The Expendable Crewman

Published on by Adam Thomas3 Comments

(Sermon for Sunday, December 26, 2010 || Feast of St. Stephen ||Acts 6:8—7:2a, 51c-60)*

In 1999's Galaxy Quest, Guy Fleegman (far left) is an actor who once portrayed an expendable crewman on the show. When the cast finds themselves on a real space ship fighting real aliens, Guy is convinced he's going to die "to prove the situation is serious."

There’s an old joke about Star Trek concerning “expendable crewmen.” When members of the main cast beamed down to a planet, the away team always seemed to include one extra person whom the audience had never seen before. Predictably, the writers killed off this extra a few minutes later to show the dire urgency of the crew’s predicament. Seemingly, Luke (the writer of the Acts of the Apostles) and the writers of Star Trek have this in common. Luke introduces Stephen in chapter six, and he’s dead by the end of chapter seven. The patron saint of this church appears in all of two chapters of one book of the Bible. And his death shows that the situation for Jesus’ followers is, indeed, dire. Could the founders of this church have possibly named our parish after an expendable crewman?

At first glance, Stephen sure looks like a prime candidate for this expendable crewman status. We know nothing about him besides the fact that he was among the first seven deacons chosen by the apostles. Also, his feast day happens to be the day after Christmas, which is like having your birthday and Christmas right near each other and only getting one set of presents a year. And furthermore, the framers of our lectionary readings effectively gutted Stephen’s story. We just heard the beginning and the end, but we missed Stephen’s epic sermon in the middle. These three reasons all but confirm Stephen’s expendable condition. I might as well stop right now because Stephen was never part of the main crew anyway.

But wait just a minute. Let’s look a little bit closer at this by going backwards through my three reasons for Stephen’s supposed expendability. If you look at your bulletin, you’ll notice that we skipped from verse two to verse 51 of chapter seven of the Acts of the Apostles. The stitching up of the hole between these verses happens so seamlessly that you’d never ever notice. Here’s what I mean: “And Stephen replied, ‘Brothers and fathers, listen to me. You are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do.’ ”

Did you catch the break between verse two and verse 51? Stephen says, “Brothers and fathers, listen to me,” and then he launches into a beautiful and concise summary of a sizable chunk of the Hebrew Scriptures. He recounts the stories of Abraham and Joseph and Moses. Finally, he arrives at David and Solomon and the building of the Temple. All the while, Stephen teaches about the history and traditions of Israel, and his audience is the very group of people, who are supposed to be the most knowledgeable about those topics.

Now, I can’t find hard data to support this, but I’m pretty sure that besides Jesus, Peter, and Paul, Stephen has more dialogue than any other person in the narratives of the New Testament. And all in the space of two chapters! He seems less expendable now for sure. Stephen’s epic sermon (which I’m assigning as homework for next week – just kidding) serves as a link between Stephen’s witness as a follower of Jesus and the oldest traditions of the Hebrew people. His accusers brought him to the council on trumped up charges of blasphemy against the very tradition that his speech confirms. But buried in his sermon is something that shows that Stephen, though a courageous Christian witness, doesn’t quite have everything figured out.

Nine times during the speech that we didn’t read this morning, Stephen refers to the folks in the old stories as  “our ancestors.” We all come from Abraham, our common ancestor, Stephen says. Our ancestors were enslaved in Egypt. Our ancestors made the golden calf. Our ancestors brought God’s holy tent into the land of promise. Nine times, he claims kinship with his accusers and with the angry council members.

But then, when the reading we heard this morning picks up again, Stephen switches. “You stiff-necked people,” he says, “uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute?” When Stephen accuses his accusers of persecution, he removes himself from the group. Because he is now being persecuted himself, he claims no complicity in the sins of “your” ancestors, who, of course, are his, as well.

With this switch from “our” to “your,” Stephen severs the connection he had with his accusers and the council. A few minutes later, they violently drag him out of the city and stone him to death. Of course, their act of murder is the greater sin. But by removing himself from the corporate sin of their common ancestors, Stephen ignores the negative effects, which that sin has on his life. He turns a blind eye to the fact that the sins of the ancestor have somehow shaped, or better yet, misshaped him.

And this is where we come back to reason number two for Stephen’s supposed expendability. His feast day is today, the day after Christmas. Many saints have their feast days on the anniversaries of their deaths, but we don’t know on what day Stephen died. There is, however, a blessing hidden in this seemingly unfortunate placement of Stephen’s feast. Stephen’s death and Jesus’ birth are linked by virtue of our calendar. In both Matthew and Luke, the Gospel writers take great pains through lengthy genealogies to plant Jesus squarely in the line of Israel’s succession going back to Abraham and beyond. And in his birth in that little town of Bethlehem, the town of king David, Jesus marks the culmination of the tradition of David, as well as the other folks Stephen mentions in his sermon.

Thus, Jesus’ Incarnation happens as part of Israel’s history in order to redeem Israel’s history. By removing himself through his judgment of the council from the negative pieces of that history, Stephen removes himself from the need for that redemption. Of course, no one, not even a man “full of grace and power” (as Luke names Stephen) is above the need for redemption. Even the first martyr of the church, for whom our parish is named, is misshapen by the corporate sin of this world.

The good news is this: through Jesus’ Incarnation as a flesh and blood person and through his death, which Stephen’s martyrdom recalls, Jesus accomplished that redemption and gives us the chance to be reshaped into new and better forms. And this is where we come back to reason number one for Stephen’s supposed expendability. We know next to nothing about this man who died for the love of his Lord. But we do know that, at the end of his life, he did not add to the world’s cycle of violence by wishing vengeance on his attackers. We do know that he loved and served people in need as one of the church’s first deacons. We do know that he was a man “full of faith and Holy Spirit.”

And finally, we do know, that whatever his misshapenness and his sin, whatever his success and his witness, Stephen’s life and death find redemption in the love of God, made known in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord.

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* At church, I preached this text to three gracious and attentive women at the 8:00am service and decided it didn’t work read as a manuscript. So, at the 10:00am, I preached this content without the text and it worked so much better.

Names

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

(Sermon for Sunday, December 19, 2010 || Advent 4 Year A || Matthew 1:18-25)

When my mother discovered that she was going to have a second child, she began thinking up names for the tiny person growing within her. Since she didn’t know until I was born if I were going to be a boy or a girl, she tried all manner of names on for size. She spoke them loudly and softly, lovingly and reprovingly. She paired them with my sister Melinda’s name. She let them roll off her tongue, and she wrote them down to see how they looked on paper. Finally, she settled on a boy’s name – a real winner. Lying in bed one morning, she struck up a conversation with my father: “I think we should name him ‘Tristram.’”

My father sat bolt upright in bed. “Absolutely not,” he said. And so with a mixture of brainstorming, cajoling, and bargaining, my parents settled on “Adam,” thinking the name to be a good, strong one. (Just a side note: if I had been a girl, and I’m not making this up, my mother would have named me “Meriwether.”)

Sometimes, I wonder what my life would be like if my dad had agreed with my mother’s initial offering. “Tristram” is certainly less common than “Adam,” not that “Adam” is on a top ten baby name list. “Tristram” comes from the word “sad” in Latin or “tumult” in Gaelic. The variant “Tristan” was one of King Arthur’s knights, the subject of stories and songs, and Wagner’s great opera. You know where “Adam” comes from. When God sculpted the dust into a form and breathed life into the body, what God made was my name. Originally, my name wasn’t a name at all; rather, “Adam” – ha adam – was the word for “human being.” “Man of earth” might be the most expressive translation, though my friends who studied Hebrew in seminary took to calling me “dirt boy.”

Would my life be any different if I had been named “Tristram” rather than “Adam?” Could I have traced a different path with a different name? Does a name really matter in the grand scheme of things? Judging by today’s passage from the Gospel according to Matthew, the answer is “yes.” The right name is significant enough for an angel to tell Joseph just what to call the child growing in his fiancé’s womb. But just one name won’t do: Matthew recalls a second name for this child from the words of the great prophet Isaiah. And these names – Jesus, Emmanuel – these names are more than just names. They are mission statements. They are explanations of the life that God sent God’s only Son to live.

The angel in Joseph’s dream tells him to name Mary’s child “Jesus,” because “he will save his people from their sins.” “Jesus” (Iesous) is the Greek way of writing the Hebrew name “Yeshua,” which we render in English as “Joshua.” In the Hebrew Scriptures, Moses grooms Joshua to be his successor because Moses knows that he’s not going to reach the Promised Land. After Moses dies, Joshua leads the people of Israel out of the wilderness, which had encompassed them for forty years. This hero of the old stories, which were told at the Temple and around the dinner table, finishes the work of bringing the people into the Promised Land. Forty years from God’s initial rescue of God’s people from slavery in Egypt, Joshua helps God close that chapter of Israel’s history.

God saves Israel. This is the mission statement found in Joshua’s name, which means “God saves.” The life that Mary’s child will live years after Joseph gives the boy Joshua’s name accomplishes the same mission. Jesus, the angel says, “will save the people from their sins.” Jesus takes the people out of the new wilderness in which they are wandering. This new wilderness takes up no space on a map. There is no Promised Land a month’s hard trudging through the desert. Rather, the wilderness from which Jesus saves the people is the emotional, psychological, and spiritual desolation that they wrought for themselves. They created deserts around and within themselves through misplaced priorities and apathy toward the less fortunate and worship of all manner of idols, including the very law that was supposed to connect them to God.

Sound familiar? The desolation that the people of Jesus’ time brought upon themselves is the same desolation that affects people today. Our idols might be shiny and new, but our deference to them is unchanged. Notice, however, that the mission statement found in Jesus’ Hebrew name is not “God saved,” but “God saves.” With his resurrection, Jesus signals to people of all times that nothing in all creation – not even death – can keep God from bringing people back to God. We are some of those people. Nothing in all creation can keep Jesus from being in relationship with us. When we embrace this joyous truth, we can participate with Jesus in turning our desolate deserts into Promised Lands.

This constant relationship, this promise kept through the power of the resurrection, brings us to the mission statement found in Jesus’ other name: Emmanuel. Matthew helps out his non-Hebrew readers by translating this name right there in the text. Emmanuel means “God is with us.” Just as God was with Moses and Joshua and the rest of Israel during their forty-year journey through the wilderness, God was still with the people of Israel during their own self-imposed desolation. After all, God is the God of the desert and the Promised Land. But their desolation kept them from seeing the truth that God was with them. In Jesus’ life, the reality of Emmanuel – God with us – found flesh and blood. 17th century poet Richard Crashaw describes Jesus’ Incarnation in this way:

“Welcome all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span!
Summer in winter! day in night!
Heaven in earth! and God in man!”

After centuries of captivity, after the life-giving words of the prophets had begun to fade from the collective memory, God’s people needed the immediacy, the physicality of the Incarnation to bring them back to God. This flesh and blood reality of God-with-us shocked some folks out of their desolation. They told others and those others told more, and pretty soon, followers of Jesus Christ were spreading to the ends of the earth his good news of abundant life lived for God.

But just as  “God saves” is not simply a past event, “God-with-us” emanates from Jesus’ life on earth through the presence of the Holy Spirit down to us. His “eternity shut in a span” breaks free of the constraints of time, and so we too can encounter Emmanuel in our lives. Jesus promises to fulfill his name’s mission statement even after he ascends to heaven. In the very last line of the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus echoes this name when he says, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (28:20).

Every moment of every day, we have the opportunity of encountering the presence of God-with-us. We have the ability to participate with the God who saves in turning our desolation into a place of springs, where the “wilderness and the dry land shall be glad” and “the desert shall rejoice and blossom” (Isaiah 35:1). In the very names of our Savior Jesus Christ, we find the good news of God for all people. When we discover the presence of Emmanuel and embrace the forgiveness and salvation of Yeshua, of Jesus, we can then begin to ask God what our missions shall be. We can pray, “O God, what would you have our names mean?”

The Pews in the North Transept: A Remembrance

Published on by Adam Thomas2 Comments

The following post appeared Friday, December 3rd on Episcopalcafe.com, a website to which I am a monthly contributor. Check it out here or read it below.

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photo credit: Lara Shine

There were a couple of pews in the north transept of the chapel. They were set perpendicular to the main body of pews and a bit apart from the others. Only one corner of these pews had a view of the altar, while the whitewashed wall that marked the beginning of the chancel blocked those sitting in the rest from witnessing the consecration of Holy Communion. A set of upperclassmen always sat in those sideways pews. If we had been in high school rather than seminary, they would have been the aloof, cool kids who wore t-shirts adorned with the names of bands you had never heard of and who only participated in school-spirit building events ironically.

It wasn’t until the second semester of my first year that I decided to try to sit in one of those pews, too. Some vestige of high school social dynamics must have awakened in me to prompt me to sit there: I would be cool and aloof by association if I planted myself in one of those sideways pews. I finally stocked up enough courage to try, and, much to my surprise, the upperclassmen had no problem with me sitting in close proximity to them. Apparently, they were cool and aloof enough to allow my greenness and exuberance for chapel services to invade their territory. At least, that’s what I thought at first. It turns out that those upperclassmen were just nice, welcoming Episcopalians with perhaps more than their share of the liturgical equivalent of gallows humor.

They ushered me, a lowly first year seminarian, into their pews. Pretty soon, I was the upperclassman sharing the pew with new folks starting their turn in the never-ending three-year cycle of Episcopal seminary. From that pew in the corner, I participated in several hundred worship services, mostly Morning Prayer and Eucharist, with an ordination thrown in here and there.

I remember one Tuesday morning during Lent when we hunkered down in those pews for another epic recitation of the Great Litany. Much to the joy of our attention spans, however, the student who was leading the Litany didn’t realize that only a small portion of it appears in the Hymnal 1982. Needless to say, we got out of chapel much earlier than we expected that morning.

I remember a sermon delivered by a beloved Old Testament professor, who had recently become the proud father of a beautiful little girl adopted from China. He preached about how his daughter toddled along next to him as he mowed the lawn, all the while pushing a plastic lawnmower of her own. We are like my little girl, he said. God allows us to push the lawnmower, but really God does the work.

I remember my only sermon in the chapel’s pulpit – five minutes on Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. I had seen the pulpit shake and sway when particularly rotund and fiery preachers tested its structural integrity. I had no such worry, being neither very heavy nor very fiery.

I remember the first time I stood up behind the chapel’s altar, the table that I could barely see from my chosen pew. I stood there in that place of mystery, while my liturgics practicum professor led us through how to celebrate the Eucharist. Never do something with only one hand, he said. Pray with the authentic voice that God gave you. If you have glasses, make sure the book is at the right height. His practical advice took away none of the mystery; rather, it gave me the ability to share the mystery with others. Still, on the day of my first Eucharist, I was so flustered that I couldn’t tell which cruet held the wine and which held the water.

I remember being proud of my own austerity when I eschewed the kneeler cushions, thus proving I had no idea what the concept of kneeling was all about. I remember putting on my crisp new cassock and surplice for my first Sunday in the choir. I remember playing the guitar at Evening Prayer. I remember practicing baptism on a cabbage patch kid.

Mostly, though, I remember the air in the chapel. It was heavy air, full of stained glass light and the comforting residue of the prayers of thousands of students who came before. That air hit me the first time I entered the chapel as a prospective student on a chilly January morning in 2005. I breathed in the substance of the holy, communal life that the seminary desired for each student – the life made up of words and bread and wine and water and song and, yes, mistakes. For three years, I added the breath of my prayers to that airy substance. And from that pew in the corner, I sat and knelt and stood, while God continually breathed life into me, making me the person God yearned for me to become.

A month ago, the chapel burned down. A friend called me about forty-five minutes after the blaze began to tell me the sad, shocking news. I’ve seen pictures of the charred, unstable structure that still remains. I’ve seen the news stories online. I’ve read the Facebook comments of dozens of seminary friends, who each changed their profile pictures to an image of the east wall of the chapel – the wall that famously read: “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel.” All of these things tell me that the chapel is gone. But I don’t think that reality will truly hit me until I visit the holy hill of the Virginia Theological Seminary and see for myself the place where the conflagration released the residue of all those prayers into the sky.

Four Bags of Saline

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

I first posted this Advent reflection on the site Day1.org, which is having a Advent/Christmas Blog tour.

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On Tuesday afternoon, I contracted a viral infection that systematically began evacuating the contents of my stomach, intestines, gall bladder, and liver as quickly as possible. Every half hour I scurried from my fetal position on the couch back to the restroom where I’m sure the neighbors and the folks in the next county could hear my wretched retching. After about four hours of agony, my fiancé finally convinced me to go to the Emergency Room. Severely dehydrated, I accomplished the weak-kneed feat of maneuvering down the stairwell and out to the car, all the while clutching a white, plastic wastebasket like a shipwreck survivor clinging to a life preserver.

With my fiancé supporting me, I stumbled into the ER at about eleven at night. The woman behind the counter took my information and fitted me with a bar-coded bracelet. Another woman took my vital signs and then told me to take a seat in the waiting area. I don’t know how long we waited. My sense of time was reduced to half-hourly dashes to the restroom followed by several, sweat-drenched minutes sitting on the tile floor heaving with exhaustion. Sometime after my fourth trip to the restroom, a nurse mercifully called me back. I sat in a wheelchair as an orderly navigated me to a bed in the hallway of the overcrowded emergency department.

The nurse poked an IV tube into the back of my right hand and fed into my bloodstream the same anti-nausea medicine they give to chemotherapy patients. Then she hooked up a bag of saline, and I watched through half-lidded eyes as the saline began dripping from its elevated place into the tube. My fiancé read the words on the machine to me: 500 milliliters per hour. The equipment was making the saline drip at a proscribed rate – the bag would be empty in two hours. With the anti-nausea medicine suppressing my urge, I now had a new way to measure the time.

One empty bag of saline later, I was showing marked improvement. A little color had returned to my cheeks, and I was thirstier than I had ever been. The nurse allowed me ice chips and promised a popsicle later on if I continued to feel better. I crunched down a Styrofoam cup’s worth of ice and then collapsed back on the bed in the hallway. While I sucked on the ice chips, the nurse hung another bag of saline, and sped up the distribution of the liquid into my body. Now I was receiving 1000 milliliters an hour, or one full bag.

A second empty bag of saline later, I received the promised popsicle, and my fiancé correctly guessed the punch line to the truly horrendous joke stamped on the popsicle stick (How does thread get to school? On a spool bus). After I finished the popsicle, the nurse propped me back in the wheelchair for a ride to the radiology department for a chest x-ray. The doctor wanted to make sure that my gastric pyrotechnics hadn’t torn my esophagus. The short trip wore me out, and I dozed off and on through my third bag of saline, also pushed into me at 1000 milliliters an hour.

By the end of bag three, I just wanted to go home and crawl into my own bed away from the bright fluorescence and constant beeps and blips of the ER. My doctor had other plans, however, and instructed the nurse to hang a fourth bag of saline. This time, she turned off the machine controlling the dispersal of the IV into my arm. The bag would finish not in one hour or two like the other bags, which were “pushed” into me, but at the undefined rate of gravity.

I knew that eventually the fourth bag of saline would empty. I knew that I would be allowed out of the ER for the blissful comfort of my own bed and sleep uninterrupted by illness or beeping monitors. I just didn’t know when. This is the same quandary that the season of Advent invites us to explore. We don’t know when Jesus will return, but we know that he will return. Now, we live in a culture dependent on the constant, steady, and unwavering march of time. We punch in time cards at work. The train leaves the station at 7:12 sharp. The firm expects so many billable hours. Time is money. So when Jesus himself says, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son,* but only the Father,” his words run smack into our conception of time. How could we not know when something will happen? How could we not know when to begin our preparation for the big day?

By not putting a date and time on his return, Jesus pushes us to celebrate the much more important fact that his return will happen. He understands human nature too well. By initiating the expectation of return without a time frame, he delivers us the perfect set of variables to make us practice constant vigilance. When I knew the saline bag would run out in one hour, I had no need to watch it. The 1000 milliliters ticked by one after another in predictable, rhythmic progression. But when the nurse turned off the machine during the fourth saline bag, I had to keep looking up at it to see how quickly gravity was doing its work.

I knew the bag would empty, but I wanted to be sure I knew exactly when those last drops would fall so that I could leave the hospital. In the same way, during the season of Advent, we practice our awareness of God’s presence in our lives so that we can more readily identify the signs of Christ’s reign breaking into the world. During the season of Advent, I invite you to turn off the machines that push the IV. Let gravity take over. Know that the “when” is less important than the “what.” Jesus is coming; indeed, Jesus is always here, as well. When we worry less about the when, we can begin to see the presence of God happening all around us. So turn off your clocks. Forget marking off days in your Advent calendar. And just live with the grace-filled knowledge that Christ is coming.

Shaking Off the Dust

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, November 21, 2010 || Christ the King, Year C, RCL || Colossians 1:11-20)

Ever since I bought my piano a little over two years ago, a stack of music has sat atop the instrument gathering dust. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy – the keyboard works of these great composers continues to fulfill the lackluster role of impromptu lamp stand. To make matters more pathetic for this stack of music, the lamp, which I purchased at the same time as the piano, was bulbless until a few weeks ago when I finally remembered to pick up a bulb at the grocery store.

You might wonder why I bought a piano at all, if I never get around to tickling the ivories. Good question. At the time, I had grand designs, which have since descended through the realm of simple designs and the land of hope and settled comfortably in the valley of pipe dreams. Perhaps, my future children will learn the instrument one day and redeem their father’s purchase. Recently, my fiancé has sat down and played for a few minutes here and there. But mostly, the piano simply takes up space. And the stack of music atop the instrument gathers dust.

But this stack of music gathering dust isn’t really music at all. The books of Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s waltzes and Debussy’s preludes are simply bound pages adorned with groups of five lines and thousands upon thousands of cryptic markings. We might call these pages by the name of “sheet music,” but the “music” exists wholly apart from these “sheets.” Only when a person, who is trained to decipher and articulate the cryptic markings, sits down with the intention of translating the notes into sounds does the music ever have a chance of happening.

Our lives follow this same pattern. We have the capacity to make beautiful music with our lives, but mostly we keep our lids closed, content to exist as furniture taking up space. Mostly we keep our covers closed, content to sit in a stack of unread books. Mostly we sit around gathering dust.

Of course, this manner of existence is not the life that God yearns for us. Today, on the final Sunday of the church year, we celebrate the reign of Christ. We give thanks for the reality that Christ is our sovereign, our ultimate authority. And in our celebration and thanksgiving, we acknowledge that Christ does not reign over a world full of inanimate furniture and closed books. Rather, Christ reigns precisely to pull and push and prod us out of the state of dust gathering.

To start shaking off the dust, we must first examine just what we mean when we claim that Christ reigns. As the One who reigns over us, Christ is our ultimate authority, but we encounter trouble when we link Christ’s authority to the paltry earthly authority we encounter on a daily basis. Certain people have authority over us based on their roles. Teachers and principals have authority over students. State troopers have authority over motorists. Judges have authority over those indicted of crimes. This earthly authority has its roots in a punitive system, where citizens cede a portion of their personal sovereignty to certain offices in order to make the society function more smoothly. People recognize that if they break the rules of the society, the Authorities have the right and the ability to punish.

Detail from "Descent into Rivendell" (2003) by John Howe, who is the best Tolkien illustrator of all time.

We may use the same word, but Christ’s authority is of a wholly different sort than the kind we encounter in our principals, state troopers, and judges. Far from being simply punitive in nature and bound by office or title, Christ’s authority arises from Christ being the author, the writer of the great script of creation. Think of it like this: before J.R.R. Tolkien put pen to paper, Middle-Earth had no ability to capture the imagination of readers. But over forty years, Tolkien authored story after story, character after character, slowly building a world of dark forests and misty mountains inhabited by elves and hobbits and wizards. Tolkien is the authority behind Middle-Earth because he authored the fantasy world into existence in the minds of his readers.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul speaks of Christ’s authorship in similar terms: “In [Christ] all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

As the author of all things, Christ has reigned since before the first things were created. And the script of creation continues because Christ has never stopped writing. And now Christ has authored our lives into being. We are small stories that help make up the great script. At the end of the Gospel according to John, the narrator concludes: “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). What the narrator doesn’t say is that all the other things Jesus did have been written down. Christ, the author of each of us, wrote those things down in us. We are the books that the world itself cannot contain.

The problem is that too often we are the books sitting atop the piano gathering dust. Too often, we fail to remember that we are not our own authors. Too often, we fail to acknowledge that we are not in charge of our own lives. Today, we proclaim that Christ reigns in each of us. Christ is in charge of our lives because Christ continues to author us into being. The author has written the words of life within us, the special words unique to each of us. When we begin to seek for those special words, when we look inside ourselves and begin to read the story of how Christ reigns in our lives, we start to shake off the dust.

Like the sheet music, we are just closed books until we begin to participate in the telling of our own stories. As the author of each of those stories, Christ has penned a work about himself, a work which we proclaim in the living out of our stories. We could choose to stay atop the piano gathering dust, but what kind of forlorn existence does this entail? How could we read the words of Christ in the lives of those around us if we remained dusty, closed books? There is far too much love and grace in the pages of our lives for us to waste them by staying closed. There is far too much that Christ is doing for us not to participate in Christ’s reign. There is far too much beauty to bring to the world for us not to let the author spill the words of life from our stories into creation.

And so, as one book trying to shake off the dust, I ask you: how does Christ reign in you? What words has the Author of each of us written in your hearts? Or, to use the words that close Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day”:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?”

What a Good Boy, What a Smart Boy, What a Strong Boy

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

The following post appeared Tuesday, November 2nd on Episcopalcafe.com, a website to which I am a monthly contributor. Check it out here or read it below.

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When you listen to the Gospel, you might notice the trend that folks rarely answer questions directly. Instead, the responder either completely ignores the question or says something so profound that the question ceases to matter. Most things Jesus says in the Gospel fall into one of these two categories. Think about how often someone asks a question, and Jesus responds, “Well, let me tell you a story about that. Once there was a farmer…” Before Jesus enters the scene, however, John the Baptizer finds himself under interrogation, and he does just a good a job as Jesus in not answering questions with the expected answers. His unexpected responses to the folks interviewing him (as recorded in John 1) show John’s understanding of his identity, which helps us understand ours, as well.

The priests and Levites come to John and ask him a series of questions, the first being “Who are you?” This question seems to have an obvious answer: I’m John from over yonder, my parents are so-and-so. But that’s not what John says. Instead of saying who he is, he explicitly says who he is not. “I am not the Messiah.” And what’s more, he’s quite emphatic about it: “He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed…” By his answer, John seems to know what they are getting at, so he makes sure with his first response that any gossip about his messiah-ship is highly overrated.

So they try again: “What then? Are you Elijah?” He says, “I am not.” They try once more: “Are you the prophet?” “Nope.” John steadfastly refuses to play into any expectations these priests and Levites have about his identity.

I wonder to what degree our identities are based on the expectations of others? It’s not necessarily a bad thing for others to have expectations for us, of course. A community (family, church, team, circle of friends) plays a significant role in the development of our identities, and expectations are a natural part of that role. But if those expectations begin to suffocate us or make us begin to dislike the people we are becoming, then there is something wrong.

In the film Dead Poets Society, Neil Perry has a passion for acting. When he sees the flyer for auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he says, “For the first time in my life, I know what I want to do. And for the first time, I’m going to do it!” He throws himself into the role of Puck, and he’s good, he’s really good. But his father expects him to be a doctor and thinks this acting business is nothing more than a dangerous whim. Neil defies his father’s wishes and continues rehearsing for the play. After Mr. Perry discovers him at the theatre, he furiously tells Neil that he is not going to let Neil ruin his (Neil’s) life. Neil feels suffocated and trapped: he has found his calling as an actor, he has found himself. But Mr. Perry is stifling this identity with his expectations for Neil’s future. That night, Neil commits suicide.

Expectations like Mr. Perry’s can smother us. They can make us feel less worthy, less capable, less adequate because our worth and capability and adequacy fall outside the limits defined by those expectations. In their song “What a Good Boy,” the Barenaked Ladies lament:

When I was born, they looked at me and said,
‘What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy.’
When you were born, they looked at you and said,
‘What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl.’
We’ve got these chains hanging round our necks,
People want to strangle us with them before we take our first breath.

When we feel smothered, stifled, or strangled by expectations, troubling questions form in our minds. What if I’m not a smart girl? What if I’m not a strong boy? What if I don’t measure up? Then another question compounds these: Will they still like/love/accept/welcome me? These expectations that help shape our identities now morph into ultimatums. They signal the possible breaking of a relationship: This is who I am, and if you don’t like it then fine. And the door slams shut. In this scenario, we begin to define our identities by focusing negatively on the rebellion against expectations rather than by stating positively who we are.

Expectations themselves are neutral things. They surely can be used to spur us to excellence or to inspire us to continue to grow and discover who we are. But they can also be used to deny our self-worth or sense of belonging. When John the Baptizer refuses to be defined by the expectations of the priests and Levites, he is holding onto the identity he has as the voice crying out in the wilderness.

The priests and Levites are unable to pin their expectation on John, but they can’t go back to their bosses empty-handed, so they press John asking: “What do you have to say about yourself?” The Baptizer answers with a quotation from the prophet Isaiah: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’ ” Even here, when they ask him deliberately about himself, he answers by pointing ahead of himself. Their concern is based on his seeming lack of authority to baptize, for he is not the Messiah or Elijah or the prophet. But such trifles don’t worry John. He states dismissively: “I baptize with water.” And then he points ahead of himself again: “Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me.” Everything John says about himself, he is really saying about Jesus. He only speaks in terms of Jesus; he deflects questions about himself, preferring to point to the one “who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.”

Rather than playing into their expectations, John flourishes in his identity as an arrow pointing to Jesus. To change the metaphor, he shines because he lives fully into his own particular, God-given identity. Like the moon, he has no light of his own, but he reflects the light of Jesus who is coming after him. Even as we struggle with the expectations of others and with discovering our own identities as God’s children, I can think of no greater joy than to be a moon to Jesus’ sun, reflecting the light of Christ.

Esperanza

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, October 17, 2010 || Proper 24 Year C RCL || Luke 18:1-8)

On August 25, 2010, a crucifix traveled 2,300 feet down into the earth. The Apostles’ Creed tells us that Jesus, after he suffered and died on the cross, “descended to the dead.” This crucifix, this representation of the cross supporting the weight of the crucified Lord, descended to the living. Twenty days had passed since the mine collapsed, trapping 33 miners nearly half a mile beneath the soil of the Atacama region of Chili and nearly ten weeks from rescue.

(image from mirror.co.uk)

Backing up to August 5th, the day of the collapse, a single thought began to spread from the miners’ families to the community to the city to the country to the world: Oremos por nuestros hermanos, “Pray for our brothers.” On August 22, a note scrawled in red marker came to the surface: “We are fine in the shelter, the 33 of us.” The message was a glimmer of hope. And over the next several weeks, the glimmer turned into a beacon of hope shining in the depths of the earth.

That crucifix, that image of the suffering Christ, which descended to the living, was a physical representation of the hope that was already present in that shelter half a mile down. The persistent, unceasing prayers of the world – from the pregnant wife of miner Ariel Ticona to the bus driver coming off a double shift in Boston – sustained the hope of the miners. And so, in a fit of divine synchronicity, the Gospel reading for the Sunday following the miners’ rescue would, of course, begin like this: “Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”

Rarely, if ever, in the Gospel does the writer tip his hand while introducing a parable. Every once in a while, the writer will explain a parable once the story is over. But most often, parables stand alone, with neither introductory material nor closing explanation to help the reader. Indeed, Jesus seems to enjoy speaking in parables for the simple fact that parables make his audience dig deep into his words and find meaning for their lives by searching for meaning in his stories. So, when Luke prefaces Jesus’ parable today with the story’s apparent meaning, we’d be justified in being a bit indignant toward our Gospel writer. Luke doesn’t give us the chance to figure this parable out for ourselves. He tells us the meaning of the parable like a teacher going over the answers to a test before passing out the exam.

But while our indignation toward Luke might be justified, I think we should let him slide just this once. He has our best interest in mind, after all. Luke doesn’t want us to miss the meaning of this story because living out this parable makes our lives fundamentally better. Living out this parable helps us live lives full of God. “Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” To pray always and not to lose heart. In other words, the story is about praying always and never giving up, or to put the meaning in positive terms, to have the stamina and fortitude to pray persistently and to hope all the time.

We’ve seen over the last seven weeks in Chili that prayer and hope are linked together. In the midst of disaster, prayer and hope rose to the surface and sustained the people affected by the mine’s collapse. Now, let’s be clear. We use the word “hope” for simple, everyday situations such as “I hope the train is on time” or “I hope this week’s episode of Glee is better than the rest of the season, which has been pretty dreadful.” This everyday use of “hope” is of a different magnitude than the hope we are talking about here.

Hope (you might call it capital “H” hope) is the active component of not losing heart. In a world that excels at distracting us from following Jesus Christ and seducing us with the ease of apathy, hope keeps us relying on God to direct us down the right paths. Hope in God allows us to take the long view of our own futures, trusting that God, like a master chess player, has already seen twenty moves ahead. Hope in God opens us to possibilities for our lives that the urgent need of now simply dismisses offhand. Hope in God tells us that God will never lose heart in us, and therefore, we should never lose heart in God.

Hope is the active component of the heart’s steadfastness, and prayer is the active component of hope. Prayer nurtures hope by reminding us that, despite the world’s distraction and seduction, God is present. The Catechism at the back of the Book of Common Prayer says this about prayer: “Prayer is responding to God, by thought and by deed, with or without words.” Notice how this definition adds much needed depth to the popular understanding of prayer. The popular understanding simply makes God the recipient of our prayers: if I pray for my cat to stop scratching me, and the next day she does anyway, I am liable to think that God is not present. But the Catechism’s definition goes back a step in the process of prayer. Prayer is “responding to God.” Therefore, each and every time we pray, we are participating in the life-changing act of acknowledging that God is present in our lives. God calls prayer forth from us. We respond by praying. Each time we enter this exchange of call and response, God fuels our hope with God’s steadfast and eternal presence.

This is why Jesus tells the disciples a parable not just about the need to pray, but the need to pray always. A continuous life of prayer, of response to God, offers us continual awareness of God’s presence. This awareness leads to hope, which, in turn, enables us to live lives open to all of God’s possibilities and to trust in God’s directing creativity.

The widow in the today’s parable exemplifies this need for continuous perseverance and dedication. She keeps coming to the judge, and, in the end, her persistence pays off. Her unwavering commitment to obtaining justice moves the judge, who grants her request simply to get her out of his hair. If she had gone to court once, been dismissed, and never returned, the judge wouldn’t have given her a second thought. But her persistence changes her situation.

This persistence, this dedication to a life of prayer changes our situations, too. Like the persistent widow, our commitment to prayer signals our commitment to respond to God in every situation. The more we commit to prayer, the more apt we are to invite God into our lives and our decision-making. And opening ourselves to God’s presence allows us to soak up the hope that radiates from God’s movement in our lives. Seen from this angle, prayer works very much like food. If your mom or your husband calls you downstairs for meatloaf, you don’t call back, “No thanks. I ate last month.” Prayer leads to openness and trust and hope in God only when we integrate prayer into our daily lives.

The miners surviving 2,300 feet below the surface fed off of the hope generated by God’s presence, a presence proclaimed by the vast multitude of prayers descending on Chili from around the world. Upon his rescue, miner Mario Sepulveda spoke haltingly about his own persistence and hope: “I was with God and I was with the devil, but God won. I held onto God’s hand, the best hand, and at no point in time, how do I explain this, at no point in time, did I doubt that God would get me out of there.”

Sepulveda’s persistent awareness of God’s presence allowed him to survive for 69 days beneath the earth. The parable of the persistent widow teaches us that a life of prayer leads to hope, and hope leads to renewed lives lived in the fullness of God. I invite you to enter into a life of prayer, to find the hope that proceeds from that life, and finally to share the joy of our hope in God with everyone you meet. This happened in Chili: Elizabeth Segovia, wife of trapped miner Ariel Ticona, did not lose heart that her husband would be rescued. She joined her prayer with the prayers of millions. And halfway through the seven-week ordeal, she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. And she named her “Esperanza,” which means “Hope.”

Note

Quotations and dates for the mine rescue from CNN.com.

Vision and Action

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon Notes for Sunday October 3, 2010 || Proper 22, Year C, RCL || Luke 17:5-10

(This Sunday was our first family service, at which I preached a sermon without notes. I gleaned the sermon out of the following brainstorm, which also made for the basis of the sermon for the early service.)

I’m really glad I got to preach this Sunday because the prospect of preaching makes me sit down and think long and hard about the words I am going to say, about the words I believe God is calling me to say. This week I sat down with our Gospel passage from Luke and thought long and hard about faith. And very quickly, I realized that – even with all my schooling and sermons and work in the church – I hadn’t really thought all that much about faith. I knew I had faith. I knew that my doubts didn’t cancel out my faith. I knew that God’s faith in me gave me the ability to have faith in God. But when I dug a little bit deeper, I found myself at a loss for words about how faith works in my life.

My confusion mirrored that of the disciples in this morning’s Gospel. Right before the passage we read today, Jesus tells them that if someone wrongs them seven times in the same day, they should forgive all seven times. The disciples don’t think they have enough faith to do something like that, so they say: “Increase our faith!” Jesus’ responds that a tiny amount of faith is enough to do amazing things. I must confess that the words about the mustard seed and mulberry tree have always seemed rather quaint and comforting, but with no real applicable meaning – like words your great aunt cross-stitches into pillows. But this week, the statement vexed me.

Jesus seems to be saying that an increase in the quantity of faith is not necessary – you can’t get much smaller than a mustard seed, after all. By using such an exaggeratedly small thing, Jesus says that measuring the amount of faith is unimportant. Indeed, thinking of faith as a unit of measure makes no sense. I wouldn’t say, “Last year I had 25 faith, but this year I have 27.” Faith isn’t a statistic.

So when the disciples ask for an increase in faith, I think that Jesus makes the hyperbolic statement about the mustard seed in order to make the disciples see that it’s not an increase in the quantity of faith that matters, but an increase in what faith does. When my thinking brought me away from the static notion of quantity of faith, I realized that I needed to bring my focus back to two simple concepts having to do with faith. First, faith in God sharpens our vision. Second, faith in God motivates our action.

I’ve had blurry vision since middle school. My parents brought me to the optometrist, who noticed my nearsightedness right away. He prescribed glasses, which I hated wearing, as any eighth grader would. Indeed, my desire to keep people from knowing I needed glasses was so great that I skipped trying out for the high school baseball team. I couldn’t see fly balls without my glasses, but I was unwilling to put them on.

You’ve probably noticed that at some point during the fourteen years since my original diagnosis of myopia, I’ve gotten comfortable wearing glasses. And now I finally have a pair that, thanks to Doctor Who, I know are pretty fashionable. But there is another sort of lenses that I fail to put on just as often as I did with my glasses in middle school. These are the lenses of faith. My glasses sharpen my vision of objects in the world around me. The lenses of faith sharpen our vision of the God who is present in and around all things.

Indeed, my glasses don’t give me the ability to see; rather, they give me the ability to see well. When we put on the lenses of faith, we see the world with clearer eyes. Our sharp vision allows us to see God’s directing movement between us and those people, places, and things with which we interact. We stand forever in God’s presence and God moves with us down the paths of our lives. Faith sharpens our vision to catch glimpses of this movement.

Here’s an example. I was standing in Boston’s North Station not too long ago during morning rush hour. I was trying to figure out from which track my train would depart. As I stood there looking up at the departures board, several trains unloaded their passengers at once. I watched as hundreds of people queued up on the platforms and, as one, began trudging toward the glass doors of the station. As they reached the doors, I was spellbound. The intricate, random choreography of the morning commuters was beautiful. They crisscrossed and hurried and meandered and loped along. And not one person ran into another. They passed me as I stood still, and I felt like I was watching a slow motion scene from a film. Each of these people was connected to me and to one another. I could all but see the wispy threads of a tapestry linking us. Faith sharpens our vision. That morning at North Station, the lenses of faith helped me see clearly the reality that God connects each of us to one another.

But sharp vision isn’t quite enough. When we see the world through the eyes of faith, we become aware of how we can participate in God’s work in the world. When I saw clearly my connection to all the people at North Station, I remembered once again that I am called to serve God in all people. Thus, the first thing that faith does – sharpen our vision – leads directly into the second thing that faith does. Faith in God motivates our action.

In many of the stories about Jesus healing various people, Jesus speaks of their faith making them well. Now if we subscribe to the “quantity” notion of faith, we might be tempted to think that Jesus healed these folks because they reached a certain statistical threshold on the faith scale, which qualified them for healing. But the mustard seed reminds us that the quantity of faith is less important than the action of faith. The healing stories, therefore, are really about people whose faith motivated them to the action of seeking out Jesus in the first place. The Gospel writers recorded those healings because of the sometimes heroic, sometimes simple action of faith.

Again, when Jesus says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed,” he is not speaking about quantity. We do not have a collection of faith in the same way that we have collections of baseball cards or teapots or old comic books. Faith is not something we can store up in a safe deposit box. Rather, we have faith the same way we have energy. Energy propels us to run and work and play; faith propels us to love and serve and forgive. Indeed, faith is the energy that motivates us to participate in God’s work in the world.

And like energy, faith unused can begin to fade away. Like Langston Hughes’s “Dream Deferred,” unused faith can “dry up like a raisin in the sun.” This is why we come to worship. This is why we meet one another at the table for the nourishing food of Christ’s Body and Blood. This is why we do spiritual practices that keep us in contact with God and with other faithful people. God gave us faith to motivate us to love and serve God. As exercise is to energy, our participation in God’s work is to faith. And the more we allow our faith to motivate our action, the more resilient is our faith when we are confronted with difficult and demanding situations.

Faith in God sharpens our vision. Viewing the world through the lenses of faith shows a deeper layer of reality, the eternal reality of God’s presence. Then faith in God motivates us to act, to live lives full of God’s love and grace, to bring God’s gifts to other people and call God’s gifts forth from those people. Faith in God motivates us to participate in God’s healing and reconciling work in the world. Faith is not a static thing. Faith is not a statistic. Faith is the great gift from God that shows God’s faith in us. Faith is the catalyst that kindles all of our other God-given gifts to shine. Thanks be to God for faith.

The Question at the Top of Page 303

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

The following post appeared Sunday, September 19th on Episcopalcafe.com, a website to which I am a monthly contributor. Check it out here or read it below.

* * *

As the church in which I am blessed to serve God prepares for a new adult Christian formation program, I have found myself thinking about baptism quite a bit lately. And I have also found myself jotting down notes about several pieces of the baptismal services. A few of these notes, I share with you below.

If you were baptized in an Episcopal Church after 1979, either you or your parents and godparents answered a series of six questions. The last of which reads, “Do you promise to follow and obey [Jesus Christ] as your Lord?” Whether or not you were baptized under this particular liturgy, this is the fundamental question at the heart of the Christian faith. The answer, “I do,” is simply two little words, but these two words really aren’t the answer at all. The true answer to this question is the manner in which we choose to lead our lives in the wake of such a powerful promise. Let’s take a moment to break down this question to see what we are really getting ourselves into.

Do you promise…
Girls link pinkies. Guys spit on their hands and shake. Car dealers sell extended warranties. Banks make you sign the mortgage paperwork a dozen times. Each of these signals a promise: the secret is safe, the ex-girlfriend is off-limits, the car will be repaired free of charge, and the loan will be repaid. The act of making the promise itself means little compared to the continuous act of fulfilling the promise. Ex-friendships, fine print wielding salesmen, and foreclosures point to the fact that many promises do not last.

But there happens to be a significant difference between these promises and the one we make at baptism. In most promises, the other entity entering the trust is another human being—another fallible, flawed human being. When we promise to follow and obey Jesus Christ as our Lord, we make our promise to God. And God never breaks trust with us. So our promise to God follows God’s eternal promise to us to be faithful always, to be with us always, just to be…always.

Thus, our fulfillment of the promise always happens in response to God’s steadfastness. When we break the promise, it does not cease to hold sway because God continues to fulfill it. And God invites us to renew the promise again and again and again.

…to follow…
In the Gospel according to Matthew, the first words that Jesus says to Peter and Andrew, his prospective disciples, are “Follow me” (Matt. 4:18). In the Gospel according to John, the last words that Jesus says to Peter are (you guessed it) “Follow me” (John 21:22). Therefore, considering how the compilers of the New Testament chose to lay out the Gospel, the first and last words out of Jesus’ mouth are “Follow me.” What does it mean to follow Jesus? Like the main promise we are discussing, this question takes a lifetime to answer; but here are a few quick observations.

To follow means to come after or travel behind. You do this most often when you don’t know the way to, say, the movie theater, and the friends in the car ahead of you lead you there. Our Christian faith tells us that Jesus walks with us, leading us on right paths through our lives. He is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). In Greek, the “way” is literally the “road” on which we walk down. So not only is Jesus the guide for our feet; he paved the road on which our feet tread. The Letter to the Hebrews calls Jesus the “pioneer” of our faith: he is the trailblazer. He invites us to walk the difficult path he first walked, a path full of both pain and joy (Hebrew 12:2).

To follow also means to learn by example. To quote a learned man at my parish, we are “apprentices” of Jesus Christ. During the Renaissance, master painters directed their students to copy their works of art in order to learn the craft. More often than not, these apprentice copies couldn’t compare to the master’s, but they still learned how to apply paint to canvas, and they learned well. Likewise, we will never be able to reach the full example of Jesus Christ, but this shouldn’t stop us from following him just the same.

…and obey…
Obedience is a tricky thing because it involves something that many folks aren’t all that good at: listening. To obey means to listen carefully and then to act. Obedience to God begins with our intentional effort to discern God’s will in our lives and continues with our reliance on God to live out that will. The good news is that when we choose to obey God, God has already given us the gifts we need to accomplish that will. (Of course, this doesn’t mean the act of obeying will be easy.)

When Jesus commands the paralyzed man to stand up, take his mat, and walk, the man gets up immediately (John 5:8-9). Jesus speaks no word of healing at all. Rather, the act of healing is subsumed in the command. Jesus gives the man the gift of healing in order that the man can obey his command. Likewise, we discover new gifts when we listen for and obey God’s will in our lives.

…[Jesus Christ] as your Lord…
In our Christian parlance, we call Jesus many things: friend, brother, teacher, savior. But in this question, we call Jesus “Lord.” We promise to follow Jesus as our “Lord.” How does “Lord” differ from other titles for Jesus? Leaving aside the masculine nature of the title, a lord is someone in a position of authority and respect. In the Gospel, the Greek word for “lord” (kyrie) can also be translated as “sir.” In the military, a person you call “sir” is someone who has the authority to command you to do something.

Likewise, when we promise to follow and obey Jesus as our Lord, we acknowledge that Jesus has the authority to direct our lives. This authority comes from the fact that God is the author of each of us. God pens each day in the books of our lives; sometimes we are the protagonists and sometimes we are antagonists of our own stories. When we follow Jesus as our author, as our Lord, we consciously take on the protagonist role. To change the metaphor, we resonate with God’s directing creativity in our lives. We are in tune with God.

Of course, these few notes simply scratch the surface of this immense question. I wonder how we each live out this promise in our everyday lives? I wonder how the promises we make with other people reflect the promises we make to God?  I wonder how readily we allow God to fulfill God’s promises, which, in the end, allow us to fulfill ours?

The Sweepings of the Wheat

Published on by Adam Thomas2 Comments

(Sermon for Sunday, September 19, 2010 || Proper 20, Year C, RCL || Amos 8:4-7)

Imagine with me a fellow of no particular consequence, an Israelite who lives in the capital city of Samaria. The year is 752 BCE, thirty years before the Assyrians conquer Israel. Through the words of prophets such as Amos, however, we know that the people of Israel lost themselves long before the Assyrians came. Our fellow of no particular consequence knows first hand the truth behind Amos’s words. His name is Dallim. This is his story.

He said I was free. He said I had paid my debt. He said I no longer had to work for him. The steward said these things as he walked me to the front of the estate. He opened a postern door in the baked clay walls and gestured to me. I shuffled through the small doorway, and without another word, the steward began walking back to the main house. I was about to call out to him when the guard shut the door in my face. I slumped against the warm, looming wall. He said I was free. But as I crouch here…now…on another forsaken threshing floor, searching for scraps of wheat to lessen my hunger, I know one thing for certain. I may no longer be indebted to his master, but I am unquestionably not free.

It all started six years ago. I wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination. But I wasn’t poor either – not like the beggars in the street. I got by. We got by – my wife and I. I ran a small stall in the marketplace selling whatever I could get my hands on. I called my stall a “specialty” store; everyone else called it “Dallim’s Junk Shoppe.” But I did a fair bit of business. I was the guy who could find things – a scrounger.

The day my wife told me she was pregnant was the happiest day of my life. I started trading for all of the things I imagined new parents would need – swaddling clothes and wooden toys and a woven bassinet. Then one day, something went wrong. She shouldn’t have gone into labor for three more months. She delivered our little girl on the floor of our hut. The baby never opened her eyes. My wife took to bed and a week later closed her eyes for the last time. For months, I didn’t leave the hut.

When I finally came back to myself, I had next to nothing. My family was gone. My landlord kicked me out of the hut. I went to the stall in the marketplace and found that my “specialty” store had truly become the junk shop. The thieves left a few baubles and trinkets, the things not worth stealing. They took everything else, including my scales, a gift from my wife’s father. That made me miss her all over again. Those scales were priceless, and not just for the memory. They were weighted perfectly – my father-in-law was no cheat. I used the scales so much that I nearly stopped needing them: I could weigh a shekel in my hand.

As the shock of the theft of my merchandise subsided, I realized how badly I needed food. I had been subsisting on dust and grief for too long. I put the worthless trinkets in a sack and slung it over my shoulder. I walked through the marketplace until I found a grain merchant. I tried to trade him the trinkets for some grain, but he would have none of that. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I’ll give you an ephah of grain and you can pay me next week, eh?” I was amazed. How generous he was. He handed me a sack of grain and asked for my sandals as surety that I would come back. You can’t eat sandals, so I readily agreed. I was so relieved that I didn’t notice how small this merchant’s ephah really was.

The week went by, and I still had no money to pay him. “No problem,” he said. “You can pay next week.” I went away with another sack of grain. This happened several more times – I’m not quite sure how many. I planned to sell my stall to repay him, but I just couldn’t find a buyer. The last time I went to see the merchant for grain, I told him my plight. His smile faded from his face. “You have no money. Then I will take your stall.” Again I was relieved. “But your stall,” he continued, “is not nearly enough. No. No. I will take you, as well.”

The genial merchant was gone. He was a hard, grim man from that moment on. I was indebted to him, and I worked and I worked. But I rarely saw him, and he didn’t even know my name. The steward gave me my orders. I filled the grain sacks and noticed them shrink year after year. The moment the sun set every Sabbath day, I hitched the horses to the grain carts so my master could immediately go back to market – no doubt to seduce more helpless people like me. What’s a few sacks of grain to half a dozen years of free labor?

In those years, I often thought of the life I could have had – with a wife and children and a small, successful business. That was my dream, and I woke to my nightmare. I was a nameless drone, a slave to a corrupt man, whose corruption seemed to be rewarded at every turn.

I lost count of the days working in that estate. They ran into each other and made weeks. The weeks made months and the months years. So I was surprised the day the steward walked me to the postern door. The guard shut the door in my face, and I slumped against the warm, looming wall. I thanked God for giving me my life back. I was Dallim again, not the grain merchant’s debt-slave. I was free.

At least, I thought I was free. But I had nothing. The beggars had more than I – they had begging bowls. But I promised myself I would not fall into debt again. I used to be good at finding things. I used to be a scrounger. I could do that again. But oh, I felt the darkness creeping in, the same heaviness that gripped me after the deaths of my wife and baby girl. I started sleeping in doorways and alleys. I could not make myself get up. My world shrank to the space within reach of my prone position. I wasted away.

When I finally came back to myself, I was beyond hunger. In my reflection I could see where each of my ribs met my breastbone. I went to a windswept hill near my old master’s holdings to find a threshing floor. The floor was bare. I went to another. It, too, was bare. And here I am now – crouching on a third bare floor, swept clean of the scraps of wheat that are supposed to belong to the poor. And driving away I see the distinctive cart to which I hitched the horses for so many years. My old master: stealing the poor by loaning them the very grain that is rightfully theirs. Ours. Mine.

I’m trying to muster some righteous anger or indignant surprise. But I simply feel…ragged. I will never be free while the threshing floors stay bare, while I’m stuck in this soul-rending poverty. How can I exist in a world where corrupt men like my old master trample on the needy? How can I live when they bring to ruin the poor of the land? How can I find a morsel of food when they sell the sweepings of the wheat? They move through life making collateral damage out of everyone that can’t afford to get out of their way. They see only what they want to see and the poor fade into the scenery. They consume and consume with no regard for the welfare of those that they have taught themselves to ignore.

But God: you know I’m not collateral damage, don’t you? In your eyes, the merchant and I are the same, right? You won’t ignore me like they do. God: you still know my name. My name is Dallim. And I matter.

I matter.

I matter.