Wednesday, July 8, 2020                   Today’s lectionary)
Being Bartholomew
If our English approximations remotely resemble Hosea’s original written words, that man was a poet!
The king of Samaria shall disappear
Like foam upon the waters
Thorns and thistles overgrow the altars of Israel
And they shall cry out to the mountains, “Cover us!”
To the hills plead, “Fall upon us!”
God never leaves his people in a poetic heap, though. There is always a way forward. Conviction has never been the same as condemnation.
Sow for yourselves justice,
Reap the fruit of love
Break up for yourselves a New Field.
Now is the time to seek the Lord
Till he comes and rains down justice
Upon us all.
Take a deep breath and just do it.
Rejoice, take heart, seek the Lord
Look to our strong God and serve him every moment
Just look and take pains to remember God’s wondrous deeds.
You must not forget!
Because the Kingdom of God is at hand.
So I sit here two thousand years after Jesus walked in Galilee, and I want to be there now. So maybe I can imagine myself a disciple and get into the story. Who could I be? Who might I be most like? Two Simons, two James, a Judas and a Thaddeus, Andrew, Bartholomew (nee Nathanael?) along with John, Matthew, Thomas, and Philip.
I imagine I am Bartholomew (named by John as Nathanael) whose martyrdom in Armenia is dated 9/11. What did he think, what did he say, when Jesus chose him? “We are not just doing fortune-telling,” Jesus said, “but you will see much greater things than this.”
Jesus gave them authority over unclean spirits,
To drive them out
And cure every disease and every illness.
My name means “son of the furrows.” I am a man made from dust. I will improve the earth while I can and then become one with it again.
In the summer heat my dusty dirty toes squirm inside my leather sandals. I long for the shade under a fig tree, to pull off my shoes and soak my feet. Maybe this evening. Maybe when Philip and I leave Jesus and walk off to seek conversation with a family of Israel, they will invite us in.
“What can we do for you?” we might say.
“Can we sweep your floors, or pick grapes, or prepare meat for the evening meal? How can we help? Can I plow your field?”
What will they say? And who knows what will happen if, after we ask the simple questions, we just open our minds and be still?
Gradually we might speak of more important matters. “Is anyone among you sick?”
Everyone wants a chance to be heard, be helped and to be helpers themselves. If we cherish this chance that Jesus gives us, can we pass it on to our hosts? Can we ourselves really become healers?
*******
After the ascension of Jesus, Thaddeus and I traveled east and north across Assyria to Armenia. After Thaddeus healed King Abgar of his leprosy, Armenia became the first state to make Christianity its official religion. But successor kings left the faith, and Thaddeus was martyred. Soon after, so was I, but not before I started a convent for religious women around a portrait of the Virgin Mary I had brought with me all the way from Jerusalem.
My own martyrdom took place on September 11. I watched with all of you in horror in 2001 when many men and women were killed in New York City, as I had been on that same day. Â God watched in horror too.
Jesus told me greater things would happen to me than mere fortune-telling. He did often seem to know what people were thinking, or even what people were going to do. But far more than this, we saw Jesus mirror and model God’s joy in loving people but not judging them, knowing them but not controlling them. He showed us how to live freely, in what he might have called the “unforced rhythms of grace.”
You are free to be, Jesus said. Free to be ME, nothing forced about it. If we weren’t so caught in our fears and egos and ingrown histories, it would always be easy to choose life, choose the rhythms of grace, unforced.
There’s no pressure. You can even say no and go your own way.
But once I’ve walked with Jesus, what other way is there worth living?
(Hosea 10, Psalm 105, Mark 1, Matthew 10)
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