Her Name Was Saphronie

But she was always Miss Peterson to me. She wasn’t quite five feet tall. She had been blind all of her life. She started teaching the week after she graduated from high school and then worked her way through college during summer school. In 1962 she was my fourth grade teacher, and, later in life, she became a model of faith for me. At eighty-four, she had cancer and needed a ride to the treatment center. I had gotten my sight back by that time and could drive, so I drove Miss Peterson to her appointments for several weeks.

Following each treatment, I took her to a Bible study where her friend, a professor at the university, was part of a study on the book of Psalms. It was part of an ongoing Bible study where professors could come and speak about their faith with students at the Lutheran Campus Center. It was fairly academic, so I mostly took notes and kept my mouth shut. This Bible study was my first real introduction to scholastic disciplines that could be used as helpful tools for interpreting God’s living word. The conversation was miles above me, and yes, I was a little intimidated by my professors talking about their faith and admitting to wrestling with faith issues.

Now you have to understand that, although I had great respect for Miss Peterson as a teacher, her years of service, the years of activism and commitment to advancing living conditions for blind people around the state, and, although I knew that she was involved in the life of her church in Janesville, I thought of Miss Peterson as an aging elementary school teacher who had been retired for many years and not current in modern biblical study.

Since I was a student and she was a guest, I was unprepared for her standing up during one of the studies to raise questions and challenge some of the ideas of these university professors. What shocked me more was that she quoted extended passages from the Psalms from memory, apologizing for only knowing the King James Version of the Bible when we were using the New Revised Standard version. She revealed she had memorized all 150 Psalms when she was young and not taken the time to memorize the newer versions, and so she hoped they would forgive her antiquated language.

Yes, I was amazed. Her questions were appropriate, insightful, and poignant. This was my fourth grade teacher. She was holding her own with these university professors, and I was proud to claim her as my friend and mentor.

Following the study that day, one of the women came and talked with Saphronie. She said, “You are such an inspiration to all of us. I can’t believe that you have memorized all 150 Psalms.”

Saphronie replied, I’m blind, I’m not retarded.”

Taken aback, the woman continued, “I know that you have cancer and are taking treatment, so I wanted to tell you that, as talented and gifted as you are, I know that, when you get to heaven, you will be completely healed and able to see just like the rest of us.”

I had smiled at Miss Peterson’s first response, but I was totally unprepared for her next statement, “If God won’t take me the way I am, then I don’t want to go.”

What Saphronie Peterson understood and believed more concretely than most of the seminary professors I have studied with since is that, if we have to change in order to be acceptable to God, then our challenging lives and the struggles we encounter have no meaning because what makes us who we are is the sum of our life experiences. If we need to change ourselves or be changed in order to be acceptable in God’s eternal kingdom, then we are no longer who we are and the goodness of our creation is discounted.

Is there anyone who believes that a black person needs to become white in order be part of God’s eternal kingdom? Do we think that everyone will have red hair? Do we have to leave our race, our sexuality, our nationalities, or our knowledge here and have all of that changed in order to be acceptable to God? Do we really believe that we are created in God’s image? That means all of us, and that we are good. Or do we think that only some of us are truly God’s creation? Can we say with confidence that our wholeness comes from Christ and not from ourselves?

If we are all created in the image of God and our wholeness comes from Christ, then is it possible that God’s being is so far beyond our understanding that not only is God’s image able to be understood as male and female, but that God’s image can also be known as black and brown and red and white and yellow, gay and straight, and able-bodied and disabled, and smart and cognitively challenged? Is it possible that since the one who is raised up from the dead; the one who appears to us with the marks of the crown of thorns, lash marks, and holes in his hands, feet and side; the one who shows that what was once death producing is now death defying is the one who appears before the disciples without change, that we might also retain our worldly marks in the death defying life of God’s eternal kingdom? Might it be that the great change in 1 Cor. 15: 51-58 is only about the perishable putting on imperishability and the mortal putting on immortality so that death might be terminally defeated in a way that does not disparage or discount the lives that we live but, instead, lifts up our lives as having great value in shaping who and whose we are? Can we know the breadth and depth of God’s love and forgiveness if we cannot come before him as we are? And if we need to change, can God even be God? Does not knowing who and whose we are enable us with Paul to say, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

I am reassured by the thief on the cross in Luke’s Gospel.  “But the other [criminal] rebuked [the first] saying, ‘Do you not fear God since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ [Jesus] replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.’” (Luke 23: 40-43, NRSV)

Jesus does not tell the criminal that he must first repent of all of his ways. The criminal need not repay what he has stolen nor repent of the lives he has taken. Jesus does not tell the criminal that he needs to change, but only to know him and to lead his life from this time onward bearing witness to who Christ is. The only person in Scripture to be assured of paradise is accepted as he is.

So, with Miss Peterson, small in stature, blind in life and faith, holding onto: the rock of our salvation, our present help in time of trouble, the one slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, the good shepherd, the mother hen who longs to gather us under her wings, I stand by her side. If God won’t take me the way I am, then I don’t want to go either.

Thank God for God’s grace revealed to us in the person of Jesus the Christ who redeems us and forgives us even when we don’t know what we’re doing. Let us stand firm in our faith, secure in the wholeness of Christ’s incarnational body, without sight but with a vision of God’s kingdom that includes us all. Yes, let us go in Christ’s shalom wholeness and peace, loving and serving God!

Lost Community--Luke 16:19-31

I think of this as the last of the five parables begun in Luke 15. The frame of these stories is the grumbling Pharisees and Jesus eating with the tax collectors and sinners. Between the fourth and fifth parables the Pharisees, who loved money, ridicule Jesus. In turn, Jesus rebukes them with some serious charges and then tells this story of shattered community. We must remember, however, that by the time Luke is writing, the temple already has been destroyed and the Pharisees no longer exist as a faction of Judaism.

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, we witness the breakdown of relationship between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless of the world. The relationship between these two groups has become so contentious that communication between them is no longer possible.

The rich man celebrates life and his good fortune in a public way drawing attention to himself without regard for others. There is an empty decadence in the purple finery he wears; the linen is like a shroud casting a pall over his lifestyle. The poor named Lazarus (God has helped) also wears purple advertising death. Lazarus’ purple is from the ulcers that cover his skin. And rather than eating regularly as the rich man does, Lazarus is being regularly eaten: the dogs come to lick his open sores sampling the meal that is to come.

When we hear that the rich man dies and goes to Hades where he is tormented (tested), we may have a self-satisfied joy concerning the rich man’s demise. If we end our time with this parable, however, rejoicing for Lazarus and are satisfied with the treatment of the rich man and his brothers, then we miss the great tragedy and challenge within the parable.

Unlike the previous parables of lost and found, this parable leaves us with only loss. As such it is the most challenging of the five parables. Within the telling of the story, opportunity is offered for community whenever the rich man comes out to eat, but he does not cross the chasm that divides them. In this life, the rich man cannot go beyond the safety of his wall. Nor is Lazarus able to break through the wall to receive the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. Not even the dogs receive the crumbs as they do in Mark 7. Instead, they get Lazarus.

In death, the rich man is still unable to recognize Lazarus as a person. He sees Lazarus only as a means to bring him water for easing his torment (testing). The allusion is that he wishes the covenant of baptism, that he longs for the baptismal (dipped) sacramental water in death as a convenience rather than as an expression of faith. Even his plea to send someone to warn his brothers is more about sending a poltergeist to scare them into right behavior and less about faith. He continues to desire avoiding the torment of Hades for the pleasures of the life he left. This is not an act of repentance or a statement for grace-filled resurrection-living.

On the other side of this parable lies Lazarus who suffered in life without community, and, although he is now in the arms of Abraham, he continues to have no community. He was not able to break through the wall that separated him from community in life, and he is unable to bridge the chasm that separates him in death.

The telling of this parable leaves both the rich man and Lazarus without community. The parable depends on the hearers of the story finding and living into the new community that is lost. Luke includes this story for the gathered worshipping community of his time. As such, it is the final statement, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced, even if someone rises from the dead,” that makes Luke’s audience smile.

With those first hearers of Luke’s Gospel, we smile and chuckle to ourselves as well. Yes, we know that as Jesus is looking to and traveling toward the cross in the Gospel, that Jesus has already risen; that our lives in Christ’s resurrection world means that we know the value of forgiveness and resurrection justification. We know of Moses and the writings of the prophets, and we know that these writings point to Christ. We are so much better than those silly Pharisees, and we know that we are saved because of this radical new community, after all most of us are the unclean gentiles of the world who are included in Christ’s new covenant: Baptismal water and Eucharistic body and blood, bread and wine table fellowship. Because of this, we know the value of the community Christ is calling us to.

Paradoxically, we also know the great chasm that separates us from many of our brothers and sisters. Racism continues to plague our world to the extent that we cannot admit to our lives of privilege. We cannot see or understand the suffering of those outside the walls of our own experience. Our children do not all have equal opportunities for education and employment. We are not always treated equally by law enforcement officials. We are not given equal opportunities of housing We are not given equal treatment in the courts of our land.

We are so oblivious to the lives of those suffering outside our walls that we think that just because a Black man has been elected to the highest office in our land that racism is over. Of course, there are some who think that racism didn’t exist until we elected a Black man to the presidency.

We are separated from one another by our politics, our sexual orientation, social position, our educations, whether or not we have work. By those who are temporarily able bodied and those with disabilities, we even hide behind the walls of our democracy as a way to condemn those who do not live with the freedoms we know.

We chase after higher profits building pipelines that potentially threaten our watersheds and the sacred lands of Indigenous People thereby widening the chasm between our own culture and that of others while reassuring ourselves of its safety even as the Colonial and Exxon Mobil pipelines rupture and threaten the water table in Alabama and others rupture and the Yellowstone river valley.

Yes, we smile at Jesus’ last comment about believing in the one who is raised up from the dead, but we have yet to embrace the radical community living that Christ models and embodies. We have a long way to go to be the ones who lift up the social dead of our world, the poor, the lame, the maimed, the deaf, the blind, the widows, the orphans and the strangers into the promise of the community of wholeness of the resurrected body of Christ.

Yes, we see that there is retributive justice for the rich man in this story, and we smugly gloat over his demise, but, if we can recognize ourselves mirrored in the rich man, we thank God that we are saved by grace, through faith, in Christ alone. And then, seeing ourselves in the rich man, we see, in Lazarus, the reflection of Christ at his crucifixion in his robe, described as elegant by Luke and purple by Matthew and Mark, with open ulcers from the crown of thorns, the whipping stripes, the nail holes, and the wound from the spear. Now we can begin to understand that we, the privileged, with the rich man, need to reach out in faith recognizing those whom God gives us where we live, those whom God has helped, that is Lazarus, in order to find that radical community of life.

Finding it, we also come to know the ways of using unrighteous wealth as a way to be welcomed into the eternal house communities of faith (parable 4), to be open to those who have gone astray and returned to gracious welcomes (parable 3), to know the value of the one who with radical love, searches for us (parable 2). We will celebrate the finding of the lost in ways that may have greater value than those things that are lost for the sake of the one whose radical love has searched us out when we were wandering off by ourselves (parable 1). We will see God’s image in all whom we meet and lift them up into the community God has invited us to be part of since that first Sabbath time of creation. We will find the community of peace that surpasses all understanding, in the community we lost and rediscovered, reveling in the wholeness of Christ.

Living Well--Luke 16:1-13

The sixteenth chapter of Luke begins with what I have come to think of as the fourth “lost and found” parable. The first three were in chapter fifteen. Each of these parables gets slightly more difficult to understand and much more complex. So let us first review the previous “lost and found” parables. First there is the lost sheep. The shepherd leaves the flock in order to find the one who is lost. This is followed by the woman and the lost coin. Here, the woman sweeps the house clean in order to find the lost coin. Each of these parables end with radical celebration. The level of celebration is possibly even greater than the value of the sheep or the coin.

In the third parable we read of the lost son. He is not so much found as he finds himself and returns home on his own. The result is great celebration. In this parable an added layer of the human condition comes when we are confronted by the attitude of the older brother and his resentment of the younger brother who has come home.

Now in the fourth parable (I call it the parable of “lost justice or righteousness”), we meet a manager described in the NRSV as dishonest. He is called in Greek ἀδικία (adikia means injustice), but I believe that unrighteous captures the description of him much better. Although in this story we are told charges are brought about the management of the rich man’s estate, that the manager is squandering or wasting the rich man’s property, we do not know whether this is true. We only know that charges are made and that these charges result in the dismissal of the manager.

Because our unrighteous manager is able to later cut the amount of the debts owed to the rich man, we know the manager has been handling the affairs of the estate in a manner that benefited the rich man. We are invited to understand that the manager has been putting energy into his relationship with the rich man and gaining wealth at the expense of the share cropper/debtor. The Levitical law declares this as unrighteous. And yet, when the charges are made, the manager is given his walking papers seemingly without a process for appeal or audit that might vindicate his work.

Much time has been spent on the manager’s ethics. Was his unrighteousness cheating the rich man? Or, was his unrighteousness cheating the people? How is it that he can suddenly reduce the bills of the people owing goods to the rich man? Does the reduction of debts make the unrighteous manager righteous?

The parable doesn’t really help us understand any of that, but it does help us understand something about living in righteous relationship with others, or how to build trust in an adversarial world. In his life of acquiring status and wealth, the manager developed a relationship with the rich man at the expense of the share cropper/poor. We come to know that this relationship is unrighteous. The manager’s status and wealth depends on the status and wealth of the rich man.

Like Joseph of Egypt in days of old, the manager’s authority is always second to the rich man/Pharaoh. But that place in the world lasts only as long as the temporal authority allows it. As Potiphar’s wife is able to cast Joseph down, so now an outsider casts down the manager.

Faced with being put out on the street, the manager does what the manager is best at: he builds relationships. This time the relationship is with the debtors of the rich man’s world at the expense of the relationship with the rich man. Here the strains of the Magnificat come echoing down from Luke 1. “[God] has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. [God] has helped his servant…in remembrance of his mercy according to the promise he made to [the] ancestors; to Abraham and his descendants forever.”

At this point, I believe the parable raises the question of righteousness (δικαιοσύνη, dikaio-synē), what is a righteous or healthy community, by addressing the relationships that sustain us through the actions of the manager. Are they the relationships of power, wealth, and status? Or, are they the relationship of people who gather in co-operative work together? Is the lasting relationship the fight to the top? Or, companionship of the poor? In the terms of Luke 15:1-2, is it life among the grumbling Pharisees and scribes, or at the table, eating with tax collectors and sinners?

As the whims of Egypt sent God’s people into the wilderness to find God’s mercy and promised relationship of constancy, as Luke’s Gospel proclaims a preference for the poor and the promise of always having one another, so now the manager finds trust and relationship among the people he formerly oppressed. This new relationship is more sustainable than the relationship the manager had with the rich man. It is a relationship of mutual support. The manager gives up something of himself and in doing this, he reduces the debt burden on those around him. Shrewdness, guile, cleverness, even wisdom help the manager find mercy among the people that has lasted at least to the forever of this day. In this new place of mercy, he attains righteousness in relationship with the people.

No wonder the rich man commends the shrewdness of the manager. I sometimes wonder if there is a touch of jealousy in the commendation. Instead of being shamed, shunned, and shattered, the manager finds lasting new relationship of welcome, mutuality, and mercy (embracing each other, needing the forgiveness of debt on the one hand and the forgiveness of oppression on the other). In this new relationship the unrighteous manager finds his lost righteous state. No longer is he advancing his place in the world through interest on goods; instead he has found a way to live among God’s people with what is enough. He has found a way to use unrighteous wealth or dishonest standards as a means for building up and enriching the lives of the people.

We are reminded of Abraham’s bargaining for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham and Sarah’s laughter, Jacob’s bargaining for his birthright and his foiled bargain for Rachel. We are reminded of the tricks Joseph plays on his brothers and his ability to interpret dreams. We recall Moses and his bargaining with Pharaoh and the visitation of the plagues. Yes, we remember the long history of Abraham’s descendants up to and including a clever carpenter who died on a cross in order to conquer death, making righteous or justifying the world through himself. Is this not God using the unrighteous power of Satan and the world against itself in order to redeem God's people? All of this comes to us in this little story of a rich man, his manager, and the working people of the world. We may even get a glimpse of Paul’s ministry begun on the Damascus road.

About four hundred years ago, George Herbert wrote, “Living well is the best revenge.” In the last century this statement became a bumper sticker and people took living well to mean living large. It was a statement made to support consumerism, but I am convinced that living large is not what he meant.

What I believe George Herbert meant was that we should live ethical lives in our times, i.e., in caring relationships with one another. As such, I think that this little saying encapsulates this parable in a single sentence. If you want to live a life that does not seek advancement based on the oppression of others, that does not depend on racism or classism, a life that does not risk our environment and access to fresh water for the sake of a few dollars, then build relationships that nurture the lifting up of all. Indeed, living life like this is living well.

When we live for wealth and status, we only serve ourselves and a privileged few, but when we live for others, we make space for Christ’s reconciling presence to redeem and reclaim us making us right with God and one another. God’s work is always with and among the people. It is not the accumulation of money and power.

May you live well this week knowing the best revenge in the relationship of wholeness found in the reconciling body of Christ.

Lost and Found--Luke 15

These texts of lost and found things probably bring many snippets of panic and fear to all of us. “Where did I leave the keys? Where did I park the car? I know I had that most precious of things (my coffee cup, the handouts for worship, the coupons for the grocery store), just a moment ago, but where did I put it or them?” In our hymnody, many of us will echo, “I once was lost, but now am found,” but few of us will spend any time reflecting on those things that are lost to us and cannot be restored.

A couple of years ago, my wife, Susan, and I were doing some radical pruning in our yard. I got to use the switch-blade-like pruning saw my mom had given me for Christmas one year. My mom had died the previous year and so as I used the saw I also heard my mom’s delight with new designs of tools and if not actually using those tools, her anticipation of being able to use the tool sometime in the future.

As I sawed through the many overgrown branches of the bushes around our new house I could almost feel Mom’s presence and satisfaction of knowing that she had given me something that I could really use.

When I was done for the day, I put my tools away, got into my truck and hauled all of the debris from the day out to the city waste disposal site where it would eventually become mulch for some other project.

The following summer I went to get my pruning tools to do some clean up on the new growth on those same bushes after discovering a few more branches that needed to be pruned out. My anvil pruners were where they belonged, the scissors pruners were there too, but my switch-blade pruning saw was nowhere to be found.

Yes, I pulled the shop apart. I went through the entire tool chest. I pulled it out from the wall. I checked under the work bench and on all of the ledges I might have laid it on. I even checked the laundry room and the shelves in the pantry, but the switch-blade pruning saw was not to be found.

I finally decided that some youthful transgressor had seen this novel tool and naively absconded with my prize tool not knowing of the sentimental attachment and my personal joy I felt using it. It was gone.

Well, I had other pruning saws, I thought. They weren’t as much fun or as convenient, but they were certainly usable. I went to work and tried to get over the grief and yes, anger over having had that wonderful tool taken away from me. Later that year I found the identical saw in a hardware store, but I was not able to bring myself to replace it. After all, I had gotten the job done without it, and even though I would have the tool, I would always know that it was not the tool my mom had given to me.

Over the years, I have thought about that saw with regret and wondered whether the person who had ended up using it appreciated it. I wondered if I could ever really justify replacing it? I really didn’t need it, but it didn’t really cost that much. Yet that lingering thought of having lost the gift that was given prevented me from being able to fully move past the loss of that simple tool. Each time I needed to do some pruning I revisited the sense of loss and violation I felt over the loss of the switch-blade pruning saw.

A few months ago I found an old tool box that I had been using at the time and I opened the box to check whether I had put the saw in there, but no. I kept looking in the past trying to reconstruct my movements that day trying to locate that saw. On some occasions I concluded that I had inadvertently put the saw among the branches I had trimmed that day and that the saw was part of some mulch pile somewhere and that the workers had gotten angry when the metal saw blade had gone through the shredder blades dulling and possibly chipping them. At other times I concluded that I had forgotten to pick it up at the end of the day and someone had come by and picked it up thinking that it had ben abandoned. Okay, I obsessed about it.  I even dreamed that I found it one night and had very carefully put it in a safe place to be used later, but when I went to that safe place the next day it was not there.

This searching for the saw continued as a way to restore something that was lacking in my life. It was something that was broken that I thought could be made whole again if I just put all of the parts together again. These parts were in the past and so I kept looking in the past revisiting the pain, nurturing the pain, feeding the pain and frustration each time I thought about it. I longed to have that sense of accomplishment and belonging that I felt that day I trimmed the bushes.

I thought that I had put it all away until I heard Joni Mitchel sing the iconic song of 1969 (Woodstock). In this song she sings, “We are stardust. We are golden. We are trapped in the devil’s bargain. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

I thought about my saw, I thought about our lives of faith and struggling to find the lost relationship of the Garden of Eden, the 15^th anniversary  of 9/11, and even the language of our election this year. how all of these things are trying to recover and restore something lost that cannot be made whole again.

Okay, I know that the loss of my saw had something to do with my mother’s death and that I was not going to be able to bring her back again, just as I know that the relationship of the Garden is not something that we can get back to. The mindset of our nation before 9/1`1 in gone forever, and  the rhetoric of trying to make us something again is not possible. So why do we keep trying so hard to do exactly that?

These events of loss in our lives can become fixations that anchor us in an unhealthy past. It is not that we should not feel grief or remember loved ones and the past with fondness and a sense of loss, but the wholeness we knew before these events continues to be part of our wholeness today. These particular events make us who we are and testify to our ability to cope and adapt to our new world situations.

The joy of recovering the sheep, the coin, and the son (in the prodigal son), are not about restoring a wholeness that was, rather, these stories are about creating circumstances for celebration in the present/future. These times of finding are opportunity for creating new communities of celebration and understanding. Even the great losses of life and property that we have witnessed around the world these past fifteen years are not events of paralyzing times of destruction only, they are also times for us to learn new ways of living with one another, listening to one another, and new opportunities of finding peace in ourselves and in our world.

There are those who say that our world was forever changed by 9/11, and to some extent that is true, but the loss of life and property is a daily event too. There are those who say that the greatness of our country has been lost and that we need to recover that greatness, but we cannot rest upon the laurels of the past. We must continue to build for the future. We cannot even get back to the Garden because God intervened in history, finding us when we had gone astray and changed the relationship forever. So we are given this amazing gift of letting go of our sins of the past in order to live into a new future having found not lost things, but our relationship with God.

Stanley Hauerwas responded in a pacifist response to 9/11 writes, “Our response [to life in a post 9/11 world] is to continue living in a manner that witnesses to our belief that the world was not changed on September 11, 2001. The world was [forever] changed during the celebration of Passover in A.D. 33.” Indeed, the consequences of that celebration resulted in the losing of one more thing. There was a body that was lost in the tomb. That loss has resulted in us being found finding new life in Christ. Finding that, all else is changed.

A friend asked if he could borrow my truck the other day. Wanting to clean out some of the detritus that had accumulated, I pulled out odd pieces of paper toweling, oil rags, and ancient maps. Reaching into the map pocket to see what was preventing the new maps to seat properly I found my switch-blade pruning saw. Suddenly I remembered getting into the truck that night and sitting on the saw which was in my hip pocket. Wanting to put it somewhere safe I threw it into the map pocket and promptly forgot it. So, in celebration I am inviting all of you to come to a shrubbery trimming party. If I can riff on an old saw, “[It] once was lost, but now [it’s] found. I’m blind and yet I see.