They sat on a little Wedgwood tray on my my dresser, a special location. Every now and then I would consider wearing them, but face the same problem.

I brought them with me to Pennsylvania. Again, they sat on my dresser. I loved the memory of my friend thinking kindly of me and sending them, but I had long since given up on wearing them.

This morning, choosing jewelry, I looked at them again. I picked them up. I looked at the backs. I tugged on one and again failed to move it.

I directed my gaze through a different portion of my progressive lenses.

I tried to wiggle one of the backs. No luck.

I changed my viewing angle one more time.

And then I realized the problem.

These pierced earrings are screw backs.

I didn’t even know pierced earrings could *have* screw backs.

How many other things do I look at over and over, tug on and try to master, when I simply don’t understand how they work in the first place?

This applies to many, many situations in life, but especially to emotional conditioning. I lived many years thinking there was only one way to put on an earring, only one way to be a success at womanhood, only one way to please the people I believed I needed to please in order to be loved.

When you believe there is only one way to be right, it leaves myriad ways to be wrong. Trying to avoid all the wrong ways can become an obsession so deep it’s unconscious. The thing we have committed to seems obvious.

At long last, those earrings.

Just like the earring backs. Obviously, they were meant to be pulled off and pushed back.

No. They unscrewed. “Lefty loosey,” I told myself, and the backs were in my hands.

I’ve been unscrewing myself from old ideas and beliefs about myself for the same several years I have not been able to wear my earrings. I’ve been working hard at it, seeking a deeper understanding. I spent three months this winter writing about my life, to help myself get clearer about how I could have missed something so true. How did I manage to see it — to see myself — so wrongly?

By making sure I was right.

Those things are better, but the way I assume others might feel about me, the way I expect to be perceived by the world, the treatment I anticipate receiving really has not changed much. I’m still expecting push back.

Perhaps the lesson of the earrings is to take a different view of the world — to look for a little more lefty loosey, a little less pushing back.

Off to war.

(A sermon for Ascension Sunday–May 12, 2013–Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23–audio here, beginning at 27:35)

We’ve all lived those moments: the train leaves the station; the bus pulls away from the curb; the person we love starts the car, backs out of the driveway, and we watch for the kiss we hope they’ll blow. Times have changed, but I can still remember the days when we walked to the edge of the tarmac and watch my daddy climb the stairs to a Piedmont jet. I would wave and wave, trusting he would turn around one last time.

In the movies, we see romantic farewell embraces at the train station; we watch the lover follow the train down the platform. It’s such a common image, it’s been spoofed in movies from “Young Frankenstein” to “Airplane.” When the love interest doesn’t want her hair mussed by a kiss, or runs alongside a plane instead of a train, we know something is hilariously wrong.

Goodbyes are supposed to be meaningful and memorable.

When I deliver my older children to airports, or to bus and train stations, I bid them farewell expecting a return or a reunion. We do this so regularly, it feels normal. I remind the college students to text on arrival. In between visits, we connect via Skype or Facetime to keep up with what’s going on at home and in their other worlds. To his amazement, our college boy discovered he could send his mother flowers via the Internet. As he put it, “Crazy, right?”

Wherever we are, we are part of each other.

Stained Glass Clouds

For Jesus’ friends on that long ago day, it was a different kind of farewell. Their loved one moved out of sight on the Great Cloud Elevator that some believe will return him to us. It was not normal, unusual even for scripture, the first supernatural departure since the whirlwind lifted Elijah. If he waved, scripture does not record it.

If they ran behind him, or leapt to reach out for him, the author is kind enough not to expose them.

Jesus’ farewell is the beginning of a new story, the Acts of the Apostles. These Acts are an Epic Adventure! Lives will be lost along the way, and the world will be changed. For the adventure to begin, the leader needs to depart. And so we begin the book of Acts with our heroes grieving. They are stricken. They stand slack-jawed staring up into the sky. An amazing and wondrous and super-natural event occurred, right in front of them, but it also bereaved them, for the second time. How will they go on?

Like Luke, Acts begins with angels confirming a message from God. The two figures in white robes redirect the disciples just as the two men in dazzling clothes redirected the women at the tomb. Why do you look for the living among the dead? Why do you stand looking up into heaven?

In the first case, they explain something that is part of our understanding, reminding the disciples what Jesus said about his fate, that he would be tried and crucified and would rise again. We observe and remember these things each year with established rituals. We tell the stories. We share the Lord’s Supper. We strip the altar. We light candles, then extinguish them to symbolize the way Jesus’ friends deserted him. We pause and wait in the silence of death and the tomb. We bring flowers and trumpets into the church to celebrate the triumph of new life. We expect to do these things.

We do not have similar rituals for Ascension.

The second part of the speech of the men in the white robes does not feel so familiar. We do not grab this text out and use it for Children’s Sunday, building elevators we will re-use from year to year like a manger, lifting some child dressed as Jesus to the ceiling on a paper-decorated platform.

We do not go outside and stand in a field and look at the sky every Ascension Day, lighting candles and keeping vigil.

Now, let’s be clear. Perfectly faithful Christians, who agree on many other things, can and will disagree about what may have happened to the body of Jesus Christ after his death and resurrection. But even the most dubious of us can get behind the idea that life returns in the spring and with it a reminder that God gives us new life in unexpected ways, often when we have given up hope.

Salvador Dali

Ascension is trickier. It promises something we have not yet seen. “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:11b, NRSV) It remains a mystery. We don’t even mention it every year. Those of us who don’t hold tight to the notion that Jesus will come again are okay with that. We might like other versions of Jesus better. In Mark’s gospel, for instance, he tells us plainly, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” Get to it right now. No need for a second coming; no need to see him resurrected, either. His arrival is the story. The presence of God right here and right now is the story.

The author of Luke and Acts takes parts of Mark’s simple story and elaborates it for a Greek audience. The Great Cloud Elevator seems like a device from Greek theatre, the deus ex machina. That’s

“a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved, with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object… (In Greek drama) a crane (mechane) was used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage.”[i]

Here the crane, or the cloud, carries Jesus off-stage. For first-century people, it symbolized their cosmology. The divine place was above, and Jesus had to get there somehow. Life was a stage, with God in the fly space. We may think we know better, but it’s still hard to reckon exactly where God is. Among the stars? In our hearts? Somewhere in between? Crazy, right?

Practical people may not like this story. We like the apostles forming the first church community, naming Deacons and getting their mission program together for widows and orphans. We can picture them in up-close relationship with other people, helping the way we do when we contribute to New Hope, or work in the Community Garden, or visit the sick. We live in the now doing our best for Christ’s sake, not waiting for the Great Cloud Elevator to descend in glory.

Practical people may not like this story. We like our Jesus in the flesh, teaching in the synagogue, stirring up trouble, walking dusty roads with his friends, healing the sick, or sitting thirsty beside a well. We may not get to sit with him, but we can picture him, can’t we? We can picture him in up-close relationship with other people. Yet it’s a truth of our faith that his location is undisclosed, for now.

Christ’s farewell to the disciples, his trip on the Great Cloud Elevator, began our long-distance relationship with God’s right-hand man. History is full of such relationships. I remember being fascinated by the phrase “epistolary romance,” a relationship conducted by the writing of letters. We call it snail mail now. We expect more instant communication. Even email is too slow for the Smartphone set; they prefer text.

Before I married and moved here to Mechanicsburg, my own long-distance relationship relied on cards in the mail, but also on “Friends and Family” cell phone minutes and unlimited text messages and Google chats and conversations on Skype. Somehow, most of the time, we felt connected. But what we really wanted was to be in the same place.

Following him on Twitter doesn’t count.

How can we connect with Jesus? We can’t pick him up at the airport. We can’t send him a Facebook message. We can’t text him and expect a quick response. We must employ more old-fashioned forms of communication to reach him. We read about him in scripture. We pray to him with words and in silent intensity. We worship, singing songs that express our feelings. Most importantly, we live in community together as his body. Christ is the guiding head. We are his hands and feet in the world. He is part of us; we are part of him. We are far apart, but we are intimate.

Jesus assured the disciples, in his last words to them, that understanding the details about his body and God’s timing doesn’t matter so much. Go out and be witnesses, he says, fueled by the power of the coming Spirit. Go out and have the Epic Adventure of being Christ’s Church. Live into the wonder of a long-distance relationship that commands new connections in the here and now, connections that show God’s love not just in word but in action.

Don’t stand around staring up at the clouds. Get out there and show the Good News of God’s love. Make some up-close relationships, in Christ’s name. Amen.

All my life, I’ve had eczema. At its worst, in a flare, it spreads all over the place. The last time it was that bad, I found myself quite unconsciously rubbing my shoulder blades up and down a door jamb.

Job and the Missus (Jusepe de Ribera, 17th Century)

It felt awful enough that I thought of Job and his potsherds. The terrible itch came up from deep places; it needed digging out and scraping off.

The trouble is scratching makes the itch worse.

Before we launch into dozens of chapters of poetry, Job is a short story, a fable about a man coming to grips with undeserved suffering. He scrapes at his sores while sitting on the ash heap. When his wife comes to him and, in her own excruciating grief for the loss of their family, tells him to curse God and die, Job remains faithful.

I want to be that person. I strive to be that person, receiving even suffering with equanimity where God is concerned.

But sometimes I still end up rubbing my shoulder blades against the door jamb.

Here’s the thing: almost all suffering is undeserved; almost all suffering simply arises from the human condition. We have an auto-immune disorder. We lose the baby. The roads were slick. The other driver was drunk, or inexperienced, or simply driving too fast. Life itches, and scratching the itch hurts us more.

I remember Job when the little red bumps reappear. I smooth salve on my forearm. I breathe. I take the bad with the good. I pray for patience. I breathe again and try not to make things worse.

(A reflection on Job 1:1, 2:1-10. This is one of my reflections for The Abingdon Creative Preaching Annual for 2015, the project I’m working on right now.)

Meanwhile, two other ball caps drove the search for the Boston Marathon bombers. The white cap, in particular, stood out in photos. In a scene out of the movies, the FBI and other authorities gathered in a hotel to scour thousands of images and videos from private surveillance cameras, professional and amateur photographers, and the offerings of ordinary people much like me who can’t stop snapping pictures with their phones. In this time-stamped world, some picture would surely show enough to make a case. Some image would reveal the perpetrator’s identity.

My identity is multi-fold. I am a Christian pastor (UCC flavor), a writer, a wife and mother, a Bernese Mountain Dog obsessive, a knitter of mostly socks, a Virginian by birth, an adoptee, a recovering Southern Baptist, a coffee drinker, a lesbian latecomer, a lover of books and music, a Volvo owner, a registered Democrat and a soon to be Smith College mom. Observing me on last week’s trip to Northampton might have provided insight into a few of these things. I drove the Volvo. I bought the ball cap. I shopped at WEBS, America’s Yarn Store. I pretty much chased down a woman walking a Bernese puppy.

If you asked my new neighbors in Pennsylvania about me, they might be able to get as far as the Volvo.

Since last week, we’ve heard stories from classmates and neighbors, car repair clients, guys at the gym. We’ve seen school pictures and boxing profiles and heard about a scene made at the mosque. In Cambridge, people proud of their diverse community cannot understand. They include everyone. There is so much variation of language and culture, religion and national origin. How could this happen?

We don’t know all the pieces. I left some off my list: raisin hater, New York GIANTS fan, trained Interim Minister, short, grey-haired, brown-eyed. On a hot dog, I like all the condiments. My ears are pierced, but it took more than one try.

Do you have a better picture of me now?

When I heard the news on Patriot’s Day – there’s another thing, for 25 years I lived in the only other state that celebrates it – when I heard the news, I first thought, “Please, whoever did this, let them not be Muslim.

Please, O God. Let it be someone else. Their perceived otherness is too easy, too reflexive and accustomed. Let it be a man whose wife left him for a marathoner, or a faux-Baptist or a white supremacist. We could identify with them instead of running the risk of condemning a whole religion. We could question our culpability, our resentments and prejudices and past injuries, all the things that can influence human behavior toward darkness.

For a short time, I felt close to the situation. I listened to the Thursday night press conference on NPR, in my Volvo, driving home from Smith. When I heard photos would be released, that they would be pictures of two young men, I wondered for a long, hard minute what it would be like to see my son in such a picture.

I have a son in Boston, age 22, studying at New England Conservatory. (There is no ball cap for a conservatory mom.) He was on the Orange Line with his clarinets, A and B-flat, when the bombs exploded. When he arrived at school, getting off the T at Mass Ave, he heard the news. His cellphone didn’t work, so we messaged on Facebook.

A few days later, for a long, hard minute, I pictured my son’s face. I had a heart for some other mother.

Soon we heard words associated with that mother’s family: Chechnya, Dagestan, places I’ve heard of but needed Google Earth to locate for sure. I hear Chechyn and remember a rebellion against the Soviet Union. I hear Chechnya and think violence. Despite my sympathy for people formed by countries where violence is so daily it is hardly news — imagine that — despite my sympathy for their suffering,I feel immediately free to take a big step back. Her cap says Marathon Bomber Mom. Not mine.

This change, this freedom, comes at a primal level, the one where I considered my own child’s safety last Friday morning, texting him before 6 a.m. to say the T was not running, learning he was already halfway to the station, breathing deeply again when he returned to his apartment. I would do anything to protect him, just as Dzhokhar and Tamerlan’s mother is trying to do in a press conference from Dagestan today.

In my higher mind, I continue to wish the bombers were not young Muslim men. I think about how it feels to have your name mispronounced, an experience familiar to me. I listen to Robin Young’s nephew talk on “Here and Now” about his high school friend from Cambridge Rindge and Latin; I see the picture of the two boys dressed up for prom. I reflect on the desire to celebrate his capture, certainly understandable and especially in Watertown, and the celebration of law enforcement. I feel relief that the tone of the local conversation is less about Islam than one might expect. I note the uniquely local ritual acts, Neil Diamond’s appearance at Fenway Park and the Red Sox in their uniforms proudly and simply reading Boston.

I wonder if either of the brothers ever wore a Red Sox cap?

I ponder the very small differences between first century Jews and Samaritans, and how from those small differences grew an abiding hatred. Jesus told a story about a Samaritan, encouraging his listeners to look beyond the identifying marks that bias us to the actual hearts of people.

It’s hard to make ourselves want to look into the hearts of young men who set their backpack bombs down next to children. I can’t pierce that darkness. It’s so easy to condemn reflexively. People I know to be intelligent and thoughtful Christians murmur about Islam, “I don’t like the attitude toward women.” “Isn’t there something … violent … there?”

But wait! Isn’t there something violent about many practitioners of *our* faith? Aren’t their people wearing our team colors who also oppress women? I don’t like to be identified with them anymore than imams in Boston want to be identified with the Tsarnaev brothers.

After a week of listening to news and commentary, here’s what I know about the young man in the white cap. He is 19, and in the hospital. He is in terrible, terrible trouble for committing a horrific act while automated cameras unwittingly made a record of it. His identity will forever be Murderer, Terrorist, Bomber.

I admit, I find it hard to pray for the young man in the white cap and his mother. I’m interested in the psycho-social mysteries that beg for solving. Deservedly disgruntled immigrants? They wouldn’t be the first. Displaced persons who never found a sense of home? Sleeper agents? Pursuing these theories keeps me at a distance, and that dark distance of perceived differences breaks the world in pieces.

I find it hard to pray for him, for his dark heart. If he knew what he was doing — how could he not know what he was doing? Yet the hope of forgiveness extends to him, by God’s grace.

My heart is pierced, but it took more than one try. God can pierce our darkness. Forgiven. It would look pretty smug on a ball cap, but it’s assured for all who open their hearts to God. That’s my hard-won prayer for Dzhokhar, that someday he will wear a different cap. I have a picture of it in my head, a white cap with red letters, a sign of the hope and grace we all need, an identity God grants to every one of us.

(Also posted at There is Power in the Blog.)

There’s something compels me. I suspect I’m looking for a crumb of reason in the unreasonable, a word of sense in the insensible, a thread of comprehension in the incomprehensible.

I had been watching for just a few minutes when I said aloud, “Oh, whoever did this timed it for the ordinary runners to be coming by.” When FBI profiler Clint van Zandt said exactly the same thing on MSNBC an hour later, did I feel better? No. I felt sadder. But I kept listening.

I’m trying to understand. It’s a coping technique for a crisis. It makes the time go by until the shock passes. It might be better to turn off the TV and cry, I realize that. But that feels dangerous and helpless, and I want to be informed and useful. I’m actually not watching most of the time. I’m listening to the talking, not looking at the images.

Last night, I got in bed, alone because kathrynzj is on a mission trip being actually useful, and instead of closing my eyes, I kept reading the Twitter feed and the Facebook newsfeed, and the live blogs for the Boston Globe and the New York Times (Boston Marathon stories free from both, now! for a limited time!). Real journalists are pretty good about warning readers away from  graphic images, but self-described social media stars don’t have rules, and tweets only have 140 characters, and who knows why people do what they do, but I clicked on a link, and I cannot unsee what I saw when the next window opened.

I expected a story, because I was looking for a story. I think words will solve something.

I knew better than to click on anything that labeled itself twitpic or anything  similar.

But there it was, on a screen held close to my face, an image I cannot unsee.

a puzzlement

Now, seeing it is nothing compared to living it. In parts of the world where these things happen more often, average folks are looking at the gruesome pictures and not holding back, because they’ve seen horror in the street, maybe in the front yard, and they are hardened to it. I don’t want to see these things. I actually can’t take them in very well. I’m a word person. I was looking for words, but I realize that all my efforts to gain some intellectual understanding of the events of yesterday, all the theories and the family stories and the eventual solution to the puzzle we will someday hear will do nothing to change them.

Tonight’s news featured a mother talking about how wonderful her daughter was, her daughter who is now dead.  I find this excruciating, the testimony of grieving mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters. Maybe it makes things real for them in a way that nothing else can? Maybe the attention of the world makes them feel they are not alone. I don’t know. I do know I cannot unsee them, unfeel them. They make me look at the giant jigsaw puzzle of currently indistinguishable pieces. They make me feel what happened instead of trying to listen to it gingerly.

I wonder what drives the people who do these things, what words are in their heads, what images are in their minds. What is it they cannot unfeel, what is it they cannot unsee that drives them to destruction?

This is the place where I should preach, isn’t it, where the essay turns to God, where I refer you to Revelation and the wiping away of every tear, or to John and the notion that sheep who actually hear Jesus’ voice would never do such things, but I’m not there yet. It’s trustworthy that I will be, at some point, in that Revelation place, or walking through the valley of shadow fearing no evil in Psalm 23, and yes, these are the texts this week.

But I always have to try and solve it myself first.

I don’t recommend this strategy.

Adé Béthune’s Good Shepherd

Better to turn to the other words, to murmur the version you remember from your grandmother’s funeral, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shalt fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”

Actually, just typing them comforted me, so much that I’m not going to check and be sure I got the King James Version exactly right. There is some comfort in knowing them, in an illogical sense of connection to uncounted women and men and children who have done their crying out to the same incomprehensible God who we try to size down to a shepherd, knowing that somewhere, someone else felt comforted, too.

I want to think it helps more than telling a story on TV. But maybe television testimonials are the Psalms of Lament for the 21st century, the rite of mourning that makes us part of the community.

The one I loved was kind and lovely and thoughtful and fun. 

Why, Lord, why?

The end of her life came too soon.

Why, Lord, why?

He never did a thing to hurt anyone.

Why, Lord, why?

I cannot understand what’s happened here.

Lord, where are You? 

Why is Your world so terrible and so beautiful, 

all at the same time? 

Where are You?

Have we done too many things You cannot unsee?

I know, I know. It’s a pre-scientific worldview, gnostic even. We know better than to think heaven is out there; we know the cosmic expanse of space and the composition of clouds and the conflict between belief and knowledge.

Spooky Jesus on the Cloud Elevator

But look! He is coming with the clouds!

Today in South Central Pennsylvania, the clouds were thin, not much more than a veil paling the blue spring sky. Trees are budding, although it has been terribly cold at night, which is hard on pansies. The sun shines, even so, and we embrace the idea that spring is coming, is here, despite the chattering teeth and winter coats at the Little League field last night.

We’re waiting on something we want, desperately. We want warm weather, daffodils in bloom, an April that makes sense.

After twenty-five years in Maine, I’ve grown more patient, even philosophical.

After many more years watching for Jesus, I am also patient.

“All the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be.” (Revelation 1:7, some of it)

We don’t want that.

We don’t want the days it’s too humid to go outside, either.

We’re seeking a snapshot moment — Jesus returns! Look, the tulips! The baby can sit up by herself!

The next thing you know, she crawls away, mosquitoes bite, and the tribes wail. We can’t hold the ideal moments. They always lead to something else.

(20, 11 and 15-wow)

In my backyard in Maine, everything came late — first the forsythia, then the flowering apple tree, then the lilacs. As spring turned the corner toward summer, the rhododendrons out front finally bloomed, the last ones in Portland because of their shaded environment. We took a lot of pictures in front of those rhododendrons, vibrant purple and overgrown long before it was our house. Day came when we had to cut them down lest they grow across the front steps — a moment that felt apocalyptic — an ending.

The tribe wailed.

What’s the platonic ideal you seek, the snapshot moment? On Patmos, John dreamed of the day Jesus would return on the cloud elevator and set things right, so beautifully and clearly God’s own self and Jesus at the same time that no one could ever question it again. It’s a pretty cool dream if you don’t like things the way they are, if you’re hungry or homeless, oppressed or neglected, or very very sure your particular Jesus team is the right one.

It’s also a primitive dream, isn’t it? Someone said he was lifted up to heaven, in the clouds, so to get back, he has to come down again.

For us, the cosmology feels all wrong.

But I’m a cloud-watcher anyway.

Also a pansy-watcher.

It He’s around, I’m determined to see Him. And if I wait, I’d like to think it will be with relief.

We’ve locked the doors and sat around our own tables, fearful, haven’t we?

• Will our neighborhood ever feel safe again?
• Will the storm knock out the power?
• Will the Soviets attack and invade and change our way of life?

I’m old enough to remember the 1980s, “Red Dawn” version of that last fear, the one that had people in my house reading books about living off the grid, my excuse for buying copies of all my favorite children’s books so my children (some merely speculative at that time) could read the classics when the libraries were turned into God-knows-what.

Anxiety gets us worked up enough; when there’s a good reason to be afraid, for real, our brain chemistry can rearrange our judgment.

It had to be that way in the house where the disciples locked the doors. According to John’s gospel, Jesus drew attention and trouble from the beginning of his ministry. Their Jesus waltzed into the Temple in Chapter Two and laid it down. When he returned later, he vanished his way to safety, inspiring murderous rage in the religious leaders.

The disciples knew it. They felt it. Jesus was dead, but things were no better.

They locked the doors.

But someone went out to get news and supplies. Someone had to do it, like my wife making the last trip to the Giant in the freezing rain a few weeks ago. Better get it done.

Since someone particular missed the visit from Reappearing Jesus, no more restrained by locked doors than by death, we may deduce the one who went out for whatever they needed was Thomas.

So when you go to preach this Sunday, or you sit in the pew and listen to this passage being read, remember he did more than doubt.

He risked.

• He offered himself up to die with Jesus. (John 11:16)
• He asked the direct, even obvious, question. (John 14:5)
• He left the safe house. (John 20:24)

He even risked when he expressed his doubts. Imagine how hard that must have been, in the midst of his rejoicing comrades!

Listen and read carefully. Does he ever touch the wounds? He risks one more time, declaring “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28)

You Won’t See Me Jesus gives him one more push; he gives it to all of us. “Believe in me,” he says, “whether I appear in body or not. That’s faith.” (John 20:29, Revised Songbird Version)

But they kept looking, and John tells us they had breakfast with him on the beach, and maybe other places, too.

In this liminal time of the Fifty Days of Easter, I’ll be looking for Him. You never know what might happen when you go out to get the paper.

“I believe!” said one.

“Have you lost your mind, Honey? Go back to bed.”

But I hadn’t lost my mind. I was groping, like the women so long ago, to express my joy at the unexpected. I’ve lived on the intellectual end of the theological spectrum, that place where we don’t believe a lot of the things we were taught as children, where we don’t take things literally, where we wonder, as I did on my first Holy Saturday as a preacher, what we believe about the bodily resurrection.

The choices I made in my personal life only added to the confusion, the rationalizing, the justifications. I believed something, but I didn’t want to be pushed too hard on it. After all, did it really matter? This man who was God — well, at times, I may have hedged on that, too. This man, this Jesus, had such an impact on human history. Something magnificent happened. God loves us. Alleluia! Etc.

But I woke this morning, while it was still dark, and in the darkness I read the words of another UCC pastor, backing away from the tomb much as I tried to do, and not to do, in the past, speaking to the doubts people may rightly have, and as I read, I thought, “No. I believe it. I believe it.”

Death had no victory.

The forces of darkness — whether human or supernatural — had no power to hold Him.

Instead of using his mighty powers to flee to the Third Heaven around 11:45 on Friday morning, he died. They buried him. And on Sunday morning the tomb was empty.

It may have sounded strange at the coffee maker, while it was still dark, somewhere between the first pot and the second. It certainly sounded strange on that long ago morning.

But I believe it. Christ is Risen!

Now the forces of darkness have no power to hold me. You either. I believe it. And I thank God for it.

They have no names in Luke, the followers from Galilee, the women who stood at a distance. A predictably stressful trip to the big city for the holiday became a disaster, dinner with trusted friends giving way to betrayal, arrest, a night without sleep as they waited for word. The new day brought no solace. They watched the cross carried, saw other women — who didn’t know him — wailing and beating their breasts, maybe the same ones who yelled, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

They watched the lots cast, his clothing divided by strangers, robes they brushed against serving at table the night before.

They watched and listened, heard the scoffing insults, read the sign over his head:

This is the King of the Jews.”

But this was the King of Love, speaking kindly to the criminal beside him. The women stood at a distance; even if they could not hear his words, they recognized his tone and his expression.

Their hearts tuned to his love, they did not run. They blinked back. They swallowed hard. They waited. They waited to see what the authorities would do, watched for a chance to care for his body. When they knew where he would be, they went to prepare the spices and ointments.

At the tomb, we will hear their names, but for today, remember how they followed and stood at a distance, fierce and waiting. Remember their perspective, not just their view of the terrible way he died, but their understanding of his life and their love for him. Remember their witness, their determined patience through the long, hard day.

I imagine they drew strength from him, but I imagine they drew it from each other, too. I imagine clasped hands, familiar postures, shallow breaths, faces set toward Jerusalem just like his.

They waited at a distance to do one more good service.

At worship,
I worship

I am not forsaken

But I am perplexed
attentive
seeking

I Google recipes
arrange itineraries
make shopping lists

carrots
asparagus
honey-baked ham

I write the litany of the holiday meal

jelly beans
chocolate bunnies
marshmallow Peeps

not quite a sacrament
but we will take and eat

I am not writing prayers
save this one:

Let the dawn bring life
and light
please
-not just to me-

but I would take some clarity
gladly
gratefully

Great List-Making Mother

if You could spare it