Scott AndersonLamentations 3:22-33 † Psalm 30 † 2 Corinthians 8:7-15 † Mark 5:21-43
There is a difference, I think, between interruption and distraction. Distraction is what happens more frequently these days when I walk into a room and forget why I’m there, and then proceed to wander around asking myself and anyone around me what I might have been doing. If they weren’t so kind, you could probably get some stories from Pat and Carolynn in the office. I do wonder, though, if there is a reason besides my obvious physical and mental decline that I am so distracted. Certainly, we’ve been hearing for some time now from the media about our president and the suspicion that many of his more distressing and offensive tweets are intended and timed, at least in part, as distraction from more fundamental and substantial policy changes. I suspect that is true, as is the codependence of a media on reader eye-balls that causes them to report incessantly on the very thing they are so suspicious of. Distraction, and despair, is also what I’ve experienced over these past few weeks as I’ve found myself heartbroken and feeling powerless by the ongoing saga of our zero-tolerance immigration policy, by the plight of little girls and boys in places we are not permitted to see. I suspect you may share that sense with me. Distraction is different from interruption. Interruption is what happens in this story within a story in Mark. Interruption is what happens when a dignified synagogue leader in need goes through all the right protocols and takes all the right steps to ask for help for his sick daughter only to be intercepted by the inappropriate touch of a desperate woman who seems to have abandoned her manners, but not before her society abandoned her.
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Maggie BreenJob 38:1-11 † Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32 † 2 Corinthians 6:1-13 † Mark 4:35-41 My Kids and I were watching Iron Man 3 on Friday night. We are working our way through Marvel movies – escaping the news, looking for the good guy, enjoying the quick wit. We were laying on various couches when the scene turned to Pepper Potts, the hero’s very capable assistant and now girlfriend. She was driving a car, fleeing a dangerous scene, with another woman Maya Hansen in the passenger seat.  Maya is a brilliant scientist and previous acquaintance of the aforementioned hero – Mr. Stark. One woman turns to the other and they talk very briefly about the work in which the woman scientist is engaged
Molly pointed from her couch and gasped – oh, I think this means this movie passes the feminist movie test. Wait, what? There is a feminist movie test? Yes, she explained there is this test used to rate movies. You ask of a movie – does it have two women in it, does they have names, and do they talk to each other about something other than their thoughts or their relationship with a man. In that one scene Iron Man 3 just scraped over the bar. This test it turns out is called the Bechdel test. Scott AndersonEzekiel 17:22-24 † Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15 † 2 Corinthians 5:6-17 † Mark 4:26-34 The news program 60 Minutes recently aired a feature on the French photographer who calls himself JR.[i] You may not have heard of him, but I’ll bet you’ve seen his work.  Here’s a photograph that popped up in September on the US-Mexico border—a 64-foot tall picture of a Mexican child named Kikito who lives just on the other side of the fence.  Because of its location on the Mexican side, US border patrol agents can’t do anything about it. So Kakito can show off his beautiful smile and his playful curiosity, display his humanity for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, calling into question how our choices impact others, how we see one another, how our policies bless or curse other families.  JR has borders in mind a lot in his art—and the crossing of them. His passion flows out of his sense that we are deeply connected, that we share much in common—our hungers and humor and hope.
Scott AndersonGenesis 3:8-15 † Psalm 130 † 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1 † Mark 2:20-35
I wanted to redeem Jesus’ family. I wanted things to be better in the end. I wanted Jesus’ dilemma to end like the version of Heinz’s dilemma in which they end up on the beach, with her made well from the medicine she needed, and maybe with a fairer health system in place that values people over profit. I wanted the garden before the serpent shows up and everyone starts blaming everyone else for their choices. So I went to the end of Mark where we find two Marys. But, as much as I’d like to tell you Jesus’ mother shows up at the foot of the cross to be entrusted to John or at the empty tomb to wonder where they’ve laid him, I cannot. In Mark there is no happily-ever-after with his family. One writer puts it graciously, suggesting Mark, unlike the other gospels, did not seem to know of any positive traditions about the family of Jesus.[i] This is the earliest gospel. It is written closest in time to the conflict and heartbreak we suspect these followers of the reformer/disrupter Jesus experienced as he created something new from a religious tradition that had become misshapen and corrupt. We know enough about broken families and broken relationships these days and in this political climate to have learned that sometimes the best move is to separate ourselves from what has become abusive or corrosive—even among our closest families. Sometimes we must separate for our well-being and even our survival, even as we try to hold onto our memory that we belong together, that we are one family. Jan DittmarGenesis 1:1-31; Psalm 8:1-9; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20
Anyone living in the Pacific Northwest should read Timothy Egan’s The Good Rain. It is a thrilling yarn by a modern day wilderness adventurer who follows the route of a trailblazer from 1853. Woven through many historic threads, is Egan’s reverence for Creation in the Pacific Northwest. Let me read a small passage, chosen at random. Near Vasiliki Tower (a mountain in the North Cascades), wildflowers grow from rock slits high above timberline. A hummingbird buzzes overhead, and I see goat prints on a patch of midsummer snow. As it has for many citizens of the Information Age, computer time has cut my attention span and reduced my patience. To come up here, I must slow to glacier time. In a class at Seattle U, several of us from St. Andrew read a half dozen books, at least four of which also captured an enchantment with Nature in these parts. I was reminded of the creation story Pat read that begins Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And it was good. Farther down, at verse 26, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing.... God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion…. Scott AndersonActs 2:1-21 † Psalm 104:24-34 † Rom 8:22-27 † John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
This was not the first time that fire from heaven came down on the earth. It had happened before. In Exodus[i] we read that fire from heaven descended on the Tent of Meeting. It says, “Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.” Whenever it lifted the Israelites would move in the midst of their wanderings, but when the cloud of fire settled on it, the Lord was in the tabernacle, and they remained where they were. The theologian N.T. Wright[ii] reminds us it happened again in 1 Kings 8[iii]. For generations God lived in the Tent of Meeting, even after David, the king had settled in his own home. Finally, around 950bce, Solomon, David’s son, had finished the temple. God finally had a home, and on the day of dedication, fire filled the temple in much the same way it had filled the tent of meeting. “The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness,” Solomon proclaims. “I have built you an exalted house, a place for you to dwell forever.” And so the divine presence of God was assured for the Jewish people, and, in Jewish thinking, Solomon’s Temple became the centering place of the whole world. When in 587, the Babylonians tore down the temple and exiled the Jews, it presented a profound crisis. If God lived in the temple, where was God now? Ezra, Nehemiah, and Jeremiah convinced the people the temple had to be rebuilt. And so, in 515 when they returned from exile, they did, constructing the second temple, the temple that stood when Jesus walked, until the year 70 when this one too was destroyed. There was a problem, though. There is no record that the fire of God, the shekinah glory of God ever descended on this second temple. Wright suggests this embarrassment could explain the growth of Pharisaism—a dominant belief in Jesus’ time that if people simply obeyed laws more completely, practiced their rituals more perfectly, maintained the sabbath to the letter—then the glory of God would return. Then they would once again be God’s chosen people. But it didn’t. Scott Anderson
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26 † Psalm 1 † 1 John 5:9-13 † John 17:6-9
You may have heard the rather startling news that the US is the only developed country in which maternal mortality is actually going up rather than down. With all our scientific advances in health care, women are dying in childbirth at an increasing rate. At the same time, infant mortality remains a significant problem. The US has dropped to 32nd among the 35 wealthiest countries when it comes to the rate of infant deaths in childbirth. There is an important, and startling caveat to all this, though. These numbers are not trending across the board. Both of these rates are driven by what is going on with black women and babies. Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women, and black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white babies—this disparity is actually wider than it was in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery.[i] Let that sink in, for a moment. In comparison to other cohorts, the divide in the experience of quality of care in childbirth is wider now that it was when black women and their children were considered property. And the problem is so significant among black women and babies that it drives up the entire US rate for both statistics.[ii] Scott Anderson Acts 10:44-48 † Psalm 98 † 1 John 5:1-6 † John 15:9-17
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg had some big news this week. In an auditorium that appeared to be full of tech workers, he announced that Facebook was getting into the online dating business. “There are 200 million people on Facebook that list themselves as single, so clearly there’s something to do here,” he said at the conference.[i] The room filled with cheers, but it was a jarring announcement for many outside commentators, who noted how closely the news comes to an avalanche of press about Facebook’s mishandling of personal information—our political views, where we live and work, what we do and what we like and what we buy—all there for advertisers and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service to exploit. Why, they wonder, would we be inclined to potentially expose even more of our personal information, and, in fact, some of our most personal information, to a platform that has proven unable or unwilling to protect what it already has? Scott Anderson Acts 8:26-40 † Psalm 22:25-31 † 1 John 4:7-21 † John 15:1-8
There’s a scene in Marilynne Robinson’s 2014 novel Lila that always gets to me. The novel does frequently, in truth, which has got me wondering what it is about it, and about Robinson’s series of novels set in the fictitious Gilead, Iowa, where the Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton and the Congregationalist minister John Ames live out their ministries and friendship side-by-side in the 1940s and 50s. I suppose it gets to me because it touches on a deep truth or set of truths that hold me, perhaps in ways that are just beneath the surface, ways that I understand to a degree, yet they are born out of what I don’t understand, and don’t experience as much as I long to. What I mean, is that Robinson’s stories speak to a reality, a truth, a series of aspirations or a hoped-for state of being that is fleeting and fragile and good at its core—especially for how rarely we seem to experience it in full. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Julie Kae Sigars Numbers 21:4-9 † Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22 † Ephesians 2:1-10 † John 23:14-21
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