Sickness in the Community

The last five weeks at Boston Square, Elizabeth and I have been preaching from the book of James. James is a hard book to preach in part because James jumps around a lot. It’s more of a collection of proverbs and wisdom sayings than it is a letter that has a developing argument or a clear progression of thought. Because of this, it’s challenging to get a clear understanding of context with any particular passage.

There are, however, themes that repeat throughout the book that are helpful to keep in mind when reading the whole book, and there are a few principles that are clearly important to James. One of these is community. James opens by addressing his letter to “the twelve tribes scattered among the nations.” The “twelve tribes” conveys a sense of shared identity while the fact that they are “scattered” implies that there’s a togetherness that is missing—or maybe rather a togetherness that exists despite the challenge of geographical distance. Similarly, James ends his letter, seemingly abruptly, by talking about the importance of bringing back into the fold anyone who has strayed. Community is important to James. 

So then as we read James, it’s important to keep his emphasis on community in mind. When he talks about welcoming both the beggar and the rich person into our meeting place, without showing the rich person favoritism, there’s both an individual and a collective meaning that’s included. You yourself should not show favoritism, but the community you’re a part of, together, should not show favoritism either. Likewise with the tongue—it causes you in particular to sin, but it’s the damage that it does to the community that really concerns James.

It’s also true of the passage we looked at this past Sunday, James 5:13-20. If anyone among you is struggling, they should pray. If anyone among you is happy, they should pray. If anyone among you is sick, they should call the elders to come pray. And if you’ve sinned, confess to one another that you might be healed…. All of this is dripping with communal language—James isn’t writing to us just as individuals about how we should pray, he’s writing about how we should pray together.

I mentioned on Sunday that this is a difficult passage, especially in the midst of a pandemic, because James seems to say that prayer will “work”—it will heal the person who is sick—if we have enough faith or if we are righteous enough. Yet we know, often from personal heartbreak, sometimes the person dies, no matter how hard we pray or how much faith we have.

But this passage becomes at least a bit easier to make sense of when we think about it in terms of community. What happens when someone is sick? They often become isolated. They are unable to enter into society and sometimes they are shunned. Community is broken and their place in it is often destroyed. Just think about the early days of this pandemic—remember when visitors were not allowed to go into hospitals? Remember when families were dropping off loved ones at the ER, unsure if they’d ever see them again? Remember when nurses were holding phones by patients so family members could facetime with them before those patients died? It was one of the most destructive aspects of the pandemic—dying alone, separated from loved ones.

So James says—if you’re sick, call the elders. Have them come pray. It doesn’t have to be the elders—there’s nothing magical about them. But what happens when a group of believers come and visit the person who is sick? When they pray for that person? The community expands again and embraces the person who has been isolated. The community patchwork that was broken is restored. Healed even.

Sin works the same way. Our sins often drive us away from the community. They isolate us from others. So what does James tell us to do? Confess to God, the one who has power to forgive sins? No—rather, James tells us to confess to one another. Enter back into the community. Clear the air. Be healed.

There’s still plenty that’s challenging about this text. It’s one that we need to keep struggling with, and it’s okay if we don’t fully resolve all of our questions about it. But it’s also a reminder of how important community is. How we’re in this together. How we’re healthier when we make sure no one is isolated, when we lean on one another, when we don’t keep our struggles to ourselves but rather share our lives with one another.

Bent Trees

This week I sat in on my children’s piano lessons. Their teacher is excellent and I love the way she interacts with them. My ears perked up when I heard her describing how to sit at the piano when you play. She said, imagine you are a tree – your feet are the roots that ground you and give you strength, so you want to make sure they are flat on the floor. Your back is like the trunk and you want it straight and tall so that your arms can reach and your hands can move freely up and down the keyboard. I found myself sitting straighter in my chair as I listened to her, making sure both of my feet were on the floor too.

My ears perked up when she mentioned trees, because I’ve been thinking about this poem I read in the Plough Magazine over the weekend:

The Hunger Winter, 1944-5

(The Netherlands)

 

A dark, dictated famine made by war.

Small fires, for warmth, lit up the towns: canals

blockaded by command froze up, as if

to make a point. The Dutch began to starve.

They gnawed on sugar beets and tulip bulbs.

 

Out walking here, in Naarden’s ancient woods,

I see a stand of trees made strange by war.

Bullets have signed the bark, their wounds a mad

and modern furioso. No Arden here.

And in the rows of trees, a few grow straight

but only for a foot or two, then veer

off east or west, continuing to rise

within a different column of air as if

an origami fold had given them

a surreal twist. These trees were cut for fuel

but over seven decades grew again.

Time is simple for a tree, it hides

its rings inside, a strange geometry

by which a rise inscribes itself as round.

The reckoning of feet or yards remains

visible, as though the tree might be

a giant ruler marking years.

These limping trees look frightened, almost as if,

having seen something terrible, they tried

to take a step – they tried to walk or run.

Three-quarters of a century is long,

even if less for trees, which hold

their winters close, and imperceptibly, rise.

They will never grow straight now, yet they grow.

-       Susan De Sola

I keep imagining these trees, bent yet still growing tall, with strong roots. And I keep picturing my child at the piano bench, feet on the floor, sitting straight and tall, arms and hands ready to play.

I rediscovered this quote on a post-it note on my desk this week at church, from Alicia Garza (one of the founders of Black Lives Matter). It’s from her book The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart. “Hope is not the absence of despair; it is the ability to come back to our purpose again and again.” It makes me think of those trees, continuing to grow. And it makes me resolve to keep returning to love. To keep my feet grounded, back straight, arms and hands ready to receive and to give. . .. to keep growing.

A Bunch of Hot Air

Anyone who has been at Boston Square in the middle of the summer knows that we don’t have air conditioning. Most Sundays it’s not too bad of an issue—the outside air cools off enough at night that the sanctuary is a reasonable temperature in the morning. Only on those Sundays when it’s been hot for a number of days in a row or when it just doesn’t cool off at night is the sanctuary nearly unbearable. 

A couple of weeks ago the weather was beastly hot. All week long. And the nights hardly cooled off at all. With an off-the-charts level of humidity. The folks that have been designated to make decisions about such things at Boston Square began an email thread early in the week with alarm messages about how hot it was likely to be on Sunday. About how the previous week was already sweltering, and all signs pointed to the coming Sunday being noticeably worse. We went back and forth about the wisdom of canceling the service or not or simply moving everything to zoom.

In the end, we decided to go ahead as usual, but encourage people to take advantage of the zoom option if they had been finding the heat in the sanctuary to be oppressive. I myself had had a hard time pealing myself from the pew the week before when it was time to go forward to help lead communion, and I admit the thought of leading worship from the air conditioning of home was certainly tempting. Not surprisingly, attendance in the sanctuary was noticeably lighter that week, and participants on zoom were more numerous.

There are a handful of mitigating tactics we can take to try to get the temperature in the sanctuary to come down. Opening the windows is a start. Running exhaust fans in the balcony is even better. They pull out the hot air that rises to the top of the sanctuary and create a draft that pulls cooler air in through the lower windows. I knew we had one exhaust fan already in the balcony that we had moved up when we first started worshiping together in person to encourage airflow to help reduce the risk of exposure to COVID, but there was still one that was in the narthex in the back of the sanctuary. I knew that if we had any hope of cooling down the sanctuary, we needed both fans running all night long in the balcony.

So Saturday night, after I put the finishing touches on the sermon, I headed over to church and lugged the second exhaust fan up to the balcony. I placed it in the window right next to the fan that was already up there. As I was bracing it between the window and the sill, however, I noticed the storm window was open only a few inches. I laughed at myself at how close I had come to running the fan with only about two inches of open screen. I also shook my head, wondering why this storm window hadn’t been open all summer—the balcony windows facing Kalamazoo Ave are under an overhang, after all, and rain isn’t a concern. As I tried to brace it open, however, I discovered that it wouldn’t hold in place higher than it was, so I ended up removing the whole storm window and then put the fan in place.

Satisfied that the exhaust fan was now doing its job, I started my way down the stairs when I had a sudden thought. I had no memory of removing the storm window when I had placed the original exhaust fan in its place back at the beginning of summer. A little troubled, I made my way to the original fan and, to my alarm, discovered that the storm window was completely down, blocking the fan in its entirety. We’d been running this fan all summer, every Sunday morning, to no avail. It’d been blowing directly into a closed window all summer long.

I pulled this exhaust fan out of the window, took out the storm window, and replaced the fan so it could begin actually pulling hot air out of the sanctuary.

Sometimes what we think has been helping us all along turns out to have been ineffective the whole time—or worse, even working against us. Sometimes what we think is a vibrant faith life turns out to just be going through the motions. Sometimes we convince ourselves that everything is a-okay and we’re growing in our walk with God when in reality we’re slowly wilting away.

James talks about faith without works being dead. That is, we think we have faith. We think our spiritual lives are just fine. But we’re deceiving ourselves if our faith doesn’t shape the way we live. If we don’t put that faith into practice through a life of service or prayer or extravagant love. If our faith is only about something we believe—well, it’s a bit like a fan that blowing directly into a window. It’s not very useful. And we might be fooling ourselves.

Rich Mullins, a contemporary Christian singer who was popular when I was in high school, had a short song, Screen Door, that’s stuck with me since I first heard it:

It's about as useless as a screen door on a submarine
Faith without works baby
It just ain't happenin'
One is your left hand one is your right
It'll take two strong arms to hold on tight
Some folks cut off their nose just to spite their face
I think you need some works to show for your alleged faith

Well there's a difference you know
'Tween having faith and playing make believe
One will make you grow the other one just make you sleep
Talk about it
But I really think you oughtta take a leap off of the ship
Before you claim to walk on water
Faith without works is like a song you can't sing
It's about as useless as a screen door on a submarine

Faith comes from God and every word that He breathes
He lets you take it to your heart so you can give it hands and feet
It's gotta be active if it's gonna be alive
You gotta put it into practice
Otherwise

It's about as useless as a screen door on a submarine
Faith without works baby it just ain't happenin'
One is your right hand one is your left
It's your light your guide your life and your breath
Faith without works is like a song you can't sing
It's about as useless as a screen door on a submarine

Faith without works—about as useless as a screen door on a submarine. Or perhaps a fan that’s blowing directly into a window.

Paddle Boarding and the Slow Work of God

One of the rooms at the Hermitage Retreat Center in Three Rivers has this quote hanging near the doorway, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something

Unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through

some stages of instability –

and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you.

Your ideas mature gradually – let them grow,

let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time

(that is to say, grace and circumstances

acting on your own good will)

will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit

gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

 

I mentioned this quote to a friend this week and we both wondered aloud about Chardin’s context. (i.e. Did he have children? a spouse? household chores to do or persuade others to do? Was there a global pandemic going on?) I have yet to research this . . .

 

It’s really hard to trust the slow work of God – in terms of the pandemic (What is God doing? How long?), in terms of racial injustice (What is God doing? How long?), in terms of so much suffering and deep division (What is God doing? How long?). It’s hard to trust in the slow work of God when so much seems unknown. And it’s hard to trust in the slow work of God when we long to be transformed – to be more the people God created us to be.

 

I spent Monday morning paddle boarding on Spring Lake. We have an inflatable paddle board, and this was my second time using it. The first time, my brother’s girlfriend, watching me from the relative comfort of a kayak asked, “Is it fun or just nerve-wracking?” I’m guessing she could read on my face both my intense concentration on balancing and my fear of falling . . .

 

She didn’t ask the question again on Monday, but I thought about it, as I paddled carefully through the calm water, willing my knees to stay slightly bent, trying to look around, but mostly focused on moving slowly forward. I kept thinking about her question and I also kept thinking, there’s some analogy for faith here. Walking on water? Not looking at the waves? Trusting it won’t be awful if you do fall in? Maybe the connection is going slow, and trying to balance, trying to hold the grief and longing of these days with the gratitude for sunlight and water and paddling and the love that holds us all.

 

I wonder about Chardin and his context, but I think the call to trust the slow work of God is right on, especially the last line, Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Small Tents, Big Views

Our family vacation this summer was the first time I had been in Yellowstone National Park since my friend Matt and I camped there on our cross-country trek home from Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, more than 20 years ago. By the time we figured out our plans and made our reservations back in February, the only lodging available in the park was camping. 

The family was a bit skeptical when I made this announcement, so I pointed out that we often did some sort of camping adventure each summer, albeit typically much closer to home. And maybe for not quite as long. And eventually they came around.

The rest of the family may have been unsure at first, but I was thrilled. For one, the adventure level of our trip just rose significantly. Why sleep in a nice soft bed when you could pretend to be Buffalo Bill Cody? For another, to be honest, we would end up saving hundreds of dollars per night, and this made the bottom line significantly easier on the budget. But truth be told, the biggest reason I was thrilled was because I remembered the campsite Matt and I had had back in 1999, and it was the best campsite in the world.

Our first campsite this summer in Yellowstone

I was transferring from Fuller Seminary to Princeton Seminary that summer, and my friend Matt graciously agreed to fly out and make the drive back to Grand Rapids with me.

We had about two weeks to complete the journey, and we attempted to cram as much of the country into our travels as possible. First we went north to Yosemite and hiked Half Dome. Then spent a night with my brother in Berkeley. North some more to a friend in Seattle. Then east to Glacier National Park. From there we jumped over to Yellowstone.

We arrived at the park late at night. This was a problem. We didn’t have camping reservations—back then a significant part of the campgrounds were first-come, first-served—and we’d arrived too late to claim any sites. I had planned to find a National Forest campground on the way into Yellowstone, but the night was so dark that we completely missed the signs for these campgrounds, and before we knew it we had arrived at the entrance gate to Yellowstone.

We thought briefly about trying to backtrack, but my ten-year-old Ford Escort hatchback, crammed full with all my earthly possessions, had developed a bit of a hiccup, especially going up mountains, and I didn’t want to risk going down out of the park and then needing to get back up to the park entrance. We double checked two of the closest campgrounds in the park, and seeing that they were both indeed full, we pulled into a parking lot near the visitor center and slept in the car.

Our second campsite in Yellowstone

While not the most comfortable, this had the advantage of us getting an early start on the next day. Up by 6:30 as the dawn was just breaking, we drove down to a more central campground and tried to find a spot. Indeed, a number of sites on the inner loop were already cleared out, and while they weren’t anything special, they would serve are needs just fine. We started setting up our tent.

As we were putting the rainfly on, however, I looked down the road to the end of the loop and saw the folks in the end site—the absolute prime location with the best possible view—starting to break camp. Before they were even off the site, I told Matt to go down there and ask if they were clearing out and if it would be okay for him to stay around to claim the site when they left. Turns out they were indeed leaving, so Matt sat at their picnic table while they finished up. I paused on setting up our tent, watched carefully until their camper was gone, and then I lifted our tent above my head and marched it down the road to the end site where Matt was waiting. I placed it in a flat spot with a great view of a spectacular meadow and a meandering creek, and started working on getting the rainfly on.

I soon noticed that Matt was no longer helping. I looked up to see him in a conversation with a preppy-looking guy in a polo shirt leaning out the window of a massive motorhome. This motorhome was massive. I mean…massive. Did I mention it was massive? This guy was leaning out the window of the passenger side just so Matt was able to hear him. Even so, Matt was looking straight up in order to be able to see him.

By the time I got there, I heard, “We’ll give you twice what you paid for the site…” These guys were trying to buy the campsite off us. The deal actually sounded kind of good to me—I was the one who had agreed to cover all the costs of our lodging on the way home, after all. But Matt responded, “No, thanks.” “Four times then.” Matt shook his head. “Nah. We’re good.” I almost strangled Matt. I would have taken the money. But it was too late now as the preppy-looking guy scowled and the motorhome drove on.

We finished setting up our dinky little two-person tent in this spacious site on the end of the campground loop, and the motorhome ended up taking the site right across the road from ours on the inside of the loop. I didn’t feel too bad—they still had a great view and our little tent was hardly in their way at all. Had it been reversed, however, their giant motorhome would have blocked the view of the meadow entirely and no one else in the campground would have been able to enjoy it at all.

We were there two nights, waking up to elk in the meadow down by the creek. It was fabulous. We explored the park by day and came back late in the evening to make our supper. We didn’t have camp chairs along, so we’d sit on the ground with our backs against a log and watch the light shifting in the meadow as the sun went down. And there was something about being in the shadow of that massive motorhome, knowing that at least once in this world money hadn’t been able to buy everything, that made those couscous tacos taste all the better.

Our campsite this summer in Grand Teton

Elizabeth will be preaching this week on James 2, where it warns against showing favoritism based on the wealth, power, or perceived influence of the other person. In the church, James says, the way you treat others shouldn’t depend on how much money they have. The small tents should get the nice spots, should be given the same power and influence, just as much as if not more than the massive motorhomes. It’s easy to focus on the bling, but James encourages us to focus on the person. And people, in God’s economy, are worth the same, no matter how preppy or drab they might look.

Our family this summer didn’t have quite the same campsites as the one Matt and I enjoyed back in the day. They were still nice—but not quite as other-worldly as that one long ago. And while we still enjoyed waking up to elk and to bison, and the overall trip was just as epic as I had envisioned, the missing motorhome made it just a bit less memorable.