When Wisdom Throws a House Party

WE LONG FOR new beginnings, a restart, to go back in time to correct our mistakes or dodge the harm someone has done to us. But those former lives are inaccessible to us. All we have is this life now. Here we are in the middle: after the beginning and before the end. Usually we associate “middles” with “stuckness”—not the excitement of the new and not the relief of an end but locked in between. For example, the morass that prompts a midlife crisis, that languorous experience of the middle of life that leads to the purchase of a motorcycle.

In the church calendar, we’re in the season called “ordinary time,” a long stretch of weeks between Pentecost and Advent. These are the middle months where the scriptures plop us into the middle of stories. And that is where we find Jesus. The incarnation is an act of God in the middle of Israel’s story: not the beginning, not the conclusion, but God-with-us in the middle. This season of unceasing tedium has also been taken up into the life of God. Perhaps we could describe the incarnation as the midlife crisis of God?

Jesus is the one who has been with us from before the beginning, who has witnessed the groaning of all creation, the births and deaths and the life in between—and comes to us now, where we are, in our midlife, with our regrets and unfulfilled dreams, and guides us as we wander into the ordinary goodness of life.

August 1

After Liberation

AFTER GOD LIBERATES the Israelites from slavery, after they cross through the Red Sea, after they rejoice in the power of God’s salvation, the people find themselves in the wilderness, an unfamiliar land. Gone are the landmarks they used to orient themselves. Gone are Pharoah’s rules that governed their social world. Now, as the people wander, God will reveal new ways to structure their lives together.

The first revelation happens the morning after their liberation, when they wake up hungry. “There on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground” (Exodus 16:14). God provides food without labor—without harvesting or hunting. The food is a gift, nothing they’ve earned. With God, they will live by grace alone.

The people don’t recognize the bread as food. The flaky substance on the ground is like nothing they could have anticipated. They call it manna, which is just a Hebrew word that means, “What is it?” (Exodus 16:31). Without a name for this food, they call it a word that is a question.

We are in the wilderness with the Israelites. Life on this side of the Red Sea involves a posture of wonder—to watch for miracles, mysteries we’ve ignored because we were expecting something or someone else. Grace happens, even when we have not yet recognized what God has provided.

August 8

Tears as Sacrament

“O MY SON Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!” (2 Samuel 18:33). Despair overwhelms David. His own soldiers disobeyed orders and killed his son, Absalom. Tears come like a flood and wash away David’s pretense of control—over himself and his kingdom. What kind of sovereign can’t protect his own son? This death exposes his weakness.

Until this point, David’s life has been a rags-to-riches story, from a lowly shepherd to the throne room of Israel. He started out under the power of a father and seven older brothers. His killing of Goliath changes the course of David’s life. He becomes the most successful warrior of Israel. When he returns home from the blood sacrifices of war, the women line the streets and sing, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7). His power grows larger when he becomes king. David won’t let God’s commandments (against adultery, against murder) get in the way of exercising sovereignty without limit.

Yet here the king’s cry betrays his weakness. Despite his life of violence, all in the name of getting what he wants, David can’t keep his son alive. This cry testifies to the undoing of his power, of sovereignty that rightly belongs with God, and for that reason David’s tears offer the possibility of intimacy with God’s grace. We know our God in weakness. And there is nothing weaker than someone overwhelmed with a cry. Tears are a sacrament that comes upon us when we accept our weakness.

August 15

Wisdom’s House

“WISDOM HAS BUILT her house,” we read in Proverbs 9:1. God’s wisdom is personified as a construction worker, a builder. When the house is ready, she throws a party for everyone in her town. “Come, eat my food and drink the wine,” she says, inviting the neighborhood to her feast (9:5).

In John’s gospel, Jesus becomes the woman in Proverbs 9. Jesus takes the form of Wisdom personified, when the Incarnate One offers bread and wine—the bread of life and the cup of salvation, our communion in Christ’s life. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” says Jesus (John 6:56). Jesus offers his life as the wisdom of God, communion as an invitation to live in the way of wisdom, to abide in her dwelling, in God’s house. As biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown argued, “in drawing this portrait of Jesus, the evangelist has capitalized on an identification of Jesus with personified Wisdom.”

Church life is our response to Wisdom’s call, an invitation Jesus repeats, although he offers his body as her house. To be members of the body of Christ is to dwell in the house Wisdom has constructed. We share our communion meals at the tables Wisdom built.

August 22

When Peace Offends

IN EPHESIANS, WE'RE commissioned “to proclaim the gospel of peace” (6:15). This life of peace involves conflict with enemies, a nonviolent clash with evil: “Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers ... against spiritual forces of evil” (6:12). This peace is not quietism. Pacifism is not passivism. Instead, the peaceable gospel is an incursion against violence’s reign in our communities.

During the Trump years, my congregation was part of a coalition of churches that housed undocumented neighbors threatened with deportation. Church properties became protective sanctuaries. Hundreds of community members volunteered to provide day and night accompaniment for the person who lived for two years at our church—all of us ready for nonviolent confrontation with the authorities, were ICE agents to invade the church.

Proclaiming the gospel of peace put our congregation in conflict with the Department of Homeland Security. Our struggle against harmful federal policies made us enemies of neighbors who demanded the use of force to expel Latinx immigrants from our communities. I still have the hate mail our church received, and I haven’t yet deleted the messages threatening my own deportation. Racists dismiss the difference between citizen and noncitizen; they just want brown people sent away, regardless of our documentation status.

The gospel of peace will offend those invested in the U.S. racialized order for their identity as citizens. In a society organized by means of policing the borders of citizenship, peace involves the costly work of organizing acts of resistance against evil powers.

August 29

Love Poems

“HAD THE TORAH not been given,” Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph said, “the Song of Songs would have sufficed to guide the world.” Akiva, the great sage of the second century, says this collection of love poems would have been enough scripture to nurture our faith. Surprisingly, the book never explicitly names God. Instead, we’re drawn into romantic liaisons and carnal intimacies. “You have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes” (4:9). A lover calls out to a beloved, “Arise, my love ... and come away” (2:10).

There is enough of God in these love poems because heavenly love pierces through our earthly loves. We are corporeal, we know love through our flesh—our embodied mind, our enfleshed heart, our incarnate soul, the physicality of our spirituality. La teología es un poema del cuerpo (“theology is a poem of the body”), writes theologian Rubem Alves inVariations on Life and Death—el cuerpo orando / el cuerpo diciendo sus esperanzas (“the body in prayer / bodies speaking their hopes”). This life we have, this body, is the site of God’s revelations—divine likenesses in human form. We don’t know God other than through the flesh.

Even though God is not named, we hear God in the breath that gives voice to the lovers’ call and response—a love from heaven invoked in their earthly desire. With our brief lives we give each other fleeting moments to draw close to an invisible God, the one whose presence bears our loves.