Fortunately, Unfortunately.

A few weeks ago a kind man from our church gave Carmen a copy of one of his—and maybe your—favorite books from childhood, Fortunately, Unfortunately. People-of-a-certain-age, you remember how it goes, don’t you?

“Fortunately, Ned was invited to a surprise party.

Unfortunately, the party was a thousand miles away.

Fortunately, a friend loaned Ned an airplane.

Unfortunately, the motor exploded.

Fortunately, there was a parachute in the airplane.

Unfortunately, there was a hole in the parachute.”

And so on.

That’s how our last few months have been. It’s so hard to tell a story when you’re in the middle of it, so I just waited. And waited. Forgetting that the story never really comes to end, does it? It just goes from Fortunately, to Unfortunately, and back again.

So because writing is a way I process stuff out I am going to give you a little installment, knowing that that’s the way we live our lives: that we’re in the middle of them, right up until the very end.

Fortunately, we had the biggest Easter service we’ve had in living memory at our church: well over 300 people (and bunnies!).

Unfortunately, the week after Easter, Molly found out there were 4 separate competing evangelical fundamentalist churches suddenly moving into Somerville, a city where something like only 3% of the population identifies as ‘interested’ in finding a new church. And all those churches are led by hip young white male pastors who all seem to have goatees, perfect families, and some of them even claim to love gay people. Until the gay people want to have sex with each other, and then it’s another story.

Fortunately, the new churches have more to fear from each other than her church does from them. Right?

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop her from having some sleepless nights, wondering if all she and her congregation had worked tirelessly for over the last decade was just going to disappear in the blink of a shiny door-hangers or a big subway ad from one of the bigger, savvier and better-funded fundies, and all the queer and/or progressive spiritual seekers would end up leaping into the warm water of these new churches only to get boiled to death in the long run.

Fortunately, something came along to distract her: a 13-year-old boy from Haiti, Junior, whom her upstairs neighbor had introduced her to.

Unfortunately, Junior was here for lifesaving heart surgery through Partners in Health: he was at death’s door, with two faulty valves barely keeping him alive.

Fortunately, his surgery was a success.

Unfortunately, his recovery was not: on the day he was to be discharged from the hospital, his father, who had chaperoned him here, went out for coffee and never came back.

Fortunately, Molly and Peter and Rafe and Carmen tremblingly agreed to let Junior stay with them while Partners in Health figured out what was next.

Unfortunately, Junior was so distressed that he cried the whole first week he was with them. And Molly couldn’t even comfort him in his native language. And he hated her cooking. And Rafe would lie awake in the bunk above him in the middle of the night and hear the steady –tick –tick –tick of Junior’s titanium valves, and the muffled sobs.

Fortunately, her children and their friends knew just how to pull him out of his funk: fart jokes and trampoline-wrestling! Art projects and scooters! Soccer practice and sleepovers with a big pile of boys! And Junior began to really like his life with the Baskettes. And started calling Peter ‘Dad’ and Molly ‘Mom’ and put a framed photo of himself in their living room.

Unfortunately, under the strain of suddenly being a full-time parent to three children and about to move for the first time in 10 years while her husband Peter simultaneously finished a master’s degree and launched a new ticketing system and working 12 hours a day, Molly began forgetting things. Like: calling the brain cancer patient for follow-up. Like: packing the Epi-pen in her daughter’s backpack. Kind of important things.

Fortunately, there were angels all around, who would take Junior bike riding or bowling so she could get a little of her brain back.

Fortunately and Unfortunately, the Department of Children and Families got involved, who are at times dysfunctional and disorganized enough to make Molly think about voting Republican. And at other times do the most noble work humans can do: getting abandoned and abused children to higher ground.

Fortunately, Junior grew on everybody. He began to learn English. He cooked up fantastic hotdog-and-onion omelettes for the whole family. He learned to put the lid up when he peed. He gained 12 pounds. He had the most joyful laugh in the world. He made art that said “God is Good” in English, and hung it up all over the house.

Unfortunately, it was just too much. The totally legitimate needs of this wonderful boy in distress were just too much for this working mom/minister/cancer survivor. Molly’s stressed-out body, the fourth child in the family, began to try to get her attention in negative ways: her herniated disc began flaring. Her chemo- and pregnancy-compromised pelvic floor began to show signs of collapsing like the work of a shoddy Bangladeshi building contractor. She developed a neuroma in her foot that made walking horribly painful. She couldn’t sleep.

Fortunately, she found an amazing pelvic floor physical therapist, who did magical things with her transverse abdominis muscle. 

Unfortunately, she found a less than amazing podiatrist who made things worse before he made things better.

Fortunately, she went to see her spiritual director, who helped her discern beyond a shadow of a doubt that God was not calling her family to be Junior’s ‘forever family.’ 

Unfortunately, just because you know it’s the thing God wants you to do, doesn’t mean you don’t still feel shitty about it.

Fortunately, things began to move forward with Junior’s placement. Molly sent out a missive to her church and some pastor friends, alerting them to Junior’s situation, seeking a DCF-licensed foster family in Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, calls began flowing in from families all over the country: Idaho, California, Colorado, even Alberta, Canada, people eager to help and wanting a call back TODAY. Some of them were really together people offering legitimate local support. But lots of the emails and voicemails ended with a kind of evangelical Christian signature, “In Him,” that made her want to call them back just to annoy them with female pronouns for God.

Molly thought: who are you people, so eager to help, so much more noble and selfless and resilient and Christian than me, who really struggled with the decision to take on an extra kid for even a few weeks?

Then Molly thought: wait, who are you people, who won’t stop calling me even though we clearly said “Massachusetts” and “licensed,” and who seemed disappointed when we told you no, Junior was all set, thanks very much, as if you had been personally thwarted in your holy ambitions?

Fortunately, after 6 weeks, after lots of phone calls and site visits and forms and confusion and silence and flurry and silence: one family emerged. A good family. A local family. Friends of people in our church and from Rafe’s soccer team. A family that above all, wants what is best for Junior, whatever that turns out to be. And Junior transitioned there yesterday. And, selfishly, happily, we will continue to see him at soccer and at church, and we will still have sleepovers and outings.

Unfortunately, a Haitian aunt and uncle living in Florida suddenly turned up at the custody hearing yesterday, thinking they could take him home with him the same day.

Fortunately, Junior wanted to go.

Unfortunately, the State couldn’t let that happen.

Fortunately, the judge was eager to support family reunification and they will expedite the process.

Unfortunately, it will still take at least 3 months, maybe 6. And Junior hung his head and cried, like he hasn’t in weeks.

Fortunately, the system will work (one hopes). And the state agencies will make sure this family is legit (I have learned more than I care to know about bad foster families in the last 6 weeks!), and they will  be legit, and Junior will go closer to home, and live with people who love him and know him and speak his language, and will give him a better life, an easier life and certainly a life with more possibilities in it, than he would have had in Haiti. And we will have a few more months to love on him and help him stabilize in his new life and in his new, strong heart.

Fortunately, Molly got out of family court by noon yesterday, and had the first real Sabbath she’s had since early in Lent, and had a chance to ask herself, “what are those things that I enjoy doing when I am by myself? Oh, right!” And ate year-old chocolate out of the dwindling stores in the pantry (moving in 10 days!) and walked to the public library and checked out books for herself that have nothing to do with church growth or ministry or efficiency or leadership or management: she checked out novels.

And that night, Molly crawled in bed with husband and kids, because we all fit there, a family of four again, and we watched TV in bed and rubbed backs, and we called Junior to say “good night! Bon soir!” as the sun went down, and Junior sounded a little better, a little more himself, and Molly and Peter both slept through the night.

Fortunately. For now.

~

And a prayer coda: beloved cancendentalists, will you pray for my colleague-sister Rev. Jean Lenk, a UCC minister with an amazing, transcendent spirit and outlook? She has sarcoma, all of a sudden. It’s everywhere. She doesn’t know what kind yet—biopsy yesterday. She’s terribly uncomfortable and knows what this means, but she’s holding up so well. She’s too young for this shit!  Fierce prayers, please! 

Shelter-in-Place.

Davis Square, Friday morning, during the shelter-in-place order.

Good morning peeps. Here’s what I said to my people yesterday. We sang strong songs, and prayed strong prayers, and had two sermons for the press of one (bless my awesome colleague Rev. Jeff, who shared the pulpit—he was originally slated to preach). 

Hope you are all well, practicing self-care to the degree to which you need it, and smelling the peach blossoms if you are in Zone 5 of North America as we are!

~

Rev. Molly Baskette ~ First Church Somerville UCC
“Shelter-in-Place” – Third Sunday in Eastertide
Psalm 23
Sunday, April 21, 2013

Our sister Lisa Cordner said on Friday afternoon that we were all involved in our own kind of marathon. A marathon of waiting. Painful in a different way than mile 18 or Heartbreak Hill.

The police called it “shelter-in-place,” but it sure didn’t feel like shelter. The desire to MOVE was enormous, weighty, stifling. It was enforced Sabbath, an unlooked-for day off, a chance to be inside and read a novel, bathe, clean a closet, cuddle our kids. But who could concentrate? Who could do those ordinary things that the living do, when there was so much death on the line?

Monday happened: the Marathon bombings.  And almost immediately, in spite of our grief and fear, we began to look for the angels. Even people of no-faith talked angel-talk. Did you see the first responders, moving TOWARD the explosion, we all said with awe. Did you hear how the marathoners, when they heard the race was stopped and why, turned their bodies toward MGH and kept running, running, to the blood donation center? We had our own First Church angel: Tessa was right near the finish line when the explosion happened. Something made her move toward the people in distress, and there was a woman, hysterical, looking for someone she’d lost. Tessa asked her if she’d like to pray. “I can’t pray I can’t pray” the woman said. Tessa had never prayed out loud with anyone before in her life but she found herself saying, “I’ll pray,” and she did. “I don’t know where the words came from,” she said. Angels, everywhere.

And over the days, we began to recover a sense of normalcy. It was a terrible thing that happened, amidst so many terrible things in the world. This terrible thing was bigger only because it was closer. Boston is a small town, in more ways than one. You realize how tightly woven a fabric we are when an event like this happens.  We were all talking what-if theology, missed-connection theology. That’s what time I crossed the finish line last year. My friend was two T stops away, about to get off at Copley. My mother-in-law had just left the area. Wonder. Awe. A sense of the preciousness of life, the thinness of the veil, the immediacy of death. Gratitude and Fear. Grief. Grief. Relief.

I have been wondering all week, why is a bombing scarier than a mass shooting? A mass shooting would have killed far more people. We know because it has. But in a shooting, you know where ground zero is. You know what and whom to move away from. A bombing strikes without warning, it could happen anytime, anywhere. No place is a safe place anymore. No person is a safe persaon anymore. They called Dzokhar a good boy. A friendly boy. A good student, an athlete. 

Maybe if we just keep moving fast enough, we can dodge the bullet, the bomb. We told the angel-stories, and through Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday our fear began to abate. It didn’t matter, entirely, that the suspects weren’t in custody. We would have to move out of the valley of the shadow of death, sooner or later.

But then Thursday nigh came, and Friday. And we weren’t allowed to move. Paralyzed from without and paralyzed from within. We’d spent a lot of the week being grateful and relieved by the missed connections that spared us and the people we love, but now we were all at our own personal ground zero, watching the windows, staying low. For some of us the ground zero was more zero than others. Matt Broman is the IT manager for the MIT police and was called into work at 3am after his friend Sean was killed, for assistance. He lives in Watertown, and when he walked out the front door with his backpack on in the middle of the night, multiple cops turned their guns on him. It’s a miracle everyone kept their heads.

 Psalm 23 affirms that even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. But that’s not strictly true, is it? We do fear evil, and that’s why we try to name it, name the boy-man, name the location, so we can move as far away as possible. We call it evil so we can distance ourselves from it. 

A question I heard a lot this week was, “how can I love my enemies, the way Jesus asks, on a day like this?”  When Jesus was walking around first-century Galilee, there weren’t teenage boys with pressure-cooker bombs in their backpacks. It was a simpler time. Jesus didn’t have to hold a dying 8-year-old full of threepenny nails in his arms. He couldn’t have meant—us, now, loving.

The Psalm says, “you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” It’s right there: an invitation to sit and be there, to eat and drink and relax, or to try to relax, or to pretend to relax, to behave counterintuitively in the presence of a threat. To go on. To fight the fear. Or truer: to acknowledge the fear, and sit and eat anyhow. Remember, in the Psalm, we are not walking through the valley of death, we are walking through the valley of the SHADOW of death. Often it’s the shadow of the thing that is more fearful than the thing itself. We are in thrall to our fear, and not the thing. Maybe that’s what lets people at the heart of a crisis move toward and not away:  they are so close to death that they can’t see its shadow anymore.

Last summer I read you some words by Rabbi Harold Kushner. It was a beautiful summer day, and we were blessing our animals on the front lawn. The shooting had just happened in Aurora, Colorado. I’m going to read the words again, because it’s as if Rabbi Kushner wrote them just for us, just for today, just for Boston:

The twenty-third Psalm is the answer to the question, “How do you live in a dangerous, unpredictable, frightening world?”

…Right after 9/11 — when everybody was asking me, “Where was God that Tuesday? How could God have let such a thing happen?” — the answer I found myself giving was, “God’s promise was never that life would be fair. God’s promise was, when it’s your turn to confront the unfairness of life, no matter how hard it is, you’ll be able to handle it, because God will be on your side. She will give you the strength you need to find your way through.”

 ”Some things happen in the world that God does not want to happen.” God is good. Nature is not good. Nature is blind. Nature is amoral. Fire burns and shrapnel injures and disease germs infect everybody, whether you deserve it or not.

But people who have been hurt by life get stuck in “the valley of the shadow,” and they don’t know how to find their way out. And that’s the role of God. The role of God is not to explain and not to justify but to comfort, to find people when they are living in darkness, take them by the hand, and show them how to find their way into the sunlight again.

The author of [Psalm Twenty-three] has enemies. He has known failure. He has lost people he loved. In the process, he has learned that life is not easy. Life is a challenge, and he has grown stronger as, with God’s help, he met the challenges of life. He is a better person, a wiser, stronger person than he would have been, had life not challenged him to grow.”

The psalm can teach us another valuable lesson as well: Much of the time, we cannot control what happens to us. But we can always control how we respond to what happens to us. If we cannot choose to be lucky, to be talented, to be loved, we can choose to be grateful, to be content with who we are and what we have, and to act accordingly.

The Lord is our shepherd. Sometimes God makes us lie down in green pastures, and sometimes God makes us lie down on the sofa all day with the sirens blaring outside. Sometimes God leads us beside still waters, and sometimes beside white water over a rickety bridge called borrowed courage. Sometimes we’re on right paths and sometimes we’re on wrong paths and you know what? God is wit us on every path. Because God is GOD.

God is with little Martin’s parents, sitting shiva, and with Dzokhar, shivering in the bottom of that boat, and God was with every one of us, in every one of our ground zeros, our missed connections, moving with us toward and moving with us away from and sheltering us in place, and restoring our souls, one breath at a time, one angel at a time, one song at a time.

 God is on every right path and every wrong path, and one of the learnings from this week is:  none of us should be too sure we know what kind of path we’re on. And another learning is: whether the path is good or whether it’s bad, God, Thou Art With Me, Thou will be there at the end.

Marathon.

Peeps, 

Sometimes when I haven’t written for a while, it’s because there is not much going on. Sometimes, it’s because there is entirely TOO much going on. That’s what’s happening right now, and I don’t know what to say about it yet. 

Don’t worry, it’s not about cancer, not really. And: it’s all, more or less, working out. 

Will write again soon, but in the meantime, my cousin reminded me of this sermon I preached many years ago after watching the Boston Marathon. It sums up, more than anything new I could say, how I feel as a Bostonian, so close to the scene of this week’s crime.

love you, bless you,

Molly

~

Rev. Molly Phinney Baskette ~ First Congregational Church, Somerville

Sunday, April 24, 2005 ~ Fifth Sunday in Eastertide

Matthew 15:29-32

“In Need of a Crutch”

Rafe and I went down to the Boston Marathon this week—-something I have never done in spite of living here many of my 34 years. An old college buddy had us over; she and her husband have a big barbecue every year because they’re right on the marathon route.

We had bagels and juice at the house and then ran down the street to catch the wheelchair marathoners, who come through first. These paraplegics fold their legs underneath them in what looks like a most uncomfortable position, and lean forward to diminish wind resistance while their powerful arms propel them the 26 miles.  Every face that went by had a strength and intensity that rebuffed the pity I would have offered them. These were athletes. They demanded my respect, not my condolences.  With every wheelchair that sped by I found myself more veclemt at the sturdiness of the human spirit. Rafe was intrigued and asked, “When I grow up and my legs break, can I race wheelchairs too?”

Then came the women, just a couple in the lead, gorgeous, all long muscle lines, fierce. Then more women, increasingly all shapes and sizes. Then the able-bodied men, who started last, for a change. A Kenyan and a South American in the lead, then another pack of Kenyans running in concert, like an orchestra. Then everybody else. It was the everybody else that was perhaps the most amazing. As they ran by, pitching water bottles and orange rinds, they were all so different. Twenty abreast, no break in between them, just a sea of humanity, a huge school of fish, but every one unique. Some focused, serious; others giving high fives and flashing peace signs or offering mushy kisses to bystanders, or dancing to the Neil Diamond karaoke artist who had set up shop half a block from us, crooning “SWEET Car-o-line BAH BAH BAH.”  A woman wearing a bridal veil (that couldn’t have been good for wind resistance), “Marry Me” inscribed in black Sharpie all over her quads. Short balding guys with stringy sweaty combovers getting into their eyes; young blond Dianas with their hair in tight ponytails, saggy women with laugh lines to their ankles.  Running for Children’s Hospital, or AIDS, or for themselves. For an hour they ran by, their numbers never thinning.

Every one of them has a story, I thought. I felt like I could practically SEE their stories, could have read them off their hearts, if they hadn’t been running by at 9 or 10 miles an hour. 

Rafe asked me, more than once, when the able-bodied runners started coursing by, “why do they have legs?”  I didn’t know how to answer. He took it for granted that because the first runners we saw were disabled, they all should be.

William Sloan Coffin, whom I am fond of calling our UCC pope, asked more or less the same question when he said, “People say that religion is a crutch. Well, what makes you think that you are not lame?”

There is a crazy idea out there that able-bodied is the standard. That we are supposed to be happy, whole, healthy, mature, with no stress fractures or scar tissue from having survived life. We are embarrassed when our wounds show, and consider it our job each morning to apply the makeup carefully enough that we can get through the day without revealing them. The idea of crying, or showing any emotion in public that we did not intend to, is mortifying to many of us.

The mystic priest Henri Nouwen writes, “Nobody escapes being wounded. We all are wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed but ‘how can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.”

One of the things Jesus spent most of his time doing, of course, was healing. It was a precursor to most of his teachings—the way he got the people to buy in.  Some of them came to him with no intention of joining a religious movement, but simply out of self-interest, because they had heard he was a phenomenal healer. Matthew sums up these opportunists by saying, “Great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others.” I wonder how Jesus felt about that—knowing they might be just using him for his medical prowess, and didn’t give a fig about his sermons.  But almost every healing story ends with the people staying, listening, and praising God, or hailing Jesus as the Christ. They come for healing, and leave with faith—which will heal them for a lifetime.

This is all done by the man whose stigmata will bleed in Renaissance paintings for eternity. Why did Jesus spend so much of his ministry healing wounds and yet, after the Resurrection, didn’t bother to heal his own? He shows up at the house where the disciples are gathered and shows them his hands and his side. They are his calling card, his proof that this is not a practical joke, and they deliver a message:  His wounds are a part of him forever. Without them, he wouldn’t be who he is. They tell part of his story in an important way.

When we suffer, our wounds remain a part of us forever. We can apply the proper salves and medicines, keep them clean and covered.  Bones will knit and skin grow back, but our bodies and our souls will never entirely forget the hurt. This, the stigmata seem to say, is as it should be. Our hurts never completely go away, but they heal to the point where they can be put into the service of others.

A Talmudic legend tells of a rabbi coming upon Elijah the prophet while he was standing at the entrance of a cave. He asked Elijah. “When will the messiah come?” Elijah replied, “Go and ask him yourself.”  “Where is he?” “Sitting at the gates of the city.” “How shall I know him?” “He is sitting among the poor, covered with wounds. The others unbind all their wounds at the same time and then bind them up again. But he unbinds his one at a time and binds it up again, saying to himself, ‘Perhaps I shall be needed; if so I must always be ready so as not to delay for a moment.’”

There is a protocol that governs the tending of our wounds. Jesus does not bleed all over the place, but unbinds his own wounds only one at a time, so that he may be always ready if needed. Henri Nouwen says that “our own experience with loneliness, depression and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care. As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away. But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others.”

I often remind you that when we gather here, we call ourselves the “priesthood of all believers.” Every one of us, in the United Church of Christ, is a minister. And with that title comes responsibility. A colleague of mine said, ‘Ministers must be willing to go beyond their professional role and leave themselves open as fellow human beings with the same wounds and suffering—in the image of Christ.’

In that spirit, I wanted to share with you all a wound I recently received.  Peter and I found out a month ago that we were expecting, but the baby has been struggling, and earlier this week, I had a miscarriage. This is the second pregnancy that Peter and I have lost in the last year. The first was last spring; Holy Week to be exact. I didn’t share it with you at the time because I wanted you to be able to experience Easter, and not just become a party to our personal Good Friday. But since it’s happened again, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I ask you to bring your whole lives to worship, and to our common prayer life, and I know that I as your minister am called to do the same in this moment. The main question, as Nouwen said, is not “how can I hide my wounds from my congregation, those who have pledged to care for me as I do for them,” but “how can I put my wounds in the service of others?” 

So I stand here today, sad but healing, empty of the springtime hope of a new child, but full of gratitude that I have a people to hold some of that sadness.  I know that I am not standing here alone, but I stand here with my family, my incredible husband and my healthy and beautiful son, my extended family and my brothers and sisters in Christ. I stand with every woman here who has loved and lost a pregnancy, every man who has hoped to become a father and been disappointed.

Peter and I are doing ok. We have good support systems in place, including the ministerial care committee with whom we shared our news earlier this week, and who have prayed with us, made us food, taken over church tasks or watched Rafe so we could concentrate on other things. Thank you for making your love so visible. As we move forward and let our wounds heal, know that we don’t feel the need to talk about our experience, but we welcome your quiet prayers in the months and years to come as we try again. We look forward to the day when we can share good news from this microphone, of one sort or another, and in the meantime we pray with all of you for the birth of many good things and beautiful babies in our common life together.

On Monday at the marathon, I held my belly, held what was trying against the odds to grow inside of me. I watched all those strong bodies and intent faces run by, looking hard to see if I could see what was trying to grow inside of them. Rafe kept interrupting my thoughts to ask me again and again, “Why do they have legs?”  And I finally came up with an answer that seemed to satisfy him. “Their broken parts are on the inside, but God is making them strong enough to keep running.”

There is Power in the Blood.

So, here’s the sermon I preached on Sunday, which was Palm/Passion Sunday at church. The hybrid Palm/Passion is something Protestant churches started doing in the last couple decades because so few people went to the sad, blood-y services toward the end of Holy Week, and we didn’t want people to miss out on the crisis that makes Easter’s happy ending so powerful. Otherwise, it’s like walking into the last five minutes of a movie.

I re-read an old blog entry, the one where I first got a blood transfusion, as homework for the sermon. Amazing how far away it all feels, but it was not even three years ago. 

What doesn’t feel far away: the gratitude. Sometimes when I wake up in the night, I just lie there smiling in the dark, at how good life is.

~

Now is the time when God brings Her stories before us.

Life turns on a dime. One minute Jesus is homecoming queen, riding in a convertible, at an impromptu parade, with his hair blowing in the breeze. The next, they are calling for his blood, and none of his many friends are anywhere to be found.

Life turns on a dime.  The people are shouting Hosanna, and then all of a sudden the people are shouting Crucify. Perhaps these are not the same people. Perhaps the first people are good people, and the second people are bad people. But where have all the good people gone?

Life turns on a dime. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I had to make a lot of decisions very quickly. One of the decisions I had to make was about blood. The chemo, you see, would make me dangerously anemic. I could add another pill to the drugs I was taking to help rebuild my blood, but the list of side effects was long, and serious. I decided, should I need blood, that I would get transfusions instead, hoping I would need to.

But I did. A day came when I was bald, frail, getting my children breakfast at a chemo patient’s pace, and the wooziness surged, and I nearly fell and hit my head on the counter. And I knew it was time.

There is nothing like watching another human being’s blood flow into your own veins. It’s not much like a mother nursing her child—there is all the plastic, and the beeping, and the alcohol swabs—but it is like it, the raw power, the joining of life to life, of weakness to strength, something so impossibly red flowing down through the cannula, down, down, following the glucose, and finally reaching the organic stream of your own blood, a canal joining a river, currents merging, communion.

I found myself wondering, who was this person who gave me their blood? Was it a man, a woman, old young, black brown or white? What did they eat for breakfast the day they donated? What is their temperament—angry, happy, melancholy, gregarious, hungry? I lifted my hands up to the bag in blessing, and gave thanks for this person who gave a little bit of their life to me. Who made life just for me, a stranger to them, and a child of God.

On the way home, I made my husband stop for pepperoni pizza, which I had a sudden craving for. I ate half of it, and some strawberry rhubarb crisp, and three chicken drumsticks. I hadn’t eaten like that in months. I decided: whatever else my donor was, they were definitely hungry. And now they were a part of me.

Up in Magoun Square, less than a mile away, there is a sweet storefront church called Igreja Mr. Jesus. The Mr. Jesus Church! The tagline of the church is “There is Power in His Blood.” When I sit idling in traffic in front of that church, I pray for the people inside. What are their lives like? What kind of work do they do, and what kind of suffering do they suffer? And what kind of savior do they hope for, that their comfort lies in this assertion, “there is power in His blood”?

When the choir learned that some of the songs we would be singing today were about the blood of Jesus, there was grumbling. There was anxiety. What is all the blood business anyhow? It’s not our theology. We are not people of the blood; we are people of the Word. We say in church, “In the beginning was the Word.” We know that God called the worlds into being with words; that Christ Himself was the Word with God at the beginning of all Creation. It is words that have power, not blood.

Blood theology is for superstitious folk, unlearned folk, right? Blood is for people who don’t have enough words. 

All I know is, that day when I almost fainted and hit my head on the counter, I didn’t need words. I needed blood. 

A pastor friend of mine recently said, some people learn about God by hearing. Some people learn about God by seeing. And some people learn about God by feeling. That’s why there are churches with tag lines like “Building the Beloved Community” and other churches with tag lines like “There is Power in His Blood.”

There are many ideas about what the crucifixion of Jesus meant, under the category of what we call Atonement Theory. A lot of words have been used up on them. The most convincing one, to my mind, is Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, which goes roughly like this:

Humans want to be like each other so much that we end up in endless competition with each other. This lack of self-differentiation and competition makes us anxious and jealous and angry. Rather than take responsibility for our yucky feelings, we externalize them: we identify scapegoats, the “bad people,” and we, the “good people,” kill them, metaphorically or actually. Each death buys us peace, for a little while.

Jesus came along and was not even a little bit bad, but we killed him anyway. The worst death of the best innocent, rather than temporarily buying peace the way other executions had, instead exposed the violence at the center of every human heart.

I believe this idea. It satisfies my head. But it misses out on something. What about the bad things that happen to us, that no other human is responsible for, or the things we have done to ourselves? The diagnosis, the empty chair at the dinner table, the terrible loneliness or addiction or depression? The blood of Jesus has power not just because the blood of innocents has political properties to cure our warring madness, as Gandhi and Dr. King taught and re-taught us.

The blood of Jesus has power because it is God saying: I have suffered, and I know your suffering. The worst part of suffering, often, is not the pain itself, but the loneliness that accompanies it. When you are suffering, when you are bleeding, you want to be with someone else who is also bleeding, but someone who is surviving their mortal wound. Someone who can show you the way out, the way home. Jesus’ blood says:  Because I love you and I don’t want you to be afraid, I have gone ahead of you into EVERYTHING bad that can and will happen to you; I have gotten there first. Look for me there. I will have a cup, a cannula, communion, ready for you.

Some comp lit major or other once noticed that the word, Atonement, can be read differently: At One Ment. The state of being one, together. The moment when what’s in the cannula reaches your bloodstream, and saves you. You don’t need to understand mimetic theory for the blood to save you. You just need to show up, and open a vein. You need to let God in.

We are going to sing an anthem in a few minutes. It is called The Blood Will Never Lose its Power. The story told about this anthem is that Andrae Crouch wrote it when he was only 15 years old. And he didn’t understand what it meant until he was 30. Sometimes, our circulation is slow. It takes a long time for what’s in the heart to reach the head, and that’s ok.

I don’t need to understand clotting and IGE factors and blood typing for a pint of blood to save my physical body. And I don’t need to understand all the nuances of Girardian theory for Christ to save my spiritual body. All I know is: it works. There IS power in the blood.

Our sixth and final mark of discipleship is Service. At coffee hour, if you are willing, look for Melissa. She is going to be sitting at a table with sweet Nolan, and a stack of brochures on how to become an organ donor; she’ll have a live computer there, so you can sign up immediately. There is power in YOUR blood, because it is Christ’s blood, Christ’s kidney, heart, liver, corneas, because you are the body of Christ. Jesus said to his disciples, just before he went to the cross, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Amen church? Amen!

Spring is Not Safe.

One of my parishioners reminded me about this Easter sermon I preached. They had just found my tumor, two days before Palm Sunday. So I guess tomorrow’s like my tumor-versary? Three years now.

We didn’t know what it was, other than BIG and in my lung. And I told a few people at my church, but not many; I didn’t want to get everyone anxious, not till we had a clearer picture of what was going on. But it was in the deep background of all of Holy Week. 

I just re-read this sermon, in the preacher’s mood of “What Do I Possibly Have Left To Say About Easter and Oh Mi Gosh So Many People Are Coming Lord Give Me a New Sermon.” And I felt the truth of it, all over again. And so much gratitude.

Maybe it will touch you, too, if you are feeling a little bit, or a lot, broken?

~

My mind’s on summer today. I wonder why, when it’s hardly spring. Could it be, I don’t know, the fast-track to climate change, evidenced by all the strappy dresses in the crowd, when it’s barely April? I fantasize about summer like I never did before I had kids. Maybe it’s because I know that summer promises Sabbath, promises that my children will pester me nonstop to go to the beach, the park, the pool, to leave my work behind, and my worries, to go and put my face in the sun. I hope you have kids, and that they do this for you, give you an excuse to tell your boss it’s time to go home, tell your schoolwork to go hang. If you don’t have kids, I will lend you mine. And then I will go to the beach all by myself.

There’s another reason, though, to want to fast-forward through spring. Spring is fragile; it’s not safe and strong at the root like summer is. Spring blabs on and on about its “new life” this and “new life” that, but let’s tell the truth. Things that are trying to get born or give birth in Spring, they don’t always survive. Sometimes, the fruit trees bloom too early, and a killing frost arrives. The cow giving birth to her calf in the barn, the rabbit and her bunnies in the burrow, the woman in the maternity ward or the mud hut—they don’t all make it. There are still whole cultures where children don’t get their names until they are four or five years old, until they are summer-strong.

There’s a reason, after all, that we call it spring BREAK. Of course, maybe that’s the way God intended spring to be. You wonder what Easter eggs have to do with the story of the Christian God coming to Earth as a human being, dying, and rising from the dead on the third day, well. It could be that the egg thing is just stolen outright from the Jews, who have an egg as a symbol of sacrifice on their Passover Seder plate, or from the Pagans, who were deeply in tune with the rhythms of nature, and our animal and springly desires to create and reproduce. But the story I was told as a child is that the egg is like the tomb Jesus was placed in—it looks like something quiet and dead, but really, there’s a whole new life inside, and we have to break it to get at it. Something in us, needs to break, to get at new life.

Ernest Hemingway wrote that “the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.” He seems to be saying it is those who refuse to break who will die. And he doesn’t, I notice, say that everyone becomes strong at the broken places. Just that many are. I wonder if there is a choice here? I wonder what makes the difference between someone who is stronger at their broken places, and someone whom the breaking, just breaks?

Our brother Owen has spent a lot of time in Haiti these last few months, coordinating medical services. He came home for good last week, a little heartbroken because there’s so much left to do, and he has to go back to his regular job solving the global AIDS crisis. Selfish brat. Owen is normally a pretty unflappable guy, but when he came home after his first visit, just after the earthquake, he could barely talk about what he had seen. He has been working with a fourteen-year-old boy named Widlove, who had one leg severed and the other crushed. The boy didn’t get to a field hospital until a week after the quake. He did not have any medical attention or painkillers for seven days, with his wounds. Owen sent me pictures of Widlove this week, smiling from his hospital bed in the Dominican Republic. Widlove, having nothing better to do while he recuperates, decided to learn Spanish this month. He’s now almost fluent. Someone remarked to me soon after the earthquake that Americans would never have survived that degree of pain if it had been us. The long suffering of Haitians had made them strong at all the previously broken places. Owen disagrees. He said, “I think any human is capable of it. I think we have no idea of our own resiliency, until we have something we need to survive.”

I want to be careful here not to glamorize suffering or poverty. And I want to be careful not to conjure an image of a false God who sends tragedy upon us so that we can learn what we need to learn. But it seems to me that Haiti had become a smooth, dead-looking egg to the rest of the world, that all of the tears and faith and pain and love inside of it was invisible to most of us outside until that earthquake, and the breaking of the earth broke everything wide open, poured Haiti out all over the place, poured Haitians into our community, poured out their suffering so that it became impossible to ignore it, and it broke us open, too. I don’t believe that God is responsible for earthquakes and cancer, but that does not mean that our God is a safe God, and won’t ruthlessly take any opportunity to break and enter our hearts. We don’t gather here every Sunday and shout, ‘God is safe! All the time.’ What do we say? What do we say? God is Good. All the Time.

Is it the breaking of things, then, that allows us to see God? That’s how it happened for the two on the road to Emmaus. They’re walking along with Jesus for 7 miles, talking to this man they knew like they knew their own faces, and didn’t recognize him! It was only when something got broken, the bread, that they recognized Jesus for who he was.

This would sound like bad news, not good news, if it weren’t for the fact that the breaking, in the Gospels, never happens by itself. Whenever Jesus fed people in our stories, the same four words appear, over and over. They are as close to magic words as we Christians get: Take. Bless. Break. Give. This is what Jesus did when fed the 5,000: he took the food, blessed it, broke it, gave it. He did it again when he fed the 12 disciples at the last supper. And he did it at the table in Emmaus. It’s the same four words we say whenever we consecrate communion, our magic words.

God is not safe, but God is good. Nothing is broken that doesn’t have a blessing behind it and a giving before it. What if it were true that everything that breaks in our lives, in Widlove’s life, in your life, was bracketed by blessing and giving? What if believing it made it so, and we could stop being afraid?

I try not to mistake the eggshell for what’s inside of it, but I forget, and the only way I remember is to have that shell shattered periodically. Once upon a time I was dating this sweet young man, a little summer romance that was trying to make the transition to fall. He was my first real boyfriend. Poor thing. You could say my lack of a real relationship until that moment was just time and chance, or you could say it was my pathological fear to commit as a result of generational transmission of anxiety and depression, and my status as an adult child of my stepfather’s alcoholism. You pick.

Anyhow, my boyfriend was playing soccer one day, that deadly cutthroat intramural soccer that you find among grad students who are starting to face the fact that they are aging. A guy on the other team kicked his leg so hard he got a spiral fracture up his tibia. It put him in a cast up to the top of his thigh. He was sternly ordered to stay off of it.

So he got on the couch, and since it was the beginning of the semester I did everything for both of us—registration, book-buying, syllabus-collecting, shopping and cooking, dish-doing. I was learning how to be a girlfriend, a partner, and I was not very good at it yet. I liked the IDEA of a boyfriend but the reality, well, that was a different thing. Like most things good and worthwhile, it required a huge paradigm shift away from narcissism. It was autumn in the northern hemisphere but fragile springtime for me and my boyfriend, and about three weeks after his leg broke, three weeks after trying to do everything for him as well as everything for myself, something broke in me.

Today we’re talking about resurrection. Did you know that the literal translation of ‘resurrection’ is, Arise? Basically, what I did was, I told my boyfriend to resurrect. Only I said it in modern English, like this, “Get UP! It’s your turn to do the dishes!” He looked at me, amazed. That might have been a good time to storm out, if he were capable of storming on a broken leg, and never come back. Maybe I secretly wanted him to. Instead he got up, crutched his way to the sink, grousing, and balanced there precariously on one leg while doing all the dishes, his leg throbbing in pain before he was done. And I thought to myself, this is a man who is not going to leave.

That was a crucifixion moment as well as a resurrection moment for me. I realized in that moment that if I wanted real love in my life, it would mean giving up my idea of romance, and a whole lot of my fears. God is not safe, and love is not safe, and spring is not safe, and life is not safe. New life is fragile, and the egg has to break in order to reveal it. So much of what God wants to give us depends on our willingness to break and give, break and give, over and over, and look for the blessing in it.

That boy became a man who a few years later got up next to me at our wedding and promised me and God that he would give and not count the cost. Still later, he got up in the middle of the night and paced the floor when our babies wouldn’t sleep. Now he sits at the back of the church so that he can get up easily when newcomers come in, late and disoriented, help them find a seat, find their way into our beloved community. It may be that someday he will get up in a pulpit, clear his throat, and speak a eulogy of me, forgetting in his graciousness that I once made him do dishes on a broken leg. We wonder sometimes: if he hadn’t broken his leg and needed me to care for him, if God hadn’t broken through my defenses to the reality of what it takes to decide to love someone every day for the rest of your life, would we have survived the spring?

It’s harder to face the broken bits when the blessings and the givings are less in evidence than they are with the people you already love. The news is so discouraging. There’s so much hatefulness all around. When bricks are thrown, ominous letters sent, when spit and racist epithets are hurled at veterans of the civil rights movement because of a Senate vote on health care, I think, there is something very broken in our country. When nine members of a Christian militia, a Christian militia—how do those two words even go together in the same phrase—are arrested for plotting against the lives of innocent human beings in order to foment civil war—I look at all these broken pieces. I’m overwhelmed by anger and want to throw them all away and start fresh.

That’s when God calls me back to this story, to our story, the Easter story of the broken egg, the broken promises of friends, the broken body. God didn’t throw away the pieces of this story, the failed Messiah, humiliated and dead on the cross, the runaway friends, the hypocritical priests. God didn’t give Jesus a brand-new Volvo of a body to replace his totalled Yugo; God resurrected this body, complete with wounds, and showed how the breaking could offer a blessing. God did this 2,000 years ago and God has been repeating the resurrection ever since. I’ve seen Her do it in your lives. When your hearts were broken or your cancer diagnosis came in or your dreams were desolated, I’ve seen you look behind the breaking for the blessing, and ahead of it to the giving. I’ve seen you notice God surrounding what’s broken; I’ve seen you live to fall in love again, to go into remission, to get new and better dreams. How can I be so quick to throw away the broken bits I don’t understand, when I have seen over and over, in the story of Jesus and in your stories, in this body of Christ, how much blessing and giving God does with the brokenness I do understand?

Jesus practiced four verbs: take, bless, break, give. We humans were give one, by the angels: Remember, the angels told the women. Remember what Jesus told you. Remember what he did, over and over. Take, bless, break, give. Easter people, when something gets broken, look for Jesus immediately. Look behind the breaking to see what’s being blessed, and look ahead to what God will give you.