Blog
Many Miracles
The crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard [the disciples] speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? … [Yet] in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power. What does this mean?” Acts 2:6-12 excerpted (NRSV)
Language is a delightfully mystical phenomenon. Set aside the oddities of grammar and the hazards of translation, and you’ll find that language is a kind of miracle: A few funny scribbles on the page, a line here, a swoop there, and voilà! The scribbles now convey ideas that live beyond the page and the ink.
I can write three symbols, for example—R, E, D—and your mind’s eye immediately paints a picture of blooming roses, or of campfire sparks drifting up to the sky on a summer night, or of your grandmother’s red sweater that she wore to church on Pentecost and Christmas, always with a gold broach appropriate to the holiday.
Letters are only scribbles and sounds, yet when assembled together, they can capture our lived experiences. Miraculous!
As with most miracles, of course, language can be a source of confusion and conflict. Do we insist upon a single interpretation, confining language like wine to an old flask? Do we worry its inconsistencies to the point of death-by-grammar, concerned that nothing so messy as language can yield new possibilities—like the darkened sun and the bleeding moon welcoming God’s new day? When communication is strained, should our tongues retreat from language in favor of silence?
I imagine someone muttered to themselves on the day of Pentecost: “This is too many tongues, too much fire, too many languages, too much noise.” But who is God, if not the One with too many miracles still unfolding?
Prayer: I prefer to understand it all, O God. Thank heavens the Holy Spirit continues to interrupt and confuse me with new miracles.
cross-posted with the Daily Devotional
Faith-in-Flesh
Evil is well worth our anger, our outrage, our fury, our deep indignation. Violence too is a worthy recipient of our defensiveness, our horror, our disquiet, even our fear. To rage against the injustices of the world is an appropriate response of Christian faith.
And yet…
Carrying all that rage and fear around on our shoulders as if they are the yoke of Jesus is not faithful living. Holding anger tightly within our bodies—in a knot in our backs, in the tension of our hips, in the shallowness of our breath—is not a spiritual practice. Allowing fear to establish a residence in our guts, hunching our shoulders permanently forward to guard our hearts, fatiguing our minds with the obsession of resentment—these are not the disciplines to which Christ calls us.
If we were called to a faith of rage, we would be followers of Peter with his sword swinging wildly in the Garden of Gethsemane.
If we were called to a faith of fear, we would be adherents in the church of Ananias and Sapphira with their hands clenched tightly around security and their hearts racing with anxiety.
If we were called to a faith of self-righteousness, we would be siblings to the sons of Zebedee in our clamor for seats of judgment and control.
And if we were called to a faith of stiff necks and tense backs, we would be known by the sign of a millstone rather than the sign of the cross, weighed down by worry, tripping over our own doubt.
Instead…
We are called to a faith of radical love and abundant life. We are called to displace the bitter anger from our bodies with a strong backbone of love, the kind of loving backbone that moves easily to make room and holds steady to protect joy. We are called to exhale fear from our guts, to breathe in the expansiveness of hope. We are called to throw off the burden of anxiety from our shoulders, so that we have room to bear the light yoke of Christ.
Anger and fear and heartache have their place in faith—God knows!—but when they sink their roots into our bodies, psyches, and nervous systems, we are hindered from faith. So we choose to love from our physical core, trading fear for community. We love from our hips and our backs, releasing resentment in favor of hope. We love with our whole bodies, because Christ did too. We love, and God is known.
cross-posted with Witness for Justice
Known
O Lord, you have searched me and known me. ... It was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. - Psalm 139:1, 13-14a (NRSV) We are formed and reformed continuously, shaped by...
Witnesses to Love
13,000. That’s how many Palestinian children have been killed in Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas, as estimated by UNICEF this spring. 1,195,070. That’s how many deaths in the U.S. have been attributed to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic,...
Good to Be Seen
Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders went up the mountain, and they saw the God of Israel. Under God’s feet there was something like a sapphire pavement, as clear and blue as the heavens. They beheld God, and they ate and drank. - Exodus 24:9-11...
Let There Be No Dew or Rain
David intoned this lamentation over Saul and his son Jonathan: “How the mighty have fallen! You mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew or rain upon you, nor bounteous fields! For there the shield of the mighty was defiled, anointed with oil no more.” - 2 Samuel...
Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” - 1 Corinthians 12:21 (NRSV) Actually, the eye can say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” The eye can discern texture without the hand, after all, and...
Playing
O Wisdom, how diverse are your works! In the great sea alone, there are countless creeping critters and all sizes of living things! Humans build ships to cross it, but you form Leviathan to play in it. - Psalm 104:24-26 (adapted) I’m sitting at the end of a long...
Miracles
In every dawn veiled by silent fog, before the sun scatters its mystery; In every dark crevice of earth's womb, before the seed breaks open to root; In every gasp of the unknown, before certainty cements itself: a miracle of wild possibility.
How Shall I Receive You?
As an ass, playing the role of jester? As the outlandish actor in the scene, cast to make the comfortable laugh and the disenchanted daydream? As a stone, the unseen understudy? As the patient watcher in the wings, ready to leap up and shout one line if only the leads...
A Jar of Oil
The widow of one of the prophets cried to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and now creditors come to take my two children as slaves.” Elisha said to her, “Tell me, what do you have in the house?” She answered, “Nothing except a jar of oil.” (2 Kings 4:1-2,...
