Shiphrah and Puah: The Courage to Say “And”

(This talk was totally inspired by the amazing, courageous stories from women speakers at the Why Christian conference, 2018).

Courage: the Core Virtue

We are in this great new series, called “The Ways of Passion and Courage” – where we are dipping into some stories from the Old Testament – some of which you may have heard before and some less well-known.  

As we were framing this series – my mind raced to the flashy, well-known, acutely courageous stories of the Old Testament. It was easy for me to gravitate to the stories of David & Goliath, or Moses, or Daniel, or Noah. These are undoubtedly courageous stories that are wrapped in moments of history that we tend to remember that involve decrees, and battles and moments of high drama.

But I want to poke at courage from another angle, a courage that looks a little more subtle and a little more present in our ordinary lives – day in and day out. I think this angle on courage – can help us access courage and see ourselves as courageous beings a little more regularly.

Maya Angelou speaks of this kind of courage – that I’m going to get at today i think,  she says:

“I am convinced that courage is the most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue consistently. You can be kind for a while; you can be generous for a while; you can be just for a while, or merciful for a while, even loving for a while. But it is only with courage that you can be persistently and insistently kind and generous and fair.”

Courage seems to be the source and steady undercurrent for all the ways Jesus calls us to engage with the world around us.

Courage seems to be the source – and steady undercurrent for all the ways we hope to engage with the world around us.  

 

Sometimes I think that we might be our own stumbling blocks to courage — that our own limits of courage are our definitions of it.  And, even more, that our definitions tend to skew toward a binary way of defining it. Either I’m “with” or “without” courage.  “Courage” is attached to an outcome that looks like success. It leads to a heroic triumph or visible changeAnd in some cases this is how courage looks, but I think the risk is that we miss a whole lot of moments of courage in-between.

That’s why today I’d love to look at two women — two midwives — from the Old Testament whose names are Shiphrah and Puah, who I think can break open a whole host of helpful ways to think about courage. Their manner of courage isn’t limited to the binary framework of “either/or”, but one that takes over this in-between space — most of their lives — and is anchored to their utter belief in and embodiment of God.

If you’ve never heard the names – Shiphrah and Puah – fear not!  At the beginning of the week I was with a bunch of pastors from this small cohort of churches that we are a part of called Blue Ocean Faith. And when I mentioned that I’d most likely be speaking about these two women, I thought I read a bit of panic on their faces… “who?”…blank stare — “wait – who you are talking about?”

Courage in My Story

So before we get to the story of Shiphrah and Puah, I want to tell you two quick vignettes from my own life. Two that popped to mind immediately as I thought courage in my narrative.

Vignette #1:  Some 20ish years ago I was a Junior in HS and was taking a pretty rigorous math class. I think it was an honors pre-calc class.

It was pretty clear early on in the semester that I wasn’t doing well — like really not doing well — hovering around a D average.

I thought I was the only one.

Turns out aside from 3 geniuses – the rest of the class was failing. Turns out that this was a pattern in this class, over the years, with this particular teacher.

We start to ask for more in-class teaching/explanation.  And after-school time. The teacher thinks that’s preposterous – “It’s the way his system has always worked”.

I think this response is preposterous and I organize a walk-out.

The day following, at the beginning of class, we all get up, pile our textbooks on his desk and walk out of the classroom down the hall to the principal’s office, to talk directly to the principal about some sort of mode of action going forward that might help promote better teaching and learning.

Vignette #2: Just a couple of weeks ago I went to a inter-denominational gathering in NC that invited a myriad of voices to answer the question “Why are you still a follower of Jesus?” Many of the stories we heard that weekend – were stories of deep pain as a result of skin color, gender, sexual orientation and physical sickness, but stories that did not shy away from the REALNESS of Jesus.  Incredibly beautiful, liberated and loving voices that had taken life head on – and were walking upright – it was really inspiring. (Full of agency and power and all the credit to Jesus — wow!) I left wanting to harness this collective courage.

The morning I left – I walked to the hotel check-out desk at 4am.

Right away I noticed the woman who was behind the desk – was being “chatted up” by a man .

As I approached to hand over my key, it became clear that this man was a guest at the hotel, not an employee. He asked where I was headed.  When I told him “Boston”, he quickly did a really poor impression of Mark Wahlberg and then asked me my room number.

I left the desk, headed to get coffee in the side room, mulling over what I should do on my way back through the lobby.

A few minutes later I walked straight by the front desk and to the exit door, where the hotel bell-hop opened the door for me.

As I went through the doorway, I turned to the bellhop/doorman and said “Is she ok?”

OK – I’m going to pause there with these two vignettes and head straight to the story of Shiphrah and Puah, before I fold them back in for what will hopefully at that point make a little more sense.

The Courageous Midwives

Where we often come close to the story of Shiphrah and Puah is with the story of Moses.  Many of you probably have heard the epic story of Moses – this Hebrew baby that was drawn from the water and raised in Pharoah’s courts and becomes not a prince, but a liberator of his people. These peopl are the Israelites, who have been enslaved and considered less than human by the Egyptians. It’s the story of the great exodus from Egypt into the promised land.

This story of Moses is the one we know… But we don’t know the story of  Shiphrah and Puah – the story that sets the stage for Moses to live, and determines the fate of an entire people.


So let’s read the story found on your program:
Exodus 1

8Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. 9“Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. 10Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”

11So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. 12But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites 13and worked them ruthlessly. 14They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.

15The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, 16“When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” 17The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. 18Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”

19The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.”

20So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous.

A little context to where we pick up here: the Israelites had moved to Egypt during a time of famine and starvation. Joseph, who had been sold into slavery in Egypt as a result of his jealous brother’s action, had helped the Israelites land here. Joseph’s time in Egypt was blessed by God, and he worked his way into high standing in Egypt, and the Israelites fared well. And for a while the Israelites and Egyptians coexisted without (that much) trouble.

Soon, though, a new King came in to Egypt, and it says “He did not know Joseph”. This means he didn’t know Joseph’s people or his God, and therefore he looked out at the Israelites with fear and suspicion and saw them as a threat, as the “other”.   

He attempts to limit the growth of the Hebrews, who only seem to grow in number, by dehumanizing them in systemic ways — by slavery, and forced labor, and oppression.  These attempts, however, don’t seem to make a difference to keep them down either.

So Pharoah enacts a fear campaign,  “What if we were attacked by our enemies and these growing number of Israelites join sides with our enemies?” “We would be crushed!” And this fear messaging starts to shift the opinion of his people and there’s more of a widespread buy-in to oppress and segregate.

Pharaoh’s xenophobia pushes him to take drastic measure to ensure these “outsiders” do not one day take over the land, and his latest attempt, as we see here, is calling forth these two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah.  Under government sanctions, Shiphrah and Puah are enlisted to participate in the extermination of Hebrew baby boys — to bring death to the world around them.

Now, the text reads that these women were Hebrew midwives. And yet, there’s a lot of conversation among scholars that suggests that these women were in fact Egyptian, but attended the birth of Hebrew women.  So they were midwives to Hebrew women.

I’m inclined to agree with this take – it makes sense to me that Pharoah would want his own “people” to carry out this decree.

This means  Shiphrah and Puah likely attended both Hebrew and Egyptian births. And midwives were often thought to be women who couldn’t have children themselves, so they were often pushed to the edges of society. Shiphrah and Puah are though to have possibly been Nubian midwives, from now Northern Sudan (reference:  Ebony Johanna), meaning that their relationships — throughout their vocational lives — spanned cultural and geographical lines.

A midwife’s primary role is to usher in life, regardless of status, race or any other defining division — to assist, guide and protect life.

So Pharoah is quite strategic with his newest attempt to limit the growth of the Hebrews. He knows that these midwives are the touch-point to life or death. And he says, “choose death”.

I can imagine that Shiphrah and Puah run through a few scenarios in their minds.  Either we are courageous and we say “no” to Pharoah 1) “we refuse to follow Pharoah’s orders and we likely die and likely our friends and families also die”.

Or we aren’t courageous and we say “yes” to PHaroah 2)“we follow Pharoah’s orders  – we promote the sovereignty of our state – and by the work of our own hands, bring death to the next generation of Hebrew males”.

This either/or choice seems to not be a complete picture of what courage could look like.

Thankfully these midwives seem to know another way to courage deep within their spirit. And I think they utilize this tiny conjunction word: “and”. “Wait!  AND we fear God”.  We revere and love and trust our God.  This “AND” — this belief in God — seems to be a way of harnessing courage, and it seems as though it isn’t only found in this one high-stakes moment with Pharoah – but it’s been built and developed over their lives.

Fearing God helps them see beyond the binary — that courage is far more than a choice of saying “yes or no” to Pharaoh.  It’s instead about saying “and…yes”! to LIFE with God.

These midwives are courageous!  They are divinely defiant! They’re heroically brave in their refusal to kill baby boys,  they’re clever in their explanation to Pharaoh of why baby boys keep being born, “these Hebrew women are so strong and vigorous that they birth their babies before we can arrive!” This is courageous, and smart. That explanation isn’t just an excuse to buy them time – it’s a subversive move to uphold the strength and dignity of the Hebrew people to Pharaoh.

This is the part of the story we would remember — these 4 verses of Shiphrah and Puah — and it is super courageous. It is, after all, what sets the stage for the liberation of an entire people from Pharaoh.

But the subtler courage that let’s them say “and… I fear God” — that type of courage that is developed over time, that isn’t as bold as these few recorded verses — is the version of courage I want in my own life, and what I want to explore more today.

As I mentioned Shiphrah and Puah were likely midwives who attended their own people’s births, but also the births of their “perceived enemies”.

These midwives were involved deeply, deeply at the center of women and their  family’s stories. To just go in and assist at a birth – is not the way of the midwife. A midwife is one who identifies with pain, one who sits with people in pain, and holds hands with pain, and confronts spirits that are full of despair and want to “give up”.  

Day after day, birth after birth, they came along-side the “other” — these Hebrew women, who they should hate. And they take their hands and rub their backs, and they say again and again “and” there’s a way here, “and God”. This breaks open a deep belief that courage wells up from inside of us — that it’s not only found in taking on a piece of armor.  That their God is one who sits alongside of them too, is in their reality — A God who doesn’t just go to the margins to serve someone else – but ONE who LIVES at the margins.

These midwives do this! They live at the margins. And, in their vocation, take on a calling, an oath to “in all ways serve life”. And the courage they dip into is God’s, because they believe that He is truly with them. And they greet pain — the pain of childbirth, and the pain of injustice, and the pain of not being seen with these virtues of God and that Maya Angelou speaks of. This is birthed by courage to say “and my God” – he’s real.

I can wonder if we wrestle with this question in our lives — whether acutely or sub-consciously — does what I do matter?  Does it touch real life? Does it bring forth anything new or courageous into the world?

This midwives seem to encourage us that “yes” — wherever we are, whatever we do, whoever we talk to matters. If we do it with kindness, and generosity, and equity, backed by a God that is real, it all matters.

These thousands of moments where they  offer their laboring and birthing mothers cool washcloths to their foreheads, where they gently turn babies inside of wombs – where they listen closely for heartbeats, where they root for life with their encouraging words, “yes push”, “you are almost there”, “life is coming”.

These times of being so intimately close to life and so close to God flip our ingrained allergy of “both/and”, and re-wire our pathways to see GOD AND LIFE as one — beyond political/authoritative decrees or external circumstances that try to inject fear.

For Shiphrah and Puah, these moments compile and develop a courageous heart — one that doesn’t filter with external factors “Life or no life” or “Egyptian or Hebrew” or “male or female”. Instead the passion for justice and care for all of humanity comes from a posture of  “and” – and GOD.

Omid Safi (a Duke University professor of Islamic studies) said recently that this closeness (to God),  is what allows us to see that the

same love that pours out of God’s own being and brings us here, that sustains us here, that will take us back home. It is this same love that we recognize in other people, who love their babies and their community as we love our babies and our community. When we recognize this same love in one another, we will not stand for having something happen to other people’s babies and community that we wouldn’t want to have happen to ours. That is simply what we call justice — and this work of justice is a task of love. (Onbeing).

The courage to say “and… justice and love” must go hand and hand.  This is the powerful picture of courage that Shiphrah and Puah give us today, one that they still invite us to!

Courage in My Story (Again)

The two vignettes that I shared at the beginning of the sermon  are  interesting to me because they so totally show the ways that I want to categorize myself as being “with” courage or “without Courage”.

I never labeled them in my story-telling as one or the other, but I bet  even you sitting and listening could recognize your own mind categorizing one as “courageous”, and one as “not so courageous”.

In highschool, I was courageous –– I staged a walk out and brought awareness to something I felt was injust at the time. Three weeks ago I wasn’t courageous — I consciously exited a situation where I noticed an awkward dynamic that could have been helped by intervening in some way.

May be very true, but I think it’s a limited view of courage. I’m slowly beginning to realize that the question at hand isn’t either “Am I with courage?” or “Am I without courage?” Because likely on any given dayI am both/and courageous and not courageous.

The question is, “Can I harness the courage of a God that is always with me?”

If I can tip more toward this – I can see the hundreds to thousands of times throughout my days and my weeks  where courage is live.  It’s then that I can see the maybe quiet, less obvious moments of courage that happen all the time.

Otherwise – I think the threat of disparaging thoughts can take over –  “Am I only destined to be a prisoner to the pharoah’s of my day? Will I ever witness more than pain and heartache ?

But the words of Paul here in Ephesians, fill out my truncated thoughts with the power and realness of Jesus.

He reminds me that, I am not a prisoner of anyone else but of JESUS who wraps me in humility and gentleness and patience, who gives me courage to lean toward people with love with an eagerness of heart that seeks to maintain the unity of the Spirit — this powerful JESUS who makes a way, who provides the “both/and to my either/or” tendencies, for the bonding posture of peace — this I realized is the power of Jesus.

This I realized is the courage that Jesus can offer so many of you;

To stand up – get out of bed, walk into a day, into a society that sometimes in the words of Lucille Clifton, “will do everything it can to kill you”… that’s courage and triumph!

To stand up and get out of bed and meet the reality of your day, in a sick body — perhaps penetrated with disease, infection, cancer, a body that is trying to murder you day in and day out — this is courage.

Courage is to stand up and get out of bed. Period. Nothing else to follow – just that one act.  It is courage that is full of sweat. A courage that says “and” — and today, I will rise.

Because Jesus lives in the “AND” – right?  He doesn’t fit in the binary tracks of either/or… He lives in our reality – which encompasses a whole lot of  both/and!

This picture of everyday courage gives us the freedom to sit down and listen, even when speaking is heralded as a sign of power or intelligence. And also the permission to see that some days courage is to stand up and speak, because you’ve been away from the mic for too long.

Jesus makes way for a courage that is ever-present, running through our veins,  on the tips of our tongues, in the palms of our hands as we touch life around us, and in our feet as we roam this earth.

When we can say “and”, there’s another way here with Jesus, another way to keep helping birth new life, “ I can’t yet see it – you can’t yet see it, but it’s here!” It allows us, as it did for the midwives, to ignite our moral imagination.

Where we have the humility to see the world as it is around us  and the audacity and passion to imagine the world as it could be.

All of us and the Midwives

Us limiting our sense of courage, doesn’t serve the world. We are all called to be courageous.  And to believe that our everyday posture of heralding life in spaces where only death looks apparent, will produce change  somewhere down the line.

The outcome that Shiphrah and Puah witness after making their courageous move to not kill these Hebrew baby boys could have felt disappointing to them, because Pharaoh just keeps marching on with his plans to wipe out these babies, demanding that all his people throw them into the Nile River.

But what Shiphrah and Puah might not realize is that their story — their whole story of being women who courageously live at the margins, and who stand against power and oppression — will continue to be told. Their names will be kept alive and whispered among the Hebrew women, their names will be yelled out in the pains of labor, as sign-posts of resistance and hope, (when their land is vacant of it), and  their courage to say …. “and”… “and I fear God”, would give PHaroah’s daughter, and Moses’ sister and moses’ mother  the courage to protect & hide and find and nurse him to life….

These names of Shiphrah and Puah are recorded! We get to see them written down in the text that we read today! This show us that a lifetime of courage — harnessed with the Divine — is worth 3,000 years of remembrance and legacy, and still worth talking about today. While Pharaoh’s fearful acts of dominating power and authority leaves him nameless and less than 300 years of fame.

Perhaps our role is akin to the role of a midwife — to cherish other life as our own, to stand right where we are in our jobs, and roles, and play, and life — and reclaim these places, places of courage.   And to keep live the courage to say “AND” as we continue to find and preserve and nurture life — wherever we touch it.

Sermon Notes – How Do We Harness Courage?

    1. Weep with those who weep”. (Romans)
      Come close to those around you – at your job, your neighborhood – LEAN in.As Maya Angelou and Jesus tell us: Humility, compassion, empathy might be the most critical ingredients to a heart full of courage. Because they allow our hearts to be softened to people and their pain.  Just as Jesus does with us.

      Pay attention to your emotions: are you weeping? are you angry? These emotions they might just suggest what you are passionate about

      From there  — where you realize your heart is stirred — you can figure out where to move from there if you want. What are you willing to do about it? Where maybe are you already doing something in your everyday life

    2. Where can you utilize the word “and” ?
      This might mean you have to take some time to realize where you are categorizing life into either/or buckets.  Try out the word “and” in place of either/or this week – and see what it produces. 
    3. Seek wisdom from people who have diversity of viewpoints.
      It’s likely there were a whole bunch of midwives. We get Shiphrah and Puah because they feared GOD, but I imagine there was a lot of conversation that varied in opinion and viewpoints that helped shaped how Shiphrah and Puah would move forward as they did.
    4. Check in each day to see where it is God is real to you.
      This will anchor you in your high-stakes moments and in your everyday moments of courage…When God is more real to us than the powers we see around us and infront of us, we are better able to choose God’s way of courage – with love, life, peace and justice….

      This will help you believe that the “Pharaoh’s of this time and in this land”, will not kill your spirit.

       

    5. Write down the names of the courageous people who come to mind. 

      These are both your forerunners and perhaps your contemporaries.People who die have no control over who tells their stories, who remembers their names. So it’s an important role we play – to keep the narrative of courage alive in grounding, real stories.Shiphrah and Puah likely had a sticky-note stuck to their mirror with the names of their ancestors, Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel  – courageous woman whose names were whispered in their ears as flames of hope and movement when we can’t see it ahead of us.

      This is important because it keeps the name of Jesus alive, not just in our memory, but right now, as our unending reservoir of courage and passion.

Bravely Eat These 40 Days

Today, we enter into one of my most favorite seasons of the year: this Lenten season – the 6 weeks leading into Easter – that we at Reservoir have taken to calling the 40 Days of Faith. It’s a season that calls us into an intentional personal and communal faith experiment (as we are all invited to engage with these 40 Days together). It’s an opportunity to scrub the windows of our hearts – where the dust and smudge of life have added it’s shadowy filter… it’s where we break pattern in our busy lives to get to know and see Jesus afresh – and alive in our own beings and in the world around us.

The 40 Days of Faith is a really powerful season where some pretty amazing steps of faith are taken and answers to daring prayers are realized and where we take this powerful journey together as a community.

We have a 40 days of Faith guide here in your programs that outlines the history of this season in our church — I believe this is our 16th year! And the fun story of how this building and campus came to be our home — as a result of the 1st 40 days of faith. And it also outlines what the invitation is in this year’s season.

This year we are calling this Lenten season, “Children of God in Fractured Times”. We’ll feature a Daily Bible guide we’ll read together in this mighty fun book of Revelation and outline some spiritual invitations, (ways to pray, different spiritual practices to try, fasting) — as a way to experience Jesus in ways that strengthen our courage, hope, and resistance as children of God and followers of Jesus in challenging times.

To be honest, I’ve been wrestling a bit with this phrase “child of God”. I’ve heard it most of my life, and so there’s a part that sounds too much like just a Christian-y phrase. It didn’t hold much authentic weight for me in my own experience of God. I wasn’t offended by the phrase, but it didn’t churn anything in me — it wasn’t a way I would frame my connection to God. And I had planned in this talk, to mostly touch the edges of the phrase without a lot of attention to it, because I didn’t want to speak out of something that wasn’t genuine for me. This plan, I realize, would have been a great loss for myself and all of you.

This past Thursday night however, “child of God” became live for me, and I wanted to share this small moment with you to frame how I see “child of God” now, and why I think this is super helpful as we kick off this 40 Days Season.

Thursday night my husband picked up my youngest from his after-school program and it was clear that he and his peers had talked about some of the events in Parkland, FL. Scott and him talked more about this on the short drive home. I was upstairs when they got home – and my son came running up the stairs to me and said, “mom I don’t want to go to school tomorrow”. I turned to face him and he smashed into my body full speed, threw his arms around my waist and exploded into tears… And he asked, “Mom – why can’t there be one place on earth where nothing bad happens?”

My only response was to hug him tighter, let my tears fall on the top of his beautiful head… and say, “oh sweet boy. I hear you. I hear you and I don’t know… I don’t know”.

This was a picture of being a child of God for me. And we are all children of God: a raw, vulnerable and brave posture — running full throttle into God with no filter. We are invited these 40 Days to throw everything we have and feel and can name at God — and find in return not a list of explanations, or rationalizations for pain, or check-boxes to tick off to return to sanity, but instead a warm, lavish love that embraces and shares in our madness, our pain, and outrage.

This phrase, “children of God”, is not just an over-used description; it’s the invitation of these 40 Days — an invitation that is a way forward in our fractured times and an invitation that is counter-cultural and straight up brave.

And so, if you are up for it these 40 Days are an invitation — yes — to carry on a tradition that for centuries followers of Jesus have engaged with to enliven their spiritual focus (and get to experience God more deeply). But these 40 Days are also an invitation to be courageous, to name your fears, right alongside your deepest longings and move through and out of this Lenten season with “child of god” stamped squarely on your warrior’s heart that’s also cloaked in the softness of God’s lavish love for you.

Back in September my husband, Scott and I started praying together in the morning. This had never happened before in our 16 years of marriage. We might pray for each other, (in separate spaces) — but not with each other and for each other , as an intentional part of our marriage.

We both are night owls — but tip that often to the point of exhaustion and crash pretty hard when we actually get to bed — so nighttime never felt like an opportune time to pray together. And Scott gets up and out of the house by 6am which just felt – absolutely unfathomable to me.

This year in particular, busyness seems as though it has ticked up a bit — just in family life — you know — kid activities and time commitments to those. So for me, it felt like our moments of connection were less than I would prefer… and I also noticed my own tendency to become a little more — let’s just say — “bristly” with Scott when we weren’t connecting. And by “bristly” I mean, pretty shut down to any kind words or extensions of kindness that he might offer me. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of them, but I just didn’t fully receive them or take them in.

It wasn’t necessarily a big warning flare going up — but it was a subtle and potent undercurrent of our interactions: a little more transactional in vibe than ‘loving’. A little more hardened than soft. And even more subtly — under my skin — a little more fracturing than I think I was aware of.

We have to acknowledge that being in a fractured world affects us as well — and not only in the areas that we are comfortable naming, but in systemic ways that spread throughout our whole being. Because it really is unrelenting.

Sure, as in Scott and my case, “busyness” is one identifiable piece of this fracturing. It makes us feel fractured in our brains, we have a word for it – “scatter brained” — brain-shattered.

But our fracturing is way more systematic than just one area. Every day we hear and read painful news headlines which don’t resonate in our beings as something a gentle heart could hold — and we become heart-shattered.  We see people we love suffer, endure and even die at the hands of violence, and we become soul-shattered.

Not to mention when our fractured world lunges directly at our bodies, with it’s sharp edges and weapons and causes pain and hurt — and we become physically-shattered.

Our minds, our bodies, our souls and our spirit are fractured too.

The spiritual growth we might hope for walking into the 40 Days of Faith together is not just a time to sit in our pain, or tick “spiritual” checkboxes, but it’s an opportunity to heal ourselves — and heal our fractured and broken world. This is one spiritual practice. And I think we are hungry for this. But we often displace our deep hunger and flail about our days in a state of starvation which yields more fracturing.

If you’ve been in the vicinity of a hungry child – you’ve probably recognized how quickly their demeanor can go from “sweet child” to “less than sweet child”. A missed snack/meal could result in crying, flailing on the ground, throwing things, or my favorite — chilling obstinate stillness. But likely you’ll miss the beat about it being about hunger, b/c likely the child is crying about his sock feeling funny, or the wrong colored cup, or the fact that it’s too sunny out. And so you go racing around, distracted looking for the gray lego piece that’s being demanded — with 6 connection points, shaped in the form of the letter “L”, but a flat “L’, not a thick “L” — and really the kid just wants a sandwich.

And we adults are no different. We, too, might just need a sandwich. I mean, really — maybe that’s what our fractured selves and by extension our world around us could use: something that we can take into our bodies, into our muscles and tissues and marrow of our bones – that would assimilate fully into our beings in a way that allows us to move and live out of this sustenance, where our internal systems are working together in a sense of wholeness and unity.

As I mentioned, we’ll be spending time over the next 6 weeks in the fascinating book of Revelation – Steve has written a daily Bible Guide for this that we’ll make our way through together – and he and Lydia, our newest pastor, will hit on Revelation a little more directly in the upcoming weeks. But I wanted to give us a taste of this wild book this morning, because I think it hits so nicely with how we can think about engaging in these 40 Days:

The author of this book, St. John, is a commanding figure. He was pastor of marginal, politically and economically powerless Christians, in a society in which their commitment to following Jesus branded them as criminals of the state. He was moving to keep their hope fresh against formidable odds, and to keep the living, speaking, acting Jesus at the center of their lives.

He had these wild visions that came to him one morning as he was worshiping on the prison island of Patmos, in which he saw this gigantic angel who had one foot planted in the ocean and the other on the continent with a book in hand. The angel was preaching from this book a sermon like nothing John had ever heard, and he started to write down what he was hearing. But a voice told John to stop taking notes and to do the following instead:

Revelation 10:9-10 (NIV)

9So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, “Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but ‘in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.’” 10I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour.

What a picture: eating this scroll! The angel doesn’t instruct St. John to pass on information about God — he commands him to assimilate the words of God into his being. To eat and ingest is so broad, so comprehensive, and yet so personal – especially as we are talking about taking in the words of God.

Our invitations are often to interact with the words of God, to read the Scriptures, to pray, to try spiritual practices in a particular manner. Rarely is it to take it all in and let the nutrients fall where they are needed most. The beauty of eating the scroll is that God does a fine job inside of us at directing these pieces to exactly the parts in us that are the most hungry and craving, and God starts a lot of times with attention to words.

And this is so personal. It’s why — if we had time to sit with even these two verses — there would be a myriad of responses if I were to say, “Close your eyes and invite God to highlight a word or phrase for you”. Some of you might say “Sweet” , some of you might say “sour”, or “I took”, or “angel”. We all are likely craving something specific, and these words start to orient us to the root of that hunger.

Eating the words of God, as John — and other biblical players, like the prophet Ezekiel — show us, allow them to have a breadth, not a narrow/prescribed way of living these words out. This approach to eat the words — to Eat these 40 Days — is huge for us because it releases the need to get the words of God — or God Himself — “right” in our HEADS, and instead absorb Him into our full bodies and let the nutrients fall where they are needed most.

Words spoken or listened to, written or read – are intended to do something in us: give health and wholeness, vitality and hope. And it effects all of our systems, right? When we take in food, it doesn’t just satisfy our digestive system – it enhances our endocrine system, our nervous system our immune system, our circulatory system. The words of God, whether we read them, hear them, or sense them — if we eat them, digest them– start to form new wholeness in our fractured, innermost beings — in our minds, hearts, bodies and spirits.

And that is not just good news for us; it’s good news for the world around us. Because just as when we take in the food we eat — when we are healthy, it is unconsciously assimilated into our nerves and muscles — it’s put to work in our speech and in our action: an unconscious outpouring of that intake.

Scott and my morning efforts of prayer together hovered around just about 47 seconds each morning: me, stumbling down the stairs at just the point Scott would be leaving the house, and mumbling, “Dear God – be with Scott today, love him and give him energy and a safe drive”.

But we went for it. Whatever our prayers looked like or sounded like, we ate it up. And what we ended up eating — was not just the words of our sleepy-formed prayers, but the words of God for us, individually and together. Turns out we were hungrier than we thought. We had become distracted looking for the obscure lego piece and had missed the sandwich on the table in the hustle of life.

But Jesus took our words and converted them into deep, rich words within us — words that said “you are ok, you aren’t failing”, “Yes this is hard”, and “i love you”. God is continually forming and shaping all things new within us, but it took our intention to tap the well of the love of God within us.

These 40 Days remind us of the offer on the table to take inroads back to our deep hunger — that our pain in this fractured world, is absolutely felt in real, visceral, concrete ways, and it is layered with hunger pains for the love of God, the words of God.

Scott and my experience of praying together — as it says in these Revelation verses — tasted “as sweet as honey”. I started to see new things about Scott that I had missed. I started to have a more generous heart toward him. I started to offer kindness (rather than bristly interactions), and lead with this posture of love (far beyond my human capacity). A wholeness was forming in me, God directing nutrients where they needed to go . That allowed me to have a broader view of Scott, instead of only seeing slices/fragmented parts of him. And that lasted for just about 18 days (that’s as long as we sustained it, as good as it was!).

And maybe this is a bit of the “sourness/bitterness” that John talks about as he digested the scroll. This new, upright posture that we might discover in ourselves as we sit in the love of God is actually hard to fully digest and take in, and live out in our real world. Because we get tired, people are mean, etc.

Sure, my story of Scott is a fairly straightforward one. We have relationship, history, trust, a motivating reason to continue to act out of love toward each other, and yet even within that framework it’s hard to sustain. And so the harder it becomes in the fuller stretch of our lives with our unpredictable, fractured relationships. Or the words that infiltrate our beings from our fractured social media feeds, newsfeeds, where we take in splintered jabs at our personhood? Or words that are just thrown at us as weapons? How do we continue an appetite for “Love” when so much churns our stomach and is unsettling?

“How do we live, fully live on every word that comes from the mouth of God?’” (Matthew 4:4)

The sweetness it seems is being a child of God and sitting in God’s lavish love. The bitterness that unsettles our bellies is realizing that this lavish love — this lavish love of the DIVINE — knows no bounds, evades no one, and is so compelling it demands we do the same. It challenges us! It doesn’t make space for stopping our “leading of love” when Scott does something that infuriates me. It challenges us to keep loving inspite of the pain.

Divine love does not come in digestible bites. God’s love douses us full force. As we encounter God’s love these 40 days, it will scrub our insides — the film and shadowy filter of our hearts — and it will give us a system reset, and that is hard to handle. It’s a lot to digest.

This is why, my friends, I say that if you are up for eating these 40 Days, if you are up for really digesting them, they will be brave, brave days ahead of you!

These days will invite us to not deny our pain, but to take it in and convert it to more. These days will invite us to not deny our fears, but to look at them squarely and name them.

These days will invite you to not just learn more of the words of God – but these days will invite you to integrate these words into your being and allow yourself to become more.

These days will invite us to peer into the dark tombs at our feet — where dead, unanswered prayers or unrealized hopes lay — and be open to the full force of the lavish love of God, that just might call them back to life.

So much of our 40 Days is this great exploratory journey of our inner self with Jesus. You’ll get a chance to put to words something you might be hoping God will be with you in or do on your behalf. You’ll have a chance to pray, fast, and try spiritual practices. But these 40 days are also a shared spiritual experience where we collectively are expecting God to catch our attention, to be alive to us, to help us breathe with belief for a new collective energy beyond 6 weeks — into our work spaces, where we play and live — not just for ourselves and our own health, but for this picture of a world that could be revolutionized by love.

I’ve been listening recently to the story of Valarie Kaur. In just a few minutes you’ll hear a piece of her story yourself. She’s been the direct target of a fractured world. She’s a Sikh American who grew up in the Sikh faith; she was bullied for having brown skin, for her family wearing turbans, and her experiences of discrimination turned to violence when her uncle was murdered in one of the first hate crimes post 9/11. And this propelled her into exploring and devoting her work to see just how love could be reclaimed as a public ethic. She’s a film-maker, a faith leader, and a lawyer.

She is currently the founder and director of the Revolutionary Love Project, where she encourages us to bravery, to love, and to birthing new ways forward in our world. Here’s a clip of her Ted Talk last November:

[Video: 3:30 minute excerpt of this video]

This picture of God as a midwife is compelling to me and feels so resonant in this season of Lent: a God who welcomes new life in even the most excruciating circumstances, and the one who calls us to look into the darkness and see with fresh eyes.

This is Lent – walking us right into the tomb. Staring in — do we see death? Or do we imagine and believe for life which is about to be birthed? The followers of Jesus breathed and pushed together, and kept going (even in the pain and the joy).

These are the components of the spiritual sandwich – that we are hungry for:
Joy. Love. Pain. Breath and Bravery. This is what we are invited to eat these 40 Days.

The hot winds don’t promise to cease, the waves dont’ promise to calm, but as the prophet Jeremiah found: “ eating the words of God – become the joy and the delight of our hearts”

Joy can be birthed. As we run to God as Children of God — with all our pain and our panic — and sit in His sweet love, here is where he converts all of our intake into love and joy that helps reframe our darkest times.

This allows me to hold my sweet boy a few seconds longer, to entertain the thought of getting up before the sun rises to drool prayers with my husband; because the love of God is so divine and compelling that I too, want to birth and create things new.

These 40 Days, let Jesus see you and sit with you. Let him tend to you. Let him love you. And let him whisper to you, again and again: “you are brave”.

And may this be the compelling Spirit to start our breathing and pushing together — as children of God in this world — through the power and the love of the Holy Spirit.

How Exactly Do I Eat These 40 Days?

1. Bravely embrace these 40 Days from exactly where you are at. Start by naming your fears (let these fears that you name – be their own prayers):

“Courage is fear that has said it’s prayers” – Gene Robinson, Bishop
Courage breaks forth from acknowledged fears – and these fears themselves allow us an opening to a deeper spot in ourselves, where our hopes and desires reside….
**take a few minutes to jot down any fears you might have***

2. Consider how you can find and savor your joy each day.

Valarie Kaur – says that “joy” is a move to not give into the darkness — to the fractured-ness around us. This is a form of resistance. Ask God what that might be for you

  • Try: a spiritual practice (where you might encounter unexpected “joy”)
    We’ll have suggestions of a spiritual practice to try in the daily bible guide. But maybe you have your own thoughts.
    “I’ll sit in my favorite chair, with coffee in the morning for 5 minutes and ask God to be with me”.
  • Try: fasting (Allows us to see the props that we’ve been resting on to satiate us – to bring us perhaps fleeting “joy” – and to kick those props out from under us – and make more space for God). Spirit of fasting – is to fast for what we want or hope to encounter with Jesus. And we direct our hunger toward God – and make space for that encounter to be noticed.

3. Ingest God’s words

  • Try: Participating in the Daily Bible Guide. It’s great – it promises to turn on circuits in our brains that we don’t normally touch!
  • Try: Eating a sandwich
    Give yourself freedom – to just practically take in what you need for sustenance, like literally a sandwich!

4. Breathe and push alongside others

  • Try: Joining a community group for these 40 Days
    I’ve heard these referred to as “moveable sanctuaries”: a place of respite, to be youreself, of safety, where anyone is welcomed. Where you can encourage one another to breathe deeply, and move and push with love at your core.

5. Invite the Holy Spirit to fan the flames of lavish love and protect you from the hot winds.

  • Try: Praying for yourself, your six and your church/community.

Shepherding Hope

Luke 2:8-20

 That night there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared among them, and the radiance of the Lord’s glory surrounded them. They were terrified, 10 but the angel reassured them. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. 11 The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David! 12 And you will recognize him by this sign: You will find a baby wrapped snugly in strips of cloth, lying in a manger.”

13 Suddenly, the angel was joined by a vast host of others—the armies of heaven—praising God and saying,

14 “Glory to God in highest heaven,
    and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.”

15 When the angels had returned to heaven, the shepherds said to each other, “Let’s go to Bethlehem! Let’s see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

16 They hurried to the village and found Mary and Joseph. And there was the baby, lying in the manger. 17 After seeing him, the shepherds told everyone what had happened and what the angel had said to them about this child. 18 All who heard the shepherds’ story were astonished,19 but Mary kept all these things in her heart and thought about them often. 20 The shepherds went back to their flocks, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. It was just as the angel had told them.