The Margins

“No, the one who in love forgets himself, forgets his suffering, in order to think of someone else’s, forgets all his misery in order to think of someone else’s, forgets what he himself loses in order lovingly to bear in mind someone else’s loss, forgets his advantage in order lovingly to think of someone else’s – truly, such a person is not forgotten. There is one who is thinking about him: God in heaven…The self-lover is busy; he shouts and makes a big noise and stands on his rights in order to make sure he is not forgotten- and yet he is forgotten. But the one who loves, who forgets himself, is recollected by love. There is One who is thinking of him…”

Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (read this in the comments section of one of Eugene Cho’s blog posts)

Mercy and Aaron both decided to stay with me for “big church” this morning. I gave them little activity handouts and pencils, and Mercy had a bottle of water my Mom had given to her. They spent the beginning of worship waving frantically at Deb who was on stage playing bass with the worship team and at Candace who was leading the singing. They were moderately squirmy and needed frequent reminders about when they needed to stay quiet and that staying quiet actually meant not talking. My mom was on the other side of the two of them and she spent a fair amount of time wrangling and shushing and containing their energy as well.

At one point, Mercy knocked over the water bottle that was sitting on her chair with her, and I had not realized that it was open. I turned and watched as at least half of the bottle emptied out on the floor behind me, and I made a quick trip to the kitchen to get some towels to soak it up. At another point, and it was of course during one of the quieter times, Mercy decided to put her paper down on the floor and furiously poke holes in it with her pencil, relishing every “pop”. Again, lots of shushing and reminding were required.

As much as I value having my kids with me in Sunday worship, I breathed a sigh of relief when it was time for them to be invited to Children’s Church.

I thought about the ways it can feel tempting to have Sunday worship be this time where we present the best of ourselves. We dress up. We comb our kids’ hair. We sit close to our spouse. And inside we can be falling apart, but somehow feel the pull to put on shiny, happy faces with one another. In some ways, worshiping with my kids keeps me honest. They broadcast that my life is not tidy and manicured; their wiggles and spills reek of humanness.

As I walked out with my kids this morning mid-service, I saw a dear friend rush out of the sanctuary in tears. He was a mess inside: a mess of grief and emotion, and like me he struggled with how to manage the messiness of that in the midst of our worship.

I have a friend who struggles with a wide range of challenges that range from the financial to the physical, and recently she confided in me through her tears that the para-church Bible study program she has been involved with for years recently asked her to stop coming. “Your needs are just too overwhelming for some of our women,” she was told. I seethed inside imagining the new wounds my friend had received with those words, and I marveled at the ability of this leader to steward this ministry with such a mentality of scarcity: to protect and ration just how much compassion or kindness a bunch of women studying the Bible together could “handle”.

A few months ago I went to a reading and book signing with Heather Armstrong, author of the popular website “dooce”. And she read an old blog post she had written about visiting Seattle years ago, and in this post she tells the story of being in a public bathroom when someone passes gas quite dramatically in a nearby stall and a few women in other stalls start to laugh uncontrollably. And she writes this: “I fart, you fart, we fart, they fart. People in bathrooms fart. If there’s a place on earth where you should be able to fart, where it’s wholly legal to fart, it’s a bathroom, for crying out loud.”

I remember thinking about the church when she read that line aloud. If there is a place on earth where we should be able to share the messiness of our lives, it’s the church, for crying out loud. Yet for how many of us is church the place where we feel the need to put on more pretense or where we most fear being judged?

A few years ago, I lost someone dear to me to a very heinous crime, and I remember going to worship at my home church in Portland the following weekend after helping bury my friend. I am not sure I made it through the Call to Worship before I started to sob. I left the sanctuary and went into the Women’s bathroom to cry and find Kleenex and cry some more. My friend Maria saw me leave and came and found me in the bathroom, weeping. She put her arm around me and told me that I didn’t need to stay and we could go somewhere, wherever I wanted to go. And I remember telling her that I wanted, maybe I said needed, to be there. I needed to be with my family.

We went back into the sanctuary and I stayed through the service, crying throughout. Those around me offered comfort, and honestly I was oblivious to whether or not I was a spectacle. One of the people who sat with me that morning was a girl from our youth group, and I remember thinking later that it was good that she saw that it was okay to be a mess at church, and that being a mess didn’t mean you had to leave until you could get your act together. The mess was welcome. The mess belongs.

“Be kind,
for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

-Plato (H.T. Annemarie)

“The crucifixion was the consequence of the incarnation.” This statement was given to me from one of my favorite professors at Fuller, Dr. Marianne Meye Thompson, in a class that explored the significance of the cross in the New Testament. Her claim has stayed with me, years after leaving that class, and I have written here before of how that thought has impacted the way I have understood my own life in ministry and God’s love for the world.

This past week I was thinking about the incarnation, and I wondered aloud to myself in the car whether the incarnation was the consequence of God. In the same way that Jesus public ministry was one steady progression toward Jerusalem’s cross, the testament of Yahweh as creator and liberator and King is likewise one of a steady progression toward Bethlehem’s cradle.

“Crib and cross—they are both of the same wood, they are of a piece.”

That was how Helmet Thielicke described it, and yet we are tempted to reserve scandal for the cross and take the incarnation as a sentimental gesture.

I was struck this past year by a passage in Exodus where God proclaims his name to Moses. Exodus thirty-four says that: “the LORD came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the LORD. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

I recently suggested to Doug that his youth choir sing an arrangement of a song for our Christmas Eve service this year that is more of an Easter song than a Christmas one. There were no angel choirs at the empty tomb, I reasoned. The incarnation was their gloria.  I think we can afford to recover a bit of their awe and hear in a baby’s cry the same name Moses heard on a mountain side.

The incarnation is the consequence of God being his name. It is the consequence of a God persistent in pursuit of relationship with his people; it is the consequence of God being who he says he is in relationship to his creation. It is not some strange, surprising detour from a preferred plan.

“Crib and cross…they are of a piece.”

I remember moving toward the counter in a daze. Surrounded by the noise and elbows and roller bags of the Southwest ticket counter at Midway, I felt out of body, suspended above the chaos. I think it was a Sunday.

A warm smile greeted me as I slid my paper confirmation printout toward the woman at the counter. Her smile turned a bit as she looked over my reservation: “Your flight was on Wednesday,” she said, looking confused but not unkind.

“I know,” I said as the tears started falling. I don’t remember what I said or how I explained my circumstances, but I remember offering no excuse for the fact that I never called to change the reservation. I stood there in front of her, uncertain and uncaring, even, of whether or how I could find a plane to take me home.

She started piling Kleenex on the counter in front of me. Suddenly she was a woman filled with compassion, no longer a chaos-managing airline employee. I don’t think I even got through much of my story, but she did not need much after “shot and killed” and “funeral” for her heart to swell with kindness and care.

Kleenex, a new flight reservation and a pile of candy were all she could offer and she offered them freely. As I gathered these lifelines, she touched my hand and told me that she was sorry.

She was my angel that afternoon. I never knew her name and I don’t know her story but she touched me in my grief and acted with mercy. Reading this article this morning reminded me of her. Thanks, Tim.

Doug has been working on a few assignments for an Ethics class he took at Fuller last month, and occasionally he will email me snippets of what he is reading. Last night, he sent the following:

“If conversion should be a turning to God and neighbor…then we must ask ourselves whether we perhaps do not show greater respect to images made of wood than to human beings who are living images of God. We must ask ourselves whether we are not more courteous to images than to the human beings who are sunk in ignorance, sorrow, poverty, and slavery.”

-Bishop Leonidas Proaño