This morning my 3 year old son, Rowan, came into my bedroom to ask the same question he has asked everyday for the past two months: “What’s today?”
Now most people would know this is an impossible question to answer. You can’t put the cart before the horse and expect to get anywhere. How can I say what today is before today has really begun? I’m still in bed, not sure if I’m still dreaming. The alarm clock ticks 5:45. I’m actually in a nightmare. What’s he doing up already, asking, “What’s today?”
In our house this question can be answered in one of three ways. “It’s a school day.” “It’s a Grampy day.” “It’s a stay-home day.” The first of these usually evokes a level of whining that can be tampered only with candy bars. News that it’s a school day means there’s no way in hell this day has any chance of being treated fairly or judged rightly. There may be a fridge full of Mickey Mouse yogurt cups downstairs, but today, Mickey might as well be the Devil. As for my own cup of coffee that thanks to Keurig can change flavors daily and brew instantly, today all coffee tastes bitter. And school—that glorious place of pre-K-ness where recess actually counts as a class and picking your favorite color of crayon is the measure of smarts—it’s just a cover for minimum security prison. “What’s today?” Of all the hopeful, cheery ways to answer this question, “It’s a school day,” is just a mistaken way of saying, “Today we are condemned.” How unfortunate.
On the other hand, news that it’s a stay-home day can raise us to levels of ecstasy reminiscent of soldiers who have just been told they don’t have to go to battle today after all, the other side has declared a cease fire. You can leave your bunker, go into the backyard and play ball. You can even cross enemy lines—go to the school yard and take a ride on the swings. Today the promise is that no one will fire upon you by ringing a bell to summon you back inside. It’s not a school day. It’s a stay-home day.
In between these is a world of compromise, or what we call, a Grampy day. To understand how this day works, let me back up to what happened four months ago. Four months ago I announced to my church that I was leaving. Leaving, as you may well know, is hard, painful, divisive work. We try harder than hard to make it easier by saying things like, “You’re moving on to bigger and better things.” And the person who is leaving says back, “And bigger and better things will come along for you as well.” We tell each other that it’s not what we’d like; it’s not according to our timetable, but nothing ever is. We appeal to reasonable irrational—“It makes no sense but somehow it must.” In the church we give up to faith and to the plan of God, which we trust isn’t just out there somewhere waiting to be discovered but is (if you dare to believe it), waiting to discover us. We need only to come out of the bunker, let the sun fall upon our faces and see that it’s falling on everyone everywhere.
Scripture tells a story about an Ethiopian eunuch who is pulled over on a desert road just outside of Gaza. As in that part of the world today, so in that part of the world then, Gaza was contested territory. Many claimed Gaza, but few belonged there. It should not surprise us then that a eunuch—traveling in the service of a foreign dignitary, robust, having the appearance of one who should not be messed with, yet underneath all of this, castrated—is pulled over just outside Gaza’s coveted borders, for a eunuch knew what it was to be claimed and yet not to belong. To be told, like it or not, your whole future now belongs to me. You’ll go and not go where I say. Did the eunuch want it this way? Did he say, not my will but yours be done. (That would be noble, I suppose.) Or was it the price of being who he was, an Ethiopian? Either way, this Ethiopian eunuch has just come from worshiping in Jerusalem.
Now I don’t know how you, my reader, worships. Lying on your back in a bed of leaves, staring up at the stars? Sitting perched on a porch with a cup of coffee, quietly observing the world going by? Keeping weekly ritual in a pew or on your knees, surrounded by 10 or 10,000? To me worship is the recognition that like it or not, we are not alone. God is everywhere, and this means Grace and Mercy and Kindness are everywhere, too. Because God is Love we are not only claimed, but we also belong. We are claimed to belong.
So the story goes that this no-man is sitting in no-man’s land reading about this Extravagant God and wondering, is it for me, even for me? Of course, the only answer he can come up with is the only answer he’s ever known. Except along comes a fellow-worshiper who climbs up into his chariot with him.
“Do you know what you’re reading? Do you know who the writer is talking about?” they ask. “No,” says the Ethiopian. “How can I without someone to make it plain?”
Saint Paul once confessed that the basic reality of God is plain enough to see. Run your fingers along a tree trunk, climb a hill and feel the sun warming up as you go, from the ocean depths to the tiny star speck, it all sings God’s praise and glory. True enough: these are good enough for the glory of God, but only flesh and blood can confirm the love of God.
“Is it for me, even for me? How can I know?”
I don’t know if this was the exact question that called me and my family to move four months ago, but such is the question whose answer I find myself coming up with every Grampy day when I drop Rowan and his 4 year old sister, Lillian, off with Bernard who has no arms, and who must wonder, “Is it for me, even for me? How can I carry them?” And it is the answer that comes to me when my 82 year old Nana who is no bigger than 5 feet offers to spring Rowan from preschool early and take him to the duck pond. It is the answer the Ethiopian eunuch comes up with from the seat of his chariot, the answer I heard coming from the backseat of my Subaru this morning when, knowing it was a school day and there was no way to avoid it, Lillian suggested we sing on the way there. “It will make things easier for you, buddy,” she said to her little brother.
“It is for me, even for me? How can I know?”
The God whose mercy and kindness is everywhere says yes it is, but only flesh and blood—mine and yours together—can make it known.
PleaseGrace 