I have bought me a cow

Tuesday, November 3, 2020              (today’s lectionary)

I have bought me a cow

Even now at seventy I feel animal husbandry running in my veins. The cows in our barn stomped their feet and breathed fog into the cold air, day after day and night after night. We spread straw in the barn for them to sleep on when the night air fell below 10 degrees. Dad ground up corn and stuffed it with minerals and nutrients. We baled hay all summer and filled the barn loft to the brim. Our Holsteins ate well all winter. They gave us their milk, lots of it, and we drank their milk, and we were happy.

Sort of.

These days our eight chickens settle into their roosts at 5 pm. (Late autumn nights begin so soon.) I resolve to get up earlier to open the coop’s Dutch doors and watch our girls fly wildly into the yard, looking for food. They look up at me. Sometimes I have something for them, but mostly they hunt and peck and find what’s there in the dirt – grubs and worms and other fancy stuff. We no longer have any grass in our back yard but as Clarence Heller says, “Before you know it, they’ll have moved on.”

Of course there is nothing bovine about Jesus. But still, the word’s definition includes “placidity.” And Jesus never loses his cool.

Jesus emptied himself, taking the form of a slave coming in human likeness and humbled himself, obedient unto death.

The best moment in my childhood barn takes place in my imagination, as my spiritual companion Nancy sat with me on a dock in Mundelein. We gazed at the water, and I slid back fifty years. I sat on a milking stool under our most cantankerous cow, and Jesus put his own stool down beside me.

The lowly shall eat their fill, while all the families of the nations shall bow down before him, all who sleep in the earth shall bow down, and to him my soul shall live.

Jesus knew all my irritations and disappointments at being a farm kid rather than a city boy. Manure on my shoes when we knelt for Lutheran communion was just the tip of my embarrassed resentment. I was in a rush to get on with another life.

So he listened as my soul wept its tears of self-pity. I leaned my head into the cow’s shank, and Jesus leaned in with me. “There’s no hurry, David.”

What?

His name is above all names, and at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord.

“There’s no hurry, David.” Jesus put his arm around me. Then while we sat between the cows, in a little commotion I realized Dad had brought his stool too, and he sat down on the other side of Jesus. There we were all of us together, and in that moment, fifty years later, the confused and unnecessary rift between Dad and me disappeared. His own frustration at mowing weeds when he was an accounting genius merged with mine, and despite our lack of language, at that moment we both knew how much we were loved.

Come to me, ALL of you who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

Here’s the rest of what Clarence has to say:

Cows

If you awake to find cows

grazing on your front lawn,

let them be.

In fact, welcome them,

these strange visitors.

The damage they’ll do will bear fruit …

in ways unexpected …

and only possible by their visit.

 

If you awake to find cows

grazing on your front lawn,

let them be.

Before you know it,

they’ll have moved on.

I suppose I’ll tell this story until I die.

Let the coming generation be told of the Lord that they may proclaim to a people not yet born, the justice he has shown.

And I know that Dad is listening.

(Philippians 2, Psalm 22, Matthew 11, Luke 14)

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