A Blessing for Ash Wednesday from Jan L. Richardson

So let the ashes come
as beginning
and not as end;
as the first sign
but not the final.
Let them rest upon you
as invocation and invitation,
and let them take you
the way that ashes know
to go.

May they mark you
with the memory of fire
and of the life
that came before the burning:
the life that rises and returns
and finds its way again.

See what shimmers
amid their darkness,
what endures
within their dust.
See how they draw us
toward the mystery
that will consume
but not destroy,
that will blossom
from the blazing,
that will scorch us
with its joy.

May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May the Lord's face shine on you and be gracious to you.
May the Lord look upon you with favor and give you peace.

Amen.

There's a Psalm For That -- Psalm 2

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer, Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Full disclosure—in preparation for this sermon, I believe, was the first time I ever read Psalm 2. I’ve nothing against the psalter, don’t get me wrong. I’m hip to other psalms like 8, 13, 16, 23, 24, 34 and even some triple digit ones like 100, 105, 118, ultra-lengthy 119, 139, 142. (Shout out any numbers you love that I missed. I mean numbers of psalms, not just like, numbers. Cool, a lot of psalm fans out there today.)

Well, because the world is great, I’ve figured out a way to, once again, tell the story of the Old Testament project that Gretchen and Maria and I did, first year. It was an obviously amazing infomercial that played off the Apple marketing campaign “there’s an app for that”—but, rather, there was a psalm for that. There’s a psalm for your sorrow, your revenge fantasy, for gentleness, for you the oppressed or you the oppressor, for justice, for celebration, for anguish, for fear, for joy.

Sojourners contributor Kari Jo Verhulst writes that “the poetry of the psalms preserves the immediacy of human experience…void of the broader perspective that we get well after the moment has passed….the psalms preserve the heart’s cries in language, images, and movements spacious enough to find our own experiences.”

And John Calvin, guy I don’t usually quote in sermons, called the Psalms “the anthology of all the parts of the soul.” And he meant all parts.

David Tuesday Adamo, a religion professor in Nigeria, classifies Psalm 2 as a therapeutic psalm—specifically for stomach pain. I have to admit that yesterday, when I realized I was preaching the day after Jim Lobdell, I had some stomach pain. The African Indigenous Churches, Adamo explains, regard these words as “potent” when read as part of a healing ritual, which includes the drinking of water made holy by these words.

While we wouldn’t classify our baptism as cure for stomachache necessarily, we do know a little something about water made holy by word. While you may be a better biblical scholar than I am and have included Psalm 2 in your life before now, you may have just recognized the words “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” as bearing a striking resemblance to the words that thunder from heaven during Jesus’ baptism.

We as Christians have a specific understanding of the term “God’s son” and we mean Jesus, the Christ, when we say that. But we’ve also learned, probably from Steed Davidson, that earthly kings often claimed to be the son of a particular god, in order to lend themselves that god’s authority. Some interpreters say that this psalm could have, liturgically, been used in royal rituals—and it makes perfect sense that it would appear in the story of the baptism of Jesus, as told by Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels. Matthew, greatly concerned with the establishment of Jesus’ authority, and Luke, greatly concerned with social location, would have called upon this familiar, royal phrase to underscore the baptism of Jesus.

And Jesus has more power than any earthly king—and he hasn’t amassed an army or oppressed a people. Rather, he has emptied himself of that power through “suffering, humiliation, despair” and death on the cross.

In Psalm 2, it’s written that God has established a king to bring order to the world, but that all the other kings are running away with it. God has established a rule of law, a coming kingdom, and humans who would even claim the best of intentions are failing miserably to fulfill it.

When we hear the words of this psalm in our world—big and messy—we may wonder if God can really make order out of our chaos. If you read or watched any news today, you’ve been long-distance witnesses to the upheaval in Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Uganda, Mexico, the Central African Republic, Somalia…

There are death tolls in the dozens and the capture of a drug kingpin and re-imprisonment of musicians and anti-gay legislation and drone strikes and civil wars and disappearances and protests and crackdowns and unchecked abuse of power.

And, in the midst of it all, there’s a psalm for that.

I told a non-religious friend of mine I was going to preach today, and he asked what I was planning to say, and so I, sort of flippantly, said that I was going to talk about how everything is awful and the only reason we don’t give up is because God has promised to make order out of our chaos. He just sort of said, “oh” and we moved on to talking about something else -- but isn’t that the thing? Isn’t it just that the world is constantly in uproar—with earthly kings plotting against that which will engender the kingdom of God—and yet somehow, here we are, week after week, being read to about that chaos, and responding, “Thanks be to God.”

The last line of this psalm made me laugh. Its contrast to the rest of the psalm is so typical. Wrath, fear, trembling, wicked, perishing, warning—people are going to be dashed to pieces like pottery, it says!—but happy are they who take refuge in him.

Mic drop.

As though that’s it. And as though all the folks who are going to be broken with a rod of iron are simply unhappy. I think they’re probably more than unhappy. I think they’re probably dead.

But the thing is, the people of God know who has the last word. The people of God know that this king—earthly or otherwise—is from God and will, therefore, lead them toward happiness.

And since I’m so fond of bringing my horrible jokes full circle, there is, in fact, an app for your happiness! I stumbled upon it earlier this week and am interested to see how I’m able to use it, going forward. The app is called “happier” and basically is an electronic journal of moments of happiness, gratitude, etc. So like, on Monday when I went to Café Yesterday to read like a million pages for homework, Josh, the guy who runs it, put my coffee in the giant Disney Princess mug, knowing without knowing that that would make me happier. I posted a picture of it to the app, and got notifications that it had made other users smile—the “happier” version of the Facebook like.

What I like about “happier” is not just that I post little positive things that occur in my life, but I peruse the moments that have made strangers happy. For other folks, it’s a visit to their horse’s stable, a great grade on an assignment, managing to be on time to yoga class, noticing blooming trees on their way to work. Knowing that people out there in the world are experiencing little bursts of happiness helps me know that there’s a way out of our chaos. In the midst of the trauma and terror of human life, there is also happiness. There is goodness, and there is love, and there is life.

The words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu have been made into a song that we’re going to sing in just a moment, because their simplicity is built on the same confidence as Psalm 2:

“Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate. Light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death. Victory is ours, victory is ours, through God who loves us.”

Amen.

We like books and we don't care who knows.

It's been an unintentionally long while since I've written anything of substance, here. Being back at school last semester was really exhausting, word-wise, and I think that's the excuse I'm going to stick with. I'm back at school for the spring, again, so no guarantee you'll be hearing from me on the regular again. But I read a fantastic piece today about reading, and my imagination responded so strongly that I had to put pen to paper. Err, finger to keyboard. Not as romantic a notion.

The piece is called "28 Books You Should Read If You Want To" and it's not actually a list of titles, but rather ways in which one comes across a book (if you didn't click that link, go look and come back) just by living one's curious life.

Thinking about how I've come to know and love the stories that I cherish brings the beginning of tears to my eyes. Y'all know how much reading is a part of my identity. I love, in the totally great chick flick You've Got Mail, when Kathleen talks about how the books you read (especially as a child) help you to become who you are. I don't think this ever stops, but I think the rate at which we read and subsequently become tapers off rapidly in our adult lives and so we think that reading just isn't as necessary as it once was. Many of my peers (non-students) maybe slog through a book a year or something, or maybe read the latest series that's become films so they can get the whole story. Most adults don't sit, mystified, deep in the world that these words and their imaginations have formed for them somewhere "other" than themselves, like they did as children.

Even if the writing and printing of books stopped right this minute, so many have been penned that you could never read all of them in your life! And new books are published every day! New books worth reading can be in your hot little hands (or your ears, if you're of the audiobook persuasion) practically instantly! There's no end to where you can go and who you can be and what you can feel.

I hear out of the mouths of teenagers and young adults and adult adults (whatever) all the time that they "just don't like reading" or that "there's nothing really worth reading out there right now" AS THOUGH they've scoured every possible choice and come up empty? Please.

Janet Potter, the author of the piece I told you to go back and read (I'll wait) didn't give you actual titles -- she gave you room to imagine what there is out there in the world to experience, based solely on the happenstance of who you encounter in seemingly mundane situations that can be UN MUNDANED (whatever) if you bring a book along.

Lemony Snicket, whose books I'll admit I've never read (haha) is quoted as saying that he doesn't trust anyone who didn't bring a book along. Man after my own heart. During the semester, I bring homework everywhere I go, just in case I get a free minute. When I know I'll have many free minutes and not a lot of homework (cross-country flights) I bring leisure reading, too. Sometimes, I bring two books, out of sheer anxiety that I'll finish one and be stuck, bookless, for even the shortest duration of free time. This is a shining example of my being a classic Enneagram 6 as well as a word nerd (unsurprisingly, a characteristic of sixes).

I scoped the hefty lists that Janet Potter links to at the beginning -- full disclosure, I'd already compared my catalog to the Amazon list, and have read more than half of them (and of the remaining titles, have little interest in completing) and so I'm not going to say that those lists  have absolutely no merit. But what bothered me about all of them, and about anonymous book recommendations in general, is that I have no clue what's good about those books. I don't know what made the person who compiled that list love them enough to include them -- of all the novels ever written!

YouTube awesome person John Green posted a video today in which he recommends 18 books he loves that aren't super popular. I watched it, and I've never read any of them, and was only familiar with like two of the authors. Here. Watch it.


What's great about this video is that John tells you (very rapidly) precisely what is so great about these books you've yet to encounter, and why you might like to encounter them. Some of them are by well-known authors, and yet more than once he says that their other book is more famous but that this one is better. Just because it's a "bestseller" or a "classic" doesn't mean it's the end all be all! One time, I bought a book that had won a Pulitzer and it bored me half to death and I stopped reading like a quarter of the way in.

And when it comes to recommending classic novels, I kind of barf, because some of those are classic because no one wants to be the one to say "we can be done with this one now" and be shamed out of the literature nerd club forever. Or whatever. Certainly, there are some "classic" books that I've loved. I'm above averagely willing to read Shakespeare. I loved Heart of Darkness and The Stranger and Old Man and the Sea and Crime and Punishment when we were assigned them in high school. But y'all can take your Jane Austen and shove it. A thing I say a lot is that not everything has to be for everyone. (Except The West Wing. I don't want to know if you can't appreciate the best television show ever made. Full disclosure, I think that's actually MASH, and also I've never seen Breaking Bad, which a lot of people really liked. So.)

I have written a lot of posts about books. Maybe scope them, if you've got nothing better to be doing and want to linger inside my brain a while longer. If you don't do that, at least go back to this one. I could edit it or expand it or something but it's truth as it is. I like books, y'all.

Please read.