The Painted Prayerbook

The Humble Seat © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Proper 17/Ordinary 22/Pentecost +14, Year C (August 29): Luke 14.1, 7-14

Ah, the endless wisdom of the table! Throughout Jesus’ ministry, we see again and again how in much the same way that he never passes up an opportunity to share a meal with others, he rarely misses the chance to use a table as an occasion to teach. Whether it’s welcoming a woman who anoints him, or using the table as a way to talk about the kingdom of God, or employing the elements of a meal to describe who he himself is: the table, for Jesus, is always about right relationship, about how we are to live in community and communion with one another.

At the table that Luke tells of in next Sunday’s gospel lection, Jesus turns his attention not only to the kind of hosts we are to be—inviting those who owe us nothing—but also to the kind of guests we ought to be. When we receive an invitation to share in the table of another, Jesus says (a wedding banquet, in this case: Jesus’ ultimate image of the kingdom of God) we should come with no expectations, no intent to grasp at a seat of honor—from which, Jesus says, we might be ejected. When approaching the table, Jesus says, our stance, is to be one of humility, a posture that leaves room for surprise and for grace.

When it comes to humility, and discerning how we are called to embody this sometimes perplexing quality as the people of Christ, I often find myself turning back to the desert mothers and fathers, those ammas and abbas of the early church who articulated this disposition with such clarity. Of all the practices and habits that these early Christians engaged in, humility was the one that surpassed all others, and upon which all other practices depended. We see this, for instance, in Amma Theodora. In The Sayings of the Desert Fathers we read that Amma Theodora said, “Neither asceticism, nor vigils nor any kind of suffering are able to save, only true humility can do that.” She went on to say, “There was an anchorite who was able to banish the demons; and he asked them, ‘What makes you go away? Is it fasting?’ They replied, ‘We do not eat or drink.’ ‘Is it vigils?’ They replied, ‘We do not sleep.’ Is it separation from the world?’ ‘We live in the deserts.’ ‘What power sends you away then?’ They said, ‘Nothing can overcome us, but only humility.’ ‘Do you see how humility is victorious over the demons?’” Amma Theodora recognized that without humility, all our practices become hollow.

The desert folk, however, understood humility in a rather different way than we tend to in the 21st century. Where we sometimes equate humility with being a doormat, Roberta Bondi points out in her book To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church that “humility did not mean for them [the ammas and abbas] a continuous cringing, cultivating a low self-image, and taking a perverse pleasure in being always forgotten, unnoticed, or taken for granted. Instead, humility meant to them a way of seeing other people as being as valuable in God’s eyes as ourselves. It was for them a relational term having to do precisely with learning to value others, whoever they were. It had to do with developing the kind of empathy with the weaknesses of others that made it impossible to judge others out of our own self-righteousness.”

At the root of humility is the Greek word humus. Earth. The earth that God made and called good, the earth from which, as one of the creation stories goes, God fashioned us. Humility is our fundamental recognition that we each draw our life and breath from the same source, the God who made us and calls us beloved. Humility does not only prevent us from seeing ourselves as more deserving or graced or better than another. It compels us also to recognize that we are no less deserving or graced than another. For women, so often conditioned to take on roles and attitudes of subservience, this is a particular point that the desert teachers would have us understand. Humility draws us into mutual relation in which we allow no abuse, no demeaning, no diminishment of others or of ourselves.

And when we bungle it, or see others bungle it, humility gives us a break. “When it comes to living together,” Bondi writes in her book To Pray and to Love, “humility is the opposite of perfectionism. It gives up unrealistic expectations of how things ought to be for a clear vision of what human life is really like. In turn, this enables its possessors to see and thus love the people they deeply desire to love.”

Humility invites us to stay low to the ground so that we can find the treasures there. Not so low that we become a doormat, subject to whatever treatment others may mete out to us. Instead, humility helps us remain grounded in the best sense of the word: centered in the humus from which we have been created, the gloriously ordinary earth from which God made each one of us. Humility enables us to recognize our dependence on the One who fashioned us as well as our kinship with those who share this earth, this humus. In practicing humility, we leave room for the surprising and graced ways that God works—beyond expectation, beyond privilege, beyond status—at the table and in every place beyond it.

So how’s your humus these days? In what are you centering and grounding yourself—your earth? Are you leaving God enough room to work beyond your expectations and assumptions? How might God be challenging you not only to offer hospitality but also to receive it in ways that bring wholeness?

Blessings to you at the table and beyond.

[To use the “Humble Seat” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

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Freedom in My Bones © Jan L. Richardson

Gospel reading, Proper 16/Ordinary 21/Pentecost +13, Year C (August 22): Luke 13.10-17

I’ve heard it said that every preacher has only one sermon, and that each message is simply a variation on it. I know this about myself, not only as a preacher but also as a writer and artist. I’m not sure what the title of my core sermon would be, but I know it has something to do with these questions: What are the habits, patterns, and rhythms by which we live our lives? Do they enable us to live in freedom, fully open to the presence of God? Or does our way of life hinder us from this? Are there patterns and habits that, over time, have become confining, keeping us bound and bent and feeling less than whole?

As a preacher, writer, and artist, I may venture far afield in my work, but I always seem to return to these core questions about what we shape and build and construct—and sometimes constrict—our lives around. And I find myself pondering these questions again as I contemplate the upcoming gospel lection, which is among my favorites: the story of the bent-over woman that Luke gives us in his Gospel.

Luke tells us that the source of the woman’s crippling illness lay beyond her control; he describes it as a spirit that had kept her bound for eighteen years (“eighteen long years,” Jesus points out). There was nothing, it seems, that she did to cause her condition, and little she could do to remedy it. There is no habit, no pattern, no routine that this woman can change that will free her—except to place herself in Jesus’ path.

I find myself curious about the community around this woman, wondering what their habits toward her had been. Did they hold her responsible for her condition, thinking—as people so often thought in that time, and still often do in ours—that her physical appearance was a manifestation of an inner fault? Did they take any notice of her as she made her painful way among them, or did they allow her to travel below their line of sight? Did they ever pause to look her in the eye, alter the shape of their own body in order to meet her gaze? Did they keep their distance, concerned that her state might pass all too easily to them? How much of this did the woman absorb into her own body and soul?

I know my wonderings reflect my own assumptions, largely born of my noticings about how in our own day we still so often look around, look through, look away from those in our midst whose bodies look different than whatever we consider the norm. And maybe I’m taking a too dismal view here; maybe this woman, whose name we do not know, did in fact have kinfolk and allies. Yet it’s clear that there were those in her community who allowed themselves to be locked into patterns that worked against her wholeness and freedom. When Jesus dares to heal the bent-over woman on a sabbath day, he meets resistance and outrage. In turn, he challenges those present to consider what sabbath really means: that in its fullness, the laws regarding sabbath are designed not just for rest but for release from all that keeps us in bondage.

Yesterday morning I returned home from my three-week trip to the other side of the country. After spending two weeks at the Grünewald Guild, a place I think of as another home, I went to Lake Tahoe to serve as the keynote speaker for the Companions on the Inner Way retreat. Both places offered remarkable experiences of community and hospitality. And in each place I witnessed the power of what happens when people are invited to live and move and work in ways that lie beyond their customary habits, patterns, and assumptions about who they are and what they can do.

In my retreat work, I often encounter folks who claim that they don’t have a creative bone in their bodies. I understand this; can see all too readily how our culture chips away at the creative spirit that is innate to us. It is alarming, how easily we participate—however unconsciously—in societal patterns that seek to keep us within certain confines; that keep us from being too distinctive, too creative, too noticeable. That keep us from standing upright.

But in these past weeks, I watched a woman create a sculpture for the first time since her mother’s death more than a decade before; I heard a woman in her 80s declare that she was going to spend the rest of her life painting; I saw people take the scriptures into their bones as they sang and worshiped and prayed and danced the sacred texts of our tradition; I saw them piece together words and images that drew them more deeply into their internal terrain where they found the presence of God in ways they had not noticed before. I saw them holding one another in community, walking with one another into new landscapes.

As these scenes and moments of the past weeks play through my memory once again, I see, too, among them a shadow: a woman bent, moving, rising, standing, praising. Healed and free.

And so I, the preacher and writer and artist who perpetually circles around the same message, am come this day to ask you: What are the patterns you are enacting in your life and your community? Do you have any habits and routines that, once comfortable, have become constricting and confining? Are there ways that you participate in keeping others in rhythms that are comfortable for you? Do you allow others to do this to you, letting yourself absorb assumptions and prejudices that keep you bound, however subtly? Do you resist moving in ways that might challenge and conflict with the patterns of others? What would it look like to place yourself in the healing path of Jesus, and know sabbath down to your very bones?

Prayer for All Things Rising

For all things rising
out of the hiddenness of shadows
out of the weight of despair
out of the brokenness of pain
out of the constrictions of compliance
out of the rigidity of stereotypes
out of the prison of prejudice;

for all things rising
into life, into hope
into healing, into power
into freedom, into justice;

we pray, O God,
for all things rising.

In the coming days, may you place yourself in the path of the Christ who desires our wholeness. Together. Blessings to you!

[“Prayer for All Things Rising” © Jan L. Richardson from Sacred Journeys: A Woman’s Book of Daily Prayer (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1995). To use the “Freedom in My Bones” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]