So here I am, hardly a Mothers Day sermon, although, if the church is your mother, here's my truth this week.
A reading from Johah 4 (paraphrased)
Jonah left the city and squatted down in the hills outside to watch God raise Holy Hell. God put up a bush to give him shade but in the morning, God killed the bush to get Jonah's attention. "Oh kill me already," said Jonah. "You're that angry about the bush, then," said God. "So angry I want to die," said the emo Jonah. "Jonah, you are all beat up about a stupid bush and you are completely avoiding the point - which is all the people in that town you stormed out of yesterday." Here endeth the lesson, and the book.
I've heard preaching on Jonah before. Usually, people talk about the whale and spend a ridiculous amount of time discussing the difference between a whale and a big fish. Which is a bush if I ever heard one.
I'm coming off a long season. In short, I skipped the liturgical celebration of holy week because I actually had to live it a couple weeks before and after that, anyone talking to me about the woes of the altar guild or copier errors would have sent me into a rage spiral. If you mentioned those things on facebook, I've unfollowed you. I'll try to remember after ordination season to put you back in the newsfeed.
So today, when I decided I needed to find a totem bible figure for this season of my life, Jonah came quickly to mind. I've always had a soft spot for Jonah and that damnable bush. So, I pulled up the story and read Chapter 4. The part I paraphrased.
And I realised, that stupid bush is the church. Which is just perfect, and horribly accurate, and why didn't I see this before. But really, the church is this dumb bush. The exact quote: " You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night." I can't tell you how many articles get rewritten every single day about the death of the church in America. Frankly, I don't have much patience for them anymore. Because at the end of the day, it's all summed up right here.
I suppose the impatience I have had with the church for so long has everything to do with the fact that they are still watering the damn bush half a mile out of town, leaving everyone to try to figure out how to save themselves.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to save people these days. Not in the Old Time Religion sense of getting them wet so they can clean toilets in heaven, but in the sense that the world is such a fucked up mess of a place to try and live and how do we all stop from going completely bonkers. For real, that trauma has replaced suffering in the common language is perhaps not a total disgrace, but that barely anyone can actually speak between the two languages without sounding like a complete twat is actually beyond disgraceful.
I spend a huge amount of my time with people either getting slammed by life, common enough, or escaping it, also common. The ordinary time of this culture, all of Western Civ, I expect, no longer has anything to hold it together. And I'm not proposing we try, like many Islamic countries are, to put the lid back on Pandora's box. The only way out is through, and I have no idea where all this leads. But, given the obsession of my generation with tribes, with creating family of choice rather than the national nuclear familial project we inherited, I expect that the larger project of culture will continue to wander down it's barrren path.
There are going to be new bushes. But they are going to be like any salvage plant - a tiny leaf in rooting powder and the rest of the plant, soil and pot, tossed in the trash to keep the rot from contaminating this new plant. And it probably won't even work. (Can you tell I do this sad trick often in my own gardening?) It's going to be very custom work, very small scale, and it's going to be hard pressed to attach the word institution to it. It's certainly not going to be paying anyone's salary.
And what's going to be the hardest I think, is that I have this great resource, but mostly, it's going to have to spend some time in quarantine before we see if it's going to survive. And in the meantime, I've got to figure out how to hold people together, navigating trauma and suffering, saving the people while decontaminating them, helping them toss the dead parts, the old soil and possibly even the pot. (I think I've walked this metaphor right off the end of the branch, surely a sign to hit post and run.)
In case you are too lazy to go looking for this on your own...
Jonah 4 (NRSV)
But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’And the Lord said, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.
The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’
But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’
