Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 23, 2022             (today’s lectionary)
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart
Three readings for Sunday plus a psalm. Three stanzas of a poem, plus a picture. Sunday is always full of surprises, sabbath surprises, and we notice them more quickly because we are (sort of) at rest.
Ezra opened the book and the people rose, all the men and women and all those children old enough to understand. Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people said, “Amen!” They put their faces to the ground, and Ezra read plainly from the book of the law of God.
The law had been lost, and now was found. As they listened, his listeners realized their sin and failure, and wept. Ezra told them to stop. No, this would be a time for a party.
For today is holy to our Lord. Do not be saddened on this day. For rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength!
The poem is part of The Book of Seventy, by Alicia Suskin Ostriker. It’s another gem made more famous by Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’ Almanac.” Here’s the first of its three stanzas:
The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog
To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God’s love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow
Close to my heart – the milk through a cow. The name of my least favorite cow is the only one I remember after all these years. SHE was named John, and apparently she resented the gender confusion, because she kicked at me (and everybody else) whenever I’d get close. Which I had to do every single time we milked! Twice a day, every day, week after week, month after month, and at last year after year. God’s love washes right through you, like milk through a cow. It never stops. If you’re not there to catch that milk, God will just moo and moo and moo.
At least, that’s what John the cow did.
 Brothers and sisters, as a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.
Paul continues to praise our feet, our hands, our ears, our eyes, and our heads, and especially the whole that those parts make.
If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? The eye cannot say to the hand, “I do not need you.” If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy.”
Do not ask for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. John Donne read Paul’s words to the Corinthians and knew nothing had changed over the centuries, how much each one of his parishioners depended on each other in all their lives and in all their deaths.
Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it.
Alicia wrote her second stanza watching a tulip open in the morning sun.
To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended
skirt
Â
Catch me if you can, the poet sings. Yes, I’m talking about blessing, what did you think? Ron Rolheiser calls this mix of desire and yearning the “holy longing.” You can call it lust, you can call it passion, you can call it praise. Any way you call it, there is dancing and singing involved, and joy. This becomes God’s medium for our growth. Two hundred years ago Goethe wrote:
Finally, insane for the light,
You are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
Funny how we must die to live. Words like these call us out of our cocoons, before they become our tombs.
Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit. He stood up to read in synagogue on sabbath and was handed a scroll of Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me … he has anointed me, he has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives … to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were on him.
At last, God will host a jubilee. God’s ancient command was awkward for the rich, so they ignored it or did as possible to honor it. All property is to be returned to its original owner. How can we do that? So much has happened in the last fifty years. Maybe God will settle for tithing, charity and the giving of alms.
Or maybe not. In the next few minutes his hometown listeners turned on Jesus and tried to stone him and throw him off a cliff. Clearly a true prophet had come among them, and they couldn’t handle it.
Was Alicia among Jesus’ listeners? Did she go home and write this third and final stanza?
To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other dogs
can smell it
Jesus didn’t come to make peace, but to separate those who wanted to follow him into the kingdom of Heaven, from those who did not believe he could lead them there. Jesus preached and healed, and Luke told the story of his short few years of ministry, and then his death, and then his resurrection. The people of Israel had always been asked to choose, and now after hundreds of years they were being asked again.
Can you smell the pinch of God? Cinnamon on the applesauce, garlic in the marinara, a taste of life in the gritty cereal of death? Take a deep breath and believe. In the eternal present, Jesus is alive!
(Open red tulip photograph, New England spring)
(Nehemiah 8, Psalm 19, 1 Corinthians 12, Luke 1 and 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
