The Painted Prayerbook

Getting Garbed © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 23/Ordinary 28/Pentecost +17: Matthew 22.1-14

I have anxiety dreams. Not frequently, mind, but they do pop up once in a while. And for the past couple of years it’s been the case that when the anxieties floating around my subconscious emerge in a dreamscape, they tend to attach themselves to one activity in particular:

Weddings.

I have anxiety dreams about other people’s weddings. I’m performing the ceremony, and I’m running late. Or I’m in the church, but I can’t get to the sanctuary. Or the ceremony is about to happen, and I realize we haven’t actually planned it. Or I don’t have my robe.

I have anxiety dreams about my own wedding, which, God willing, will take place about this time next year. (Note to those who know us: this does not constitute an announcement! It’s not official; we haven’t set the actual date!) It’s the day of the wedding, and I haven’t sent out the invitations. Or we’ve taken care of every detail except for actually planning the service. Or the wedding starts in five minutes and I haven’t dressed. Or I don’t have a wedding gown.

The anxious landscape of those wedding dreams feels to me a lot like the setting of this Sunday’s gospel lection. In Matthew 22.1-14, we find a wedding banquet that is, by turns, wondrous and terrible. It reminds me, in fact, of the old “That’s good! That’s bad!” shtick. In this case, it would go something like this:

A wedding banquet! That’s good!
No, that’s bad; the invited guests didn’t come!
But the king sent people to look for them! That’s good!
No, that’s bad; they killed them and burned their city!
But then they went into the streets and invited everyone they found! That’s good!
But then the king saw a guy who wasn’t wearing a wedding robe, and he had his attendants throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!

Oh, that’s bad. Definitely very bad.

It’s a wondrous text. In its high points, it shares similarities with Luke 14.15-24; both passages contain parables of a great wedding banquet to which the invited guests find reasons not to go, and so a wild and wondrous array of last-minute B-list folks wind up enjoying a splendid feast. It’s one of my favorite depictions of the kingdom of God.

It’s a terrible text. In his version of the wedding banquet, Matthew sets the stakes considerably and painfully higher than does Luke. Those who refuse to come suffer violent repercussions. Matthew’s inclusion—and punishment—of the hapless, robeless fellow strikes a particularly curious note that feels like a scene out of one of my wedding anxiety dreams.

The fellow comes to the banquet, after all, but somehow, whether by intention or inadvertence—the text isn’t clear—he misses the line where they were handing out wedding robes. The severe punishment inflicted upon him got me wondering about the significance of the missing wedding garment, and, beyond that, about the symbolism of clothing in scripture, and how it bears on this story.

Given that the Bible doesn’t always provide a wealth of descriptive details, I was surprised and then fascinated as I considered the scriptures with garments in mind. Significant mention is made of clothing from almost the very beginning. When God exiles Adam and Eve from Eden, God does not leave them to their fig leaves; in a charmingly domestic gesture, God “made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them” (Gen. 3.21). Exodus tells of the lavish vestments fashioned for Aaron and his sons, clothing that was intertwined with their ordination and service as priests of God. When Ruth, a stranger from another land, seeks security in her new home, she goes by night to her kinsman Boaz, asking of him, “Spread your cloak over your servant” (Ruth 3.9). In Matthew’s gospel, the hem of Jesus’ robe becomes a conduit of healing for a woman who has bled for years (Mt. 9). The father of the prodigal son cries out for his returning child to be garbed in the best robe (Luke 15.22). In John’s version of the crucifixion, the soldiers’ division of Jesus’ clothing and their casting of lots for his tunic is seen as a fulfillment of Psalm 22: “They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots” (John 19.24).

The book of Revelation surpasses all others in taking particular note of what people are wearing; their garb is laden with symbolic import, with white robes achieving particular prominence. The visionary John draws our attention to “one like the Son of Man” who is clothed with a long robe and a golden sash (Rev. 1), white robes that will be given to members of the church in Sardis “if you conquer” (Rev. 3), the twenty-four elders surrounding the throne who wear white robes and golden crowns (Rev. 4), martyrs who receive a white robe (Rev. 6), a multitude clad in robes that have been made white by washing them in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7), an angel garbed with a cloud (Rev. 10), witnesses who prophesy wearing sackcloth (Rev. 11), a woman clothed with the sun (Rev. 12), seven angels robed in pure, bright linen and golden sashes (Rev. 15), a bride clothed with fine linen that is the righteous deeds of the saints (Rev. 19), and a rider wearing a robe dipped in blood who is followed by armies clad in fine white linen (Rev. 19).

Clothing carries such symbolic weight that, in the scriptures, simply being in relationship with God and doing what God would have us do is spoken of in the vocabulary of textiles. “I put on righteousness,” Job claims in one of his discourses, “and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban” (Job 29). “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,” Isaiah exults, “…for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels” (Isaiah 61).

From Genesis to Revelation, clothing takes on significance in virtually every case as a sign of God’s providence. Time and again, God cares for God’s people by providing clothing for them. It is a tactile, tangible, textured sign of God’s mercy, care, and love. Perhaps to help make up for giving us such vulnerable skin, God works to ensure that we have something to wear. So important is this that God compels us to participate with God in providing clothing for one another. Covering the naked with a garment is among the list of actions in Ezekiel 18 that make a person righteous. Jesus picks up this theme with particular directness in Matthew 25: “Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world…I was naked and you gave me clothing….” And if anyone takes our coat, Jesus tells us, “do not withhold even your shirt” (Luke 6).

So providential is God on this point that Jesus specifically instructs us not to sweat the clothing issue. “And why do you worry about clothing?” he asks. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field,” Jesus continues, “which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’” (Matthew 6.28-31).

So, given how hospitable God is when it comes to garbing us, what’s the deal with the garmentless guy getting booted out into the teeth-gnashing darkness? Where is the good news in this parable?

I’m intrigued by the suggestion, posed by a couple of folks I’ve come across, that we rethink our tendency to assume that the king of this parable is God, who comes off looking supremely grumpy and vindictive in this tale. These exegetes suggest that the king instead symbolizes earthly authorities, and the robeless man thrown into the darkness in fact refers to Jesus. They draw our attention in particular to Isaiah 52.13-53.12, where the prophet describes the suffering servant. In his silence and in his afflictions, the servant indeed bears a resemblance to the wedding guest whom the king commands his attendants to bind and throw into the darkness.

Particularly bearing in mind that Jesus grounded his teachings in the Hebrew Scriptures, it’s an enticing suggestion to ponder. I’m not clear, however, that it explains everything. Jesus is telling the parable to describe the kingdom of heaven, and it seems hard to get around the implication that the king in this kingdom is, well, God.

The text doesn’t provide enough clues for us to be certain whether the wedding guest was missing a robe by intention or by accident. Jesus seems to imply that the guest failed to properly receive the sacred hospitality extended to him, or to receive it fully enough—he deigned to come to the feast, but not to wear the correct attire—and therefore was punished in such a fashion that one wonders if perhaps it would have been best for him not to have come at all.

Given the scriptural witness to God’s bias in favor of garbing the garmentless, it seems fair to interrogate the text and its traditional interpretation. At the very least, we need to read Jesus’ parable in light of the scriptures’ well-established depiction of God as one whose propensity for clothing us extends even to the prodigal.

For my part, in pondering this passage in the realm of lectio divina, all my wonderings have come down to this:

What am I clothing myself in? Or, perhaps more precisely, how am I allowing God to garb me these days?

Am I feeling good because I’ve accepted God’s invitation to show up at the feast, but in truth have neglected to open my arms fully to the wonders before me? Am I harboring some sense of rebelliousness—I’ll come in for the party, but you can’t make me dress right? Given that I think a measure of well-placed rebellion is okay, how do I work to ensure that I’m not directing my rebelliousness toward God and God’s hospitable intentions toward me? And on those occasions when I’m wrestling with God, or needing things to be less intense in my relationship with God, or when I simply need to temporarily set aside a metaphorical holy cloak that’s grown too weighty or wearisome, can I trust that God won’t bind me and send me into the darkness to gnash my teeth? If, in my waking life, I’ve wandered into a landscape that feels like those wedding anxiety dreams—I’m not in the right place, I can’t get there, I’m not ready, I don’t have the right thing to wear—can I rest in the God who gives party clothes to the prodigal and spreads a cloak over the stranger and, in baptism, clothes us with Christ’s own self (Galatians 3)? Can I trust that this same God will provide what I need and will let me linger at the feast?

I think I can do that. How about you?

In her wondrous book Showings, also known as Revelations of Divine Love, the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich wrote, “Our good Lord is our clothing that, for love, wraps us up and winds us about, embracing us, all beclosing us and hanging about us, for tender love.” In these days, may you know the beclosing clothing of Christ, and extend it to those who cross your path. Blessings.

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

[Julian of Norwich quotation cited by Gail Ramshaw in Treasures Old and New: Images in the Lectionary.]

© Jan L. Richardson ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

One of the cool things about going to The Grünewald Guild each summer is that it offers an opportunity to see what other artists are doing. One of the challenging things about going to the Guild each summer is that it offers an opportunity to see what other artists are doing. Coming into contact with creative folks is a two-edged sword: even as it supplies inspiration and camaraderie in a vocation that requires much solitude, it can also provide an opening for envy to seep in.

Take my friend Gilly. Gilly regularly comes over from England to teach at the Guild. As if having a fabulous accent weren’t enough, she’s also a fantastic artist. Much of Gilly’s work involves painting on fabric. Oftentimes, really big pieces of fabric. In churches, in her local theological school, and in other settings, Gilly creates large-scale pieces that both evoke and invoke a sense of the sacred.

Folks who teach at the Guild have an opportunity to give an evening presentation in which we share what we’ve been working on. This year, Gilly offered a PowerPoint presentation that contained images of her work, both in progress and completed. I was taken in particular by a series of large painted fabric pieces inspired by St. Patrick’s Breastplate, that remarkable prayer for protection attributed to the patron saint of Ireland. As Gilly described creating the pieces, and how she has used them with groups, I felt a stab of envy. For nearly a year the main artwork I’ve done has been the collages for this blog, which are 3 x 4 inches. I love working small right now. Particularly after completing a commission last year that was 4½ x 6½ feet, took nearly two years to do, and was a real trick to create in my 300 square foot studio apartment, the wee collages have been a wonderful way to explore some new directions and techniques in a more manageable and intimate fashion. But listening to Gilly, and seeing her images, it was hard not to compare. I envied her talent, her vision, her access to a church and a school where she could explore and offer her gifts. I envied her having a space that enabled her to create such large pieces.

I’ve been thinking about Gilly as I’ve pondered next Sunday’s gospel lection, Matthew 20.1-16. This passage is part of the conversation that Jesus has with the disciples following his encounter with the rich young man who asks him what good deed he must do in order to have eternal life. In talking with the disciples, Jesus tells a parable about a vineyard owner who hires laborers in the early morning, making an agreement to pay them the usual wage. He goes out to hire laborers again at 9:00, noon, 3:00, and 5:00, telling them he will pay them what is fair. When quitting time comes in the evening, the owner begins to pay them, starting with those he has most recently hired and working his way back to those he brought in first. Hearing that he paid the latecomers the full daily wage, the early birds are full of anticipation, then seething with resentment when he pays them the same wage. When they begin to grumble, he reminds one of the workers of their agreement. “Take what belongs to you,” the vineyard owner says, “and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” I like how the King James Version renders that last question: “Is thine eye evil, because I am good?”

In talking about this parable, we often use it as a way to describe not only the wideness of God’s mercy but also the wildness of it. We acknowledge how God’s sense of justice doesn’t always match our own, and how the grace of God is lavish and limitless, extending in an equally drenching measure to each person, irrespective of status. We admit that we don’t always understand the way that God’s love works, and that we are sometimes embarrassed by how much greater and deeper God’s generosity is than our own.

Even as I know and acknowledge these things, and am aware of how God tends to work with such incomprehensible mystery, I find myself lingering with the complaint of the first-come workers. The owner is right, of course; it’s his prerogative, he’s paid them the wage they agreed upon, they have no real cause for griping just because someone else got a sweeter deal. All the same, I resonate with their sense of indignation. I want to fix it for them. And not by negotiating with the owner for better wages. Rather, I find myself wanting to step into the story and say to the workers, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, get your own darned vineyard!”

I recognize the class issues that might have precluded day laborers’ purchasing a vineyard in that society. But for me, pondering this passage here in my 21st-century life, Jesus’ parable prompts me to ask, What does it look like to cultivate a vineyard of one’s own? How do we create a place in our lives where we aren’t beholden to others, subject to their whims? Where do we experience the freedom and the focus to tend a vision that God has given us, using all the gifts that God has provided us?

I’m not suggesting that cultivating one’s own vineyard means giving up the structures that provide income and some measure of security and stability. (I’m not suggesting it doesn’t, either.) As someone whose call led me to a nontraditional ministry that involves raising my entire income, I’m really clear about the kind of discernment that needs to go into making the big decisions about what work we will give our hands to, and how we will find support to do this, and what kind of structure we need. Yet whatever field God calls us to labor in, God also calls us to cultivate a space of freedom, a place where we have room to explore and discover and create what will bring sustenance and delight for ourselves and for the world—as vineyards are meant to do. I’ve found that creating such a place often involves piecing it together a scrap at a time. In forming connections, in cultivating relationships that sustain us, in moments of insight and inspiration, in making creative choices, in becoming clear about the work that’s uniquely ours to do, in doing whatever is necessary to do that work, in finding allies who can help us: in each action, we find another patch of the vineyard to which God beckons us.

Obsessing about what others are doing and constantly comparing our work to theirs distracts us from our own work of cultivation. Left unchecked, envy saps our energy, robs our creative focus, and eats us alive. I appreciate the way that Bonnie Friedman writes about this in her book Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life. She asks,

What is this thing that can take the best from us and yet remain unsatisfied? When I think of envy, I think of Pharaoh’s lean cows [from Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41]. They eat up the healthy ones—cannibals, those cows!—yet they remain as skinny as ever, so that, the Bible tells us, ‘when they had eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them; but they were still ill favored, as at the beginning.’ I’ve always felt sorry for those cows. We’re told they’re poor and lean-fleshed, emaciated and ugly. They feed, but cannot digest. They are unhealthy desire incarnate.

Friedman closes her chapter on envy by writing, “The antidote to envy is one’s own work. Always one’s own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself. It drives the spooks away.”

Maybe that’s what Jesus is trying to say, really, in telling this parable about the vineyard. He wants to remind his hearers that whatever circumstances we are in, we find a measure of power in staying focused on discerning and doing the work that is ours to do. Cultivating that quality and depth of attention is its own kind of vineyard.

The stab of envy can be painful, but its knife has a way of laying us bare and revealing to us what we need to work on. It’s a tool for cultivating the vineyard. When I acknowledge the presence of envy and let it do its piercing work for a limited time, it opens up room both to explore new directions that other artists inspire me toward, and also to renew my commitment to what I am uniquely called to do.

Who knows, maybe one day I’ll get desperate enough to knock out one of the walls of this cozy apartment, unroll a bolt of fabric over the side until it touches the driveway below, and start painting. Until then, I’m keeping my eye on these bits of painted paper, piecing them together inch by inch. There’s a vineyard in here somewhere.

How about you? Does envy surface in your own life? What triggers it? What message or invitation does it hold for you? What kind of vineyard are you cultivating, or longing to? Who can help? Whom can you help to do this?

Wishing you peace and sustenance and delight as you tend what is yours.

Seventy Times Seven © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 19/Ordinary 24/Pentecost +13: Matthew 18.21-35

Well, now that I’m back from my long weekend with the Labor Day chicks, I have to face it: summer is over. Though it’s still hot as blazes here in Florida, returning from my time with the women means it’s time to shift into a new rhythm. There’s much to look forward to in the fall, but the transition is a bit bittersweet.

The calendar of the liturgical year, however, tells us that we’re still in the season of Ordinary Time. We have nearly three more months of it, in fact. Though we’ve been navigating this season for a good while, the gospel lections aren’t getting any easier. If anything, they’re growing more challenging. Ordinary Time takes us into the heart of Jesus’ teachings, where there is plenty to stretch and sometimes stump us. Next Sunday’s gospel lection provides an excellent case in point.

This passage follows on last week’s reading, which Jesus concluded by assuring us that wherever two or three are gathered in his name, he is in our midst. Peter, however, doesn’t allow us to linger in that moment. He knows that such concord and communion will not be a constant state among Christ’s followers. And so Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” In the Bible, the number seven is often used to signify perfection, completeness, wholeness: seven days in the first story of creation, the seven pillars of Wisdom’s house, seven churches in the book of Revelation. Mark and Luke tell us that Jesus cast out seven demons—a perfect complement—from Mary Magdalene. (“A demon for every day of the week,” Kathleen Norris writes, “how practical; how womanly.”) Yet when it comes to forgiveness, seven is not complete enough for Jesus. “Not seven times,” he says to Peter, “but, I tell you, seventy-seven [or seventy times seven] times.”

We sometimes hear this passage as referring to a situation where a person is persisting in sin, causing harm again and again, compelling our forgiveness anew with each occurrence. I wonder, though, whether Jesus is instead acknowledging that in the life of the community, we will sometimes have to make multiple attempts to forgive a single act of harm. I suspect that Jesus well knew that forgiveness is an act—and an art—that we would have to work at. Again. And again. And again.

In this passage, Peter is asking specifically about forgiveness in the context of one’s intimate community. The word he uses here, adelphos, refers to a brother or fellow believer. He’s talking about sin that comes by the hand of one who is part of our circle, our kindred. We sometimes feel this brokenness all the more sharply because it comes from a source so close to us, where there are habits of familiarity and bonds of trust. This kind of sin tests the connections of a community to the limit.

The word forgive comes from aphiemi, a Greek word with a rich constellation of meanings that extend to financial, relational, and physiological matters. Aphiemi can mean to remit, to give up a debt, to keep no longer. We can translate it as leave behind, let go, forsake, divorce. In Matthew 27.50, it’s what Jesus does with his spirit; he gives it up, releases it. Aphiemi is a powerful word that speaks of loosing our hold on something or someone, to renounce our claim to it.

To forgive someone involves a releasing, a letting go, that is countercultural. This kind of act goes against the grain of a society where one of the primary ways we gain power is by accruing debts owed to us, obligations not just of money but also of time, favors, and other things that we think are owed us.

Forgiveness is such a radical and challenging practice that, as is his way, Jesus has to tell a story to try to explain it. He describes a servant who owes his king a staggering sum of money that he cannot pay. The king threatens to sell him, his family, and all his possessions. Pleading with the king, the servant receives extravagant mercy but fritters it away when he refuses to forgive a small debt that a fellow servant owes him. When the king hears of it, he hands him over to be tortured until he pays his debt in full.

Jesus caps the parable by telling his listeners, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” It seems a harsh turn in the tale, with Jesus invoking an image of God as a torturer. Yet the truth is that it doesn’t take God to inflict pain on us for our refusal to forgive; suffering is a natural effect. The context of the parable makes sense, with its images of servitude, imprisonment, torture, and complex tiers of power. By what we refuse to forgive, we place ourselves in bondage.

Refusing to forgive someone who has harmed us often holds deep appeal because it is, in part, a path that seems to offer us a measure of control. This becomes particularly true in situations where the hurt has come from someone who has more overt power than we do. Our refusal to forgive may seem like the only way we can have any power. Yet as in the parable, our lack of forgiveness can eventually become a prison that not only holds the other person but our own selves.

Jesus never claims that forgiveness compels us to accept the behavior of one who has caused harm. He never tells us that forgiveness means saying that everything is okay or remaining with someone who persists in wounding us. In challenging us to forgive, he acknowledges that we may not be able to change the behavior of another, or to alter what they have done, but that we have power over how we will respond. To offer forgiveness means that we refuse to allow another’s sin to control us, to hold us, to bind us.

I’m intrigued that this parable should turn up in a week that holds the date of September 11. Amid the stark images and memories this anniversary stirs up, Jesus’ words remind me how important it is to persist in practicing the art of forgiveness, to work to keep my heart clear, to refuse to allow the destructiveness of another to colonize my soul. Forgiveness is an act that I can’t always conjure on my own. It instead requires a curious combination of work and grace. For my part, I have to cultivate an openness to the possibility. Sometimes it means asking to want to forgive, long before I actually do it, because I can’t always summon even the desire to forgive. But the forgiveness itself, that ability to release, to let go, to loose the bindings: that is purely the graceful work of God who does the same for me.

In this week of September 11, what might God be challenging you to loose your hold of? Is there pain, resentment, or anger occupying precious terrain in your heart? Is there any harm you are holding onto? Where is God in that for you? How might God be wanting to hold that for you, and to begin to release its hold on you?

In this and all weeks, blessings.

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