The Splanchnizomai Samaritan

This sermon, based on the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, was preached at Luther Memorial Church in Des Moines, Iowa, on July 14, 2019.

            My friend Steve Paulson once began a sermon by saying, “There are some places the gospel is more true than others.” I didn’t stand up in the pew and call BS on him, but in my head I thought, “That can’t be so. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The gospel can’t shift and change according to our earthly circumstances.” Yet, if our gospel reading today has anything to say about the matter, as usual it turns out that I was wrong. Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan shows the gospel as being less true in some places – especially among lawyers and religious people.

            This familiar parable gets its set-up with an encounter Jesus had with a lawyer. This was a particular kind of lawyer – maybe the worst kind – a religious lawyer. This fella was a Pharisee. These were people trained in the ins and outs of the 613 laws given by God that appear in the Old Testament. It was easier to be a Sadducee than a Pharisee when it can to the law. For Sadducees, if a situation didn’t appear in the scriptures, that was that. You didn’t have to do any more thinking about it. But the Pharisees thought that those 613 laws needed interpretation, so they went to school to learn all about how to deal with the law. Both groups were equally strict when it came to a person’s religious life and what made them holy or unholy, clean or unclean, righteous or unrighteous, justified or unjustified. But the Pharisees had to have the nimblest of minds to see every facet of an issue. And they loved to debate.

            That’s what’s going on at the beginning of our gospel reading. A Pharisee proposed a debate topic: what a person has to do to inherit eternal life. And Jesus took on the role of Socrates answering questions with his own questions in order to draw out what was behind the lawyer’s query. He pointed the Pharisee back to those 613 laws and asked what he could find in there that would answer his own question. The Pharisee knew those laws inside and out and immediately rattled off the two big ones that summarize the two tables of the Ten Commandments: the ones dealing with God and those dealing with our relationship with other people. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

            That should have done it right there, and the encounter wouldn’t have needed to progress any further. But the Pharisee understood something important. Those two commandments to love God and your neighbor are a cruel taskmaster. They demand everything of you: all your heart rather than a part of it, all your soul not a portion of it, all your strength rather than your left bicep, and all your mind, that is, every single thought of every waking moment. God requires every single part of you without reserve. The Pharisee knew it and did what any self-respecting sinner would do: he looked for a work-around. It’s because the lawyer knew God isn’t interested in leaving a piece of you to your own devices. If a little bit of you gets left for you to maintain autonomy over, then you’ll always stake out the territory with religion, piety, and morality – trying to show how, even if the rest of you can’t perform up to par for God, at least this last little bit is good, even if it’s just good intentions.

            Luke tells us the lawyer wanted to justify himself. The Pharisee wanted to find some small place where he could stand before the divine judge with even an iota of evidence that on the Last Day he should be waved through St. Peter’s version of the TSA security line. Knowing the impossibility of fulfilling all those alls in the commandment, the Pharisee deflected and asked about the easiest part. He thought, “If God is so stringent and impossible to please, maybe I’ll have a better shot at success by focusing on other people who are just as fallible as I am.” So, he asked, “Who is my neighbor?”

            The Lord Jesus in Luke’s story was no fool. He knew exactly how things work. He knew the weaselly ways we unctuously try to slide through the law’s grasp. He knew that the gospel he came to give – that the kingdom of heaven was at hand in his very person – was simply not true for the lawyer. So, he told a story that shredded every last vestige of the Pharisee’s hopes for self-justification. In Jesus’ parable you have a cast of characters that includes two seemingly fine upstanding religious people who act like jerks, some robbers who belong in the penitentiary over in Anamosa, the nearly dead guy the thieves had beaten up and tossed in the ditch and who would have made anyone who helped him unclean, and a Samaritan.

            We have to be careful when we attach the word “good” to any Samaritan. Samaritans were the people whom good God-fearing Jews loved to hate. You may not think you know much about the status of first-century Samaritans in Judea, but here at Luther Memorial we’re mighty familiar with a particular Samaritan, because that’s who the woman in our altar painting is. The picture is of the moment Jesus tells her the words beneath the painting: “Hver som drikke af det Vant, som jeg vil give ham, skal til evig Tid ikke tørste. (Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall not thirst for eternity.)” I know that our painting is more folk art than a professional study, and I know the artist didn’t intend for me to do this, but I have an inner twelve-year-old boy inside me, and every Sunday I look at the woman at the well and wonder why she’s an amputee. It looks like she only has one leg. On the other hand, I also know that faithful Jews in Jesus’ day looked down on Samaritans as not having a leg to stand on, so maybe it’s appropriate.

            The point, though, is that, if a Samaritan is the hero of the story, Jesus had raised up a person of no account as someone to be admired. The Samaritans claimed that they were the true descendants of the Israelites after Moses, because they worshiped God at Mt. Gerizim rather down in Jerusalem. And for their part the Jews regarded the Samaritans as heretics and blasphemers for worshiping the wrong way. For them, even with the best intentions a Samaritan could never, ever be called good.

            So, what are we to make of this parable? If the Pharisee grilling him was going to zero in on the easiest part of the commandments, then Jesus would turn that into the point of the wedge that he would drive between the lawyer and his hopes of justifying himself. Jesus’ aim was to get the Pharisee to despair of his own ability to achieve acceptability before God. His goal was to get the religious professional to turn to him for life by showing him the kind of mercy he had to bestow. He wanted to turn him from religion to faith, from the rigor of law and rule-keeping to a relationship with him, from captivity to freedom.

            Who in this curve ball of a story was a neighbor? Who had mercy? It certainly wasn’t the bad guys. They were the people St. Paul talked about in Galatians who were all about the works of the flesh: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.” The robbers were a law unto themselves. Their boundary was whatever their dark hearts desired. If that meant beating up a traveler and leaving him to do, so be it.

            Then there are the priest and the Levite. These were the people religious folks looked up to. Seeing the guy by the side of the road must have forced a dilemma on them. They had important religious stuff to do. If they even touched the bloody road kill they encountered, that would make them unclean, that is, unfit for their holy and sacred Temple duty in the work God had appointed them to. Their own calling took precedence over helping a fellow human being in need. Someone else was going to have to mess with the mess in the ditch.

            As for the man who was beaten and left for dead, the Pharisee grilling Jesus would have had the same questions as those who quizzed him about the blind man he had healed: “Whose sin caused this to blindness to happen?” He would have regarded the violence perpetrated on the man as someone’s fault – most likely his own. You get what you deserve, you know, and this man failed to pull himself up by his own bootstraps.

            That leaves us with the Samaritan. He applied what first aid he could. He tore strips of cloth from the fabric he wore and used his oil and wine as the first century equivalent of an antiseptic. Then he lay him over the back of his pack mule and continued further down the road. That was no easy matter. Jerusalem sits over three thousand feet in altitude above Jericho, and the 16-mile road has about a 4% grade. That’s steep. No RAGBRAI rider wants to bike for sixteen miles on that grade. When he got to the closest inn, he paid around 350 bucks in advance and promised to pay even more for the guy’s care and feeding. That means the Samaritan not only took care of the immediate need, he also committed himself to an ongoing relationship with a stranger who would wake from his wounded state and regard him with hatred.

            The real telling quality of the Samaritan in not his willingness to lay out cold hard cash for the man he spotted along the road. It’s that when he saw the man he was moved with pity. Those three words – moved with pity – in the original Greek are a single word: splanchnizomai. Try that word on your tongue. Repeat after me: splanchnizomai. The root of the word is “splanchna,” or guts. Maybe a better translation than “moved with pity” would be that the Samaritan was simply gutted. Chad Bird, who spoke at our Christ Hold Fast event this spring, says it was “a gut-wrenching, stomach-twisting mercy.” The Samaritan wasn’t a “good” Samaritan; he was a splanchnizomai Samaritan, one who was moved to his core at his fellow human being’s plight.

            That word splanchnizomai is a strange one. Chad Bird reminds us that it’s a Jesus verb. It only appears in the New Testament connected to Jesus. Our Lord has splanchnizomai when he sees the people of Jerusalem as sheep without a shepherd. He has splanchnizomai for the sick. He has splanchnizomai for the widow of Nain whose son – her only source of support – has died. And in Jesus’ parables, the characters who represent him, both the father of the prodigal son and the Samaritan here, feel splanchnizomai.

            By telling a parable about patently offensive characters, Jesus sought to remove the moral, ethical, and religious categories that the Pharisee judged the world by. In their place he gave the lawyer the same thing he gave the woman at the well: living water that would remove both his thirst and his need for self-justification. If Jesus’ aim was to undercut the lawyer’s world view, he also wanted to give the world back to him by giving the Pharisee new vision. That would only begin by being the splanchnizomai Lord, the Lord gut-wrenchingly moved by him.

            Surely we understand who the good guys and the bad guys in the parable are. The good guys are the religious leaders in Jerusalem: the priests in the temple, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees. The bad guys are those in this world tending to their own lusts and wreaking violence on others. Of course, Jesus is the Samaritan in the story. But who is the man beaten up and left by the side of the road? That’s our Pharisee – and you. Jesus knows what the world does to you. He knows exactly how beaten and bruised you are. And he knows that the world expects you to take matters of fixing your situation into your own hands. The world says, “Physician, heal thyself. God helps those who help themselves.”

            But it’s the great good news of this parable that Jesus’ deep splanchnizomai is aimed at the least righteous, least actively good, and least able person in the whole story. When the world comes crashing down on our lawyer friend, as it does on all of us, Jesus wants this crazy story to linger and finally come to life. When I was growing up my little brother had a toy demolition derby car. You could wind it up and let it race across the floor. But when it hit something – and it never failed to hit something – the car exploded into pieces that would have to be picked up. If we’re holding ourselves together, our hold is tenuous. There are very real evils around us that prowl around us waiting to pounce. Many of us aren’t more than one big medical bill away from financial insolvency. We know that even though we may be fit and healthy today we don’t have a clue about cancer cells that might be exploding in our own splanchna or an aneurysm waiting to burst even as we speak. You understand that our security and safety are illusions at best, because there isn’t one among us that won’t in the end face a final breath and a last heartbeat. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

            But Jesus, our good Samaritan, every last splanchnizomai-ed cell of him is the one who regards the helpless one as most deserving of his benefits. That’s why we see him in the gospels hanging out with sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes. It’s why he has no fear of being made unclean by lepers or the blood of the woman with a twelve-year hemorrhage. And it’s why his mercy extends to the thief on the cross next to him in his own hour of agony.  We should turn to the man by the side of the road to see that what we have to do to gain eternal life is utterly passive: You just need to lie there and take what Jesus has for you. That means that, if you’re in the midst of a situation that feels like it’s killing you, Jesus is splanchnizomai for you. If you’re beaten down, it’s total splanchnizomai. If you’re powerless over alcohol and your life has become unmanageable, splanchnizomai. And when you’re finally embalmed and dressed and laid in your casket in a hole that a cemetery back-hoe has dug, Jesus will be even more moved with pity. Splanchnizomai, compassion, and mercy over and over and over again.

            And that’s where the gospel is most true. It’s among the beat-up, the dragged-down, the least, the last, the lost, the little. It’s for you and your black-and-blue tender spots, your tumors, your failures, your junk that Christ’s mercy, his compassion, his pity, and splanchnizomai can finally be seen in their fullness. Where you’ve got nothing to bring to the table, Jesus can bring everything. And if he’s brought everything for you, then you, too, can start looking for your fellow dead and dying souls along the side of the road and become yourself all splanchnizomai. Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.” Keep your eyes open for the road kill and be prepared for a gut-wrenching experience. Amen.

The Death and Life of the Horseman Uncle

I was honored to be asked to speak about my uncle, Bobby Jones, at his funeral at. St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Sturgis, SD, on April 27, 2019.

My uncle Bobby was the consummate West River horseman and rancher, and for his first four decades a bachelor cowboy at that. The best photo I’ve ever seen of him is one that my cousin Anna took of him sitting up against a fence at the 2 Lazy J Ranch. Those long legs are all folded up like some cowboy origami, all elbows and knees. He has a straw cowboy hat on his head, a pair of black boots with scuffed toes on his feet, and a set of reins in his hands. With his long face and equally long beard, he’s nodding at the horse, and the horse nuzzling his hand seems to be nodding right back, as if there’s some unspoken language they both know – which wouldn’t be surprising when you’re dealing with a horse whisperer.

There’s a side of Bobby that’s well represented there: silent, stoic, thoughtful, still. This is the Bobby who would do his ranch chores with an eye to the horizon, watching for smoke to forestall the disaster of a prairie fire or the loss of a haystack that had been hit by lightning. Or keeping on top of the signs that his heifers were about to calve for the first time. Or silently stoking a stove-full of wood in the ranch living room to keep us warm at least until the wee hours before a winter dawn. No words. Just do the work. Git ‘er done. Do it all over again the next day. About the only time before he retired to town that I saw Uncle Bobby not actively taking care of the ranch was a 20-minute stint each day after lunch, when he and Grandpa Buster would take a quick nap on the floor in the living room and recharge for whatever haying or cattle feeding was in store during the afternoon.

I don’t expect that’s much different than it’s ever been for the men folk among the ranches of central Meade County, including Bobby’s best friend Floyd Cammack, or the Youngs further south, the Mikkudiks at the place north of ours, or the Bruchs and Vigs heading over to Fairpoint on the Old Stoneville Road. The ranch women had their extension club where they could connect. But the men would stand next to each other, leaning on their pickups after fetching the mail at the Stoneville Store, and say everything that needed to be said, but with as few words as possible. This is the ranching ethos, and Uncle Bobby served it faithfully.

Under that stoic demeanor there was a jokester and an imp. Bobby could get away with a quick-witted line under his soft voice. He’d say something about his beard covering up his turkey gobbler neck and then patiently wait for you to catch on. Healthy ribbing and leg-pulling were skills he’d mastered. The subtle joke was always better than out-and-out yuks. But when Uncle Bobby heard a good one he had a smile that stretched wider than a section of land, and he’d laugh with the best of ‘em.

Uncle Bobby was a steady presence in my life. He sat me behind the wheel of the old backward tractor and showed me the clutch and shifting lever, so I could help scoop up windrows and bring them to wherever he had the cage set up to stack hay. Later he taught me to drive the John Deere tractor with the hay fork on the front end. Still later it was that gold Chevy pickup with the plastic seat covers that left an imprint on your thighs. He trusted me to follow directions, be safe, and get my task done. It was from Uncle Bobby that I gained a love for peeing without walls. We’d be out with the cows, and he’d undo the four buttons on his Levis and let flow. This is an activity I believe we need more of in this world. He taught me to grab a cow’s teat just-so and showed me the rhythm of my fingers that brought milk squirting into a stainless steel bucket. He taught us kids to be careful in the granaries around the ranch and climbing stacks of bales behind the barn, so we’d be delivered back to our parents alive.

There are so many things in my life that continually remind me of Uncle Bobby. When I’ve let the lawn go too long between mowings and I think I could bale the grass, the smell of the new-mown grass takes me back to Bobby cutting alfalfa field across the road from the Stoneville School. When I catch a whiff of diesel fuel, I’m right back at the tank west of the garage with Bobby filling up the John Deere. Whenever I see the arc of something being welded on TV, I think of Bobby taking time to weld bolts, washers, and nuts together in the shape I wanted to make some goofball kid art project, which wasn’t far from how he created beauty from a strip of leather and a few tools. The feel of a rope in my hands takes me back to the contraption Bobby made to braid baling twine. And each semester he’s there when I tell my students about Christ the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world, I recount how Bobby and Grandpa would save an orphaned lamb from winding up on the ranch’s bone pile, by skinning a dead lamb and jacketing its skin on the bum lamb and presenting it to the dead lamb’s mother.

And of course there’s Aggie. I don’t know if my bachelor uncle ever had other shots at love and romance, and he sure waited long enough. But I’m grateful he was slow on the marriage front, because he and Aggie gave me a model in their long and faithful commitment to each other. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis, once said that your love can’t sustain a marriage, but a marriage can sustain your love. That’s what I saw happening between Bobby and Aggie over more than just shy of forty years as they depended on each other, filled in the gaps, and raised their three kids, Patrick, Anna, and Ted. Bobby brought me an aunt who understood me, who could talk literature and liturgy and love of family each time we met up.

These last years haven’t been easy. Bobby and Aggie had looked forward to traveling. That didn’t happen, although seeing pictures from Anna and Mark’s Jamaica wedding proved to me that an old rancher can learn new tricks. From the waist up Bobby was all cowboy, complete with hat and western-cut shirt with pearl snaps. But go south from there and find shorts, white legs, and flip-flops under Caribbean skies. Bobby in shorts? Who knew that my uncle was capable of it?

Whenever I asked my dad about the ranch or relatives or the history of the clans of honyockers who homesteaded this West River country, my dad always said, “We’ll have to ask Bobby.” Uncle Bobby was an amazing repository of lore. He was the only person I knew who could keep track of who the Shaeffers, the Cales, the Braziers, the Crows, the Dows, and the Mutchlers in our extended clan were. With my dad, Aunt Ida, and now Uncle Bobby gone, all those stories have disappeared. With the lore gone, we’re left with my beloved Stoneville Steadies history books and whatever paltry information Ancestry.com can offer.

When my siblings and I were growing up there used to be a billboard for Rapid City Clothiers along I-90 south of Piedmont. It was a giant pair of bow-legged blue jeans and cowboy boots. Nothing from the waist up. Just a 20-foot pair of Levis. Every time we drove past we kids would point to them and say, “There’s Uncle Bobby’s blue jeans,” because he was such a tall and lanky drink of water.

It seems impossible that what we have of him fits in this little container. But we’ll take it out to Red Owl this afternoon and place it in the ground just a ways from the church where Aggie brought him Sunday after Sunday, like the paralyzed young man’s friends brought him to Jesus in Mark’s gospel. It’s the cemetery where Grandma and Grandpa, Aunt Ida Mae, and countless friends and neighbors have been laid to rest. In a couple months that prairie graveyard will be surrounded by yellow clover and sit under wide open skies. In a way we’ll release Uncle Bobby to the elements, the land he loved, the countryside where he worked tirelessly. And we’ll give thanks for his twinkling eyes, his unassuming voice, his hands that could fix anything with some baling wire and a pair of pliers, and his gentle heart that loved with quiet strength. Blessed be his memory.

My Uncle Carl: the King of the Pasture

I was privileged to write a piece that was read at my Uncle Carl's funeral at First Prebyterian Church in Sturgis, SD, on March 4, 2019.

Dear Candy, Lisa, and Carl,

I’m grateful for the chance to write a few words about your dad, my uncle with the ready smile, the barrel chest, and such resilient faithfulness to his work, his community, and his family. Uncle Carl was a steady presence in my first couple decades, when we’d gather at the Atoll school for Christmas programs and at the ranch afterward to open gift, or when we Jones kids would spend a summer week each year playing or picking potato bugs down in the garden and dropping them in a jug of kerosene. Whatever we did Uncle Carl was there.

In the winter time he’d be dressed in coveralls and a Scotch cap heading out to feed cattle, in the summer it was a straw cowboy hat and work cowboy boots, and on trading days when he’d come to town he’d be decked out in that black leather vest, white shirt, black hat, and black cowboy boots. And along with it came the badge of a working cattleman: an untanned forehead. That was nothing, though, compared to seeing Uncle Carl when he took off his pants at bedtime. We’d be dazzled by the brilliant light show of his tighty-whities in combination with the brightest white legs that had never seen a ray of sunshine.

In my memory Uncle Carl took his work seriously. Successful cattle operations don’t appear magically, and he came by his hard-working way honestly. That’s what his folks, Jack and Ella, brought him up to do. And it was the legacy from his grandparents and your great-grandparents Carl and Liesel who came from Germany and homesteaded that Diamond-S Ranch in central Meade County. The spirit of the honyockers remained strong in him, that pioneer generation that plowed the gumbo and ran the Herefords, making do and often barely getting by. Uncle Carl was a man of the land, always more comfortable it seemed without a roof over his head, which might have been the reason behind his buying that red convertible. I remember him putting the top down and racing north to Jim and Vicky’s place, with gravel dust billowing behind us but blue skies above.

I never put much stock in the fact that Uncle Carl was on the school board. He was just my uncle. Besides, no kid understands how those things work, and I somehow had the idea that my Meade County ranching kin couldn’t have been as important as bankers and attorneys in the county seat. But I know now that they’re the salt-of-the-earth folks who actually make life work. And looking back now I can see the qualities that planted him on that board and rooted him there for all those decades: his honesty and trustworthiness, his diligence, and even the example of civic service he no doubt had from his own uncle, Jake Wahl, who himself served on the school board and in the South Dakota legislature. Uncle Carl had a commitment to making the world around him better, more productive, more efficient, more able to bear fruit into the future.

Of course, Uncle Carl had a side that truly delighted in those times when he let down. He knew how to have rigorous and righteous fun. I remember him at a rodeo in Union Center pulling a cold Schlitz out of a cattle tank filled with ice and beer cans on a hot summer day, with a lit Camel in his other hand. And I can still see him, rifle in hand, shooting rattlesnakes with the other menfolk, or watching us kids traipse around Goblin’s Gardens, or stomping the snow off his boots as he carried an armload of Christmas gifts into our house. Every memory includes his hat cocked a little to one side, a glint in his eye, and sideburns to spare. Put Uncle Carl on a dance floor, whether at the Red Owl Hall with my own grandpa playing banjo in the band, or at those early German Club Oktoberfests in Rapid with a polka band, and you’d see the picture of suave delight.

It’s been over forty years since I lived in Sturgis, and I’m sorry that I hardly knew Uncle Carl as an adult. That’s how our regrets work, don’t they? If I could, I would have asked him about the event that in a round-about way led to my existence. I’ve heard about the destruction of a car in the mid-50s and some resulting trouble with the law that involved your dad and mine, and how it led to both of them deciding that the better part of valor meant a hitch in the military. My dad’s service took him to Germany, where he met my mom and where I showed up on the scene. And it’s also the connection that got your mom to follow us with Vivien in tow back to South Dakota, and why you three also exist.

I’m thankful for your dad, my dear Uncle Carl. Over the years he came to resemble a big old red-and-white Hereford bull surveying the pasture he’d been given dominion over. But not even the greatest prize-winning bull ever had Uncle Carl’s straight line of white teeth that would stretch into a gleaming grin. When he directed it at me, it was his vote of approval and my own point of pride. I’m looking forward to seeing his smile restored, along with the rest of him. I hear the Pearly Gates are really less of a gate than a cattle guard that keeps the cloven-hoofed from crossing over and allows the rest of us to roll in. I suspect Uncle Carl is on the other side, refusing the haloes they’re handing out and demanding his black cowboy hat back. Thanks for sharing your Papa with Gine, Troy, and me, and with all of us who’ve been blessed to know him.

Love,

Kenny

Is God male or female?

Chapel at Grand View University this semester focuses on common questions students ask about the faith. This sermon was delivered September 25, 2018.

Our question we’re tackling today is this: “Is God male or female?” The easy answer is “No.” Thank you very much. Have a nice walk to your next class. And enjoy the extra ten minutes. Amen.

Of course, the answer is no because God is God and not a creature. Back in ancient Greece, Xenophanes, who lived a few hundred years before Christ, could have told you that. A couple weeks ago, my Ancient and Medieval Philosophy students learned that Xenophanes argued that it’s just wrong to think of the Greek gods as having human bodies. And thinking the sun is Apollo’s fiery chariot streaking across the sky isn’t much better. If our own God is going to be God, then we’d also be wise about assigning gender to a being who’s way more than a binary creature with either internal or external plumbing or X and Y chromosomes.

In Genesis we hear that God made human beings male and female and that they were made in God’s image. But that doesn’t mean that we’re male and female because God is multi-gendered. No, we have to look a few words later and see what God says about all that was created. When God’s divine identity was expressed out into the cosmos, God declared that it was all “tov me’od,” or “waaayy good.” God’s creation, including platypuses and pachyderms, spiny echidnas, and your high school cafeteria lady, is totes good. And so are you, no matter what body parts you have.

The hard thing about our question is that it assumes we can actually figure out something about God that God apparently isn’t interested in letting us in on. If only we knew whether God was male or female, then, depending on God’s gender, we could decide that women are manipulating she-devils or that men are full of toxically masculine demonic rage. And whichever one doesn’t match God can go back to hell where Satan’s spawn belong.

But our Bible passage this morning gives us some hope. In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul assumes we’re going to ask all kinds of questions that want to get at something about God’s essential nature. Stuff like, “Why did God let my cousin die so young?” and “If I prayed so hard for a homecoming date, why am I sitting at home with Ben and Jerry as my companions?” For Paul, no matter what our questions, when we try to get beyond the veil, all we’re going to find is ourselves. “For now, we see in a mirror dimly.” When we ask a question like ours, the only answer will be a reflection of ourselves. It’s all part of the limits of our thinking that God established in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve were told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We ask questions, and God will answer with silence.

But there’s hope in our verse. We look into that mirror and get a faint echo of God’s being. That means that we can learn something about God from human characteristics, even the most grievously stereotypical attributes we slap on the genders. We can learn about God from muscle-bound dudes and sentimental, weepy guys. We can learn about God from care-taking women and take-charge women. And those aren’t the only places we can learn about what God’s like. The opening litany we prayed today gives us a mighty list of things God has done that open up a vision of who God is. It’s admittedly a dim vision, but they’re clues nonetheless. It’s as if God were wearing many and various masks in this creation that show just as many and varied facets of who God is.

When we get no response to our question, maybe God is silent because God wants us to look elsewhere. It’s a dangerous thing to get behind the veil and see God’s full power and might (and maybe even God’s gender). When Moses asked to see God up on Mount Sinai, he only got to see God’s rear end and, because of it, was so changed that the Israelites forced Moses to wear a veil over his face. He was just too scary. So God sends you to encounter God where you can come to know God’s fullness in a way that God wants to be known: in the person of Jesus. There you have God made flesh and bone, with all the requisite and specific body parts real human beings have. Which isn’t to say that the almighty God is male, but only that God showed up in this one, Jesus. And because he was male in that patriarchal society, he suffered humiliation and degradation on the cross in a way that it wasn’t possible to experience for a woman.

But maybe I’ve misunderstood the question today. Maybe the question is really about whether we can use language other than male terms to address God. If so, we have Jesus’ example. Certainly, he taught us to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.” But Jesus also gave us the image of a hen bringing her chicks under her wings as a way to understand God’s great care for us. And we have the Old Testament witness of Proverbs that speaks about God as wisdom. In Hebrew, that word is “sophia.” Have you ever heard of a guy named Sophia? The point is that God doesn’t much care about our little pronouns and divisions of the creation according gender. God cares about whether you send your prayers God-ward at all.

Find a way to talk to God, all the while knowing that your words and images are a dim reflection of who God really is. If you don’t like calling God “Father” because your dad is a jerk, then know that God’s definition of father is so much greater than a fallible sperm donor. Know that a hen and her chicks is just one aspect of who God is. God is also a rooster crowing his delight at the sunrise and the rising of Jesus on Easter. The possibilities are endless. But the beginning comes only when you speak to God. And there you have an entire Bible to use as your source.

You can address God by pointing to what God has done. “Almighty God, who answered King David’s confession of adultery and murder with mercy, grant me forgiveness as well.” “Gracious Lord God who stayed faithful to the Israelites in exile, even when they thought you’d forgotten them, help me to trust that you remember me.” “Holy Spirit who drove Jesus to be tempted in the wilderness, I’m out of control and ask you to take the wheel and drive me, too.” “Divine One, who came to Moses in the burning bush, my life is pretty dark, and I need you to burn a little brighter for me, so I can hang on.” “Good Shepherd, I’m a stupid sheep who’s gotten lost. Please find me.”

See how it works?  You have resources for prayer and an utterly human brain with all its limitations. But God delights in hearing you. If neither heights nor depths, nor principalities, nor angels can separate you from God’s love in Christ Jesus, then your human language is a mighty small hurdle for God. However you speak, it’s enough. Give it a go. Just connect. Amen. And A-women.

The Office of Preaching and the Church Today

This is a link to the lecture I presented to the Augustana District of Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) at its annual convention on May 5, 2018, in Hutchinson, Minnesota. It follows up on LCMC's discussion of qualifications for ministry at its gathering last fall.

Click on this link

A Beloved Aunt, a Grave, and the Two-Lazy-J Ranch,

My Uncle Arlen Rounds asked me to speak at my dear Aunt Ida Mae's funeral today. 

This afternoon Aunt Ida will take one last trip in this world, to Red Owl of all the little ignominious places in this big wide world. There she'll be laid down near my grandpa Buster and grandma Luberta in a fenced off section of West River pasture land on a day as wintery cold as the one twenty-odd years ago when we committed Grandpa to the earth — ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Come spring (yes, that's almost a prayer right now), come spring the snow will be a dim memory, and you'll be able to cast your eyes west and see thunderheads growing over the Hills to stretch over the vast blue sky. And around that fenced-in plot, for as far as you can see the yellow and white clover, the alfalfa, and the purple coneflowers will delight with color and wafting sweetness.

It's fitting for Aunt Ida to come full circle and await the resurrection in the land of central Meade County that so shaped her, as it did to so many of us. When you drive north and a little west of Red Owl, past Cammack's place and the intersection with the Stoneville school and what was the store and post office, you'll head around the curve at Stoneville Hill, and finally see the specific little ranch that shaped Ida, the 2-Lazy J Ranch nestled down on a creek bed. A ranch house that began as a pioneer dugout in the side of a hill. The garage. A couple granaries. The cabin, bum lamb shed, outhouse, barn. And north of all the buildings, the prairie dog mounds and bone pile.

In my college office in Iowa, up on the top shelf of too many books, I have a calf skull that came from that boneyard. Every time I glance its way, it nearly nods back, as if to say, "You, old man, come from the dirt and manure of the Jones ranch. You come from the warm morning stove in the ranch house. You come from summers baling hay and winters breaking ice in cattle troughs. Your epigenetic processes are shaped by opening gates so Uncle Bobby can drive the pickup through and by the struggle to get that blamed thing closed again. Your intestinal biome is fed by home canning and milk straight from an actual cow. Your sleep patterns were established up those steep steps in an antiques bed with a chamber pot under it at the ready. You may think you're at home in the world, but you won't be until you drive up that lane, get out of your car, and stand there just above the rusting cans and junk of the trash dump, next to the sandstone face Grandpa carved, creek in front of you and windbreak behind. You will breath in air as it should be and settle in to who you really are." I think you all need your own office skull to remind you of these things.

None of us ever understands how deeply we're shaped by place. When you take in the ranch you can see what made Aunt Ida. Joneses have always had to ride low to the ground. Ranch life ain't easy. So Aunt Ida became practical and resilient, happy with small pleasures. You don't survive for long in ranch country without the bonds created with those around you, like the Lees, the Vigs, the Orths, Youngs, and more from Red Owl to Fairpoint and Union Center to Opal. Ida knew the importance of those bonds of family and friendship. She carried it out everywhere she lived, in her college days at BH, in Custer, Ogden, Elko, Sitka, and Laramie. You could see her deep dependence on and joy in others in her connections in Does and Eastern Star and her love of the folks at that little congregation in Medicine Bow.

Last night as so many of us gathered under Dee's gracious roof, I recognized these same grounded, landed, and practical qualities of character around the room. Uncle Bobby's doesn't have much strength for story-telling, and since my dad died, I've depended on Ida Mae's storehouse of prairie family lore. This is, perhaps the one of the last times we'll gather all of us as the product of that land. But Aunt Ida will have been one of the homely channels that made us these people.

There's another cemetery up Boulder Canyon on a hill above Deadwood, and there's another gravestone marked with the name Ida. She was my Aunt Ida's grandmother, grandpa's mother Ida Cale. This is our other family plot, for baby Jimmy is buried there, too. Today we stand with arms stretched from plot to plot Ida to Ida. Thankful, yes. Sorrowful, certainly. But for me I'm mostly eager to see once again my beloved aunt. She, one of the last who had known me my whole life. Aunt Ida with the ready grin. Ida with Buster's twinkly eye. Ida who knew my parents' feet of clay and showed me how to loved them. Ida on whom the shadow of Grandma's own darkness and that of a passel of alcoholic blue-talking uncles sometimes descended. Ida of the embroidery, the bookkeeping, the following of a tall Forest Service man with eyes twinklier than her dad's, of the scrolling handwriting. Ida of the strong love for her children and now grandchildren, who could only speak that love with a squeeze of a hand, even when she couldn't move the fingers that once played Great Grandma Mamie's Price & Teeple upright piano in the living room at the ranch.

Oh, we've been loved by her. We give her back, hardly wanting to release our grip. Thank God we can do it by placing her back in the bosom of that land that, even now, holds us all and waits to unfold what has belonged to it all along. Goodbye, Aunt Ida Mae. We'll see you on the Youngest Day, when this good gumbo earth bears its final fruit. 

Gine's flamingo feather

It's been a couple weeks now since my sister Gine's funeral. I hadn't wanted to speak at it, but my brother-in-law Joe demanded it. This is what I came up with in our hotel room that morning.

In my sister Gine and Joe's magnificent teal and turquoise bathroom, there's a picture frame hanging on the wall. What it contains she found on a trip to visit Mary and me and has deep meaning for me.

Gine had twisted Joe's arm enough that he consented to take time away from his other marriage to RCS and drive the 12 hours across the state through Sioux Falls, where months later she would be gifted with a competent, listening oncologist, an incomparable nurse navigator, and other staff who regarded her as a complete person worthy of their best efforts.

But that would be months away. On this trip they drove past the signs for Avera Health and continued down toward Omaha on I-29 and east halfway across Iowa. They came for our annual Palm Sunday shrimp boil: andouille sausages, onions, shrimp, and corn on the cob boiled together and dumped in the middle of the table. Around that table were our pastor and his wife, along with their three little girls, still another a couple recovering from addiction and expecting a baby, and, by phone, my brother Troy. Our sister Lynne arrived from Gettysburg a day later. Afterward we engaged in a little Cards Against Humanity and delighted in the laughter that arose at a pastor's wife being forced to say those things.

You'd think that would have been the utter highlight of the trip. But there's no photo of of us all enjoying ourselves in that frame a few blocks west of here in their house. It contains no family pic or vacation shot but instead holds something just as precious to my sister: one solitary sherbet orange and pink flamingo feather.

She picked up that feather from the ground at the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines that week as she and Joe played tourist at places we never think of visiting: the botanical center (think Gine's greenhouse but way bigger), Zombie Burger + Drink Lab, the state Capitol, and Blank Park Zoo. The flamingo feather lay on the ground and her sharp eye spotted it, something she regarded as a singular thing of beauty and a rare find for a kid from happily unrefined West River country. 

That she took a feather that probably had lain there next to a gob of decidedly non-pink flamingo poop and back at home turned it into an object of art and pride and joy, and that she placed it in a frame to be honored and valued says something profound about Gine.

There were easily any number of times in her life where you could have found her down low, waiting and hoping to be picked up, revered, valued. When it didn't happen she built a space around herself with small objects of beauty or created and crafted the beauty herself. The trinkets and tchotchkes invariably connected to places she felt happy or to people who had noticed the feather she was. The crafted cards were sent to those same people.

My sister Gine loved deeply, starting with that Christmas Eve baby in Manhattan, Kansas, with such an unwieldy name: Brandon Augustus Jones. She was central operator on the line, staying connected with us siblings, Troy, Lynne and me. When her dogs Kramer and Suie died her, grief was a great as the unconditional acceptance she got from them. And when our Papa died just over a year ago, she was inconsolable. Everything around her was something that promised her love, joy, and value.

And then along came my brother-in-law Joe. He was the third of those things, and I didn't expect much out of such a misogynistic, mullet-wearing Wisconsinite. But what I'm so grateful to come to know is that Joe Mack is the most righteous upstanding husband I'd ever want for her, a man who himself spots flamingo feathers, picks them up, and places them in a frame of honor. My sister's last years with Joe were years of being valued, of Joe walking in the door and catching his breath because of the beautiful woman he saw waiting for him.

They made quite a pair of feather finders. I thank you Joe for these last months when Gine couldn't bear to look in the mirror because of the ravages of this vile disease but could take your loving gaze. Thank you for putting her in a place of honor in your heart.

And Brandon, the recipient of 36 years of love, you, too, hold a delicate feather in your palm, for she gave herself to you and lived as best she could to take you into the full, gracious, thoughtful manhood you now present to the world. You know there were lots of opportunities it could have gone crap-wise. If it had, she would have loved you even then.

We're sure going to miss her laughter, so often aimed at herself, her birthday cards, her garden, her secret place in the back yard, her piles of rock treasures found in the Hills, her retirement job as number one Rapid City Rush fan. Our dear daughter, mother, sister, aunt, cousin, friend, and quirky loyal companion. To day, hold your hand up, and imagine a flamingo feather in your palm. Our Gine. Regine. Gina. Regina. Gine Dean. And now blow gently and let her float away into the utter grace and acceptance where God collects such precious things.