God in the details

God in the details

We just learned that a colleague of ours—someone we considered a friend and “a good guy,” whatever that means now—has resigned as the minister of the church he has served for many years, following his recent arrest by police for soliciting prostitution.

As it happened, this Sunday’s Old Testament text was the story of David and Bathsheba—or “the wife of Uriah” as she’s more often called in scripture. I had already decided to preach on this one passage, not because it’s an easy story of wrongdoing on the part of a king who takes the wife of one of his soldiers and beds her, and righteousness on the part of the soldier who refuses the king’s invitation to sleep with his (the soldier’s) wife while there’s a war going on.

You see, the king had gotten his soldier’s wife pregnant and thus was trying to pass off the deed as that of the soldier by granting him a short leave at home. When the officer proves to be too honorable of a gentleman—“How can I spend the night with my wife while the other soldiers are in the field of battle?!”—the king then gets him drunk, assuming the soldier will do it while intoxicated.

But the soldier does not sleep with his wife even under the influence of alcohol, and so the king sends him back to the war and has him deliver a letter to the military commander. In the letter the king instructs the commander to position the soldier in the front line of fighting and then withdraw the other troops, leaving the soldier to be killed.

No, I decided to preach on this passage because it contains intimate details which don’t allow us to manipulate the big picture to suit our own agendas. One of those intimate details—diluted in some English-language translations—is that the king sent messengers to “take” the woman. That is, she’s abducted by a gang of servants. And as a female in this patriarchal society she has no choice, making this a description of rape. Another detail—it comes immediately after the king has ejaculated into his soldier’s wife—is that she has just had her period. In other words, she wasn’t pregnant to begin with.

As I read aloud this royal rap sheet to the congregation, they counted how many of the Ten Commandments King David manages to break: working backwards, he covets another man’s wife, he is deceitful, he steals his soldier’s wife, he commits adultery, and he has the soldier killed. He certainly doesn’t honor his parents by his actions.

Regarding the four other commandments—those having to do with God, who made David king in the first place—they prompt the question, “Where is God in this story?” God is not given an active role or mentioned by the narrator or any of the characters in 2 Samuel 11. Certainly a detail worth noting.

Has David assumed god-like power and authority? Does he objectify people and idolize his own status? Having earlier promised to serve God as ruler of God’s people, is David breaking that promise by his actions, thus taking the LORD’s name in vain?

As for remembering to keep one day holy, perhaps if David had attended to this weekly detail he might have remembered to honor his one and only God and to respect Bathsheba and her husband Uriah and all the other people effected by his behavior.

This especially holds true for those of us who work on the Sabbath.

Moving House

Moving House

My mother, who was born before 1937 and thus is no longer required to take off her shoes when she goes through airport security, is moving from the house that she and my dad moved into 21 years ago, to a house-like condominium near where my brother and his family reside. It’s a major move that involves putting her house up for sale, finding a new dwelling in a town 400 miles away, giving away and getting rid of several generations of stuff, packing up boxes and hiring a professional mover.

As she undertakes the multiple tasks of relocating, my emotions are all over the place.

It’s not that I’m attached to the house she’s vacating; I didn’t grow up in it.  But I do consider Nashville, Tennessee, where she’s moving from, to be my hometown. I was born in Memphis but don’t remember much about those early years of my life. Then we moved to Mobile, Alabama, for four years during which I started school. Then came Starkville, Mississippi, where my family endured three years before the great escape to “the Athens of the South.”

My family moved to Nashville forty years ago this summer so that come autumn my father could begin graduate school at Vanderbilt University. Neither of my parents had jobs to go to; we started out living on the ominous amount of $666 a month which my dad’s previous employer—the white Presbyterian church in Starkville that had ousted him over his support of civil rights for black people—was ordered by the presbytery to pay him for twelve months. My mother would eventually find gainful employment as a facilitator of the infant developmental program at The Kennedy Center of Peabody College. She helped babies who were developmentally delayed and worked with their families to stimulate their cognitive and physical growth, enabling some of these children to catch up to their peers.

It astonishes me now to think that during that summer of 1972, with both of my parents jobless, my family went on a big vacation trip out west. After we had unloaded all our worldly belongings into a rented house in Nashville, we loaded up our 1967 Volvo with a 10 x 10 feet tent, a kerosene stove and lantern, and six beer boxes which my mother had shellacked to make water-proof. Two boxes contained cooking utensils and food, and each of us had a box for our clothes and personal belongings. We drove from one national park or forest to another where we would spend days hiking, white-water rafting, horseback riding, reading, napping, and sitting around our campfire eating s’mores.

We had camping down to a science. We would pull into a campsite and—before other people towing a trailer could manage to back it into their site—my mom would unpack the trunk while I climbed onto the hood of the Volvo and opened the car-top carrier and lifted down to my dad and brother the rest of our equipment. Then as Mom geared up the stove and filled the collapsible water container, Dad and my brother and I would pitch the tent and blow up the air mattresses and arrange our sleeping quarters. As you entered the tent, my bed was always to the left of the door. At the foot of my bed and perpendicular to it was my brother’s bed. Next to him and in the opposite direction was my parents’ air mattresses and sleeping bags which zipped together. At the head of each bed was our respective beer box. My mother was usually the last person to change into her pajamas at night, after the lantern had been turned off, and we would sometimes shine a flashlight on her in the middle of disrobing. To scare away any wild animals, we would claim.

Now as my mother picks up stakes and prepares to live outside the South for the first time in her life—aside from the first year of their marriage when she and Dad lived in Edinburgh, Scotland—I find myself in awe of her courage to let go and move on. She’ll be saying good-bye to friends with whom she has shared many lifetimes. She’ll be saying good-bye to the metropolitan area that made great use of her talents as well as those of my father. And she’ll be saying good-bye to the Presbyterian congregation that four decades ago took us in and restored our faith in church. Second Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, is where I was confirmed as a member at the age of 13, where my mother transferred her church membership not once but twice, and where she was ordained an elder.

Nashville will always be my hometown, just like Louisville, Kentucky, will always be my mom’s hometown, even though neither one of us has relatives living there anymore. I look forward to visiting Mom in her new home in her new town and attending the church that takes her in. After she gets back from her next vacation.

What does freedom feel like?

What does freedom feel like?

I was sitting at a table one evening recently with my husband, my stepdaughter and son-in-law, and my two grandsons, when my heart all of a sudden gushed, "I give thanks for being adopted by this family." We happened to be eating in an Ecuadorian restaurant along the very international street of Central Avenue in the not-as-white-bread-as-it-sounds city of Minneapolis in the still-blue-despite-Michelle-Bachman state of Minnesota. One of us was born here (my stepdaughter); the rest of us hail from Tennessee, Oregon, Ohio, Ethiopia, and Thailand, respectively.  Only two of us (my stepdaughter and my husband) are related biologically. My spur-of-the-moment gratitude reminded me of something a campus minister once said to me: Regardless of where we come from, at some point in life we have to adopt our families.

This is true not only of kin but of country; wherever we come from, at some point we have to adopt our place in this world.

On May 25, 2012, the Scottish National Party launched its campaign for Scotland to become an independent country. The leader of the SNP (who is also First Minister of the Scottish Parliament), Alex Salmond, during an interview on BBC radio was asked, "What will freedom feel like?" He of course could only answer from a pre-independence perspective. I've been mulling over my response as a white European-American who was born in the South in the Jim Crow year of 1960, who at the age of 11 read "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown, and who celebrated Bicentennial Sunday, July 4, 1976, by signing a replica copy of the Declaration of Independence while serving on a church work camp on St. John's Island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina.

What does freedom feel like? Being adopted, taken in, welcomed, given a sense of belonging. It also feels like adopting a place as one's own, partaking of its cultural highs and lows, practicing being a gracious guest and host, remembering its collective sins and working to leave things better than they were—at personal cost to myself.

Freedom is an exhilarating enterprise, but it's also a heavy burden. It brings a sense of pride which cannot be imagined, as well as the temptation of hubris that too often thwarts its very essence. True freedom is when you can take it for granted—it's the air you breathe. Only like the wind you cannot capture it; trying to do so out of irrational fear or for "reasons of national security" leads to unhealthy consequences like war. Freedom never makes things safer, nor is it supposed to. Freedom means risking my life for a better quality of life for others—not just my blood relatives or fellow citizens, but my adopted family around the world.