The Road Is Long

Reposted from the CaringBridge site for Everly Broadway

This weekend I attended the Moral March in Raleigh to both display a commitment and be encouraged for the long struggle for justice in our state where it seems so many people, particularly leaders, forgot who we are and where we came from after the economy crashed.  When I listened to the remarks about public education, and when I read the stories of how things have changed so suddenly and dramatically in our state and our county, I find myself saying that I'm glad Everly did not live to see all of this.  It's only half true, because although I would want her to be free from the pain of seeing her work dismantled, I also wish I had her as a mighty ally to work to put things in order.  But I don't really want to write today about all those political struggles, except indirectly.

As I stood on Fayetteville Street near the NC Capitol, at one point a singer on the platform was singing Sam Cooke's song, "A Change Is Gonna Come."  Those of you old enough to remember can feel with me the deep emotion of the plaintive lyric that says, "It's been a long, a long time coming," and of course, what he waits for has still not arrived.  He holds on to hope for that change to come.  As that line echoed among the skyscrapers and marchers, and I listened to people talk about the struggles for voting rights, only to see them reversed, I felt that deep ache that resides deep within the human heart, that longing for a world to be set right.

Anyone who paid attention in literature class should know that poetic texts are by intent polyvalent (what dominant cultures love to falsely call "universal" when they want to claim all truth for themselves as the omniscient knowers).  Poetry describes specific people, events, and experiences, and yet the words inevitably connect with readers who find themselves in many other situations.  People who listen to Sam telling about his struggles to be respected and to simply live a life will very likely be drawn to places of hurt and longing in their own stories.  I hope it is not privileged appropriation to talk about this song in relation to my own long road of grief.  Connecting with another song, this one made popular by Everly's beloved Osmonds, "The road is long, with many a winding turn that leads us to who knows where."

This Wednesday, February 18 and Ash Wednesday, will be nineteen months since Everly died.  Those of you who read this, who miss her, and who have walked alongside following my writing before and after Everly's death, know that the journey has been long from her grand accomplishments as an educator, leader, servant of God, wife, and mother, through her courageous struggle to survive cancer, through her preparation for and acceptance of dying, and through her family's and friends' demoralization and disorientation after losing her from our lives.  I have tried to chronicle and reflect on it first here in this CaringBridge journal and then later at my "earth as it is in heaven" blog.

For a very long time, the emotion was raw and unbearably tender.  Many of us were regularly surprised by tears in unexpected moments, or not surprised at all by the tears and pain of remembering times when Everly was the best part of our day, of our lives.  I could not pass an 18th of the month without the pangs of loss, the memories of that day and her final struggle before peaceful release.  In the fall of 2013, a wise friend encouraged me that with time, even those last days might be remembered more for the joy and goodness of knowing Everly than for the wrenching pain of her departure.  I found that hard to believe.  I held a thread of hope that it would be true.  And finally, I am beginning to believe that it can be true.

"Grief work" has become a popular term in therapeutic culture.  I find it to be helpful to me.  It helps me recognize that the richer understanding and memory of those precious months and days with Everly will not happen purely by chance nor by inattention.  Even when there are unexpected moments of insight, those will not simply sprout from uncultivated ground.  For wounds to heal, I am having to apply the antibiotic ointments of remembering and retelling truthfully and lovingly the stories of living and struggling with Everly until I can see their beauty and dreadfulness.  I have to massage in the salves of wise words from others who have walked this kind of road to soften and mend the torn places.  Doing these things is hard work, like growing things in a garden is hard work.  I'll not hammer away into absurdity with these two metaphors, but move on.  The point you already get is that I have to put effort into healing and new growth. 

Much of my reflective work over the past year has been about what I would do next with my life, living a very different life than the one Everly and I had planned together.  For that reason, I shifted away from this site that had been more focused on Everly.  Love for her was the reason you all came to this site to read, and only secondarily to know about her loved ones as they pressed into the future.  But today I'm back because I again want to focus on the grief and loss that accompanied her last days of living.

A few weeks ago (just before Christmas), I wrote about a poem by Denise Levertov, "Terror."  In that poem, she draws a powerful image of the emotional changes that come in time after loss, when the immediacy and intensity of the pain begin to recede for many people.  Awareness of such moments can awaken a new terror that somehow the person who has been grieving has become hardened, stony, inhuman, for not feeling the same as before about so great a loss.  It described for me a very different feeling about the Christmas season as it came around the second time without Everly there to make the plans and decorate and wrap and make us all happy.  Sorting through the mixed emotions of trying to get on with the life that Everly expects of me and of not having such all-consuming sadness has been part of the grief work.

Last week I started another book in which a noted scholar and minister traces his own steps through loss and grief, Henri J..M. Nouwen's In Memoriam, written soon after the death of his mother.  Nouwen is known for his deep insights into the complexities of human struggle in this world and for the ability to articulate the ways that love must unfold and entangle itself in the relationships of our lives.  His gifts as a writer have meant that on most pages some turn of phrase leaps out or sears my consciousness with illumination of pain or joy.  Thus, I am taking it slow.

Today I read his account of spending time with his mother in her last days, when she found it too taxing even to speak.  He said that he and she had been using the same prayer book during her illness, so that even if separated, they were able to share the fellowship of reading the same prayers from the Psalms each evening.  Remembering being at her bedside with their days together soon to end, he writes,

Now there was no doubt that she was dying; it was so clearly written on her face.  It was so clearly written on her face.  I knew that we both knew.  But there were no words.  I bent over her face...."Shall I pray?" I asked softly.  She seemed pleased and nodded.  Knowing she would have asked me this if she had possessed the strength to speak, I realized that the words of the psalms would make it possible to communicate with each other in new ways....As these words were slowly shaped by my lips, covering her like a gentle cloud, I knew that we were closer than ever.  Although she was too ill to smile, too weak to say thanks, too tired to respond, her eyes expressed the joy we felt in simply being together.  The psalms...lifted the veil of sentimentality.  As soon as the words of the psalms were spoken, there was a strength, a power, and a divine realism between us.  There was a joyful clarity.  A mother was dying, her son was praying, God was present and all was good.  As she looked into my eyes, I knew that my gratitude for her presence in my life would live on within me.  As I looked into her eyes, I knew that she would die grateful for her husband, her children and grandchildren, and the joyful life that had always surrounded her.

I would not want you to infer from this selection that I am now deciding everything was happy in July of 2014.  Neither I nor Nouwen would sugar-coat those times.  Of course those final days were filled with questions, struggles, frantic emotions at times, and deep sorrow.  Yet they were not captured by those difficult aspects.  We also had the beauty of Everly's eyes, her smile, her demeanor, her humor, to accompany us.  When she felt troubled, afraid, or upset, we were there to listen to her calls, meet her needs, embrace her with love, and calm her with our presence.  In a house where death was soon to come, life remained the force and hope of a family intoxicated by our love of one another. 

What Nouwen's writing in this opening chapter brought to my mind was the way that Everly's children surrounded her with a peaceful, loving presence.  Sometimes we were all in the room with her, and I have vague memories of such times.  More often, we were in pairs or one-by-one sitting with Everly and opening our hearts to the sacred time with her.  Sometimes one of the children would sing every song she could think of, or even turn page after page of the National Baptist Hymnal and sing for Mommy.  Sometimes they would go to talk with her about deep matters of their lives, answering the questions they knew she would ask, opening the hidden places of their lives, hearts, and minds to the Mother whose love was so abundant and present to them.  I had my moments of sitting beside her, holding her hand, talking, singing, and praying as well. 

But what stands out to me is the way David, Naomi, and Lydia opened themselves up to Everly as instruments of peace, sewing love, pardon, faith, hope, light, and joy.  All of those gifts to their Mommy were mingled with aching tears, but they were tangible gifts nonetheless.  Not in Nouwen's way of the psalms, but in their own ways of hymns and songs, honest words from their hearts, hummed melodies, and gentle caring touches, they bore her body through the vale of tears, through the valley of the shadows.  Their giving presence eased her death with the comfort that she had loved her own in this world, and now could love them to the end.  I could wish for so many things to have happened to let her be here with us longer, and I do.  But short of that bliss, how could I ask for more than the beautiful human beings that she bore into this world, who stood by her in her darkest hour and blessed her name with their loving presence?

We all still struggle in the wake of those hard days.  They are difficult memories, but even as I compose these words, I do so behind tears of joyful memory mixed with the pain of loss.  So I give thanks that the beauty of those days increases in my memory, as I strive for endurance to produce character and for character to produce hope.  For hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.  We have seen that love poured out in the life of Everly, and we have seen it poured out into her children.  May they and I be the blossoming rose of Everly's love, strength, and courage in these days of our sojourn.

The Regard of God

This sermon was first preached in the Chapel service of Shaw University Divinity School on February 7, 2015.

Sermon Texts from the Revised Common Lectionary

Isaiah 40:21-31, highlighting verses 27-28, 31

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The language we use is always changing.  We commonly use the verb “disregard,” but we don’t often use its opposite “regard.”  It means to see, to pay attention, to look upon, to consider.  In the hymn we sing that “Christ has regarded my helpless estate.”  What sorrow it would be if he had disregarded us!  This morning I want us to reflect on the regard of God…the regard of God.

In today’s text from the Prophet Isaiah, we read familiar and beloved words.  As is so often the case in our reading of scripture, one verse stands out in most people’s memory—the last verse.  All of us want to mount up with wings like eagles.  Such a text can take on a life of its own, living apart from its original setting as an icon, a free-standing piece of tradition.  This process may sometimes be beneficial, characterizing key aspects of our faith.  Other times, it may open the door to distorted interpretations and wayfaring teaching.  Those of us called to lead and teach have a responsibility to read with great care so that we may guide along the path that leads to God.

As always, we must discipline ourselves to understand even these favorite texts in their context.  This text comes near the turning point in the canonical shape of Isaiah.  The book began with a denunciation of the ways of Judah and a warning that unless they changed their ways, judgment would arrive swiftly and harshly.  Those pre-exilic oracles clarify something that you and I need to understand—the judgment against Judah came because of their unjust economic practices:  debt-slavery, violence toward workers, low wages that shift wealth from the poor to the rich, laws which favor the wealthy, foreclosure and seizure of homes and land, ignoring the widows and orphans, filling rich homes with gold and silver while many are hungry.  There was a temporary repentance, and the Assyrians failed to conquer Judah.  Isaiah died.  New kings arose.  God sent other prophets.  There is much more of the story to tell, but not today.

In the long run, the rulers were afraid to change their policies for fear of becoming unpopular with their supporters or for fear of crossing and offending the neighboring empires.  The wealthy did not believe things would go wrong for them, since they were too big to fail.  The priests and prophets glibly said whatever their patrons wanted to hear.  Finally judgment came.  Jerusalem was invaded, conquered, and destroyed.  Many people of all ranks and classes died.  A large number of the elite were forced to go into exile in Babylon and serve their conquerors.  The people who were left behind suffered the results of war and the insecurity of having their defenses destroyed.

After decades had left the prior Kingdom in ruins, a new set of oracles came to the people, and these oracles were later canonized in this book of Isaiah.  A new calling to a prophet appeared in that time, most likely among those who had carried on the traditions of Isaiah and preserved his oracles.  Chapter 40 begins with this new calling to the prophet, “Comfort my people.”  It speaks of a new beginning.

But as the chapter continues, it becomes apparent that the people are not hearing what the prophet is saying.  They are set in their ways.  They and their parents have followed Jeremiah’s advice to build homes, raise families, marry off their kids, and make a life where they are.  Many things are not what they want them to be, but they are not expecting their lives to change.  They figure that the God of their ancestors has lost interest in them, stopped paying attention to them.  They believe that God has disregarded their situation.  

I don’t mean that they have all rejected God.  This era in exile is most likely the era in which the Jewish faith practices that we read about in the New Testament began to take form:  the collecting of writings, the editing of histories, the compilation of liturgical and wisdom texts.  Clearly many of the people had made a place in their lives for God and for the regular observance of the Sabbath.  New practices of reading, study, and conversation about sacred texts were taking hold.

People had God in their lives, but they did not expect much from God.  They had worked on preserving a way of life and the stories of their past.  However, they did not really think God would have much to offer beyond that.  They were resident aliens in a place where they would always be second-class citizens and outsiders.  They regularly ran into problems with the empire, so they just tried to keep to themselves and be left alone.  Of course they knew it was true that God had led their ancestors out of Egypt, but that was back in the day.  They did not live as if God had any regard for them.

Now and then I hear the same kind of comments in church.  When someone starts talking about the injustices that the poor endure, some church people are likely to say, “You know Jesus said that the poor will always be with us.  That means there’s nothing we can do to change poverty.  It’s just going to keep on being the same old same old.”  Or if church people get started talking about racial injustice, somebody is going to say, “Racism goes back to the beginning of time, and it’s never going to go away.”  They will shake their heads with doubt that anything can change.  Whatever the social ills we face, it seems that far too often our congregations just want to throw up their hands and give up.  One of the hardest things to do is to get church people to talk through and think through and plan for making changes in the way things are.  We don’t even like to change the arrangement of the Sunday service or change where we sit in the church house.

Somehow church people have gotten satisfied to go through the weekly practices of reading, singing, studying, preaching, and holding meetings without believing things can be different.  We figure if we can just get a little recharge to get us through the week, that’s enough.  If we can sometimes get a little shout on, we’ll be satisfied that we have a little bit of God in our lives.  If we can fill all the nominations for committees and offices, and if we can repeat the same calendar events year after year, then we are satisfied that church is being church, and God is being God.  

Some other churches have trained their focus on getting a little piece of what the world loves.  They go to church to get in on the money machine.  They figure if they say the right incantations and perform the right sacrificial offerings and rub shoulders with the right holy people, the money will come their way.  They aren’t concerned to think about what is wrong with the world we live in.  They just want to get a little piece of the world’s action.  Maybe we would rather not have the regard of God.

In one way or another, most of our church life ends up being confined to a building and unconnected to the rest of our lives.  Outside of service or Bible study, when people struggle with injustice, when the poor cry out for bread, when the thrown away people are longing for a friend to walk with them, we find ourselves throwing up our hands and giving up.  Those problems seem too big.  Mass incarceration is too complicated to understand.  Voter ID restrictions are just an irritation to be ignored.  Underpaid teachers and underfunded schools are too big for us to manage.  Low wages, no safety net for the poor and marginalized, and no access to health care are just too many things to wrap our little heads around.

It seems we have found ourselves right where those people in exile were.  We think we meet God at church for our limited purposes, but as for the rest of our lives, our day-to-day issues and the injustices all around us, those must be hidden from God.  Our God is only concerned with saving souls from hell and not with the problems of this world.  Our God has disregarded us.  As for dreaming about a world we think would be right, we’ve settled on the belief that God has no regard for it.  At least that’s what our ways show.

But Isaiah will have none of it.  He is not satisfied to have a God who shows up for worship and ignores the rest of our lives.  He does not believe that the God of the Exodus has decided to go into retirement.  So he brings a word from God that is mostly in the form of questions.

“Haven’t you heard who God is?  Haven’t your Momma and Daddy told you from the beginning?”  At times, the inquisitor is God’s own self.  “Who do you think I am?  Don’t you know what I have done?  I made the world, by the way.  No earthly ruler can stand up to me.  And NO, I did not get tired and go into retirement.”

The Psalm for today says,

The LORD builds up Jerusalem, and gathers the outcasts of Israel.

The LORD heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds.

The LORD determines the number of the stars, and gives to all of them their names.

Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; God’s understanding is beyond measure.

The LORD lifts up the downtrodden, and casts the wicked to the ground.

When we settle, in one way or another, for the world as it is—the world with all its injustices, its unjust structures of economic life, its domination systems that aim to keep the masses down—we show ourselves to have forgotten who God is.  We may still be going to church and reading our Bibles and certainly praying for God to do things that we can’t be bothered to do.  But we are not really thinking of who God is.  We are not thinking through the stories that we have heard about what God has done.  If, in fact, we can put those stories out of our minds, we can just settle in to this old world and have our church routines and not have to be bothered.

But the problem Isaiah is noticing is that this kind of living falls far short of all the good that God wants for us.  God made this wide world and placed us in it so that people could share loving and just lives together.  God did not want us to give token worship and all the while let ourselves and our neighbors continue to be crushed under the feet of unjust systems.  God wants us to soar into the fullness of beloved community.  God wants us to run like the prodigal son into the loving arms of blessing.  But most of all, God wants us to walk and not faint.

What does it mean to have the regard of God?  God’s eye is on us,in the same way that God’s eye was on the children of Israel who were slaves in Egypt.  God hears our cries.  God knows our struggles.  And God comes among us to deliver us.  But the Israelites could not have headed out of Egypt to make a better life if they refused to walk.  It turned out to be a whole lot of walking, but they walked and did not faint.  

In our text, the Jews in exile are being told that God will make a new beginning, so they will have to shake their old habits of settling for the world as it is and start walking toward the world as it should be.  God sees a better life for humanity, and God sees us living it.  This is what it means to have the regard of God.

When the economy crashed half a dozen years ago, the easiest thing to do was to relegate economic injustices to the realm of things too complicated for action.  Church people too often shrank back from the challenges the world was throwing at us and said, “[Sigh!] All we can do is pray.”  When I hear that, it often seems to be a way of saying, “We give up, and we don’t plan to use our energy trying to make a difference.  We will just leave it to God and ask God to fix it without us.”  That is a sad kind of prayer.

Praying is actually a big thing to do, if we do it right.  Praying, contrary to much of our actual practice, is not about changing God’s mind.  It is about God changing our minds.  If we had prayed seriously, we would have come out of prayer meeting working on a plan for action against economic injustice.  If God hates injustice, then praying ought to ignite hunger and thirst for justice in us.  That hunger and thirst should stir us to walk and not faint.  A congregation cannot do everything, but it can do something.  We can do the obvious things of offering relief to those who struggle, but we can also do the less obvious things of economic development, forming credit unions, insuring the health of our poor members, creating business incubators, growing fresh and healthy foods, investing in our neighborhoods, providing job training and jobs, shutting down the usurious lenders, pressuring businesses and governments to act justly toward the people.

Next Saturday is an important day on the calendar for churches in North Carolina.  It is the day of the Moral March on the Capital, the Historic Thousands on Jones Street, the Forward Together Movement.  Right outside Boyd Chapel, people will gather when some of us are in class.  Our chapel hour will be a brief observance to affirm the God of justice whom we serve.  And then we will walk.  We will walk symbolically and demonstratively.  It will be a walk of witness.  We will be bearing witness to the God whom we serve, a God who does not faint and does not grow weary.

This week’s gospel text from Mark 1 tells about the intensity of Jesus’ ministry when great multitudes of people were crowding him all day and even into the night. It was hard for him to get any rest.  Sometimes his disciples would get caught up in the mob excitement.  One problem for Jesus revealed by the gospels is that the crowds often interfered with the tasks Jesus believed he needed to be doing.  The worst example comes later in Mark, when they began organizing to force him to be their king.  But in this passage, Jesus gets away for some rest.  Your fellow student, James McRavion, is preaching on these same texts today in High Point.  We compared our notes, and he pointed out something from this text.  After Jesus rested, then he spent time in prayer.  The prayer must have stirred him to do his work. You could say he got his marching orders.  He tells his disciples to get to walking.  They need to go on to other towns and proclaim the Reign of God.

People from many communities will come to Wilmington Street for many reasons.  Some believe in democracy.  Some believe in America.  Some have suffered financial loss and felt what it’s like to be abandoned.  Some have struggled without means to get health care, housing, or a job.  Some care for their neighbors deeply.  Some have learned the hard way about the strength of solidarity.  Some come out of self-interest.  Many are angry.  Many are frustrated.  Many are hopeful.  

We will march because we have known.  We will march because we have heard.  We will march because it has been told to us from the beginning.  We will march because we have understood from the foundations of the world.  We join the march because it is a sign of who we are.  We march on that day as a foretaste of our discipleship for the long haul.  We march under the everlasting, unsearchable regard of God.  

If next Saturday is the only day we walk, we have not heard who God is.  God is the one who has regard for us.  The everlasting God, creator of the ends of the earth, created our little corner of it too.  God has regard for us.  We walk in the regard of God who does not faint or grow weary.  Saturday’s walk is another beginning of a long walk to justice, to love, and to community.  Let’s plan to walk and not faint, thankful that we live and move and have our being in the regard of God.