The Generosity of Numbers: Why I love and hate math

When I was a kid, I loved words--give me metaphors and similes, give me alliteration, give me the "snap, crackle, pop" of onomatopoeia! Math was...well, not the same. Once I got into Algebra and all the surprises that followed it (Algebra II, Trig/Analyt), I could no longer count on my magnificent brain to figure out the answer with any degree of reliable accuracy.  Sometimes the right answer felt like winning the lottery--and by that I mean, rare and random and disconnected to any pattern I could figure out.


I appreciated the beauty of math, how it had hidden rules and patterns and how it solved so many of the world's problems..."If a train leaves Chicago at 12:45 and another train leaves South Bend at 2:17, and then if there's a cow on the tracks..." I did not understand math, totally, but I respected it. I stared wide-eyed at it, like a Neanderthal's first encounter with fire. It gave off lovely sparks, but had a heat and power that I knew were beyond my grasp. Math was to be approached with caution once we had variables and equations and parabolas and hyperbolas. Math was to be approached with something akin to awe, barefoot and kneeling before a burning bush full of mystery and beauty and sometimes, as my GPA swiftly showed me, full of pain.

I love this poem by Mary Cornish about the generosity of numbers. I dedicate it to my favorite high school teacher, who taught, of all things, mathematics. John B. Walters, III, this one is for you.

Numbers
by Mary Cornish

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.

There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

The Play's (Not) the Thing: a Word about Worship

Once upon a time, I was in a Helpful Workshop about Worship. Perhaps you too have been to one of those. It was in a church basement and I was in my “I will be the world’s most active layperson and God will quit it with the ideas about seminary” phase. The person standing up front, next to the newsprint and the continental breakfast items, was talking about worship as an “unfolding drama,” and was asking, in fairly dramatic, suspensful fashion, “If worship is a drama, who is the audience?”

I flashed back to my childhood in Macon, GA, where in my memory, it is always hot. Seven-year-old me is wearing a dress, tights and black patent leather shoes. There is a ribbon in my hair. Mama is wearing a dress too and Daddy has on a jacket and smells like aftershave. We got up early to come to the big building with the columns out front and the marquee sign with the service times and the short, pithy sermon title on it. We were always late or nearly late and most weeks would fuss in the car in not-so-Christian fashion over the stress of what being late would mean, as if we had paid for tickets in advance or would not be seated until intermission.  We’d get bulletins from ushers and sit in spots that had come to be almost assigned. We’d face forward to the chancel area where the “drama of worship” would unfold, complete with music, choir, oratory, laughter and tears. If we liked something, we clapped and at a certain point, we’d have the chance to make a donation of sorts, putting money in a plate they passed around. We’d wait in a line to critique the pastor. We’d say “Good sermon” and he’d say, “God bless you,” a sort of liturgical flight attendant’s “Buh-bye” as we tired travelers stepped off the plane from the long strange trip of worship.

Back in my Worship Workshop, I realized that everything about Sunday worship sets up the congregation as the audience, but our presenter was trying to get us to see that we are not the passive critiquers and consumers of an entertainment event. The answer he wanted for “Who is the audience for worship?” was clearly not us, but God. He pointed out that liturgy means “work of the people” and that in that sense all the gathered community participated in this drama of worship. But something about the analogy seemed to be missing for me. Did that mean that God was our passive audience and that we were up there working like roadies to earn God’s standing ovation? That seemed a little too “saved by works” for me, and didn’t line up with what I found when I experienced true worship, even in that same columned church at the age of 7. Worship was an encounter with a living God, who was not just a passive receiver of “our” worship.  God participated too! God directed it. God was all up in it in ways we could not anticipate on the way to the “theatre”. It was a dance, full of surprises and unexpected turns and spins. It was an encounter with a burning bush, that ignites but doesn’t consume, a dancing fire, a loving God who calls us and challenges us, who makes liturgy leap off the page into something else—something that changes us, little by little, into people who look more like Christ. If worship was “our” offering to God, it was at best a paper kite, scrawlings on a page, images on a screen. When the community gathered for worship, we held our kite out at arms length and waited for God to take it where God would. The holy breath would flow in community to give life to that which we had made, taking it to places we never thought it would go. This was no passive audience, and we were not actors. This was silver being refined, this was a true story about God and God’s beloved whispered in our ears by Someone other than us.

What is worship about? What is it for?  Larry Stookey has this to say, and I don’t know that I could say it better:

What Worship is About

By Larry Stookey (reprinted with permission)                      

Worship is not first of all about me.

It is above all else about GOD—

            God’s marvelous glory,

            God’s boundless compassion, and

            God’s stubborn insistence

                        On transforming the world

                                    That divine love created and redeemed in Christ.

Next:

Through worship God wills and works

            To change all of us,

            To empower us by the power of the Holy Spirit to minister as those

                        Who renounce injustice

in favor of justice

                        who reject greed

                                    in favor of generosity

                        who forego self-direction

                                    in favor of interdependent discipleship.

Only then is worship about me

            As I am a part of God’s “us.”

My God, My God...Why Have You Forsaken Me?: A Reflection on the Fourth Word from the cross

A sermon preached at Asbury UMC in Annapolis on Good Friday.

Right off the bat, I want to tell you a secret. The hardest of the 7 last words is always the one you have to preach on.  My God, My God, why have you forsaken me is probably really the hardest though, and not just because I’m preaching on it today.

Because one of the things I think we secretly believe is that Jesus was somehow immune to feeling truly alone. After all, he’s one with the Father, he’s part of the Trinity, he’s “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the word WAS God.”  He’s never alone, for Pete’s sake.  It’s like those movies where two kids try to impersonate one adult in one set of clothes, one on top of the other.  We suspect if we were to look inside, we’d see God and Jesus both walking down the dusty road under the same big overcoat. We’re always being reminded in the gospels of Jesus’ hidden divinity, so obvious to us, so cloudy to those dimwitted disciples of his. Example of Lazarus—where Jesus says, “I know you’ve done this already, Father but I just thank you that you are helping these idiots see it.” Or words to that effect.

I think there’s a part of us that prefers the Jesus as superhero model. Sure he looks like Clark Kent but really, he’s superman. Sure, he’s the word who took on flesh and walked among us, but he never really was one of us. He was sort of God wearing a mask.  In the world, but not of it.  His every conversation is laced with hearing from God, after all—even his words are in a different color ink in some Bibles. Lest you forget that he’s really just God in disguise.

And then sometimes…we get glimpses of some other side of Jesus. The Bible verse everybody can remember—Jesus wept—is one example, when Jesus weeps because Lazarus is dead. Surely, Divine Jesus knows he’s going to raise him up, we just went over that. But he wept because he loved him. He loved his whole family.  And when we see love we wonder, because if Jesus LOVED someone, then Jesus can HURT.  Because love and vulnerability go hand in hand.  You cannot have one without the other.  Simon and Garfunkle said, “If I never loved, I never would have cried.” Someone else put it like this…”Everybody plays the fool…sometimes…no exception to the rule.” When you say “love,” you say “vulnerability,” you say “sacrifice.” So when we read that God so LOVED the world that he sent his only begotten Son to save it, our eyes should get wide, because if our God is going to LOVE us, our God is going to open Godself up to hurt and pain. (As hard as that is to get our heads around).

And this day, Jesus sounds the most like one of us that he’s ever sounded. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  Good Jew that he is, Jesus is quoting Psalm 22.  Scholars will tell you that one way to think about this Word is that, quoting the first line of a psalm was a way to invoke the whole thing (a shorthand).  And if you read all of Psalm 22, you see it doesn’t end with the Psalmist being forsaken. It ends in praise, with all creatures, living and dead, bowing down before a living God.

But, I know you’re saying…that’s cheating Preacher. So just taken on its own terms, Jesus’ crying out to God teaches us some important things. First, and most importantly, it tells us that when we fall on our knees in pain, when we get the phone call about our child at 3 a.m., when we hear about the plane crash, the doctor’s report,  it tells us that when we cry out, we are acting like Jesus. We are being Christian.  We don’t serve a keep it together and get over it kind of God. When we are backed into a corner and at the very end of our rope, we are acting like Jesus when we say, My God, My God, why?

Second, we learn that  Jesus was not just  impervious God wearing a human mask.  This is proof that  when God came to save us, He took on real pain, real hunger, real desperation, real loneliness.  He felt it, for real. He’s not a god in disguise. He became one of us in every way so that he could love us in every way and save us in every way.

God knows what we are going through and he is going through it with us.  Where was God when Jesus was suffering on the cross.? God was suffering on the cross too! Where is God when we feel god-forsaken? Suffering with us, catching every tear we cry, absolutely with us.

Jesus went to every God-forsaken place so that when we get there, we’ll find it’s not God-forsaken after all. When we get to our good Friday, in whatever awful form it takes, we will find our God has gone on ahead of us, setting a table in the presence of our enemies, God is right there too.  This word says to us,  no matter WHAT we are going through on our Golgotha, we have a God who completely knows how it feels. Who doesn’t just say, “Buck up, and get over it.”  When we shake our fist at God in our very darkest hour, and we say,  my God my God, why have you forsaken me? Why have you turned your back?  we have a God who knows even what it feels like to be abandoned by God.  We have a God who knows how it feels to be God-forsaken. And that’s how God can say, with a straight face, staring deep into our eyes, “Beloved, I will NEVER leave you or forsake you.” Amen.