. Yes.

She continues:  "Many readers love this Gospel because of its sublime language and imagery, and its ability to lift its readers out of the historical moments of Jesus' life to the lofty heights of the cosmos.  Others dislike it because of its insistence on the exclusive truth of its message, and the absence of space for any other way of viewing the world" (p. 152).    And she notes that "John's Gospel has been called the most Jewish and the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels."

Her description of "the Johannine narrative" is helpful:
As a "life" of Jesus, the Gospel of John tells what we might term a "historical tale," in that it situates Jesus' story in its historical context of Galilee and Judea, during the decades leading up to the first Jewish Revolt against Rome.  The Gospel also tells a cosmological story of the preexistent Word of God who enters the world, conquers Satan, and returns to the Father.  This cosmological tale exists within and behind the account of Jesus' words and deeds.  The historical tale, which describes his interactions with his followers and his opponents, is evident primarily through the platy, which traces Jesus' life from the moment of his identification by John the Baptist (1.19-36) through to his crucifixion (ch 19) and his resurrection appearances to the disciples (cha 20-21).  The cosmological tale is told both by the narrator and by Jesus, in their comments and reflections upon Jesus' life and death" (p. 156). 

As we move from the prologue to the narrative portion of John 1, the first question that "the Jews" ask is "WHO ARE YOU?"  They ask the question, not of Jesus but of John (the Baptizer)  (1:19).

John's Gospel does not present a narrative of the baptism of Jesus, but rather introduces a dialogue about Jesus as "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world"  (1:29).

Reinhartz notes that John's Gospel makes a distinction between those he calls "the Jews" who tend to be the ones that reject a notion of Jesus as the Messiah--and those he calls "Israelites" who tend to be faithful followers of the LORD God.

For some completely incomprehensible reasons, the creators of the Revised Common Lectionary separate 1:35-42 from 1:43-51.  The former is read in Year A on the second Sunday of Epiphany, the latter in Year B.  And both passages are separated from the passage where Jesus is first identified as the Lamb of God and where the question "Who ARE you?"--so important in the Gospel of John--is first introduced.  

This is why I think it's important for followers of Jesus to read and study the Bible outside of the context of Sunday morning worship.  It's just not possible to get these connections and appreciate them in a typical Anglican 10 - 15 minute sermon.

It's clear that a notion of call is an important theme for Epiphany.  The actual feast day has twin emphases: that God called the Magi via the star and they followed; and that God calls and welcomes Gentiles as well as Jews to worship and follow Jesus as Savior of the World.    The First Sunday after the Epiphany always invites us to consider the baptism of Jesus, how God identifies Jesus as "my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased" and how God may, at our baptism, welcome us into a relationship of sonship.   Then, once we are baptized, what is expected of us as children of God?  We are invited to heed the call of discipleship.  We are invited this year to remember the importance of listening, as we reflect in this context on the story of the young boy Samuel, whom Eli instructed to respond to God's very personal call with the words: "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening."

Driving while Distracted

My mom, a maven of the bon mot, used to say, "God helps those that help themselves, but God help those that help themselves!"  She also used to say, when she had a cold, "Oh, it's my nose that runs and my feet that smell!"  I was about 30 when it dawned on me that this was funny...

So, yes, I'm slow sometimes.  But I've always considered myself a safe driver.  In more than 40 years behind the wheel, I've never caused an accident, and I've avoided many others by being alert.  I've had two speeding tickets, both late at night when there were no other drivers on the road, other than a state trooper lying in wait.  I don't drink and drive. 

I disparage those who drive while on the cell phone, though, until yesterday, I myself would occasionally talk while driving.  Until yesterday. 

Yesterday I talked on the cell phone the last time while driving. It was just before noon.  The weather was perfect and sunny.  I was talking to my middle daughter, and we were having a pleasant mother-daughter chat.  I entered what is perhaps the second-busiest intersection in Minot, North Dakota; and, due to road construction, there were a bunch of cones placed to divide traffic turning left from traffic continuing straight through the intersection.  I had intended to go straight through the intersection, but somehow I thought I'd got into the left turn side of the cones. I'd observed a car behind me in the lane to my right, going straight through the intersection into the single lane on the other side.  Thinking I had to clear the intersection (or something...???) I turned left into oncoming traffic, disregarding the red left turn arrow.  Cars had to dodge me.  I'd thrown the phone down without hanging up.  I was not hit; I did not hit anybody. No police officer was there to issue a well-deserved ticket. (I don't know if they do the photo tickets here in North Dakota.)  But what I did scared me to death.  

It was too much input for my feeble brain, apparently.  No more talking on the cell phone while driving for me, hands-free or otherwise.  Every trip I've made since I've turned the phone off and tucked it in my bag, so that not even by force of habit will I be able to pick up a ringing phone and respond while driving.  

I know two teenagers who crossed the line or drove off the road while distracted by texting or talking on their cell phones.  One died, one was in the hospital for months.  I don't know why I thought I could drive and talk on the phone safely at the same time.

God created us with common sense.  God expects us to help ourselves by using that common sense.  I'm profoundly grateful for another chance. 

Grace All Around

In the Episcopal Church, we have a series of small prayers called Collects.  (The accent is on the first syllable, but they are called collects because they collect or gather the thoughts of the people.) There's one appointed for each Sunday of the Church Year.  Collects offer to God a prayer that often focuses on one aspect of God, and asks God's help for us to behave in a certain way as a result of our growing awareness of that aspect of God's --shall we say?--character.   The result is a small prayer that is quite specific in its focus yet applicable to the lives of everyone who has gathered for worship.   

What is fascinating is that, for the long seasons between Epiphany and Lent and between Pentecost and Advent  that are sometimes called "Ordinary Time,"  the Collect of the Day is not intentionally related in any way to the readings from the Bible that are appointed by our three-year Lectionary cycle.   Often these readings bump up in very interesting ways with the readings.  

Tomorrow at All Saints' we will read the passage where Jesus reflects on the place of money and wealth in the life of someone who might seek to follow him.  Instead of regarding wealth as a sign that God is rewarding the deserving, Jesus sees it as an impediment to entering the Kingdom of God.  So, if the poor are "godforsaken" and the rich can't get into the Kingdom any easier than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, Jesus' disciples' ask,  who CAN enter the Kingdom of God?  Jesus answers that it's humanly impossible.  But with God, ALL things are possible.  Even the rich may inherit the Kingdom of God. Even the poor may find themselves welcome there.  Even you.  Even I.  And that is God's grace at work, God's tendency to love before anyone must show him or herself worthy of love.  It's all about grace. 

Here's the collect appointed for tomorrow (October 14, 2012):

Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and
follow us, that we may continually be given to good works;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

Three years ago, as I reflected on how the collect and the Bible readings of the day came together, I wrote a the following poem. 

Thirty Seconds on a Sunday Morning

She stands up to lead the flock,

their heads bowed, 

some still settling in

to the business of worship,

To the stillness of worship

In the community that gathers

in Sunday morning darkness

in October in North Georgia.

She stretches out her hands,

evoking  spaciousness

making room, welcoming all

into God’s generosity.

She prays ancient words.

They speak of God’s grace.

In an eternity between syllables

she hears a dialogue

between herself and God,

riffing, jazzlike on the Collect’s contours:

She says to God:

“How I need your grace!

I can’t be alone in this need

to be at the meeting of mercy and love,

to taste this unimagined blessing.

God says to her:

“Here you ask for what

you surely know is true:

that my grace will

precede and follow you.

She prays for her flock:

“that, before we know where we are going

and after we have been there,

we may see

signs of God having been there already.

“And…” she thinks between other syllables---

“lest we gaze at God

like deer in the headlights

(before he runs us over?)

“Lest, caught in the glory of this holy instant,

we forget: that soon enough

we will walk out these doors

back into a world with pain--

She sighs.

“We must follow the logic of prayer

and be pushed

out of the nest of the Mother Hen

back into the world.”

Grace has this purpose:

that we may continually

be given—ah! we are the gift!--

to good works.

The grace first, then the works.

Gratitude and Granddaughters

It was a "Melmo Morning" on Saturday at our Orlando apartment.  Our son Sam was visiting us with his two little girls.  They had had a huge day the day before. 

They had flown on a plane for the first time with their daddy and their Auntie Anna. 

They played their great grandparents, their FarMor and FarFar, and their aunties and uncle.

Lilly helped make her own "Rectangle Birthday Cake" (her choice when asked: round or rectangle?).  She helped mix the batter and spread it in the pan.  While it was baking, we made chocolate frosting.  While it was cooling, we made four neon colors of icing in plastic zip loc bags, and when the cake was cooled, we frosted it and Auntie Simone helped her decorate it.  It may not have been elegant, but Lilly helped make it herself, and that made it very special.

By Friday night, everybody was tired.  After a good sleep, the girls were awake and rested and ready to tackle a big Saturday.  The girls wanted to wear T-shirts with their favorite Sesame Street character.  Sophia, at 22 months a girl of more words every day,  was ecstatic.  "Melmo! Melmo!" she shouted joyously.  It was a "Melmo" morning.

At breakfast and at every meal, Lillian expresses her gratitude and thanks Jesus for the food.  I am glad that her parents encourage her to be grateful.    Here's a little meditation that I found recently when I was looking for something else in my Word files.  I wrote it four years ago, when Lillian's birth was imminent. 

 When I was a child I had my share of what I irreverently call “Jesus Junk.” Most memorable was a 12 inch wooden ruler, painted fuschia, with the inscription, in the King James translation: “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a worker that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).  I guess I was supposed to remember, when I did my math, that I should study hard, and that I could divide things like line segments in half by means of the marks on my ruler.

Perhaps you have children or grandchildren who have participated in a program called AWANA, a Scout-like weeknight Bible club for children ages 3 to 12.  Some of  my children did, when we lived in Ohio.  AWANA takes its name from this same verse in 2 Timothy.  AWANA is an acronym for “Approved Workers are Not Ashamed.”   Its goal is to help children to acquire the spiritual tools and insights to grow up to be faithful evangelical Christians.  AWANA accomplishes its goals by making sure that children learn how to behave respectfully, by having them memorize  a lot of the biblical passages that summarize the importance of believing in your heart and confessing with your lips that Jesus is Lord.  AWANA gives kids facts, and lots of rules of thumb, especially from the Book of Proverbs for healthy, productive living.  AWANA tells children: Follow the rules, work hard, do your best, and your work will be approved by God.  And to a large extent this is true.  We can see the appeal of AWANA to parents who see the world out there, with all its dangers and temptations, and want their children to be safe. 

Once, when I was assistant at a parish with more than a thousand families on the rolls, I taught a class for parents and godparents of infants and young children.  There were to be about ten baptisms the next day, and so we started out by introducing ourselves and sharing our best hopes for our children.  What kind of adults did we want our children to become?  By what values did we hope they would live?  At first people said they wanted their children to be healthy and happy.  And to know that they could achieve whatever they set their minds to.  They wanted them to be successful, to have friends, and to be friends.  As the conversation continued, the answers became more deliberate and thoughtful. These parents said they wanted their children to be able to face hardship and persevere.  They wanted their children to be able to look up into the sky in awe and wonder at the beautiful world they lived in.  They wanted their children to love to learn, to be unafraid to ask questions.  They wanted them to be compassionate and generous and grateful, to know how to forgive and to ask forgiveness.  They wanted their children to love God and to be certain that God loved them.  They wanted their children to love others in Christ’s name and to be passionate in their pursuit of justice.  One dad, known for his ability to cut to the chase, borrowed a wonderful Yiddish term and summarized: “I want my kid to be a Christian Mensch.”

The AWANA approach and the approach of that group of Episcopal parents are a little bit different.  The AWANA approach lends itself well to being taught to gangs of little children on Wednesday evenings.  Creating a Christian Mensch is probably the work of a lifetime, something that is caught, not taught.  I follow Jesus Christ as an Episcopalian partly because I believe that there’s a brittleness about the AWANA approach.  Like many rules of thumb, the idea that if you believe certain things and behave in certain ways you will be productive and happy works most of the time.  But not all of the time.  Often, despite our best efforts, we have a very hard time. If you’re taught that there’s a one-to-one mapping between your good work and God’s blessings in your life, your faith can snap when you come to the hard places and the formula doesn’t seem to be working.  I want my children and grandchildren to have a faith that is resilient in the face of hardship.

“Study—do your best—to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed,” says Paul in the Second Letter to Timothy. Sometimes I think AWANA leaders may have forgotten the larger context of this verse that they seem to understand to advocate making oneself approved by correct belief. Just a few verses earlier, Paul was saying that his life doesn’t look so great by a lot of ordinary measures.  He’s in chains, under house arrest at best, not free to go where he wants, at the mercy of the Roman system of justice, to which he had appealed when he feared for his life at the hands of irate Jewish brothers who didn’t understand the appeal of the story of Jesus.  Paul speaks in this letter about dying with Christ in order to live with him.  We need to remember that Paul seldom speaks of the resurrection and freedom and even glory of life in Christ without also speaking of his crucifixion and suffering.   

The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus give shape and meaning to Paul’s own suffering.  His hope in Christ makes present hardship worth enduring.  God’s people have always understood that God is present even in pain and suffering; God’s hand is guiding the lives of nations and individuals, even when everything seems to be falling apart.  In the Psalms we read:

         You, O God, have proved us;

                  you have tried us just as silver is tried.

         You let enemies ride over our heads;

         we went through fire and water;

         but you brought us out into a place of refreshment. (Psalm 66:10-12)

 I want my children, and my granddaughters, to have that sort of resilient faith that will enable them to persevere, to keep trusting God through the hard times, confident that, in spite of appearances, God will, indeed lead them out into a place of refreshment. 

Every person comes to those hard places eventually.  It is one of the great privileges of my priestly vocation to hear the stories of people’s lives, to stand with them as they cope honestly and graciously with illness, with the aftermath of other people’s wicked and cruel behavior, with financial reversal, with the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease and mental illness, with the untimely death of people far too young to die, with the betrayal of adultery, with the heartbreak of addiction.  I see people struggle with doubt, I see them ask: Why?  Where is God in all this?  How is any of this my fault?  Living with these questions—because people don’t seem, usually, to get any obvious answers—requires a resilient sort of faith that is much more about relationships than about formulas or quick fixes.

 The book of the prophet Jeremiah makes two important and rather obvious references to real estate. Once, Jeremiah made a very public contract to purchase property in his hometown (Jeremiah 32:1-12).  It was a sign of hope that, even though God’s people had been displaced from their homeland by political upheaval, in due time they would come home.  But Jeremiah also tells the people in exile that God’s message to them is: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.  Take wives and have sons and daughters….Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you” (Jeremiah 29).  Jeremiah had it from the LORD that the period of exile would be seventy years: roughly a whole lifetime. Jeremiah knew some fellow-prophets who were saying: don’t get comfortable here in exile.  You’ll be going home soon.  God is going to rescue you.  Jeremiah, by contrast, is telling the people two important things.  The first important thing is that there is no place where God is not with us.  Even in exile, even in a foreign land, God makes crops to grow, God can bless with fertility, God can bring forth and preserve future generations of children.  The second important thing is that we must sometimes trust for a long time that God is faithful before we see the fulfillment of God’s promises. 

I want my children and my grandchildren to know and live by this truth. Furthermore, I want them to have a kind of trust in God that sees evidence of his power to heal, to forgive, to love—and says “Thank you.”

There’s a wonderful little story from the gospel of Luke.  It tells of ten men, ostracized by a disease that they didn’t deserve, that they didn’t do anything to catch. Ten men who probably heard all kinds of whispers and maybe also some taunts, from people who assumed that disease is a punishment, a logical consequence of poor choices.  Ten men whose illness forced them to the very margins of society.   All cried, like the Psalmist, from “out of the depths” of suffering and despair.  All ten called: “Jesus! Master! Have mercy on us!” 

Jesus healed all ten.  He didn’t worry about whether they were Jews or Samaritans.  He just healed them. Here’s what he did:  He sent them to the priest, who would certify that they were healthy and could return to the community.  He sent them on their way, it would seem, before they were healed.  In their own little community of outcasts, there was enough faith that all ten started on their way even before there was evidence that anything would happen.  All ten were healed.  One man, the “outsider’s outsider,” a Samaritan, came back to say “Thank you.” 

Did Jesus, in frustration, un-heal the other nine?  No.  That’s not how Jesus gives.  Jesus is not like your great aunt who told your mother that she would no longer send you a birthday check because you had failed to send a thank-you note for the last one.  Saying Thank You is not some sort of quid pro quo, or an insurance policy for the next time you need Jesus to do something for you. 

Think about what we teach our children about gratitude.  We say “Thank you” not because it will get us more next time, but because it is the right thing to do.  It helps to maintain relationships.  It is right to share your delight in what you have been given, and in the giver of the gift.  I’m sure you’ve heard it a thousand times, but I will make a thousand and one:  Eucharist, our English word for what we do when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, is related to the Greek word for giving thanks. What we are about when we celebrate the Eucharist is giving thanks.  We give thanks for a rehabilitation that dwarfs the one experienced by the lepers that Jesus healed, for, as one of our Eucharistic prayers says to God: “You have brought us out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”

I want my children and my grandchildren to have the sort of relationship with God that sees his goodness all around, and, delighted and rejoicing, says Thank You.  I want to have this sort of faith, too.  I want to have the sort of grateful, trusting heart that gives thanks even from places that feel like exile.  I want to have the sort of grateful, trusting heart that gives thanks to God from circumstances that feel like prison.  Someone who had this sort of faith was the German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who went to prison during the Second World War for protesting Hitler’s policies.  From prison, like Paul, he wrote letters and papers that were somehow preserved.  One contained words that Pratt Green turned into a hymn.  If my children and my granddaughters can pray this prayer with all the courage they can muster, I will be pretty certain that they are safely, and gratefully, home in the Reign of God.

By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered,

and confidently waiting come what may,

we know that God is with us night and morning,

and never fails to greet us each new day.

Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented,

and evil days bring burdens hard to bear;

O give our frightened souls the sure salvation,

for which, O Lord, you taught us to prepare.

And when this cup you give is filled to brimming

with bitter suffering, hard to understand,

we take it thankfully and without trembling

out of so good and so beloved a hand.

Yet when again in this same world you give us

the joy we had, the brightness of your Sun,

we shall remember all the days we lived through,

and our whole life shall then be yours alone.

Come to the Party!

Before long I will be moving to Minot, North Dakota, where I have been called to serve as priest at All Saints Episcopal Church.  This is a 24 month assignment, with a very specific goal.  I am being called to lead worship, to preach and celebrate the sacraments, and to help provide pastoral care.  Meanwhile I look forward to working with a group of people who are to be ready in two years to take over these duties, on a volunteer basis, under the supervision of a seminary-trained Canon Missioner who has responsibility for half a dozen congregations in the Diocese of North Dakota.  This model of ministry is sometimes called "Total Ministry." 

The parish has identified candidates for Holy Orders, and the members of the Diocese are in the process of affirming those calls.  The individuals involved will be training locally to serve God's people in the community through All Saints. 

I am excited about this new assignment.  One of the little secrets that most people don't know about me is that, despite having the M.Div. (Master of Divinity, the basic 3-year professional degree for clergy) and an S.T.M. (Master of Sacred Theology, an additional post-M.Div. degree that allows a person to devote intensive study to an area of particular interest, in my case, history of biblical interpretation in the Anglican tradition), and despite having been ordained for 25 years, I have no course work on my transcript either in liturgy or in preaching.    Now I'm getting to revisit these subjects, along with the others that a candidate for the priesthood must learn.  They are all prescribed in the Constitutions and Canons of the Episcopal Church.   It looks to me like a lot to cover in three years of full time seminary study, much less in the two years I'll have to work with these people--and they will continue in their full time work or professions both now and (until they retire) after they are ordained.  

On the recommendation of my bishop, the Rt. Rev. J. Neil Alexander, I picked up a copy of Patrick Malloy's Celebrating the Eucharist  (New York: Church Publishing,  2007).  Professor Malloy was our speaker at the conference for priests of the Diocese of Atlanta last month at Camp Mikell.  He's a very organized, engaging speaker.  I'm looking forward to digging deep into his book.  There's nothing like having to teach someone else to force a person to re-examine practices and presuppositions.   I admit to feeling my skin crawl a little as I confront the flurry of details in this book.   I am a little bit "spatially challenged."  You do not want me near you in a line dance.  I nearly trip and fall on my face as I think about a simple instruction to put my right foot in front of my left foot.   But Professor Malloy promises that there are principles behind his prescriptions, and I believe him. 

In his introductory chapter, he writes:

The liturgy is a kind of "rehearsal."  In and through it the church, using the medium of ritual, behaves as it aspires always to behave, but in a very stylized and controlled way. The exchange of the Peace, for example, is seldom an actual event of reconciliation between enemies, but is a stylized gesture that rehearses the community in reaching out with love to whomever is near.  By this very act of "rehearsing," the church can grow, if only by the smallest increments, into being what it aspires to be. (p. 7)

I read Malloy's comment last week as I was preparing to preach at today's celebration of the Eucharist, on the strange, multivalent parable of the Wedding Banquet for the King's son (Matthew 22:1-14).  

Themes of wedding banquets are bound up, in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, with a vision of a joyous, culminating, triumphant celebration of the Reign of God. The book of the Prophet Isaiah contains oracles about the feast of rich food and well-aged wines that God will provide "for all the peoples" on the Day of the LORD, the day when God will "wipe away the tears from every face" and destroy death forever.    The Book of the Revelation to St. John presents the culminating vision of the triumph of God as the Marriage Supper of Jesus, the Lamb of God, to the Church.  The image is rich: the slain Lamb of God, with all those allusions to Passover, has triumphed over death to be both Victim and Victor.  

When Patrick Malloy says we "rehearse" who we are in liturgy, he is implying that all of this imagery and metaphor may be ringing in our hearts and minds.  When the Celebrant recounts in prayer that Jesus "stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself..." Episcopalians who know Holy Writ and their prayer books may well think of the prayer we may pray daily in Morning Prayer, in which we say, "Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the Cross, so that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace."  They may well see in the Cross, not only a symbol of suffering and death, but an evocation of the four cardinal directions, and remember words of scripture about people coming "from east and west and north and south" welcomed into God's kingdom.   

One of the things we "rehearse" in the Eucharist is the invitation and the welcome of Our Lord to the most unexpected, most undeserving people, even to "prostitutes and tax collectors," the idiom of Jesus' day for the lowest and most despicable members of society.   The Reign of God makes a place for the orphan, the widow, the foreigner, the blind, the lame, the sick, the suffering, the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned--in short, for all the people who are most easily overlooked, or, worse, most easily blamed for their own lot in life, whether or not it is their fault.   

Jesus tells this parable during Holy Week, addressing the Temple officials in Jerusalem, people with whom he typically has little patience, people who represent hypocrisy, arrogance, and self-centeredness.  Jesus had been telling parables that those officials heard as judging them.  The shoes were fitting, and pinching!  But, like all parables, this parable addresses the rest of us, as well.   I know I'm not alone in finding this parable hard to wrap my mind and heart around. 

• The king has issued his invitation, in a way analogous to the "save the date" messages I receive from my friends whose children are planning to be married several months hence.  
• As the event gets close, the king sends servants out to tell everybody: "Come to the party!"
• People's response to the invitation, now that the time is near, range from indifference--continuing to go about their business--to outright hostility. Some of the invited guests actually kill the king's servants. Why this extreme response to the king?
• The king appears to put the party on hold while he takes retaliatory measures that remind me of nothing so much as the kind of violence I used to see on TV cartoons when I was a child.
• The king REALLY wants people to attend the party, so he sends out servants to the thoroughfares and the countryside, to gather everybody in: good and bad.  No excuses. No advance warning...
• Then, when everybody is celebrating, the king focuses on one person who is not wearing the prescribed wedding clothes, confronts him, asks him how he showed up there, and proceeds to have him tied up and thrown out of the party into the outer darkness where there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth."  Gnash, gnash, gnash....
• How is that fair?  It just doesn't fit with the picture that Matthew's Gospel has been building up, of the Kingdom of Heaven as being for ALL the people, as a celebratory party to which God has been issuing invitations to EVERYBODY. 

This parable can play on people's anxieties.  What if I am thrilled beyond measure to be at God's Great Party, so unexpectedly?   What if there was still some secret handshake, some secret dress code I know nothing about, some measure by which I will be find wanting and, having tasted the great food and danced the dance with abandon, God is going, still, to yank me by my (sartorially inappropriate) collar and throw me out?   Am I going to hell after all?  And do I want to be at a party where the guy next to me seems to have been thrown out because he didn't have time to go home and change clothes before he accepted the invitation of the King's servants?

Or perhaps you've heard in a sermon or a Bible study that the guy without the wedding garment is the person who is trying to sneak in without an invitation.  (The king would naturally have provided the tuxedos or togas along with the engraved invitations, the explanation goes.) The next step in this way of telling the story is often that those kinds of people are Jews, homosexuals, adulterers...and they're going to hell. 

In her reflections on this parable in The Christian Century (vo. 128 No. 20, October 4, 2011), Mary Anderson  imagines the thoughts a parishioner might have to that kind of sermon on this parable:

Imagine that an active member in a congregation has just heard that sermon.  She has tears in her eyes.  She hears the judgment loud and clear.  Her son-in-law is a self-proclaimed atheist and her granddaughter is unbaptized at age six.  She has a wonderful neighbor who is Jewish; her longtime doctor is the best listener in the world--and a practicing Hindu.  How can she be happy in heaven without them? She was told once that heaven will be so incredible that she won't miss these people, but she can't imagine rejoicing in the Lord under these conditions.  She can't imagine her sweet grandchild in hell.

But the grandmother has accepted the invitation; she's put on Christ and considers herself clothed with righteousness.  She has recommitted herself on many occasions to imitating Christ.  So what would Jesus do, she wonders.  The congregation rises to sing a hymn rejoicing in salvation, and worshipers dutifully recite the Apostles' Creed.  The grandmother's voice catches on the words of faith, "he descended into hell."  She's never had a satisfactory explanation of what Jesus was doing in hell between his death and resurrection.  For her at that moment, after suffering through a sermon that sent her loved ones to outer darkness, she knew what the creed meant for her.  Before he was raised from the dead, Jesus went to retrieve those who had not heard the gospel through no fault of their own.  Jesus went to get those cast into outer darkness and bring them into the kingdom with him.  If she was clothed with Christ, she reasoned, she was called to be like him.

By the time of the final hymn she decided that to really be like Christ, she would pass up heaven in order to comfort her grandbaby in hell.  ..She would descend into hell as Jesus did.  She left church convinced that day that if we truly live a transformed life, we can't stand by and feast while others starve and burn.  That just isn't the Jesus way!

...Isn't this what Jesus did and what Jesus would do? Orthodox interpretation or not, the parable interpreted her life, and she found herself exiting worship with a slight limp [--an allusion to Jacob wrestling with God--] but rejoicing nevertheless.  (p. 20)

Anderson says that these parables judge us.  We see in them, ideally, what God needs us to see.  We hear the story in the context of our great weekly re-enactment (PRE-enactment??) of the Heavenly Party.  (Another blogger on this theme, The Rev. Rick Morley on September 27th, writes about his preference for "party" over "banquet," which makes him think of plastic tablecloths and vats of overcooked green beans and rubber chicken: events to which one is supposed to go, but to which one may not really want to go.)  If we read carefully, we can see that the role in this parable of the King's subjects is to really enjoy the party.  The role of the King's servants is to keep crying out: "Come to the party!"  The servants are NOT assigned the role of doorkeeper or of fashion arbiter.   The king's servants keep inviting and inviting and welcoming and welcoming.  There is still plenty of room at the party!

And the King does not give up easily. (Hearers of this parable are going to draw parallels between the King and the Owner of the Vineyard in the parable we heard last week (Matthew 21:33-41), whose chief character traits are perseverance and patience.) The arms of love are extended in an embrace.  But there is freedom in the embrace.  The king does not force anyone to come to the party.  We can leave it up to the King to sort out these matters, and, however undeserving we think we are, however surprised we may be to find ourselves at the party, we can eat and drink with great joy.  And we can say, "Thank you. Thank you, Thank you."  That is what we rehearse, Sunday after Sunday, in our liturgy that is called The Great Thanksgiving.  Even though the bread does not look like bread.  Even though we have just a tiny taste of wine.  The bread and wine are the Body and Blood of Jesus himself, offered for us.  A great and holy mystery is that Jesus is the host of the feast, and the Feast himself.

My friend, the Rev. Penny Nash, preached a wise and compelling sermon  on this parable this morning at Bruton Parish, Williamsburg, Virginia.  You can read it here.