The Labyrinth of Job (Sermon)

“The Labyrinth of Job”

Job 1:1, 2:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/27/15

         Job: History or legend? A flesh-and-blood human being or an amalgamation of human experience in general and of Jewish experience in particular? There are at least two ways to start this conversation. We can ask: WAS Job real? or IS Job real?

In his book Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, Jewish scholar and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel writes an essay entitled “Job: Our Contemporary.” In that essay Wiesel wrestles with the stories around the story: “Once upon a time,” he says of Job, “When? Nobody knows. [Job’s] name is mentioned by Ezekiel in passing, along with those of Noah, and Daniel – was he a contemporary of one or the other? Possibly. Other legends link him alternately to Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Samson, Solomon…and…the Babylonian exile. He would thus have lived…more than eight hundred [years].”¹

Later in the same essay, Wiesel describes Job as one who “was everywhere and everything at the same time…[a man characterized by] peregrinations through provinces and centuries.”²

To ask, “WAS Job real?” forces us to deal with nearly a millennium of conflicting stories. It becomes a kind of maze, and a maze is just a complicated playground for which there is, typically, only one right answer. You enter in one place and try to find the exit at another. The point of a maze is simply the entertainment of getting lost. The experience leaves you essentially unchanged.

To ask, IS Job real? is to ask an entirely different question. It brings the question into the moment. It acknowledges unmerited suffering, and dares to ask, “Does God cause, even by passive allowance, human suffering?”

To ask if Job IS real is to enter not a maze, but a labyrinth. A labyrinth is an ancient spiritual practice in which a person walks a set course with twists and turns like a maze, but a labyrinth can be trusted. It is about engaging Mystery, not becoming mystified. When walking a labyrinth, one follows the pathway, shedding distractions, pretensions, and fear. The center of the labyrinth offers a place of stillness, reflection, and Divine Encounter. It also becomes a place of metanoia, of turning around, a place of new beginning. To leave the labyrinth, you simply retrace your steps, and, assuming due discipline, you become a changed pilgrim reentering the world.

To ask if Job IS real is to enter his story as one would enter a labyrinth. At the center of this story-labyrinth, we encounter God in, of all places, a gut-wrenching experience of human suffering. When traveling with Job as a path of Divine Encounter, we discover that regardless of whether or not he existed as a particular individual, Job most certainly IS real.

On the path of discovering the immediate IS-ness of Job, we walk shoulder-to-shoulder with all of the characters in the story. Entering the labyrinth, we have to deal first with God bragging on a righteous Job. Irked by God’s boasting, Satan dares God to test the man’s spiritual mettle.

‘Make any human being miserable,’ says Satan, ‘and he or she will turn on you in less time than it takes to turn a pot into a pile of potsherds.’

And what are we to make of God accepting Satan’s dare? Twice! (Job 1:12) “Do your worst,” says God both times, “just don’t kill him.” Who wants to walk justly, kindly, and humbly with that God?

Then we meet Job’s wife. She reminds us that it was not just Job who lost everything. Her family and fortune are gone, too. Furious, she dares her husband to test the faithfulness of God the way Satan dares God to test the faithfulness of Job. And a long, bitter standoff begins.

Now, of course we have to deal with Job. Instead of eating the toxic apple his wife offers,³ Job lies in an ash heap, scrapes his oozing sores with a potsherd, and wishes himself dead.

“Let the day perish in which I was born,” he cries, “and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived.’…Why did I not die at birth?...I loathe my life.”

Complete despair is not exactly where one expects to find God, is it? Indeed, many people dismiss the very notion of God when caught in the grip of suffering that seems to have neither purpose nor end. And I have a hard time blaming folks for that, especially those who have been taught that a lack of physical pain and a surplus of material wealth signify God’s presence. And from the sale of indulgences in the medieval Catholic Church to the Protestant work ethic of rewards and punishments, the Church has infected countless generations with such dis-grace. We have funneled people into a kind of doctrinal maze. Turn here, now there. Memorize this and that. Do not trust experience. Just repeat what you’ve been taught. Perhaps there is comfort in such certainty. In a maze, however, we have more in common with mice in a laboratory than disciples on a journey.

The labyrinth of faith leads us not away from suffering, but into it. And there we encounter God.

Like many others, I am kind of smitten with Pope Francis. I am grateful that someone of such visibility in the Christian world is doing things like washing and kissing the feet of prisoners during Holy Week. I am grateful that he speaks boldly on controversial issues like climate change and the death penalty. And I am grateful that he has turned down invitations to dine with a host country’s leaders in order to eat with the homeless in the streets outside. He demonstrates what it looks like to walk the labyrinth of faith rather than to wander the maze of theological convention.

Granted, as Pope, Francis is well cared for. Unless he secretly wants a wife, he lacks for nothing. But neither his words nor his actions allow us to forget that Jesus asks to be followed, not merely “believed in.” Jesus leads us into a labyrinth where we encounter God’s most amazing grace in the midst of the world’s deepest pain.

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink…[or] a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing…[or] sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:37-40)

Why is it that Jesus is more real in the projects than the palaces?

We will return to Job in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I encourage you to spend time with this remarkable story. Read it. Pray it. Most of all, trust it. Let a very real Job take you by the hand and guide you to a place of profound suffering, your own, someone else’s, or the raging, cultural pain around us. Be honest with any feelings of anger, betrayal, bewilderment, or despair. And if you find yourself in that dark, lonely place, sit still. Open your heart wide both to give and to receive the grace of the Living and Loving God.

Then may you turn and begin your journey outward – retracing your steps toward healing, transformation, and hope.

¹Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, Random House, NY, 1976, p. 188.

²Ibid., p. 190.

³I thank church member, Bill Reese, for this insight!

Journey into Humility (Sermon)

"Journey into Humility”

Mark 9:30-37

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/20/15

        

Lonely places.

Introverts usually crave them.

Extroverts usually fear them.

In lonely places, flying solo with your thoughts and fears, you can either come to fresh new understandings and energies, or you can come undone. The irony is that sometimes, those fresh understandings and energies require a certain degree of undoing. Tribal elders, therapists, the Holy Spirit, and other teachers often guide individuals or small groups into lonely places for coming-undone experiences that lead to healing or transformation.

Jesus seems to know that when his disciples face their rabbi’s death, they will, in some way, come undone. As the embodiment of Wisdom, he keeps their journey through Galilee a secret. He shepherds them through private, lonely places because coming undone is much more effectively and healthfully accomplished beside still waters.

Jesus learns this for himself at his temptation. He goes into the wilderness alone and faces all the selfish possibilities lying at his feet. It takes everything he has to push through the allure of pride, and for the experience to become a beneficial undoing.

I think that when the disciples begin to imagine that Jesus may actually die, and when they try to imagine life after his death, they face temptations similar to those that Jesus overcomes.

“What were you arguing about on the way,” asks Jesus. An embarrassed silence tells all. Out in that lonely place, confronting the reality of life without Jesus and the hope he represents, the disciples begin trying to intimidate their way into dominance over each other. As Jesus leads his followers through the valley of the shadow of death, they turn this terrifyingly gracious, lonely-place-experience into a childish political primary.

One can almost see Jesus shaking his head as he says, Boys, boys, boys. True greatness is about humility. To lead well, serve well.

Then, in a move that feels as much like a crusty old coach mocking his losing ball club as it does a shrewd teacher illustrating his point, Jesus picks up a child and says, in effect, Here I am. How you welcome a child reflects how you welcome me – and how you welcome God who sent me.

This is a scandal, of course. Children represent women’s work. No self-respecting, first century man gets significantly involved in the lives of children. Jesus is leading his followers into yet another lonely place where accepted arrangements are breaking down. He gives them the chance to realize that the difference between being humiliated and being humbled is the grace to live intentionally and gratefully as cooperating equals with all people.

“For by the grace given to me,” writes Paul, “I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think…” (Romans 12:3) Paul goes on to say that we are all members of one body. Only in humility can we truly accept, appreciate, and love one another as uniquely vital members of the same body. To live humbly requires an often-painful transformation. Biblical literature uses the stark metaphor of death to describe that transformation. And virtually all deaths, metaphorical and literal, include some kind of lonely-place sojourn.

More primitive cultures created that lonely place. One day during my grandfather’s experience with terminal cancer, he told his daughter, my mother, “Now I understand why the Indians used to take their old people out into the wilderness and leave them.”

While those desperate words reveal the weight of one man’s physical suffering, they also reveal how burdensome good intentions can be on anyone suffering critical illness or acute grief.

We often surround those who suffer with food, trifling conversation, cut flowers, overly sentimental Hallmark cards, and expectations of a valiant fight against disease or despair. While we intend such things as expressions of love and offerings of grace, just as often they become attempts to control the situation. They become ways to argue with mortality about who is the greatest. Sometimes the most comforting presence in the face of a death is that friend who sits silently and patiently with us, that friend who resists the temptation to cloak suffering with layers of words, that gifted friend who, like the angels and wild beasts of Jesus’ temptation, simply wait on us. They wait on us while we, as the old spiritual declares, walk that lonesome valley by ourselves.

Any argument with mortality, like any argument about relative greatness, is the stomachache that follows a feast on the poisonous fruit of pride. Pride is the seminal offense from which all other sins arise. Think about it. Is there any transgression that does not germinate in one person’s assumption of superiority over other human beings, over the environment, or over God? The opposing virtue to pride is humility. So it makes sense for Jesus to take a child and tell a bunch of prideful men that to be truly great, one must first learn true humility.

In ravenously competitive cultures like ours, humility does not come easy. It requires a spiritual death. And nothing can bring pride to its knees, nothing can make pride come undone like loneliness, like the experience of absolute need for others.

In foretelling his death, Jesus prepares his disciples for an experience of dire poverty. They will need each other. And they will not be able to carry on Jesus’ work without humbly depending on fellow servants, whoever they may be.

It comes as no surprise that in the very next story in Mark’s gospel we see the disciples complain to Jesus that they have seen a stranger casting out demons in Jesus’ name.

We tried to stop him, they say. He wasn’t one of us.

And Jesus stuns them with a rebuke: Why in God’s name did you do that? Why are you still trying to argue about greatness? Whoever is not against us is for us! Welcome their help!

When confronting our limits as human beings, when realizing that we are not so great as we would like to think, the Spirit leads us into a lonely place to die a healing death. As often as we find ourselves striving for greatness, superiority, victorious “rightness” over one another, we need to die that death.

A journey into humble service reveals to us the indescribable value, the wholeness, and the purpose unique to ourselves, to the individuals around us, and to the communities which God creates through us.

May we all enter places of transforming loneliness.

And may we learn servant-hearted humility so that we follow Jesus, and live as grateful members of God’s one body of justice, kindness, and Love.

Human Things/Divine Things (Sermon)

“Human Things/Divine Things”

Mark 8:27-35

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/13/15

         Simon Peter. The Rock. Bold, and brash to a fault. But faithful, too, even though when denying Jesus, Peter denies all the Christ-like qualities in himself.

         In Mark 8, Peter steps out in prophetic faith to declare out loud what others have surely begun to hope: Jesus of Nazareth is God’s Messiah. Jesus affirms Peter’s confession, and it seems to embolden the disciple all the more. When Jesus turns and speaks of his suffering, rejection, and death, Peter grants himself authority to scold God’s Anointed One.

         With a blistering rebuke of his own, Jesus refers to Peter as “Satan,” and basically tells him to get lost. Then he says, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

         My heart goes out to old Saint Pete. His mouth is not getting all that far ahead of his brain. He has seen Jesus do some pretty crazy things, and they have all been human things. Peter has watched Jesus touch people, heal people, feed people, argue with people. He has listened to Jesus teach through those grounded, earthy stories called parables. If Peter sets his mind on human things, who can blame him?

         The problem is that human things are all that Peter sees. And Jesus says that it is time to behold human things differently, because woven into those tangible, earthy realities are strands of holiness and eternity. Jesus is starting to hold his disciples accountable for recognizing divine things within human things. When he speaks of his imminent suffering, Jesus wants his followers to hear more than bad news. He wants them to smell the air, taste the water, and feel the sand beneath their feet in that new realm where divine and human things are being reconciled and reunited. If they fail to experience the eternal wrapped up in the temporal, then Friday will never become Good Friday.

         Setting our minds on divine things does not mean ignoring that which is human and earthy. It means to look ever more closely at the creation around us and to open our hearts and minds to those places where earthy things and divine things intersect. Revelation tends to occur when material and spiritual realities deny their margins and meld into one another like lovers.

         Such holiness is everywhere. There is very little in God’s great creation which cannot, in some way, convey something of the divine things that Jesus invites us to see. In his poetry, Wendell Berry consistently acknowledges and beautifully illustrates the divine in the midst of the earthy. Listen to his poem entitled “The Heron.”

                                    The Heron

                  While the summer’s growth kept me

                  anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river

                  where it flowed, faithful to its way,

                  beneath the slope where my household

                  has taken its laborious stand.

                  I could not reach it even in dreams.

                  But one morning at the summer’s end

                  I remember it again, as though its being

                  lifts into mind in undeniable flood,

                  and I carry my boat down through the fog,

                  over the rocks, and set out.

                  I go easy and silent, and the warblers

                  appear among the leaves of the willows,

                  their flight like gold thread

                  quick in the live tapestry of the leaves.

                  And I go on until I see, crouched

                  on a dead branch sticking out of the water,

                  a heron – so still that I believe

                  he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water,

                  and then I see the articulation of feather

                  and living eye, a brilliance I receive

                  beyond my power to make, as he

                  receives in his great patience

                  the river’s providence. And then I see

                  that I am seen. Still as I keep,

                  I might be a tree for all the fear he shows.

                  Suddenly I know I have passed across

                  to a shore where I do not live.¹

         Imagine yourself in that small boat, out on the easy flow of the river, in the rising mist of a late summer morning. You float silently on the dark water, watching, listening, expecting. You eye the heron who is eyeing you. When your human presence does not cause the bird to flee, you find yourself a part of the river’s life. Suspended between the two shores, you share space and consciousness with a wider, deeper creation. There, on the water, you are grounded in God’s peaceable kingdom where all things live together, healed and in harmony.

When the two who look at each other are both people, things get more complicated, don’t they? If we look at fellow human beings and see only human things, we will see only differences, and we will find excuses to judge, discriminate, and even persecute. As long we are governed by fear, greed, competition, and a need to control, it will always boil down to us against them.

         We are making some progress, perhaps. Then again, as election seasons always illustrate, we still have so far to go that one must wonder if the divides can be crossed, if the wounds can be healed. The Gospel declares that healing is not only possible, but underway. Still, complications arise when we discover that crossing over to that new shore feels, at first, like moving backward. The Holy Spirit, scandalous rascal that she is, always leads us to live over against institutions and attitudes that have made us feel safe, but that hide the fresh workings of the divine within the creation. And because we have so revered some of those institutions and so nurtured some of those attitudes, the Jesus-Journey of discipleship may feel like unfaithfulness. Jesus calls the burden of this journey our cross, and taking up our cross necessarily includes denying, dying to whatever separates us from the Divine Presence within us and within our neighbors.

         In his book A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren says this about discipleship: “Jesus has taught us that the way to know what God is like is not by determining our philosophical boundary conditions…before departing, but…by embarking on an adventure of faith, hope, and love, even if you don’t know where your path will lead (think of Abraham…),” says McLaren. “The way to know God is by following Jesus on that adventure…Anyone who doesn’t embark on the adventure of love doesn’t know God at all…for God is love…”²

         Remember, discipleship is not “sin management.” Sin is real, of course, but it is not our fundamental reality. Sin obscures our eternal nature. It distorts our God-imaged selves. So instead of trying to avoid sin so that we can “go to heaven when we die,” discipleship is about living into the kingdom of heaven here and now, with the people who are next to you – the ones whose perfume you smell, whose stomachs you hear rumbling, who will vote differently than you.

         True disciples claim the holiness within them and hold it up like a mirror so that others may see it in themselves, as well.

May you shoulder your cross and die whatever death you must to see the holiness within yourself.

May you die that more challenging death through which you see the holiness in others.

And through these deaths, may you live as a reflection of God’s eternal-yet-here-and-now realm of Resurrection.

¹”The Heron,” Collected Poems, 1957-1982, Wendell Berry. North Point Press, San Francisco, 1984, pp.137-138.

²Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 2004, p. 207.

The Earth is Grace (Newsletter)

It was about 3pm Sunday afternoon. As usual, I was tired and just wanted to relax. Enter Marianne. Before I knew it, we were headed toward Rocky Fork State Park just south of Erwin.

         Rocky Fork is a 2036-acre quilt of dense, Appalachian cove forest in the steep, rocky folds of the Cherokee National Forest. The parking area for the still-undeveloped park is a dirt pull-off with about a six-car capacity. When we pulled in on this lovely Sunday afternoon, ours made car #3.

         I tied my boots, set my trekking poles, and gave my backpack to Marianne. (Don’t judge. She has better discs in her back and joints in her knees than I do.) After passing two fishermen, five hikers, and four dogs, all of whom were leaving, we were the park’s lone visitors

         Thanks to recent rain, Rocky Fork Creek chattered urgently on our left. Within a half-mile, we opted for a right fork which led us on a gentle but steady ascent away from the creek. The further we climbed, the more the rush of the water blended with the rustling of the breezes. When given another choice, we turned left and continued climbing into deep silence.

         The air was fragrant with moist earth, rot, and new life. It all but oozed with humidity. Even a momentary stop caused my glasses to blurr with condensation.

As we skirted large puddles, the clear, still surfaces suddenly roiled with muddy streaks as tiny frogs gave themselves away in desperate attempts to escape notice.

And, oh, the limitless green! The dark avocado of evergreens and late summer hickory, oak, and poplar; emerald mottled with the reds and yellows of already-fallen maple and sassafras leaves; and the bright, liquid seafoam of the high canopy backlit by the sun.

After we had hiked some three miles, the sun began to sag close to the nearest ridge tops. It was time to turn around. A forest trail like that in reverse is, in effect, a brand new trail. Trees angle the opposite directions. The light falls differently. Things once hidden are revealed. It is a kind of metanoia. And because the forest is alive with fauna as well as flora, there is no telling what may reveal itself to you on a return trip. That Sunday it was a large rabbit, a young and apparently ailing hawk that let us get within six-feet of its perch next to the trail, and a mother bear and her three cubs scampering up a steep hillside across a small feeder creek.

To enter such a world is to experience what the Japanese call Shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” In deep woods, silence sings like a chorus. Solitude surrounds you with a most welcome and welcoming company. The remote wildness draws you close to holiness and reveals God’s creative patience and purpose.

The Earth is Grace.

O Lord, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom you have made them all;

         the earth is full of your creatures.

When you send forth your spirit,

         they are created;

and you renew the face of the ground.

(Psalm 104:24, 30)

We are THEY (Sermon)

“We Are THEY”

Mark 7:31-37, 8:22-26

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/6/15

         The Presbytery of Western North Carolina supports a medical missionary in Malawi. Her name is Barbara Nagy. Barbara serves as the staff pediatrician at the hospital in the central Malawian town of Nkhoma. As a participant and co-leader on two trips to Nkhoma, I gained appreciation for not only true poverty, but genuine community.

         Consistently among the poorest nations on earth, Malawi lacks many basic resources, and it offers virtually no amenities, especially to Malawians. Supported by congregations around the world, missionaries like Barbara enjoy a few conveniences of home, but every day at the Nkhoma hospital, one feels Malawi’s poverty and sees its community.

         If you get sick in Malawi, your family and friends become your EMTs, ambulance service, food service, social workers, and HMO. When you go to the hospital, you must have a community around you to do everything except to deliver medical treatment. While you lie in a crowded ward, your family and friends live on the grounds of the hospital. They sleep under the trees. They use the restrooms built by the Presbytery of Western North Carolina. And they prepare food for themselves and for you under the outdoor cooking shelter. Only the most destitute get fed the meager hospital rations.

Without that community, few Malawians survive for long. In a place of such acute poverty, every individual needs and belongs to an enfolding community, to a responsive and attentive THEY.

         As Jesus returns to Galilee from the North Country, a very proactive THEY brings to him a deaf man. In Bethsaida, another THEY brings to Jesus a blind man. I can imagine each THEY being as desperate and as trustingly hopeful as a Malawian family. The THEYs who bring the deaf and blind men to Jesus do not come to test him. A desire for wholeness drives them. They do want wholeness restored to the particular individuals, but I think they also desire wholeness for the community. As long as one of them is deaf or blind, there is a deafness or a blindness to the entire THEY.

         This appears to be a difficult concept for wealthy, individualistic cultures. Folks like us have been taught to attach much if not most of our identity to individual achievements and personal property. I have to think, however, that the cultures represented in biblical literature, especially the culture in which Jesus lives, has much more in common with places like Malawi than the contemporary western world.

Now, we all belong to peer groups. We identify with political parties and agendas. We brand ourselves with the logos of schools, sports teams, shoe manufacturers, particular stores, denominations, and so forth. Still, to many of us, the idea of being defined by a THEY, by other people’s joys and sorrows, by their strengths and weaknesses, seems as quaint, confining, and anachronistic as a rotary phone. More dangerously, such an association may seem to threaten one’s own individuality. Where is the line between I and We?

As the Church, we are an intentional community. We are a re-presentation not just of Christ to the world, but of the THEY which brings the deafness, blindness, and brokenness of the world to Jesus. Individualistic religion judges all of that brokenness. It says, “If you were moral enough [or] if you had enough faith, you wouldn’t be in this mess.” At its most devilishly heartless, individualistic religion dismisses the world’s brokenness by saying, “Take heart, God never gives you more than you can handle.” Like you, I have heard that phrase in hospital rooms, funeral homes, and from pulpits. Brothers and Sisters, please think carefully before you stab someone with those words. Maybe, sometimes, there are “good intentions” behind that platitude, but it really feels to me like saying, “That’s your problem. Handle it yourself.”

God calls us to recognize when one of us has, indeed, become burdened with more than he or she can handle. God calls us to accept their suffering as our own. If we are part of the great THEY of faith, our vocation includes bringing individual and collective deafness and blindness to the Christ, and joining our voices in begging for help.

How many of us have approached worship as a time to recharge our batteries? I understand that image, and can even appreciate it to some extent. But do you hear how it also encourages a kind of individualistic, handle it yourself mentality? If we, as the Church, are part of God’s created and creative THEY, worship is more that recharging batteries. It is a time of equipping the saints for tending to our broken and over-burdened neighbors. There are personal aspects of that, but our deeper and wider purpose is to draw and to be drawn closer together in holy communion, closer to God for each other’s sake, and closer to each other for God’s sake. In this renewing community, our witness to God in Christ becomes a magnificent harmony of distinct voices.

Many of us grew up hearing preachers erect a fence around the Lord’s Table. The words were exclusive: This table is set for those who know, love, and trust God. Generations ago, many pastors even examined their parishioners before a communion Sunday, and only those who survived his scrutiny were allowed at the table. More and more of us are removing that fence. There are too many reasons to come to the table.

You may come in penitence to receive forgiveness.

You may come in gratitude to praise God.

You may come to reclaim your unique gifts and recommit your unique individuality to loving both God and neighbor.

You may come to feel the embrace of a community of faith, to identify yourself with the body of Christ.

You may come to receive a reminder of God’s faithfulness to you in a season of sorrow, illness, loneliness, or grief.

You may come out of unbreakable habit.

You may even come out of simple curiosity.

Whatever your reasons, come. Come and find your place in God’s gracious THEY in and for the world.

Charge and Benediction:

       There is a very interesting detail in the story of Jesus healing the blind man in Bethsaida. After the first application of spit on the man’s eyes, Jesus asks him, “Can you see anything?”

“Can you see anything?” God Incarnate has to ask the recipient of his touch if he has been made whole. Not only that, but Jesus’ work requires some fine-tuning.

       You have come to Christ’s table. It is now time for ongoing conversation with him. Don’t run straight back into the village. Take time to process what you have experienced.

       Depending on your reasons for having come, Jesus asks you,

‘Do you feel forgiven,

grateful,

equipped,

comforted,

included?

Does your habit still feel justified?

Are you still curious?

       Can you see anything?

              Trees are okay.

Trees are a good start.

May you branch out into the world

in grateful, hopeful, healing peace;

And may your ears, and eyes, and hearts be opened.

Amen.