Paddling with Divine Abandon

Even as I knew with a big part of my mind that there really was no going back, that getting out and off was not really an option, and that it was probably going to be fun, a part of me still played with the fantasy that there might be a way to set the clock back an hour and so magically get off this seemingly rather flimsy rubber raft, a raft which was rapidly propelling me and seven others towards a large bend in the Snake River Canyon. The Rafting Company’s brochure had touted their extensive safety record, and had promised that “rafting adventurers,” as we were called, would get a thorough safety orientation. My confidence in the truth of the first claim was somewhat shaken by patent falsity of the second  --  the “thorough safety orientation” turned out to be only a thirty second river-side explanation of how to put on the faded life-jackets they had handed out, together with some brief remarks that if we fell out we were to point our legs downstream so that they would crash into the boulders before our skulls. I immediately resolved to stay in the raft at all costs.

            The river bend was drawing nearer, but it was not the bend itself that concerned me – indeed, for the past 30 minutes we had been drifting lazily down the Snake, admiring the gently rising canyon walls along both banks, getting glimpses of the Grand Tetons now and again off to the west, even spotting an occasional bald eagle. Our guide had insisted that we, novice “rafting adventurers” all, practice paddling, which mostly consisted of her yelling, Captain Bligh-like, a stream of orders: “paddle left”, “paddle right”, “full power, five strokes”, “reverse all”, and so on. We were not very good at this. We improved remarkably when she told us that our ability to paddle was going to get us through the rapids – or not.

            Which was my concern. As the bend got nearer and nearer, the canyon walls drew closer and closer together, a sound, a roaring, was getting louder and louder, and the raft steadily picked up speed. A quick look at the waterproof map they had handed out showed that just around that rapidly approaching bend was something called a “Category 3” rapid – how bad could that be, I thought? Looking over my shoulder, a fellow rafter said “Oh, look, they even name the rapids – I wonder why this one was named “the Widowmaker”?”

By now the river had got my attention. As had our guide, who ordered the right side to paddle to avoid a bolder, which flashed by to starboard, then called for three strokes from the left to line us up for the approach to what looked to be something you might see on the “Discovery Channel”, or in one of those big-screen Omni-Max theaters about kayaking the Himalayans, a steep stretch of river that boiled and churned over boulders the size of cars and towards which we were headed like a runaway freight train.

At it was at that point when I seriously wondered why I hadn’t had the presence of mind to object way back at the boarding area when the guide had placed me not on the left side of the raft, not on the right side of the raft, not way back on the stern, where she was safely ensconced – but on the blunt front of the raft!

“Full power, everyone!,” yelled our guide, and the sensible, logical part of me, that wisdom and intelligence that had seen me safely through some 43 years,  said to me, “Are you nuts?! Let’s hit the reverse thrusters and get out of Dodge!” But then, as our paddles furiously dug into the tossing waves, it became clear that the way out was the way forward, that it was only by aggressively working to move the raft forward through the water that we could have steerageway, and so avoid that bus-size boulder on the left, and that back eddy on the right, but what about – oh my God, that huge hole right in front of us?!  Down, down, down  we slammed into the hole, a sucking vortex in the rapids created in the lee of a submerged ledge, the raft buckling underneath my crouched legs. The front of the raft slammed into the wall of water at the bottom of the hole, a wave poured over my head, screaming with terror and joy I furiously dug my paddle into the water and pulled for life and then – and then we were up and out and spinning in lazy circles in the calm waters beneath the rapids.

            And so maybe you can see why Mary Oliver’s little prose poem speaks to me – it resonates with my experience on the Snake River – and it calls to mind Jesus’ conversation with those recalcitrant experts of religion close to the end of his ministry.

            First, the poet calls us to stop, to listen, to pay attention. Put aside those distractions; put aside that single-minded focus you have on rowing so diligently on a course that was set for you long ago, a course you might not even know why you are on right now. “Listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and listen to me.” Mary Oliver, West Wind, Poems and Prose Poems (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1997), p. 46.

            She goes on, here is the lesson you need to learn. This is what is ultimately important in life. Not success, not money, not the adulation of others, not some secret horde of brownie points you accumulate for pleasing others. This is what is important: love. For there is life without love, but “It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied.”

            This is, of course, Jesus’ message.  What is the greatest commandment, what is the Divinely-given rule which, if followed, will be both pleasing to God as well as life-promoting for the individual and the community? “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’ . . . [and} ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  Love. Its that easy. Its what I have been teaching you about all these past three years, it is what I have been modeling for you as we have healed the sick, restored to the community those who were marginalized and scorned, welcomed all to our table fellowship, urged justice for the oppressed, sharing by all. Simply this: love God, love yourself, and love one another.

But Jesus’ message, and that echoed by the poet, is not as easy at it first might sound. Love, the poet reminds us, is not simply warm and fuzzy and a feel-good emotion. Love is risky, love is dangerous, love can be costly. There really is nothing safe and secure about loving. Love, Mary Oliver tells us, is not a leisurely row on a placid lily-pad-strewn pond. Love is a heart-pounding, adrenaline-inducing roller-coaster ride where there are no visible safety rails, an accelerating journey of increasing speed as a river is narrowed by steeply rising canyon walls into a foaming, churning rapids, a boulder-littered watery obstacle course where standing waves conspire to overturn your raft, where Charbydis-like whirlpools threaten to pull you under. This is what love sounds like, this is how love tastes and feels in the pit of your stomach: “When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, -- when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming….”

Like Jesus speaking to the lawyers long ago, Mary Oliver tells you again what you already know. You know the risk and cost of loving. Why else did your stomach get all tied up in knots when she first agreed to go out with you on that date? Why did you hope and fear and hope some more that he would pop the question, would ask you if you would commit yourself to him for the rest of your life? Why else is it so hard to send your child away to school the first time, and the second time, and you wonder if it ever gets easier? Why else does it pain you so when a loved one suffers, or dies? Loving comes with risk and with costs. You know that when you volunteer at a the hospital and come face to face with pain and suffering; you know that when you commit your time and energy to the young of this church, through teaching in the church school or helping as a youth leader; you know that when you put yourself on the line for the homeless or struggling parents or people of different sexual orientation or our environment. Love is more than chocolates and flowers and mutual self-absorption – love, in all its wonder and life-affirmingness, can be risky and costly. See where love took Jesus.

The Good News, of course, is that we can risk love because God loves us first, because God loves us so fiercely that no matter the category of rapids we might face in our lives of loving each other and God, we have Jesus for our guide, we have the Holy Spirit to give us strength for the task at hand, and we have a God who is both in the raft with us and who promises us that at the last we shall be together, at peace besides the still waters.

So what to do? What difference does this make in your life? Shall you, when love comes knocking on your heart, do the sensible and safe and sane thing, and turn and run for your life? Or will you, learning the lesson we on that raft on the Snake River learned, for love and for life paddle with divine abandon?

Listen to me.

“When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, -- when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life toward it.”

"Love" is an Action Word

Today is called Maundy Thursday, so called because it is the day that Jesus gave to his followers a new mandate – that they love one another.

“ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Sweet – so what we are supposed to do is send each other Valentine’s Day cards, have tender feelings for one another, think kindly on one another?

That is not “loving one another” by half, not as Jesus sees it.

The love he is talking about is an action word, not a cover for sentimental gushings. He is not talking about just the heart or the head – he is talking about our hands and our feet and our wallets and our pocketbooks. Love others as he loved us?  Those feet dragged a cross up a hill on the trash heap outside of town, for us. He stretched out his hands to embrace the world, and in so doing got them pierced with cruel nails. He gave everything and was left with nothing, not even a cloak.

Love one another as he loved us? Then see that we are not isolated, independent individuals responsible only for ourselves and our own wealth and well-being, but instead are all bound together into one community, responsible to one another, entrusted with the care of each other.  Then understand that the plight of the family still living in FEMA trailers almost six years after hurricane Katrina is something we are called to do something about. Then get that placing the cost of fixing the national debt problem on those least able to afford it while the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth goes to the top 1% is not exactly what Jesus would have had in mind. Then work for justice for everyone, so that no one will be bullied, stereotyped, or abused.

Loving one another will be costly.

Jesus got that.

Do we?

What Happened?

There is a terrible paradox at the heart of Palm Sunday. On the one hand, a hand raised high in exultation and triumph, it is a day of celebration and rejoicing, as we recall how Jesus is welcomed as a king into his capital city, Jerusalem, with the crowd waving palm branches and strewing their coats before him.

On the other hand, a hand clenching at our heart in fear and  shame, even as we sing, “All Glory, Laud and Honor”, we know that this king is on his way to betrayal, desertion, torture, and a cruel and grisly death without honor.

            Doug Davidson, writing in the periodical “The Other Side” (March 2002, p.9), was recently re-awakened to the paradox of Palm Sunday by his young son. He writes,

“Last summer, my three-year-old son and I stopped off at the seminary library to return a book for a friend. Our family has lived on the campus of this Lutheran seminary since Jennifer began classes here a year and a half ago. But this was our son’s first time inside the old stone building that houses the library.

As we stepped through the bright red doors into the darkened vestibule, Elliot stopped in his tracks. There, on the wall to his right, hung a sculpted crucifix, about five feet tall. I watched his young eyes study Jesus’ agonized face, the dying body nailed to a tree, the nails piercing his hands and feet.

I knew the image was a new one to him. Although he’s been raised in the church, the crosses in our Baptist congregation are all clean and sanitized; their Jesuses all resurrected and ascended.

For a moment, I considered hustling him back out the door, trying to shield him from this holy horror in the same way that I “rewrite” the violent plots of his beloved Batman comic books when I read them aloud. But it was too late; he had already taken it all in.

I thought he might cry. Instead, without ever taking his eyes off the dying Jesus, he slowly spoke words filled with great sadness, mystery, and wonder: What happened?”

            “What happened?” It really is a question that cannot be avoided today. If we can’t make some sense of what happened that led to Jesus’ betrayal and torture and death, then how can we even begin to make sense of what happened that first Easter day? If we cannot place ourselves in the triumphal march into Jerusalem, around the table with Jesus at the Passover celebration, in the garden with Jesus as he prays that he might be spared, or with the disciples as they flee after Jesus’ arrest, how can we possibly place ourselves at the empty tomb or on the road to Emmaus with the risen Christ?

            Again, what happened?

n      What happened that this spirit-filled and compassionate soul might be sold out by one his inner-circle for 30 pieces of silver?

n      What happened that this gifted healer became an object of cruel punishment and was subjected to the most exquisitely painful method of execution yet devised? 

n      What happened that this unarmed peasant who preached non-violence so threatened the religious and governmental authorities and their power that they conspired to silence him once and for all?

n      What happened that the joyous “Hosannas!” of the multitudes as Jesus entered the Holy City on Sunday only five days later were changed to blood-thirsty cries of “Crucify him!”?

n      What happened that on Sunday palm branches were strewn before Jesus, but on Friday Jesus was hammered to a tree?

n      What happened that of all those who followed Jesus on that ride up the mountain on Sunday, none stayed by his side on the night of his betrayal, or on the day of his death?

n      What happened that we could kill the incarnate God?

n      What happened that we have become so used to this shocking and tragic and humanity-indicting event that it is only through the witness of a shocked three-year-old that we might be re-awakened to its incomprehensibility?

            The Biblical scholars try to tell us what happened: that Jesus threatened the powers that be, that his over-turning the tables of the money-lenders in the Temple united the religious and business leaders against him; or that his defeat of the powers of death, illustrated by the raising of Lazarus, was too much for those who make out quite well, thank you very much, from the profitable ways of death. 

Yet even as they struggle to explain the depths of perversity in the human soul, or the willingness of humans in all generations to betray Jesus by turning our backs on the hungry and the homeless, the oppressed and the poor, or the ways in which unmet expectations can lead followers to desert and look elsewhere for fulfillment of their dreams, I find myself unconvinced, still wondering, what happened?

            But if human motivation and intent in the death of Jesus are difficult to fathom, how much more so is it difficult to understand and comprehend the faithfulness and love of God as revealed through Jesus.

            For let us not forget that Jesus could have turned from his path of radical obedience to God’s will, he could have turned from his self-giving love of us. Right until the end he could have avoided suffering and death – having been abandoned by his followers, he could have abandoned us; having fought the good fight and labored long and tirelessly to bring a prodigal people back to God, how could he have been blamed for calling it quits on those who had quit him?

And yet Jesus chose to endure it all so that we might know the full height and breadth of God’s love for us, a God who would stoop to take on our common lot and endure what it means to be human right through to the bloody end, a God who would model for us radical obedience and self-giving love, a God who was not content to give 95% and then get out of Dodge when the going got tough, but ran the race right to the end, and in so doing won for us the prize that we on our own could never hope to win, paid the debt we could never satisfy.

            On the cross, Jesus looks humanity’s brutality and cruelty square in the face and says, “I forgive you”.

Even as we pound the nails into his palms and feet, Jesus says to us, “Nothing can separate you from my love.”

Even as we throw dice for rights to his bloody clothes Jesus promises to clothe us with radiant garments fit for a heavenly court.

Even as his arms are stretched out wide on the cross-beam, Jesus freely offers to us an embrace of eternal love.

            What on earth happened? Or, maybe, what in hell happened? Or perhaps even better, what in heaven happened?

Who can comprehend the amazing and wondrous undying love of Jesus?

            Sometimes it causes me to

 tremble.          

-----------------

Valentine's Day, Every Day

            Tomorrow the world celebrates Valentine’s Day, a day which has over the years become a celebration of love, and, more specifically, of romantic love.  Now this poses something of a dilemma for the pastor, because we in the church have a long history of both celebrating love, and yet at the same time, trying to hold it at a distrustful distance. And yet, I take heart from a framed letter I found squirrelled away in a church closet here.

Here is the identification on the bottom of the frame: “The Famous Love Letter of Rev. Oakes Shaw our pastor from 1760 to 1807 to Mrs. Susanna Vanguard. She married him and lived in “Old Parsonage.”” The letter is dated April 3, 1774. it reads, in part,

            Mrs. Susa,

What shall I write about?  I can hear of no great matter of news worth the communicating to a Lady and I am so dull of invention that I know not how to make any; as to myself and family we are through divine goodness in health as I trust you are. I had the luck of foul weather to ride in the day after I left Braintree and indeed every visit since our acquaintance has been attended with a storm. I hope it will not always be so, nor do I look upon it as ominous Not as a prelude to what is bad. I trust to be well paid for it in an Agreeable Companion; each of my visits to you have been agreeable. The last was in a peculiar manner so.

People here wonder why I am so dilatory; why the Lady is not to be brought home now this Spring; though but a few have mentioned it to me.  I tell them, what does it signify to be in a hurry, slow and sure is a good maxim in many cases, and why not in this? More haste than good speed has often been detrimental; however I desire the favour that you would get ready as soon as you conveniently can, I wish it may not be beyond the middle of June; I have some thoughts of making you a visit something sooner than was mentioned. If I do, I am persuaded you will take it well, if not, that also will be well…

Mrs. Susa, it would serve to exhilarate my spirits and be a pleasure to me to have a few lines from your hand, if your modesty does not forbid it– no more at present, but that I am Sincerely yours:  Oakes Shaw

            I have to say that I find the Rev. Oakes Shaw to be a positive inspiration to all of us men who, when it comes to writing a love letter, just don’t have a clue! And yet I think Mrs. Susa would have been able to recognize the passion raging just between the lines here. That talk about the stormy weather every time he visits – it is as if the very heavens themselves try to dampen his ardor, try to cool him off after his visits with his “agreeable companion” – but as the Song of Songs reminds us, “many waters cannot quench love”!  He writes that his last visit was not only “agreeable”, but also “peculiarly so.” He pretends to be measured and patient – “What does it signifie to be in a hurry, Slow and Sure is a good maxim in many cases” – yet in the next breath he voices his desire that she be ready as soon as she can!  Instead of asking her to write back, he asks for “a few lines from her hand” – no doubt reminding her of all that hand-holding they did on his last visit!

            I believe that this letter was regarded by this congregation as “famous”, and that it was preserved and displayed, shows that our congregational forbears were onto something – onto something about the power and even the sacredness of desire, of passionate love.

            From a Christian faith perspective, love, including romantic love, is a marvelous gift. Like all gifts, it can be misused, even abused – for instance, saying that “But we were in love” is often used to justify all sorts of misconduct, including the breaking of marriage vows. But love is a gift even so. It is a central element in a good creation made by a generous and loving God. At the heart of Trinitarian theology is the belief that God is three in one – that God is not unitary, that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in the Godhead, each retaining their own distinctiveness, but all bonded together in a relationship of love. So it can be with two persons in love: two persons who give themselves to each other in love do not lose themselves, but find themselves growing with the other into the fullness of their existence. So we might hear two people in love say, “When we are together, I feel like this is what I was created for, that together we are more than when we are apart.”

And yet the love that is shared by two is not just for their mutual enjoyment – its effects ripple outward into the world.  Just as the love within God – the love that is God – draws us towards God, so too the love of two people draws others by its example. You know what I am talking about here – we want to be around people that are truly in love, whether they are two people head over heels for each other in a new romance or a couple that just celebrated fifty years of marriage together, and who still find that their love grows and changes.

            The Song of Songs celebrates this capacity we have for longing and desire, it holds up the embodied love that cherishes the fleshiness of our existence. Each lover in the Song, man and woman alike, delight in the body of the other; each lover extends equally passionate invitations to lovemaking; together, they embody a love that is reciprocal and unspoiled, two in one flesh, one in heart and soul and united in self-giving, partners in a divine dance to which God invites all humanity. Their love is not one of dominance and submission, but of equality and respect; not of lust for objects, but love for another. The Song celebrates creation and the human condition, presenting us with an ideal of love without shame, without exploitation, without selfishness – a mutual love reflecting the love of God for us.

            For God does love us. God loves you. It is a gift, it is nothing you merit or deserve. It is sheer grace. “You are the beloved”, God says to each and every one of you. “You did not choose me, but I chose you,” says Jesus in the Gospel according to John.

            This is the good news for us today, and the law of descending grace: that God, no less than Oakes Shaw, is a fool for love. And it is God’s undoing: out of a passionate, yearning desire for us, our powerful and distant God comes wandering into the our garden in search of his beloved, becoming incarnate in Jesus, taking on this flesh of ours, and loving us towards wholeness. 

            Truly, for God and those God loves – each and all of us – Valentine’s Day comes not once a year; no, for God and those God passionately desires, every day is Valentine’s Day.