Psalm 81 – Be Safe This Thanksgiving

¹³ “If my people would only listen to me,
    if Israel would only follow my ways,
¹⁴ how quickly I would subdue their enemies
    and turn my hand against their foes!
¹⁵ Those who hate the Lord would cringe before him,
    and their punishment would last forever.
¹⁶ But you would be fed with the finest of wheat;
    with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.” (Read the rest of the chapter, here.)

This Psalm has so many parallels to todays’ realities, it’s uncanny. First, it takes place at a festival, most likely the Feast of the Tabernacles. Like Thanksgiving, the Feast of the Tabernacles (also called Sukkot) occurs in Autumn, during the harvest-time. It also involves a lot of food, celebrating, and getting together.

Second, many of the words uttered by the “unknown voice” in this Psalm could be uttered from any epidemiologist who warned about the pandemic, if you take out the God language. For example, vv. 13 and 14 would sound something like this: “If only the people would listen, if they would only follow directives. How quickly we could subdue this virus! How quickly we could prove naysayers wrong!”

Finally, and most importantly, the warning against false gods in vv. 8-9. “Hear me, my people, and I will warn you—if you would only listen to me, Israel!  You shall have no foreign god among you; you shall not worship any god other than me.” The idea of foreign gods has been on my mind a lot as I listen to travel and infection rate predictions for the holiday weekend. No one (that I know of) is still praying to Molech or Baal, but other “foreign gods,” gods that take us away from the one true God of love, have become much more insidious. How much do we follow Selfishness, Greed, Exceptionalism, and Exclusion? These have become our gods.

Collectively, we allow Selfishness to govern us when we decide to not take precautions during Covid, because it would inconvenience us. Collectively, we allow Greed to govern us when we hoard PPE, toilet paper, and hand sanitizer. Collectively, we let Exceptionalism govern us when we think, “but it won’t happen to me.” Collectively, we allow Exclusion to govern us when we refuse to share information, such as vaccine research, and resources, such as more liberal PTO or stimulus checks that mean something. Selfishness, Greed, and all the rest do not have one single altar we can destroy, one high place we can decry, but that doesn’t make them any less powerful, and in following them we have fallen away from God.

I wrote a few weeks ago about our own Thanksgiving’s continually racist traditions, so I’m not going to rehash that right now. Today, all I want to do is urge you, beg you, really, to be safe and prudent this holiday season. I know it’s hard. It is so, so hard. And I’m not trying to shame the people who have to support their family, send their kids to daycare in order to do so, or go on essential travel. But so much of what I see happening out there isn’t that. To make it worse, it isn’t done carefully. I find it disturbing that, despite infection rates skyrocketing past 150,000 new cases per day, there are still large, unmasked gatherings happening. Take, for example, the Million MAGA March, or Polyface Farm’s 300 person mask-less pop-up event, which in the last paragraph of the event description categorically denies the CDC, accepted contagion theories, and basic protective measures.

So please, remember that we are all children of God. God loves each and every one of us, and therefore we should love each other, too. One of the best ways we can do that right now is by keeping each other safe and healthy. Perhaps you won’t get sick, but in moving across the country you could bring one community’s infection back home to your own, where it will kill someone’s grandmother, someone’s partner, someone’s child. The time for festivals, gatherings, and celebration will come again, but only if we are patient and restrained now.

Psalm 22 – COVID and the Coming School Year

¹¹ Do not be far from me,
    for trouble is near
    and there is no one to help.

¹² Many bulls surround me;
    strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.
¹³ Roaring lions that tear their prey
    open their mouths wide against me.
¹⁴ I am poured out like water,
    and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
    it has melted within me.
¹⁵ My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
    and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
    you lay me in the dust of death. (Read the rest of the chapter, here)

The coming school year

Indulge me, if you will, in a moment of self pity. I got word from our school-board the other day that we as parents have two choices: Half-time instruction in-school, with children alternating weeks they are in-classroom and receiving at-home instruction, or opting for full-time at-home instruction. I am extremely concerned about the recent COVID spikes in states that attempted re-openings, and am scared to death of what schools across the nation opening in a few weeks is going to do to these numbers, so I opted for the latter.

Let me be clear, I think the school board made the best decision they could: no one is going to be happy with any decision they make, but this is probably the closest they’ll get to “getting it right” in an impossible situation. I also am deeply grateful to the teachers who are essentially going to have to come up with two lesson plans – one for in-school and one for remote teaching. But essentially, I just signed on to a full year of being little M’s teacher and therapist, in addition to her mother and advocate. I have never been someone who wanted to homeschool. It has never been remotely tempting. Yet here I am, doing it. I’ll be working with her teachers, but she’s a special-needs kindergartner, so let’s be honest here: self-directed study is not going to happen. I’m staring a new full-time job in the face come August 10.

Yes, I’m grateful I have the option to do this with and for my child. Yes, I will relish the time we get to spend together. Yes, I love being a part of her progress as she learns and grows. I am grateful. I really am. But I’m also so very tired. I’m tired of limiting her opportunities for social development because of a global pandemic. I’m tired of being afraid to go to the river with the girls too late in the day because there will be too many people there. I’m saddened that my youngest is now afraid of people walking by us when we walk the dogs, because I’ve tried to explain we need to be friends from afar for now. I hate having to explain to my girls for the millionth time that we can’t do a car-ride to their grandmas and grandpas, who they haven’t seen, outside of Facetime, in months. But more than anything I’m so, so worried about how many families might lose children come fall, reopening schools, and COVID spikes. So even though I’m tired, we will stay home: for our health and theirs.

The Psalm

Psalm 22 is the most quoted Psalm in the New Testament. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are the words Jesus cries out on the cross. Other parts allude to Jesus as well: “a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet” (v. 16), “they divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing” (v. 18). It is a lament, an anguished cry of a psalm, which is why I chose it for this week’s reading. “Why, Lord?” it asks. Also, “where are you, Lord?” Those two questions have been my heart’s cries for weeks now. I am sad, I am tired, my efforts feel futile.

Yet here I am, “declaring your name to my brothers,” as v. 22 puts it. Even as tired as I am, I cannot resist the gravity of God’s pull. I saw something on Instagram today that said “God is the God of your valleys as well as your mountains.” It’s comforting, in a small way, to know that God loves us even when we aren’t feeling our best selves, perhaps even when we are feeling a little sorry for ourselves, or shaky in our beliefs. And for that, I will continue to sing Xyr praises even while asking “why?” and “where?”

I find it comforting, too, that this psalm has already been fulfilled, not only through Jesus, but through the declaration at the very end: “Posterity will serve Xyr, future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim Xyr righteousness, to a people yet unborn — for Xe has done it.” It is estimated that the final compilation of the psalms was in the third century B.C., which means many of these psalms had been sung for a long time before. Millennia of generations have sung these psalms, and the goodness of God has carried us here, in that tide. It may not always seem good, but something about that longevity gives me hope, and gives me perspective. My tired is real, but it is temporary. Even if it lasts the rest of my life (and I hope it doesn’t, and I don’t believe God wants that for any of Xyr children), it is still temporary. I may wallow around in my valley of self pity for a bit, but God is there with me. And when I’m ready to climb back to the mountaintop, God will walk with me then, too.

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Ruth 02 – Lessons in Allyship from the Pride Community

¹⁹ Her mother-in-law asked her, “Where did you glean today? Where did you work? Blessed be the man who took notice of you!”

Then Ruth told her mother-in-law about the one at whose place she had been working. “The name of the man I worked with today is Boaz,” she said.

²⁰ “The Lord bless him!” Naomi said to her daughter-in-law. “He has not stopped showing his kindness to the living and the dead.” She added, “That man is our close relative; he is one of our guardian-redeemers. (Read the rest of the chapter, here.)

Boaz in the Ruth Story

Oh hey Pride Month, I still see you over there, behind the global pandemic and long-overdue nationwide anger over racism. Today, we’re going to pay a little attention to you. Let’s draw analogies between the greater LGBTQ+ community and Boaz, the kinsman-redeemer who saved Ruth and Naomi from poverty and lives as outcasts, because both have lessons to teach the rest of us in how to be a good ally.

First to brush up on the story of Ruth: Ruth was not an Israelite, she was a Moabite who married an Israelite man while he was living in Moab. Now, not only did Ruth’s husband die, but her brother-in-law and father-in-law died, leaving her, her sister-in-law, and mother-in-law, Naomi, destitute. Naomi decides to return to her ancestral lands to see if she can rely upon her community for kindness in her time of need, and Ruth follows her (we can discuss if Ruth’s devotion to Naomi was romantic or not another time, I promise, but that’s not for today’s post). They arrive in Bethlehem, and Ruth sets about gleaning (gathering what is left behind by the harvesters) so she and Naomi won’t go hungry. She catches the eye of Boaz, who provides her successively with: protection in the field, additional food, a promise of marriage, and the legacy of her deceased husband’s name.

You could make the case for Boaz’s interest in Ruth was a calculated one: there was land at stake in marrying her. Perhaps that early kindness is an effort to woo her, and throwing Ruth and Naomi in the land deal at the last minute may have been an effort to deter the heir apparent, but even so, nothing was guaranteed to Boaz. And I’m sure Boaz appreciated a young, possibly beautiful woman becoming his wife. But more than anything Boaz was doing what was right because it was right to help these two women, not what was right because it meant sleeping with Ruth. Boaz shows kindness to Ruth before she shows any interest in coming under his matrimonial protection, because kindness to these two women was important in and of itself. Uplifting these two women meant uplifting and strengthening the larger community, that he gains personally from it (in the form of land and heirs) is the just and Biblical happy-ending for our hero.

Double Shout Out to Pride

This brings me to my double Pride shout out: for their being awesome allies in the fight against COVID and in the most recent Black Lives Matter movement. Boaz did what was right with no expectation of fanfare but also while calling the community to witness (which he does when he convenes the elders in chapter four), and that is also what the Pride community has done in both its handling of COVID and Black Lives Matter.

There was no anger in the fact that Pride events had to be canceled due to COVID, instead the organizers took active steps in protection: The NYC Pride Parade and associated in-person events were canceled all the way back in April. This is a big deal, y’all: last year saw record attendance at nationwide Pride events, and this year is the 50th anniversary of the first pride march (the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which the 1970 march commemorated, was, of course, last year). Pride organizers and attendees would have every right to be upset that this year’s events have drastically changed. But has a peep of that disappointment made itself public? I haven’t seen any. The Pride community knows that by canceling these events, they are keeping their community, and indeed the larger community, safe and healthy.

Then, when the protests of last month started, the Pride community jumped behind them wholeheartedly: because repression of one group cannot be fully addressed until repression of all groups is recognized. Instead of getting mad that Pride month may be sharing the spotlight this year (no “gay lives matter, too,” though an appropriate #blacktranslivesmatter hashtag has been gaining visibility), LGBTQ+ leaders and individuals have shown an outpouring of sympathy and support. Contrast this with the Michigan COVID protesters angry that they can’t get a haircut, or the tone-deaf individuals insisting “all lives matter,” and it’s pretty clear who has the moral high-ground here.

Being a good ally

I actually hate the word ally, it sounds performative, and it should be redundant: Boaz stood with and for the repressed Naomi and Ruth. Jesus calls us to do the same for the repressed of today. The Pride community has answered that call better than most of us. If we see injustices happening (and no, not being able to get your nails done does not count as an injustice), we, as Christians, are duty-bound to help end those injustices. Boaz gave of both his wealth and his social influence, not to mention the protection of his house and name. So, to all the LGBTQ+ individuals out there holding space for Black Lives Matter, and abiding by safety protocols for COVID quarantines, whether you are Christian or not, I bless you as Naomi blessed Boaz. God sees your heart, and I know Xe is well pleased.

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