Month: May 2013

I wear a robe on Sunday mornings.  It’s black.  It’s nothing fancy.  No frilly designs around the collar, no rope cinching it around my waist, no Friar Tuck hood, not even any softly padded buttons running my 66 inch frame.  It has a zipper.  I remember the first time I stood before my church wearing it.  I don’t know if I looked like a cleric or not.  My guess is, I looked like a pre-pubescent boy tripping over his father’s bathrobe on Halloween.  In my own mind’s eye that’s pretty much how I first wore my robe too, like one trying not to look too goofy in an XXL.  We’re told that Jesus wore a robe.  I know, I know.  A robe in his day was like a cell phone clip in our day.  Everyone wore one.  Before there were tee-shirts and jeans, there were robes.

There’s a story about Jesus and his robe.  He is walking among a crowd.  The storyteller doesn’t describe anyone in the crowd.  They don’t point anyone out as if to say, “Four rows back was a girl named Susan.”  We’re simply told, the crowd is large and pressing in.  Hence why no one is named.  In crowds like this one you don’t see people, you just feel them.  You feel their overwhelming presence, their body heat.  In such a crowd I imagine Jesus found his robe to be an issue.  It got stepped on, and he got tripped up and slowed down.  But in this crowd was a woman (who of course is unnamed).  She is, however, diagnosed (another consequence of large crowds: in being too many to name they become too easy to diagnose).  She is bleeding.  Profusely.  Grossly.  She tells herself that if she can just get a hold of Jesus’s robe she’ll be made well.  I don’t gather that she thinks this is a magician’s coat.  Touch it and poof!  I don’t even know that she figured on getting her bleeding to stop.  Maybe she just hoped to get a good grip on his robe, and then to hold on long enough so that when Jesus finally got to wherever he was going, she’d be right there with him.  He’d turn around to see this bloodied, half-comatose human dust ball lying there and think, “How did you get here?”  And because he’s Jesus he’d have to help her.  But instead, the crazy does happen.  She latches on and poof indeed!  For the first time in a long time what flows is healing, not blood.  And Jesus turns around not to say, “How did you get here?” but, “Where are you?” He doesn’t see it happen but the storyteller says, he feels it–power leaving him.  I wonder what that felt like to Jesus.  To me, losing power often means losing control as well, and that means being defenseless, vulnerable, even violated and ripped off.  Of course, the opposite can also be true.  For the one who receives power there is renewal of purpose and person.  “The woman knew that something had happened to her, something that she couldn’t have made happen on her own,” we are told.  “Where are you?” Jesus asks around.  “Where are you who has claimed my hope, my promise, my life, my power for yourself?  Somewhere out there is someone who has been reborn tonight.  I want to meet them.”

One day last week I took my robe off to share communion with a woman in my church.  That may sound backwards, given that in my church the one behind the communion table is often the one wearing the robe.  “We break this bread, Christ’s body given for you.  We pour out this cup, Christ’s blood shed for you.  In these gifts, in this sharing of pieces we have communion.”  Some traditions say that such words, when spoken by a duly robed individual, can stir the heart to believe that we are eating and drinking Jesus himself.  For me though, my robe is not a sign of speciality.  If I wear it at all it is only so you can find the one person who will make sure there is a scrap of bread and a sip of drink left for you, because it’s only communion–and it’s only Jesus–if there’s enough to go around for everyone.  Admittedly, sometimes I wear my robe well and sometimes I don’t.

Anyway, this past week, after the Sunday morning crowd had their fill, I took off my robe, changed into some jeans and a fleece pull-over, and took the leftovers to a woman who couldn’t make it to church that day.  This woman would have liked to come but she couldn’t because she was sick.  Sick with too many thoughts, too many fears, too many paranoias, too many wounds that never took to healing.  You might say this woman was, is, bleeding all over the place.  Sitting in her living room I’m surrounded by stacks of books and half-eaten frozen dinner trays.  The carpet, which no vacuum could find anyway, looks like a cat’s litter box.  The kitchen sink and the garbage disposal have run together.  The TV is on.  “You’ve got to hear this,” she tells me, turning up the volume from loud to blaring.  Some woman is interviewing Jim Wallis.  “This guy knows what we need in this country.”  I think, these are her crowd.  Everyday she drowns her pain in these.  I reach into my neatly packed grocery bag and pull out a loaf of bread, a 4 oz. bottle of Welch’s grape juice, and a matching pottery-hewn cup and plate.  Seeing me do this she clears off her coffeetable entirely to make room for communion.  I think, she’s fighting her way through the crowd.  She doesn’t turn off the TV though.  Apparently Jim Wallis is going to join us for communion.

I read from Psalm 23 about the Lord who is our shepherd and how we shall not want.  It doesn’t say that we shall not want because the shepherd gives us everything we want, or even everything we need.  The Lord has a whole world full of sheep to care for.  That’s a lot of mouths to feed.  God knows there are times when we may need to ration provisions, so to make sure everyone gets at least a bit.  Because with Jesus, enough is only enough when everyone has something.  And when that happens, enough will be enough.

I lift the bread.  “Christ’s body broken for you.”  We eat.  I pour the cup.  “Christ’s blood shed for you.”  We drink.  She, I, and an elder who has come along to stand in for the entire church community.  Afterwards I ask her if she would like to pray for us.  She says, yes, please.  In the course of her prayer I notice that she quotes, word-for-word, from John chapter 10.  Some 21 verses, also about Jesus and his sheep, and she knows them all. “I am the good shepherd,” Jesus promises.  “I know my own and my own know me.”  “Where did you learn that?” I ask her.  This is a woman who can barely keep her mind in one place long enough to scrub a pot.  “Where did you learn that?”  “I don’t recall,” she tells me.  “I’ve just always known it.”

And for a brief shining moment I think I see the crowd disappear, as Jesus turns to see the woman who has been gripping his robe all this time.

I’m not sure which it is: do we  learn early on that certain things go together or do we more figure it out?  When it comes to having a PB & J sandwich I actually prefer having fluff over jelly, and the person who sat next to me at the lunch table most days in high school liked putting mayonnaise to his peanut butter.  Now did he just figure that combo out (because I never would have), or did his grandmother spoil him with mayonnaise like mine spoiled me with fluff?  (The word “spoil” might be totally misplaced in this illustration!)  I don’t know which it is.  Oscar Hammerstein once wrote, “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.  You’ve got to be taught from year to year.  It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear.  You’ve got to be carefully taught.”  I don’t think the assumption here is that one must be taught to hate and fear because it’s unnatural.  Like it’s a once in a lifetime learning opportunity that shouldn’t be missed.  For human experience tells us, and dictates to us sadly, that being hated and feared are foregone conclusions.  Sometime, somewhere, someone, perhaps your own self, is going to find reason to hate and fear you.  Whether it begins with a hatred that turns to fear or a fear that turns to hatred, we don’t have to learn their names or faces.  We’ll know them when we see them. So what is it that must be taught?  Is it that we must be taught who and what to hate and fear?  As if the mere existence of hatred and fear isn’t toxic enough, we must be taught where and how to get the most bang for our buck.  The setting for Hammerstein’s words was the South Pacific in World War II.  I suppose in that time and place hatred and fear were tragically regarded as necessary defense mechanisms against being bombed again, against being surprised by hatred and having to live in fear again.  I’m glad though that the lyric doesn’t go, “You’ve got to learn to hate and fear,” because so long as it’s something I’ve got to be taught, I’d just assume skip class today.

I’ve titled this post, Bravery at Third and Home.  I’m playing on a softball team this spring.  (It’s a church softball team and so the degree to which the word “softball” applies may be debatable by some.  But the word “team” is as good as gospel truth.)  Running down fly balls, instinctively jolting left or right at the crack of the bat, pounding palm to mitt–all remind me of how good the game is for me, and how, in spite of my lackluster play, I am good for the game.    That both of these statements are true at the same time is a testimony to my dad, and here’s how: my dad is the fluff to baseball ball’s peanut butter.  In his own days of little league glory, my dad was a legend.  He is known to have pitched a game once in which he made every out there was to make.  He did it by striking out every batter but one.  In six total innings of play he whizzed the ball by 17 of 18 whiffers.  As for the one person who got a piece of the action, they hit a pop fly…to the pitcher!  In high school my dad is said to have shattered a batting helmet with his fastball (no heads are known to have been connected to the helmet at the time of contact!).  Had it not been for an unfortunate car accident leading to a broken neck…

Fast forward 10 years and my dad is standing back on the mound.  I’m sitting on home plate, literally.  “Don’t move,” he tells me.  Don’t move, I think.  Are you insane?  What if the ball comes in low?  What if I have to jump to catch it?  What if I have to jump to avoid it?  Can I at least kneel?  “No.  Keep your butt on the ground.”  That day, and everyday thereafter–spring, summer, and fall–my dad threw the ball right at my head.  I swear, a 6-cylinder Ford couldn’t have kept up with that thing.

In eighth grade I broke a bone in my left hand playing back yard football and had to take my first baseball season off in 7 years.  Honestly, I didn’t miss it.  I was kind of relieved actually.  I loved playing ball with my dad.  I loved knowing how to catch anything he threw at me.  But beyond this, I wasn’t very good.  I knew that in a year my 5 foot 2 inch, 90 pound freshman frame wouldn’t be able to hit the ball  beyond shortstop and my arm couldn’t throw for hard for long.  It’s not that I didn’t have it in me to try for the team anyway.  Or at least this is what I tell myself 18 years later.  Either way, anyway, I didn’t, and the goodness of that decision came to me, as it has before but perhaps never so mercifully, this past week at softball practice.  I was standing in right field, pounding palm to mitt, when the ball was popped up on the first base line.  I noticed that the person playing third put their glove up, as if to catch a ball that was flying 90 feet in an opposite direction.  A couple pitches later and the ball was popped up again, this time along the third base line.  The same player put their mitt up again, but didn’t move.  The ball fell about 3 feet to their right.  This is when I realized they couldn’t see the ball, and when I knew who it was.  We’d met at the church several months earlier.  A newcomer to the area, this elusive third basemen (were they brave? fearless? stupid? I was soon to find out) and I were both native New Englanders and soulful Red Sox fans.  What brought them to the area is perhaps a story for another telling.  What matters is what brought them out to softball practice.  That they loved the game and could spout statistical analysis on every major leaguer since Babe Ruth was not it.  That before the kids grew up and the family broke up they coached and cheered at every game, match, and meet was not it.  That cancer had taken their ability to see very well anymore was obviously not it.  That after missing the pop-up at third they still took batting practice, only to lay the bat down on home plate after just two pitches and flop down in the grass beyond the dugouts, surely that was not it either.  What made them do it?

Everyone in the outfield just stood there, murmuring and confused.  “Should we cheer for them, give ’em a little pep talk?  Two pitches?  That’s all they’re going to give themselves?  What should we do for them?”  I didn’t know but what to do first.  I jogged my way across the infield and sat down beside them in the grass.  “I had to try,” they said.  So that was it.  They were willing to risk the darkness, to stand on the third base line where the ball might come whizzing by faster than a Ford?  For all they couldn’t see, they might as well have just sat their butt on home plate.  All this just to be able to say they’ve still got a good inning or two left in them.  “I’ll just take this glove back to the store tomorrow and tell them it didn’t work for me,” they said.  I just sat there in silence.  From where I sat, the glove worked like no glove I’d ever worn.  “Where did you learn to do that?” I asked them.  “Did someone teach you to do that or did you just figure it out?”  “To do what?” they said.  “To say you’re a baseball player just because you have a glove.  Bravest damned thing I’ve ever seen.”

Hatred, fear, bravery.  Does someone teach us the difference or do we just figure it out?  Which is it?  I’m not sure it matters.  Bravest damned thing I’ve ever seen.