Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster

God’s Odd Benedictions, V: The Merciful

And so when Jesus ascends the mountain to share what the kingdom of God is like, and he says “blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy,” there is something inherently foolish knit within. You cannot win or achieve or work for or attain something that already was in the beginning. “In the beginning was mercy.” This is not something that can be earned. Mercy is not tit for tat, quid pro quo, like for like, or what goes around comes around.

Mercy already was, already has been, always will be.

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Jesus’ Grandmothers, V: Mary

There is a kind of poetry to this genealogy. I wouldn’t have thought so before. A list of begats. He begat him, and he begat him, and he begat him and his brothers. But the rhythm of the genealogy, this poem that tells Jesus’ story with an economy of words, the rhythm of this biographical bloodline is broken, punctured, punctuated by women who disrupt and displace the predictable pace and pulse of patriarchy placing atypical, unexpected, surprising women at the center of the story. Jesus’ named grandmothers are not the matriarchs like Sarah or Hagar, Rebekah or Leah or Rachel, but instead Jesus’ grandmothers named here are those in danger, those outside the patriarchal line, those beyond the social norms of their day who disrupt the orderly administration of power and privileges and thus become symbols of scandal.

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New O Antiphons, V: O Jesus Christ, down in the winter solstice…

The night provokes our most carnal fears and becomes a canvas on which to paint our deepest longings and desires. Diane Tucker quickly mixes her metaphors: “down the winter solstice… be with us in our waiting, lamenting.” And we do too. Like Psalm 88 in which the psalmist cries, “incline your ear to my cry” for I am in the “dark and deep” with eyes that grow dim with “so much sorrow,” we can’t help but equate the long nights of winter with the dark nights of the soul.

Even our Christmas carols, which you might expect to evoke joy, in fact carry a kind of minor key. “Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas” which sounds like it should be the most merry tune Judy Garland wants us to sing “someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow, until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” And muddle we do.

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The Greatest of These, IX: Integrity

On this All Saints’ Sunday, I feel that tension. Without love, there is no grief, says Amy Hollywood, or maybe she says, without grief, there is no love. Amy Hollywood’s great-grandmother died of what they called at the time “acute melancholia”—she died of a broken heart after her husband, brother, and more than one of her children died in quick succession. And so Amy Hollywood wonders what would have made it otherwise? She says that for her, the ones we refuse to lose enable us to live. In other words as we hold dear those we have lost, they help us live again. Is that true for you? The ones we have lost enable us, in their own way, to live? Weeks, months, years, decades later, the grief is somehow raw and whole again, and yet they are the ones who carry us through.

Maybe grief is so meandering and serpentine because love is so deeply embedded within us.

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The Greatest of These, VI: Guilelessness

Love is joy. Love is a finding seeking kind of joy. Love does not find joy in iniquity. Love does not find joy in injustice. Love does not find joy in wrongdoing. When someone trips up, makes a mistake, love cannot rejoice. Love only rejoices in the truth. Jesus recognizes this kind of love in Nathaniel. He calls Nathaniel “the one in whom there is no guile.”

Maybe it’s more like this: If the gospel of John were a movie, it would begin like a Star Wars film, Christmas Eve’s familiar words scrolling to set the scene…in the beginning was the word…. The theme music would follow cascading camera angles and you’d see a man out by a river inviting others into the river with him for some kind of sacred ritual. Maybe you’d be led to believe this was the main character.

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