Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

journal

This Clueless Teacher

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I am no expert on daily life for first-century Jews in Palestine, but if you are, I’d love to hear from you!

Martha had never told anyone how much she liked rocks. No one had ever asked, for one thing. But the older she got, the more special the secret seemed. She knew, even if she didn’t understand, that the adults would laugh if she tried to point out the beauty in each one, the intricacies of pattern, color, and even weight that distinguished them from each other. And now that she was approaching ten years old, the other kids would laugh, too.

Today, Martha’s hands and eyes inspected the bit of limestone in her hand while her ears strained to listen to the men’s conversation. Silly as it was to care so much about rocks, trying to learn about the intricacies of the Law was even more futile, but Martha couldn’t help it; the wisest of the men could discover such great truths in even the smallest sentence of scripture. Whenever she got the chance to listen and understand, Martha felt for the rest of the week like she could see farther. It felt like she was storing up more secrets, even more beautiful than her stones.

“Martha. MARTHA!” She spun around at the edge in her mother’s voice and hurried toward her, framed in the door of the house. In a few steps, Martha had the baby on her hip, but she knew she deserved the scolding that came anyway: “Are Mary and I supposed to play patty-cake until you’re good and ready to wander back inside? Are you going to explain to your father why supper’s not ready?” Martha’s mother turned to light a fire, still muttering about chores that hadn’t been done, as Lazarus and Gideon nearly bowled Martha over. They were so engrossed in their swordfight that Martha didn’t bother to yell at them; she picked up a piece of string from the floor and sat Mary on a chair instead. Martha pretended to tie the rock onto Mary’s wrist. “It’s so you’ll remember the scriptures,” she whispered. Mary seemed to consider this for a moment. “Spitchers!” she replied, throwing the rock on the floor with gusto. Martha moved to throw it back outside before anyone could accuse her of bringing in more dirt.

Martha had dumped out her rock collection many years later when her husband moved to the family home, but she had never stopped straining to hear the religious teachers—and no one had stopped doting on Mary. They had all indulged her fantasy of never marrying for so long that they hardly noticed as Mary actually became an old maid. When Martha’s own husband died, she mourned him dutifully, but soon found her life with Mary and Lazarus quite cozy.

Everyone in the village had expected her to invite the traveling teacher to lodge with them. Martha had a knack for concocting huge meals out of thin air and an infamously immaculate house. Still, she had heard her heart beating in her ears as she awaited Jesus’s reply; when he spoke, it was as if every glimpse of beauty she’d ever gotten from the Torah readings suddenly coalesced into a pattern, simple but captivating—one that she knew had always been there, but never quite believed she’d understand, let alone see, on earth. This man didn’t just theorize about Shalom. He described the Kingdom of God. He was the Kingdom of God.

Of course Martha had started preparing before she’d even asked, but at his acceptance of her invitation all the tasks before her became suffused with joy. Never before had she been so proud of her talent for hospitality or so excited to share it. She sang as she dusted and scrubbed, and tried to appear modest but terribly busy in her conversations at the market. She tried, too, not to mind as she caught glimpses of Lazarus and Mary listening to the teacher in the square while she hurried home, arms loaded with produce.

By the time the whole group bustled in the front door, the realities of pulling off a dinner party had overtaken the thrill. Martha had been hoping for Mary’s return for hours. No matter how many eggplants she chopped, it seemed she still needed more. Her feet ached and her back was in knots.
“Thank God you’re here,” she breathed, grabbing Mary’s arm when she walked in after the guests. “We missed you!” Mary said with bright eyes.
“Well, that’s nice, but I need…” Martha trailed off as Mary returned her attention to Jesus and walked away.

It doesn’t matter she thought,  the plan will work well enough without help. Mary has never been very attentive to household things, and it’s my own fault for spoiling the girl. Martha thumped a bowl of nuts onto a table and checked the lamb: right on schedule. Mary just doesn’t understand how the world works. She’s making a fool of herself, as if she thought she belonged in the middle of that group of men. She found herself setting dishes on the table a little more loudly than normal. How can Mary sit there, seeing how many people they had to feed, and act so entitled? Martha moved the lentils off the fire. The bottom layer had burned; that would mean a lot of scrubbing later tonight. The thought of cleaning up after all this made her want to cry. Why had she invited Jesus here in the first place?

Jesus. She knew what to do. Grabbing a wine glass, she walked out of the kitchen and offered it to the first person she saw. Then she leaned down next to Mary, who sat at Jesus’s feet. “Lord,” she said, certain that he would make Mary see sense, “Don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” Martha moved to take away a hand-washing bowl, pretending not to see Mary’s shocked expression.

“Martha…” His voice was calm and inviting, but she was already scanning the room for tasks that needed to be done. “Martha!” She turned back around and made eye contact with the teacher for the first time. The kindness in his face made her want to cry again. Here would come his thanks, his recognition of her work.
“You are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” Martha stared from Jesus to Mary for a minute, both of them appearing to genuinely hope that she would plop down next to Mary on the floor. Then she swept back into the kitchen.

Only one thing is needed! All that is needed is for everyone to sit around playing patty-cake until dinner magically appears! Later she would think that Jesus himself had inadvertently helped her, because she was so angry she hardly noticed her hands making the rest of the preparations. Once they all made their way to dinner, though, she was so relieved to have a seat and a glass of wine that her frustration quickly dissipated. In Jesus’ company, the group was lighthearted but sincere. At his words, they felt for the first time that they could be good, as the teachers had always admonished, and that it would be a joy to do so.

The food was impeccably done, and compliments abounded. Once Jesus even asked for her opinion on a theological matter, with such simplicity that she answered frankly before she even had the sense to demur. She blushed deeply, but Jesus’s friends seemed unfazed. “Yes, I think you are right there,” Jesus answered, and carried on. Martha vaguely knew that water and wine glasses were sitting empty, that the bread was gone and the centerpiece was askew. But the words that had continued to ring in her ears no longer galled her; she felt the truth of them. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her. So perfection had been taken away from Martha just as it always was. Didn’t Jesus care more about her than about her napkin folds?

A couple of hours had passed when Martha felt a hand on her shoulder. “Hey Martha,” Mary whispered, “Where’s the baklava? I’ll bring it out.”

For a moment panic seized her. Utter despair followed, but just as quickly came resignation. She had forgotten to make dessert. Martha glanced around at all the contented faces, chattering but always with Jesus in view. She stood up and pulled Mary into the kitchen. “This is it,” she said, scooping some dried dates into two bowls.
“Oh, Martha…” Mary said.

“What’s done is done,” Martha said quickly. The women made no grand entrance, but simply returned to their seats and offered the dates to their neighbors.

They were the best dates Martha had ever eaten. Juicy and sweet, winey but bright, the best of the summery fruit remaining alongside the deep caramels of aged sugars. In a blink, across the table, Martha could have sworn Jesus raised a date to her in a toast for just a second before attending to another guest’s earnest question

“Martha, it was an honor to sit with you at your table today,” Jesus said as they filed out the door.
“I hope I will see you again soon,” Martha replied.

Later, cleaning up, Martha noticed something odd on the table. There, at Jesus’s place, was a beautiful rock, not exactly unusual but with a pattern and a heft she thought she recognized. Mary glanced over, too.

“Inconsiderate of people to bring extra dirt inside, don’t you think?”

Martha only smiled.

Let the Bible breathe: scripture after a crisis

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For a long, long, time I read the Bible every night before bed—maybe from age 14 to 22. Growing up, this was the sign that you were a true Christian, and it made sense. If Christianity was having a relationship with Jesus, and Jesus spoke mainly through the Bible, this had to be a priority in your life.

It didn’t matter if most of your Quiet Times came with no great revelation, or if nothing you read really sank in at all. The point was to be saturated in scripture, to have one foot in another world, to let the revelation sneak up on you. And I am still captivated by that vision. This habit, among other things, taught me the power of faithfulness. Showing up to the things you care about, just for the sake of doing it, somehow gets a bad rap among us who are addicted to the new; but there is nothing so powerful as faithfulness. In many ways, you are what you do when you don’t feel like it; or what you care enough to do every day; or what you do without thinking. Faithfulness is all these things.

Still, faithfulness may be an important part of love, but it is not all of love. And a time came when I found that faithfulness to the Bible was getting in the way of loving Jesus. I’d gotten so wrapped up in these words and their many interpretations that this God-Man had become just another voice in the crowd of religious teachers.

I will stop to note that someone is already irritated or worried about me. The Bible could never get in the way of loving Jesus, they will admonish. It is how we know Jesus. But if you have only known a Jesus of words, maybe you are not like the twelve followers, leaning close and living life with the Teacher. Maybe you are like a crowd member, hanging back, leaving some distance because this man is intriguing but, after all, rather dangerous. I hope for you that you have known Jesus in the ways he tells us to find him in John: by obeying him, for instance. By doing just one of those ludicrous commandments he gives, by forgiving an enemy or serving the lowest, we know Jesus in us in a way we’ll rarely find through scripture. He tells us, too, to find him by loving one another: in daily fellowship we discover the face of Christ returning our love as we could never love ourselves on our own. And he tells us to ask for what we need, to abide in him, to wait upon the Spirit—to pray. Nowhere in his farewell speech to his disciples does he tell them to diligently read the Bible.

How many of them do you think were literate, anyway?

Anyway, you should not fear: it is three years later and I once again read the Bible most days. But I do so with a strong appreciation for the fact that, as my friend Katie says, the Bible is not the fourth member of the Trinity. It is a remarkable work of literature where we often meet God. But we do so through the intermediaries of its authors; through the emotion of story and poetry; penetrating layers of language and culture before we can understand very much at all about law, government, gender, war, family, friendship, or work in those days. That is not to say only Biblical scholars can read the Bible well. It is only to say that reading the Bible is a dangerous activity. People who use scripture to contain, tame, and instrumentalize God are doing it wrong.

You see, if you start to read the Bible every day like the preacher tells you to, going through all the books and not just your favorites, you rather quickly end up with a different religion than you had when you were just a Sunday-school goer and sermon-listener. Sure, you can go for a while, carefully fitting each passage into the framework of your pastor’s or your church’s theology. But eventually, you know you’re straining it. You read the violence in Judges, the political intrigue in Samuel, and good heavens, all the thundering words of the prophets, you start to see why you haven’t heard much preaching on these. You really soak up the Gospels and you begin to realize you weren’t really aware of Who you were dealing with when you picked up this book.

A lot of us put it back down at that point; or find some devotional that makes it all feel more comforting; or jam our theological paradigm ever more firmly onto the Bible, refusing to see all the bits squishing out at the edges where this mystery refuses to be systematized.

We do have some other options. The thing is, most of them involve being—and remaining—uncomfortable. But if you’re looking to the Bible to be more than comforting, here are a few.

Let go of the chapter and verse. A “medium is the message” realization that’s been frustrating me lately is that sermons, devotionals, and our actual Bibles all split up every book into 100-500 word chunks. Sure, this is a nice amount of Bible to read out loud or dig into for twenty minutes, but it’s not, like, the Right amount of Bible. Feel free to read the Bible like any other literature. Be carried along by the prophets’ poetry for several chapters at a time. Read the drama of 1 and 2 Samuel over the course of a week or two (and you’ll stand a chance of keeping all the characters straight). Get your Bible study group to spend a session reading an entire epistle out loud, the way the early church would have heard it.

Ask a Jewish person. OK, so I don’t know many Jewish people who are seriously into faith (or maybe I don’t know that I know them; holler at me!).But the Jews have thousands of years more practice reading the Bible than we Christians do, and (unlike Christian fundamentalists) even hyper-Orthodox Jews are likely to approach scripture as a rich, varied, mysterious landscape. This is one I’m still starting out in, but for now I recommend Abraham Heschel and anything you can find about midrash.

Let the questions be. I think sometimes we talk about “bringing our questions to God” but don’t actually…do it. Do you shy away from your questions? Or do you write them down, let them niggle, say them out loud? Look, sometimes the answers will come; often, they won’t. But none of this is about being certain, and it’s definitely not about being right. It is good and humbling and exciting to have unanswered questions. Find contentment there.

Take a break. I wrote about this last week, but someone is still waiting for permission. A lot of the Shoulds in your life are lies. The Bible will be there when you get back. You can walk with God without the Bible. You can walk with God without most things you Should do. God is gracious and God is not at the end of a checklist and God is not a genie trapped in the Bible. Take a walk. Phone a friend. Rediscover painting. Someday scripture will call you back; but for now, loose your white-knuckle grip on it. Let it be free.

It’s Complicated: A Bible Story

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For twenty years I loved the Bible. And then, one day, I didn’t.

I don’t think you can explain to a non-religious person what it is like to spend your life steeped in a single book. Or even to a committed religious person for whom Scripture is secondary; a hyper-devoted Trekkie or Harry Potter rereader might be better able to understand how a text can become a part of you, how bits of it might pop into your mind at any moment and how the grand sweep of its narrative becomes the ordering principle for your own life.

I don’t mean this in a rigid, dogged way. Yes, I gave that leather-bound book a lot of authority in my life, and I cared deeply about following it just as I cared deeply about being a good girl in every other way; but I also recognized fluidity, mystery, discernment in the translation of these ancient texts to today’s world. The more I grew familiar with the Bible, the more surprising and inspiring and convicting it became. Since thirteen or fourteen, maybe, I had learned as much about myself as about anything else from its pages. It asks you to ask questions, and then it asks them right back at you.

And so, when I started the required Bible classes for my college degree, I thought I was ready. Even when I realized Biblical scholarship wasn’t going to be a bag of tricks that put a new spin on every verse, I still knew that context would make my understanding of every verse deeper. And even when my teachers demolished my beliefs about the Bible’s origins and authorship, I took a few days to regroup but easily felt that this book was still fundamentally trustworthy.

I graduated with ten Bible classes under my belt, despite infamously bad relationships with both of my Greek teachers; one of my most profound encounters with the Bible happened through a fifteen-page paper in my final semester of senior year. I was as enamored as I’d ever been. My studies had made my grasp of these texts infinitely more careful and nuanced, yet I still heard the Holy Spirit through them. And I still felt that there was a unifying message in all of it, something comforting and challenging and inspiring that I could offer to myself and others in any situation.

Then life happened.

Over the next four years, I would experience betrayal, and those Psalms would just lie flat on the page instead of bringing comfort. The people and places I met would challenge my overdeveloped sense of morality, and the Bible would only sow more confusion. Yet more Bible classes would force me to sit with the ugliest parts of the scriptures and deal with the terrible oppression they had engendered throughout history. Reading the Bible for personal reasons during seminary felt like when you’ve planted too much squash in your garden: pretending you really love eating zucchini as a snack when you’ve already had it for breakfast and lunch every day this week. I could not listen to sermons and devotionals and blog posts without involuntarily annotating them in my mind. Well, when you look at the Greek, what you’re saying about this word doesn’t make a lot of sense… I suppose you could say that about God in this instance, but I bet you’re going to skip over the part three chapters later where he does the opposite…

A couple of times in my life, the process of “growing apart” from a certain friend, however natural it was that we’d both changed, has brought me immense pain. This was one of them. I didn’t know how to be Christian without the Bible, but after a few years of these frustrations I could no longer handle the exhaustion of trying to wrestle meaning out of these words.

Into this mess came a great gift: the gift of silence. After so many collapses under the Bible’s weight, God (who generally seemed absent in those days) came by to say, Here. Let me hold that. I was left with an embarrassingly cliche realization that I am starting to think I will always continue to have: I couldn’t have believed, let alone admitted it, but I was still treating life as a puzzle and the Bible as an answer key. I thought I was OK with not knowing, but I hadn’t really learned to live without certainty. Meanwhile, my calling had never been to love and honor the Bible, but that’s what my priority had been. It had now come between me and God, between me and other people, and I had to let it go for a while.

It is two or three years later and I am only just resuming a steady relationship with all those ancient stories of God. I can only now hear a sermon on its own terms before interspersing layers of criticism and corroboration. And if you are worried about my soul after so long keeping Scripture at arm’s length, here is a thing I read this morning.

18 Once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them, “Who do the crowds say I am?”
19 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life.”
20 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Peter answered, “God’s Messiah.”
21 Jesus strictly warned them not to tell this to anyone. 22 And he said, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”

See, for so long, there were crowds in my mind, all telling me who Jesus was. They came to church with me and to bed with me, telling me how to categorize Jesus in order to make sense of him. But that was never going to be the way to know Jesus; there was only the way Peter took. To follow in his footsteps, day after day, not really knowing where we were going or why. To whisper about him sometimes with other disciples. To ask him questions and receive cryptic replies. To watch him in prayer. Because if your answers come too easily, you have to wonder if you’ve really been paying attention. Because your answer might have to haunt you for a while before you’ll admit that it could cost you your life. Because you know, in the end, that you will not possibly be able to truly understand your own answer, no matter how many other things you think you comprehend.

I think I am not done here. I want to be more practical and specific about how I navigated all this, and I expect I’ll do that in next week’s post. If you want to receive a handy email when it’s live, go on over to form in the sidebar, check both of the little checkboxes, and sign up!

I am lonely and it is OK.

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There is a thing we do not always like to tell people who are graduating from high school or college, with the result that they hear of it in whispers and snatches—a specter they, too, try to ignore. And some of them escape it; they go home, or they go to graduate school, plopped down into a new life with a readymade cohort of like-minded young people. But most of us go to jobs in cities new to us, seeking adventure and success, and we find them, but we also encounter that specter. Its name is loneliness.

There are different kinds of loneliness, but we do not have names for them. It would be nice if we did. If we could throw out an offhanded comment like, ‘I’ve got a bit of the usual topodoloria that one expects three weeks after moving somewhere new,” instead of having to stay mum or else burst out: “I wish one single thing felt familiar in this place besides the coffee mug I’m carrying around obsessively because it reminds me of home.”

We need words for the loneliness of a long-distance relationship, the unreasonable rage at happy, cuddling couples when it is still weeks til you hold your person and something finally unknots inside of you. The ache of being single and wanting not to care, but thinking you would do anything to avoid one more engagement photo in your feed. The effort of trying not to weep at a party because you only wish you had people to feel safe with. The disappointment of a perfect summer evening when you have no one to give a beer on your porch.

Why does saying “I’m lonely” feel like admitting weakness, like if you had to foist the news on people that you had a disease? In a culture so far removed from the tribes and villages that have held most humans in history—a culture designed for loneliness—we don’t know how to talk about it. (I imagine this conundrum is even worse if you are male.) So we eat food or watch porn or shop to assuage the emptiness. We scroll social media looking for the rush of momentary connection. We hit the gym or log extra work hours because if we can’t feel fulfilled, maybe we can at least appear successful.

Well, everybody, I’ve done all those things and they were hardly even momentary fixes and I am done being afraid of it. I’m lonely. And it’s not because my existing friends (or my husband) are inadequate; and it’s not because I am abhorrent; and it’s not that I am inordinately needy. I fall well within the normal human range of neediness. Here is why I am lonely: because I moved. Because people my age move constantly in my culture and no one is supposed to make a big deal out of it. But you don’t find and love and trust your people overnight, the people who make you snort-laugh and tell you when you’re being dumb and are good at giving you gifts. It takes a lot of friend dates, awkward party situations, mild rejections by people who are too busy for you, testing of sense-of-humor waters, weekend nights hiding with Netflix because it’s all so exhausting. What it takes, like anything worth building, is time and effort.

Meanwhile, you will be lonely. At least some of the time, it will occur to you that you’d like to share something with someone, and there will not be anyone, and it will ache.

Here is how to live with the ache:

First, you must ignore your feelings. Not the ache itself, but the momentary feelings that keep you from making and being a friend. Read this article. Trust the rational voice in your head—the one telling you that calling a faraway friend is what you need when you’ve reached the end of your feeds; or that that one person deserves a third or fourth chance even though you’ve already grabbed a magic marker to label them annoying; or that drinking alone is unhealthy and it would be better to walk, bake, or color through that ache.

Then you really must put on your confident pants and go to the damn party. (Or the church, or the meetup, or the networking event.) Yes, you will be out too late and spend several awkward minutes standing alone next to the food table. Yes, there will be obnoxious people and fake people there. But the people you’re wishing for aren’t going to come knocking; they’re putting on their pants to go to the party and maybe make small talk with you and maybe accept your invitation to coffee or trivia. Think of your beautiful friends walking around other cities and going to other parties. Your people are out there.

Trust the process. Be patient with friendships in early stages. Grow a plant from a seed. Be faithful to the little tasks of tending them. Know that the ache, though overwhelming, will not overwhelm forever.

In the meantime, pray and pray and pray. Jesus was so lonely, dear heart. How often have you wished for the head space to reach toward him? Let the ache push you to God. Be still. Pray for others. Is this not a gift, to ache for connection, to feel the gaps in the universe where we have been broken from each other? Grow more tender and more grateful. Become a person with names for lonelinesses, and give the gift of recognition, and look the lonely in the eye and share something with them. We are already more connected than we can know.

How to Be At Home in Discomfort: 1,000,000 Easy Steps

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Boston will never be—if I had lived there ten years, would not have been—home. But I will always love it like I can never love another place. When I was in high school, I dreamed of being a young professional there, of living in a historical brick home and riding the train; lazing afternoons on the Common and laughing over takeout with friends in my garret. I never have a stronger urge to go back to talk to a former self, purely for the joy of seeing her face. When I think of those high school dreams, I am at once in awe that I achieved them and astounded by how small they were. How could high-school-me fathom becoming one of those bike commuters whizzing down Beacon Hill, dodging Duck Boats? Or working in the city’s underbelly as a caterer in the basements of its best museums?

Of course, I don’t think I could tell her about the highs of a night skyline in summer without the lows of predatory landlords and an exhausted hour-long commute at 2 A.M. The very specific loneliness of being crushed by people on the sidewalk, and how it doesn’t feel less lonely to know that they’re all lonely, too.

No one has ever really asked me what locals do in Boston, but high-school-me would. I would tell her that if you are middle-class or better off, you go to graduate school. I played an ultimate stereotype—passing through the city, using it for its books, and leaving more liberal than I came—but Boston never once derided me for sticking to that tired script. At least, I would tell myself, I had a dirty job. At least I walked many miles on my days off, til the map was part of me.

Other things locals do: put 80% of your income toward rent and heat. Crowd the neighborhood bar that has the cheapest Sam Summer once the temperature in your place tops 95. If you live on the green line, plan your days around the Sox, Celtics, or Bruins. If you do not live on the green line, refuse to ride the green line. Swear.

You see now, whenever I try to describe my fondness for Boston I tell only gritty, boring, maybe-depressing scenes. Maybe because everyone knows the bright, idyllic Boston I met in high school: sailboats on the Charles and rapturous cannoli. But it is also because I went to The North to get out of my Comfort Zone, and Boston did it for me—three years of unceasing discomfort.

Boston was full of people demanding I confront my privilege without offering an inkling as to how. It was also fond of judging my home states while itself remaining demonstrably among the country’s most racist, most segregated places. Boston gave me several weeks inventing new food combinations until I could buy groceries with the next paycheck. It was one spiritual or theological or identity crisis after another, culminating in my own personal Great Evangelical Betrayal.

All of that—it was a gift: much more than I bargained for, indeed. And through all of my throes and thrashing, Boston held me without sentiment and without judgment. Now there are sides of me that only the Charles knows. There are places I’d put my own historical markers: on this site in 2014, Lyndsey learned to be friends with women. Here, here, here, and here, she realized things were going to be OK. L and L once walked a marathon in a weekend, which began and ended here.

If you want to visit the shiny, nice, historical Boston, I can tell you where to go and wish you a very good time. But if you want to visit my Boston, I will tell you: walk and walk, then keep walking. Ask why things are the way they are. Tell the Charles you are in love with him. Get very sweaty and lost. Buy bread in the North End. Realize you have gone much too far. Then turn around and come back. And when you arrive wherever you started, and you are terribly exhausted and your bread is gone and you are grateful for a place to just be, then you are there. Share a three-dollar bottle of wine with someone and toast the safety of a cyclist and belatedly thank God, who happens to be around, for the bread. Swear. Swear especially if it makes you uncomfortable. It is good not to be so delicate; and so this Boston will make you a better person—a better lover—in the end.

This post was inspired by Tsh Oxenreider’s At Home in the World, a book about home and other beloved places and a nine-month trip around the world with three kids. I love her Art of Simple life-vision, so I can’t wait to see how it translates to the un-simple endeavor of travel with family.

Where were you on the night he was betrayed?

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I am not at all convinced that I won’t become Catholic or Orthodox someday. I love the Great Feast of Eucharist; the sense of tradition that connects us to so many places and times; the seasons, feasts, and fasts that we Episcopals are a bit lax about keeping. But if I do stay Anglican, it will be because Communion was enough. I need—I believe we all need—faith to come to us in bread and wine.

Because I love Eucharist so, much of the more terrible church-related pain in my life has been Communion-related: people denying one another Eucharist for reasons I saw as unfair. But through these great hurts, because I love Eucharist so, I understood, too: not the desire to become a gatekeeper, exactly, but to protect something sacred from a flippant and entitled world.

In my first year after college, I worked for a beautiful and holy and love-dealing church who taught me very much by being Christ to me, My main complaint was that this church did not have Communion near often enough, and when they did there was something I found disturbing. The ten or so kids in the congregation went zooming around the church whenever any activity took place, which was fine, except that it was the same during Communion—and they would sort of rip off hunks of bread as they passed by. They seemed to have no sense at all that this was special bread, and something inside me felt a physical jab whenever a piece was hacked off, crumbs flying. I wanted them to care about Jesus’s body. I think there is much to be gained by receiving something as a gift, in both hands; by learning solemnity.

I think of those kids when we have debates about who can be a part of church. It seems keeping people out often comes with good intentions, the desire to do things “decently and in order.” And even when you understand why people want to invoke grace, you also want to protest—in one sense, I know that it is silly to believe the attitude, knowledge, holiness with which I approach the Lord’s table each week is so very much greater than those kids’. Still, that seems like no reason to do nothing. Shouldn’t the church at least try to offer our best when we obey Jesus’ commandment to remember him?

Remember me, Jesus would whisper when those kids made me anxious. It is a gift. It was a gift even on that night when he was betrayed, offered to the clueless, the halfhearted, the sleepy, the deniers and the betrayer. He did not say take a decorous amount and eat, only Take, eat; this is my body. Did one of them giggle at the strangeness of these words, the nervousness of hearing him insist he would soon die? Did the servants, perhaps, gather up the remnants like the unbaptized do after Orthodox service—and was it not life to them as well?

When I remember Jesus, I am compelled to take this bread with fear and trembling; and whatever children are in my charge will be taught to do the same. But when we remember Jesus, we are also steered firmly into the grace business, into giving even when giving is indecorous. On the night when he was betrayed, Jesus said, over and over, keep my commands and my command is this: that you love one another. And he washed feet. And he did not want to be honored or protected.

So  when it comes to impertinent children, sinners and doubters and outsiders, I am hard pressed to say we should not err on the side of take and eat. If it makes us wince to have our sense of ceremony violated; even if we want to cry don’t do it! when the chief of sinners reaches out to touch his body, let us not take up swords of defense but instead go with that offender a second mile. Let us take hands, ask questions, and find in the end that (of course) the chief of sinners is us. We do not remember Jesus best by limiting our tables; we meet the humble Lord every time he is broken and shared again. Here is a debt that cannot be repaid by respectability, but might be honored by scandal. Here is Eucharist: given to us in our unworthiness, reawakening us to thanksgiving.

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As a kid I was an incurable reading addict. The worst thing that could happen to me was being grounded from books. Several times my parents punished me in this way, forcing me to read at school and in closets with one ear perked for footfalls on the carpet; I really did not know how to live without reading for hours every day.

Once I’d finished my stack of library books, I would raid my parents’ shelves, and I ended up reading a lot of Christian books about leadership. A lot of them had good things to say, but they also tended to be at odds with themselves. Be humble, they said, while also making it clear that leaders are Very Important People. Listen to God, they said, while also impressing upon readers the urgency of Casting Visions for Big Things. At the time, though, I didn’t notice the contradictions; I came away with a very clear idea of how Christians and churches are supposed to approach leadership.

  1. If you want to be a leader, God is calling you to be a leader. “Here I am, Lord, send me,” and all of that.
  2. Leadership is about servanthood: listening, learning, caring for people, and sharing credit or glory. (While this is beautiful, these guys never mentioned that women, who are trained to do these things from birth, might need to focus on other skills.)
  3. Successful leadership is evidenced by the growth of a church or program.

Of course these authors used scripture to support their points. But that’s not necessarily where the ideas came from. The ideas appealed to people like me because they reflected us back to ourselves; they corresponded, respectively, to:

  1. The upper-middle-class values of mobility and power.
  2. The Christian values of humility and love.
  3. The capitalist values of growth and metrics.

Look, I sincerely believe there is a place for all of those values in some churches at some times. But we have to at least try to sort them out.

These days I’m still sometimes surprised at how much more diverse the Bible’s pictures of leadership are than those books made them out to be. I’ve been studying Gideon lately, for instance, and when I first got to his story I was ready to skim through: Gideon is afraid, but God gives him these crazy signs involving a fleece, so he takes a very small army into battle, they smash some jars and win. But it turns out his story is actually much longer, weirder, and more complicated than that.

The surprises start at the very beginning of the story. Gideon is hiding from the Midianites when some kind of angel comes to him and says, “The LORD is with you, valiant warrior.” And Gideon is not like, “here I am, send me!” The first two things Gideon says directly contradict what this messenger just said. He literally says, “If the LORD is with us, why do we have all these problems?” And the messenger “turns to him” and goes, “For real, you’re going to go get rid of the Midianites because I’m telling you to.” And Gideon says, “I don’t think so; I’m not a mighty warrior.” Then he asks the messenger for a sign. In fact, by the time Gideon finally goes into battle, God will have sent him five different signs about all this.

Once he gathers an army, God tells Gideon to make it smaller by sending home everyone who is afraid; we’ll see later that Gideon should truthfully be sending himself home. God cuts the army down again so that Gideon is left with only 300 men. With some more reassurance from God, he leads a surprise attack on the vast Midianite army, which God throws into confusion and Gideon’s band defeats.

Biblical scholar Juliana Claassens notes that there’s a shift at this point in the story. Up until now, God has been the primary actor, Gideon a reluctant follower. But when he leads the attack, he instructs his men to shout, “For the LORD and for Gideon!” Maybe that’s not a big deal on its own, but from here on, God is nearly absent from the story. Gideon has driven off the Midianites, and now he embarks on what is revealed to be a revenge mission: he ends up killing a bunch of people along with some Midianite rulers. Then when he returns to Israel, they try to make him king, and he refuses. He says the right answer: that God will be their king. But he doesn’t really give God the credit for the victory, and he’s already stolen the show that was, perhaps, supposed to have ended with that first victory. The defeat of Midian never inspires the nation to repent from idolatry or worship God; instead, they give Gideon a bunch of gold and end up worshipping the thing he makes from it.

Maybe it’s hard to say what exactly any of this “means” for us; if it were easy, pastors would preach out of Judges more often. The book depicts the nation in a downward spiral that really begins in earnest with the second half of this Gideon story, and we’re not sure what to say or think about that.

I think, though, if you read through these three long chapters and pay close attention to God, you’ll catch the thread of a tragedy here. Gideon, who had been utterly dependent on God, who had heard God’s reassuring voice so clearly before, caught up in a wave of hubris. He probably even thinks he’s doing the right thing by pursuing the rulers who had oppressed his people; but while he’s pursuing his agenda and enjoying the adoration of his followers, God has gone silent.

I’m coming to believe that all the great heroes of our faith are people who have escaped this oh-so-familiar cycle of distraction. It’s not because they are rigorous theologians or cross-referencing Bible readers and it’s certainly not because they’ve adopted the values of growth and power. It’s because they’ve made a point, every day, to hear and obey God’s voice. All their teaching, writing, fighting for justice, all the things we see and adore them for, grow out of that secret, sacred time with the God who comes to those who wake up, every morning, remembering their great need for him.

https://www.lyndseymedford.com/5268-2/

the strongest temptation in my life right now

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I’m always fascinated by Jesus in the wilderness and confused by those three temptations. I mean, the bread one makes sense. That is a gripping scene: Jesus, literally starving, while your preferred image of The Devil whispers visions of warm, crumby, yeasty goodness in his ear. But then this devil character goes off the rails with his temptations. Maybe we expect him to offer Jesus some porn or the opportunity to insult a childhood enemy. Instead, he starts dragging him all over the world! How many people—let alone starving people—really want all the kingdoms of the world? And how is throwing yourself off a tower a “temptation” at all?

This week I’ve been reading this passage in Luke 4 along with the one before it, and the answer has suddenly become clear. Just before Jesus goes into the desert, he’s baptized by John, and there’s the spectacular scene: heavens open; dove enters stage left; THIS IS MY SON, WHOM I LOVE. WITH HIM I AM WELL PLEASED.  An epic moment.

Then Luke makes a huge rhetorical mistake. His story has all this momentum going and he breaks into… a genealogy.

You guys, I have recently become so weirdly enamored with the Bible, I decided to actually read that genealogy. And when I did, I discovered that Luke is a genius. When it was first written, this book would have been read out loud. You would have been dozing off, “…son of Mattathias, son of some other name, son of obscure Hebrew guy, son of David, son of blahblahblah, son of impossible pronunciation, son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, SON OF GOD.”

Luke is saying it twice in this chapter. Jesus is the Son of God. In a literal, special, and spiritual way, that’s, like, his title, and it means he’s divine. But also in the way that we are all the children of God, royalty molded from dust; he is human, and that, too, is what it means to be the son of God.

So Jesus has had this incredible, affirming experience, but then the Spirit takes him out into the wilderness. I think after forty days of desert dwelling, maybe that spiritual high has faded a little. Maybe Jesus is a bit wobbly. In his more parched moments, could he be asking himself whether he imagined the whole thing? And here comes the devil—right out of the gate with If you’re really the son of God… And therein lies the temptation.

Prove it.

I’m looking for a job, so every day I’m asked to prove my worth to people who don’t know me. But we feel the need to prove ourselves in a thousand little ways all the time. If you’re really a successful person, you’ll meet these project goals. If you’re really a good dad, your kids will be shiny and happy. If you’re really a woman, you’ll fit into size six. And we do it in church, too, all the damn time. Real Christians evangelize their friends. If you really love Jesus, you’ll give more dollars to this church.

Jesus was recently so sure of who he was, but now someone is calling him out. How much we want others to affirm our identities! How galling it is when someone won’t believe us, recognize our capacities, or treat us with respect until we pass their test. If I were Jesus, I would have turned the whole desert and the devil himself into bread. But Jesus, who has heard his own identity from the mouth of God, will live another hour by those words. And Jesus, who is himself being tried, will not put the Lord to the test. His identity is not up for debate. It is between him and God.

Friends, I can’t tell you what it has meant to me to sit with these passages this week. To stay with the truth that God has adopted me as her own, to finally shut out the clamoring voices of doubt. There is no other evaluation that matters.

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