The Simple Way – Trinity Bible Study – Proverbs 31 – Week 1

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Intimidating as Proverbs 31:10-31 is, describing the Woman Who Never Sleeps, we dove in with determination on Tuesday morning, armed with bananas and coffee cake.

We compared Colossians 3 and Proverbs 31, recognizing similar themes and exhortations–realizing that this Proverbs 31 Woman is not an actual woman who lived, but perhaps an explication of Colossians 3:17, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

Noting that Scripture is meant to be read with lots of layers–we mused about spiritual meanings for our Proverbs passage.  Maybe “snow” in verse 21 referred to more than low temperatures–perhaps it could also teach us something about frigid, dark moments of our lives and the promise God makes to us, that we need not shake in those moments.

Reading Proverbs 31:10-31 here at the beginning of 2014, we wondered what sorts of resolutions the Holy Spirit might hold for us in the verses.  We committed to reading the short passage slowly and intentionally a few times over this week, musing what we might be called to consider in our relationship with God in the coming year.

 

Visceral Reactions to Music (and other things)

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Sunday mornings are rough.  Getting the kids up, fed, dressed, hair-combed, and out the door (or, if you don’t have kids, doing the same thing for yourself, after your Saturday night…).  When you get to church, don’t you just want to park it in a seat?  Why do these cruel Episcopalians and Roman Catholics (and others) make you stand, and then sit, and then kneel, and then stand again, and then kneel again?  Add in crossing yourself and bowing–if you’re the CrossFit type–and it’s practically a full-fledged work out before noon on a weekend!

Firday night, I visited our girls’ choir rehearsal.  It’s been almost 15 years since I attended one of my junior high choir rehearsals, but when the choirmaster gave the command to prepare to sing and poised his fingers above the keys, my spine involuntarily straightened and my lungs filled with air–and then I reminded my body that I wasn’t part of the choir.  I’ve been out of a choir longer than I’d ever been in one, and yet, dear Mr. Johns, our music teacher, had so drilled into his students–at least me!–the importance of posture in singing, that when my body was put in the same kind of environment again (not in a physical sense, as we were in the cathedral and not an old high school great room; but in a psychological–and spiritual–sense), it still responded the same way.

Early Friday morning, I’d taught a Men’s Bible Study (the new priest gets invited to visit everywhere, without regard for gender!) on the Psalms.  Explaining the five-book structure of the psalms, we turned to the end of 72:

18 Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel,
Who only does wondrous things!
19 And blessed be His glorious name forever!
And let the whole earth be filled with His glory.
Amen and Amen.

20 The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.

When I started reading verse 18, my right hand had an insatiable urge to reach up to my forehead.  What I mean to say is that I had said and heard “Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel” at the beginning of the song of Zechariah (Luke 1:68) so many times (it’s used at the service of Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer) that my body, and a piece of my mind, forgot that wasn’t the same environment–in Morning Prayer, when we begin to say Zechariah’s song together, we cross ourselves, because it is a New Testament canticle (song/psalm).  My body is learning the same involuntary response to God’s Word that it learned in response to the prepare-to-start-singing command from junior high.

Episcopalian (or Roman Catholic, or other) gymnastics trains our bodies, minds, and souls to have a particular response when holy things happen–when holy words are said, when we ask the Holy Spirit to come into us afresh, when we admit that we’re sinners dependent on God’s mercy.  These actions, which are the most important things we do all week, train us to recognize those moments and to respond to them appropriately–with reverence, with fear, with joy, with attention.

Waiting to Breathe – The Feast of the Baptism of Jesus

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Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Collect (Prayer) for the First Sunday after the Epiphany (BCP)

If you would, close your eyes with me.  Let’s take one big, deep breath in through our noses together–as much air as your lungs can hold; then let’s all exhale at the same time, with our mouths wide open, a big “ha” sound…  Let’s do it once more, a big, long, deep breath through our noses, and a loud, long breath out through our mouths.

Thank you.  I just thought we could all use a little more oxygen.  Now, on with the sermon!

In a break with many other Protestant churches, our Anglican tradition is to baptize babies.  As you’re probably aware, many churches choose to wait till a person can speak for themselves and decide on their own whether or not they really want to be Christians before they submit to the Christian ritual of baptism.  We side with the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox churches on this count, and in doing so, we’re making a significant statement about who we believe God to be.

During the first centuries of Christianity, before there were so many denominations as such, they were ironing out some of the import sacraments–what it meant for humans to take up common physical items, water, bread, wine, and to ask God to enter those things, so that we could better understand how it is that God enters each of us.  One of the questions that came up was: what if the priest who prayed that God would bless the water for Baptism, or enter the bread and wine for Eucharist later on turned out to be a fraud?  They used a word worse than fraud, but the question they were getting at was how much human effort and righteousness affected God’s potency.  Who was responsible for how things turned out, humans, or God?

As you can probably guess, the answer our ancestors in the faith came to is that what matters is God.  Even if the priest who baptized you, or officiated your wedding, or buried your grandma turns out to be an embezzler, or worse, the Christian church throughout the ages has agreed that we all trust that God takes care of and protects and is the one thing that matters in whether or not a sacrament does the job.

Let me tell you what a relief that is!  So perhaps we should all just go home now.  God’s got it all under control, he can zap us with grace any time he likes–why bother with saying a creed and praying prayers and having this strange meal together?

Did you know that our respiratory system is the only system in our bodies that is both voluntary and involuntary?  We can’t stop our stomachs from digesting just by thinking about it, and if everything’s working right, our limbs don’t fly about on their own.  But at the beginning of the sermon, we all concentrated and made ourselves breathe.  Since then, I’ll bet that no one has kept thinking “breathe in, breathe out” every moment while I’ve been up here preaching.  But none of us has passed out, we’ve all kept breathing just as we always do, without thinking about it.

Whether we’re paying attention or not, God is at work.  When we concentrate on it, when we look for what God’s up to around us and in us, we start to see more clearly how God is active all the time.  Our lungs are passive, in a way; they can’t control how much oxygen is in the air, or how they function in different levels of pressure.  God is like the oxygen in the air–he’s present everywhere, and we breathe him in without noticing sometimes, though the greatest benefit comes when we pay attention to what we’re taking in and what we’re letting back out.

We come to church because this is where we learn to breathe.  We learn how to take God in, and how to let him fill us up.  In our modern society, spending lots of time sitting behind desks and hunched over computers, we are not breathing as well as some of our forebears did who spent their days outside in the fresh air, working the soil and making their own food.  Our lung capacity shrinks when we don’t use the full range of our breath, just like our ability to notice and listen and respond to God shrinks when we don’t make a habit of spending time seeking and noticing him with others as we worship.

We baptize babies because we believe that in the end, it’s about more than any decision or declaration one person makes; it’s about the God made known in Jesus Christ coming to be with us in the Holy Spirit, that we would never be alone, and that the love manifest in the Trinity is stronger than death.  That kind of love takes a community, and it is the Christian community, throughout time and space, that commits for us at our baptism, and with us throughout our lives, to continue to help us learn how to breathe.

Fumble! (too soon, Duke fans?)

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Only about 30% of people even make New Year’s Resolutions anymore.  Of them only 20% manage to make a lasting change, having kept their resolution for 2 years (newrepublic.com).  On this, the third day of the new year, we’re probably already struggling with the resolutions, or intentions, or goals we’ve set for ourselves in this auspicious year of 2014.

What happens in our minds when we fumble?  When we eat  that extra helping of dessert we didn’t really quite mean to eat, or binge-watch shows that make us feel like we’d like to dip our minds in some bleach; what we say to ourselves when we fail?

Most of us (me, for one!) live under a very stressful fallacy that we can perform perfectly.  That we really can not-fail, not-fumble, not-trip-up.  We fail.  To focus on failure and on shortcomings can be debilitating.  What if we brushed the mistake off instead, took a deep breath, and bravely turned around to do something else?  So much energy is wasted in lament and guilt and self-punishment–what if we learned that we would indeed fumble and that when we fumbled, we should simply pick up the ball and try again (I think that football analogy doesn’t quite work…)?

Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Cause and Effect: A Response to the HuffPo Blog

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What’s the motivating force?  Physics, chemistry–this is why we had to learn the stuff in high school; now, in real life, we make analogies about the motivating force of our lives from the principles we learned in physics (and we accuse our chronically-late husbands of being a limiting reagent in our effort to get out the door 🙂 ).

Yesterday afternoon, a fellow Dukie, Miho Kubagawa, wrote on Huffington Post about her approach to resolutions in 2013.  She and a group of friends had undertaken a sort of Happiness Project–making monthly resolutions instead of a year-long haul.  Miho narrated how her group’s google doc and update emails inspired and spurred each other on, “[w]e are more vulnerable and courageous, and we are taking more risks with each other’s support. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the resolutions are; what is more telling is our reflection on how our previous month’s commitment went and why.”  She goes on to share a resolution that she had trouble completing–unplugging from electronics for 4 consecutive Saturdays; an experience she saw as a “wake-up call.”

She’s got the motivating factor wrong.  What is most telling isn’t the reflection on a previous month’s commitment, nor is it the daring and creative things that people choose to pursue–did you see how she started each of her tips?

“We…”–Miho, and her friends.

Miho reveals that the google doc group don’t even all know each other, but committing to each other by joining the listserv and encouraging each other in their individual efforts has had both corporate and individual results–drawing them close to each other and empowering each of them in their daily lives.

The motivating factor of Miho’s resolution-success is relationships with other people; it’s not the 30-day timing.

Our problem is that deep, sustained relationships with other people, especially in large cities (Miho lives in NYC), and especially amongst young, transient demographics, is difficult if not impossible.  Significant relationships produce conversations, perhaps especially around this time of year, that often lead to a resolution, goal, or intention for the coming months.  Those same relationships (the ones which are made up of people with whom you live, or work, or see on the street every day) are the ones who are best equipped to assess your progress, and to encourage you on your journey.  But the point isn’t the resolutions.  The point is the relationships.

People, and the relationships we have with them, aren’t simply an ingredient in the compound of better life (a difficult concept in this market-driven age); relationships with people are the whole solution.