Were you there?

"Were you there when they crucified my Lord?"  I've always thought that was a strange question.  No, silly, I wasn't born, yet.  Of course I wasn't there.  As I've sung that song countless times through the years, I've always just tried to ignore the question aspect of the song and focus upon the details of the crucifixion of Jesus which the song skillfully recounts.  Then I try to be so focused that I can effectively and appropriately "tremble."   I'm not always successful, though.  Maybe the author of the song wasn't, either - after all, it says "sometimes it causes me to tremble."

It wasn't until today that I finally got it.  I think of myself as a smart person, but it would seem that I've been quite dense when it comes to this.  At noon, my daughter was napping and I was in her playroom reading the Scriptures and praying.  When I heard the church bell chime in the distance, in honor of Good Friday, I put down the Bible in a respectful silence.  I suddenly felt led to sing "Were you there..."  I don't really like that song because, like I said, I think the question part is so annoyingly weird, but not wanting to disobey a prompting from the Holy Spirit, I began to sing.  

The question hit me like never before.  "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?"  No, I wasn't.  Like the other disciples, I abandoned him last night.  I was at the Maundy Thursday service with my daughter, but she got a little chatty and we had to leave.  I was so mad.  Not so much at her - she was behaving like a normal 18 month old - but at some of the people in this church who have been so unkind, so unwelcoming, so outright mean to me and my daughter since we arrived.  But even though I wasn't mad at my daughter, she was the only one present once we left, and so it came out at her.  I was short and snappy and unkind, myself.  I knew better - I thought, "Control yourself!"  But I felt like I had such a good reason to be mad that I chose the unfaithful route.  It wasn't until later in the evening when I "heard the rooster crow" and realized that, despite my best desires and intentions, I, too, had abandoned Jesus.  Then all this morning as I continuously would draw my mind back to the cross, my mind would immediately get dragged back away.  I chose thoughts that tickled my vanity, stroked my pride, and filled me with temporary delight.  Sure, I tried, but habits of the mind are no small force.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  I wanted to be.  I tried to be... sort of.  I was following him to the cross, but I only made it halfway.  Rather than dwell in the glory of the invisible, my mind chose over and over again the visible, temporary images before it.  I didn't choose the cross.  That, in response to the question of the song, causes me to "tremble."  

This is such a good day - we receive such grace today.  Were you there - really, fully there - to receive it?  Thank God that despite the absence of many of his disciples, two thousand years ago and today, he did it for us, anyway.

Thanks be to God!

Home on Maundy Thursday

This is going to be different from what I usually write.  It is the Thursday of Holy Week.  I want to be at church with the family of Christ, celebrating the Last Supper and remembering the events that followed.  But I had to leave the service, because my 18 month old was making noises.  And so I am here at home all alone with my daughter.  I could read the biblical story alone, which is what I will do anyway later tonight, but it really is not the same.  I think that is why I'm blogging this - I just can't bare to be alone with this on this night, but the church community does not want me and my daughter there.  And so here we are.  As we left the church, some of the people even sent me haughty, "It's about time" looks.

I'm reminded of a story - I forget the author and the name of the book, but the plot goes like this.  There once existed a Utopia-like land.  If you lived there, you could have anything you could possibly want.  It was a deliciously beautiful place and everyone was super happy all the time.  But there was one catch.  In order to live there, you had to place one of you children into a dungeon where they could only eat stale bread and drink water once a day for the rest of the child's life.  The question of the book was, would you do it?  Would you sacrifice just one of your children so that the rest of your family could live a perfectly happy existence?  Tonight, I feel like the church answered "yes," and I'm the child in the dungeon.

It's tempting to think, "Hmm, that means I get to identify with Jesus, abandoned by all his friends and left alone on this night."  But there is a certain uncomfortable irony to think that the people who went to church tonight because they love Jesus and want to be close to him and don't want to be interrupted in that very worthy goal - these are the people who are like the disciples who abandoned Jesus on this night?  That doesn't seem quite right.  I wonder, should I be OK with being stuck at home on this night, separated from the church, so that the church can remember in a focused manner?  I think I would be more able to do this if the people there weren't so nasty about wanting me to leave.  But would that even be right if they were nice about it?  

The day before we came to this church, I was praying about what God would have my ministry be here.  As I prayed, I suddenly could hear the cries of young moms all across the area -  moms pouring their lives out for their families day after day after day, with no input, tired, lonely, going on nothing.  They were crying out to God, and I felt God saying to me, "I am sending you here for them."  I had no idea at the time that I would become one of those young moms myself.

Tears of the Savior

Several nights ago, as I began to rock and nurse my baby to sleep, she bit me.  Now, this has happened before, and I can generally handle it.  But that night I went nuts.  I was startled at the violence of my own reaction.  "NO!" I yelled, and I pulled her away.  I called for my husband to come rock her, which really upset her because she wanted me, but for some reason I just had zero patience inside of me.  My husband took her, and I left with her crying uncontrollably in his arms.  Once she was finally asleep, I went in to look at her.  She was huddled against my husband, little choking sobs still coming out of her limp body as she lay there, asleep.  And I felt horrible.  Why couldn't I handle her in that moment?  The fury with which I reacted - it really startled me.  

Before I went to sleep, I had my evening prayer time.  I was so distraught over the way I had treated my daughter.  And I was really worried that maybe I had scarred her for life or something by just abandoning her in her tears.  I know, I know, this may be a "new mom" thing and I'll get over it by the third child, but in that moment the concern, the distress, the shock at how upset I became - these were very real to me.  And I brought them in prayer to God.

As I sat there, praying, I saw the image of Christ, grieving over the sins of the world, agonizing on the cross.  As I imagined this image, his tears and my daughter's tears of distress became one.  My sin caused both.  In their unity, my daughter's grief became less life-threatening.  Not because my sinning against her somehow isn't really all that bad, but because the cross confronts the depth of the badness and goes deeper still.  It embraces her cry along with the cries of every human being who live in a world with broken people who break each other over and over again from the moment of birth, sometimes without even knowing it, and often dismissively.  And insofar as the cross is redemptive, it offers the very real potential for the genuine redemption of all this grief, including the redemption of my daughter's tears that night.

What is more, as I imagined this image of Christ, his tears and my tears became one.  That God would send his Son to die on the cross - so great must be his grief over the sinfulness of the world.  I, too, in that moment, deeply grieved the limitations of my flesh in raising my daughter.  God didn't tell me I was over-reacting.  He grieved with me.  And he offers me the cross as his powerful answer to this grief.  Thanks be to God that there is genuine power in the cross for the redemption of my own heart - a heart that does not yet love perfectly.

On the Cross: Death Comes First

I often hear people talk about the Old Testament as being all about law, as opposed to the New Testament which is all about grace.  I'm an Old Testament scholar, and talk like that makes me shudder, because it's really not true.  Consider the book of Exodus - it tells the story of God saving the people out of Egypt, out of the clutches of a cruel master who beat and whipped them, before it moves into telling the story of how the people are now to live, within the hands of a good and kind Master.  In Ex 20, the Ten Commandments begin "I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt..."  Before God commands anything, God demonstrates, "I love you, and you can trust me."  Before God reveals the law, God reveals what is the purpose of following these laws - that you might have life.

When my daughter was born, I could have let her cry endlessly when she was a day old and insisted on my own way, but God had given me all kinds of maternal instincts saying that was not right.  Before I became the one who disciplines her, I spent months upon months dying to myself on her behalf.  I gave up everything to hold her, to nurse her, to quiet her when she was upset, to let her know that in this world there is someone who loves her, someone she can trust whole-heartedly.  It was only as she got older that I began to discipline her, to teach her how to walk the path of life in such a way that she can really live.  I often meditated upon how much this is like the pattern with which God deals with us as his children - before I told her how to live, I told her I would die on her behalf.

This gives Holy Week a whole new meaning for me.  When I was younger, I left everything to follow Jesus.  But my motive was not yet just like Jesus' - I did it because I wanted to draw near to God, not because I so loved the world that I wanted to draw near to it.  I wasn't thinking, "I want the world to know, before I have the Holy Spirit call it to salvation through me, that I would die for it."  I didn't even know, yet, how to think such a thought.  It has been the strange providence of God in my life that the work of parenthood has brought me nearer to the cross than any of the sacrifices of my youth.

Getting Stuff Done

I reflect often on how strange it is to me that God would have children take up so much time and energy.  Certainly we could all get more done if children could raise themselves.  My brain, formed by this utilitarian culture in which we live in the United States, is just baffled.  After all, isn't "getting stuff done" the chief virtue in life, the proof of a life well-lived?  Today I checked 4 significant items off of my mental to-do list.  This was, then, certainly a good, well-spent day, right? I mean, we all KNOW this isn't true.  But then how is it that when I spend hours laughing and playing with my 18 month old I'm "taking time off?"  In sharing quality time with my daughter, where does this lingering sense come from that I didn't actually do anything.    

But God certainly understood the implications of children needing their parents' time and attention to the vast extent that this is the case.  When I reflect on this, I experience a real shock that reverberates deep within my soul as I come to understand on ever-deeper levels that all those things I could be doing (really good things - like, teaching the Bible, tutoring kids with difficult family situations, gathering food for the homeless, etc., etc., etc.) are not as important to God as my caring for this one little person.  That is so weird.  I mean, what am I raising her to do?  Raise kids of her own?  Is this the created world just an endless, pointless cycle of ceaseless child-raising?  Certainly that can't be the case.  

But this created world is a place, I am confident, in which God wants us to learn to love.  It is easy to feel like I'm accomplishing things, great things, when I get a new degree, when I present a paper before a large, appreciative audience, when I explain a difficult passage of Scripture to a student in need of clarification.  And surely those things are important, right?  But never have I learned to give myself up for another person like I have through embracing motherhood.  Just maybe the One who turned the world upside down through a child born to no one special in a little, insignificant town - maybe this One has it in him to call me to transform the world through holding this child.

Holding Back from God

This past Sunday was communion Sunday.  As we approached the kneeling rails, my 18 month old had her eyes open wide.  She watched in eager attentiveness as the bread was brought to us, one by one.  She said, "ooooh" at the little cups that had been placed in the holes on the kneeling rails by earlier communion-takers.  She picked them up, tried to drink out of them, and then put them back in the holes.  She looked down at the pads upon which we were kneeling and touched them curiously.  She listened in wonder as the pastor said the words that signaled that our time was over and we should return to our seat.  And she did not want to leave.  Better put, she refused to leave.  "Noooooo!" she cried out as I picked her up to take her back to our seat. "It's time to go sit down again," I whispered in her ear, but she just said, "Again."  "We're all finished.  Time to sit down.  Do you want to draw with the pencil?"  But no, nothing would satisfy her other than to go back to the front of the church for communion.  And so, sensing the great anxiety and expectations of the congregation over my taking her out of the sanctuary over the understood-inappropriateness of my daughter's behavior, we left the sanctuary altogether.  But even then she couldn't get over it.  She wanted to go play communion... and I wanted to let her.  This is how she learns.  It's not like she doesn't want to participate.  She does want to participate, arguably with more enthusiasm than some of the quiet, behaved adults, and I want her to know that the Lord welcomes her just as she is to his table. 

Having an 18 month old in worship is a very different experience than worshipping with just adults or older children.  My daughter doesn't know the rules - not just the theological rules like "Don't take the Lord's name in vain," but the rules of social propriety.  And teaching her to worship is showing me just how much we mix those two things up.  Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them, because the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.  Truly I tell you, anyone who does not receive the kingdom as a little child will never receive it."  Maybe instead of holding children back, we should consider emulating them.  I know that many times I have wanted to stay longer at the communion table, but the music was coming to an end, the people around me were leaving, the pastor said those special dismissal words.  Inside I have felt, "Noooooooo!  Let me sit here without worrying about these things!"  But I am a grown-up, fully capable of keeping my mouth shut, and I don't want people thinking I'm weird.  And so I quietly go back to my seat to pray there ... but it isn't the same. 

Having an 18 month old who cannot hold herself back is teaching me how much we do.  Maybe, instead of teaching our children that the number one rule in worship is to sit still and be quiet, we ought to accept them as God does, just as God accepts us however mature we are.  And maybe in so doing we will find our way forward.  "And a little child shall lead them..."

Home

As a United Methodist pastor's spouse, who was also raised as a United Methodist pastor's daughter, I have moved a lot in my life.  And one consequence of this is that there isn't a place, a house, a community out there that feels to me like home.  I think this is true for a lot of people in our world where moving frequently because of job situations is such a typical way of life.  I lament this for my daughter.  She's at such a young, impressionable age, and it is so sad to me that these people, this house, this church will disappear to her life in a few years, even though it will probably be written onto her heart that this place is what is "normal."  And even worse, the culture here is so shallow, so appearance-driven, so not what I want my daughter to think of as normal.

But here is my comfort - I think of missionary families in other parts of the world, and I realize that this is what we are, as well.  And as my daughter sees and experiences us as God-sent agents of change, bringing good news of freedom to a world in which we have no home, this way of being in the world while looking forward to our heavenly glory, will become for her - as it has become for me - what home is.