10th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 13B

10th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 13B August 1, 2021 In light of our readings this week, I’ve been thinking about trust and insatiability and about how these two attitudes are opposites in our relationships with God and with each other. In our reading from Exodus this week, we see the Children of Israel, who are only about a month into their journey with God and Moses in the wilderness. So, this is actually a pretty new relationship between God and God’s people. Scripture tells us that after Joseph, the people forgot about God, and so God is starting over with them. The people start complaining about how they are hungry and how they wish God had just left them to die in Egypt, where at least they had food. So, God devises a plan, and God’s plan is a two-fold plan. 1. God will provide food for God’s people and 2. In the way that God provides food for God’s people, God will teach the Israelites how to trust God. God provides manna, but God gives them specific instructions on how to collect manna and how much manna to collect—only enough for each day. So, while the manna feeds the people, it also serves to teach them how to trust God, how to be in relationship with God. Embedded in God’s very gift is that which will help strengthen the people’s relationship with God. But while the story for today ends ok, we know what is coming. The people will eventually complain about the manna, that it doesn’t really fill them up, that they grow weary of it, day after day after day, that it isn’t enough. We see some of this insatiability echoed in our gospel reading for today. Jesus has just fed the 5,000 in a miraculous sign, and then he has escaped the mob. But the people find him, and when they do, he accuses them of misunderstanding, and suggests that they are insatiable for signs, that upon which they can base their trust in him and in God. “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life,” he tells them. My husband has a good friend here in town who is Jewish. They often have conversations about the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures, and David asked his friend this week about manna. David’s friend sent back an excerpt from his rabbi’s morning meditation one day earlier this week. The friend’s rabbi writes, “When Jewish people conclude a satisfying meal that includes bread, they say four blessings. Why? Because the Torah says, ‘When you eat and you’re satisfied, you should bless G‑d for the land He has given you.’ The last three blessings were composed in the Promised Land. But the first blessing was composed by Moses when manna appeared from heaven. Now isn’t it strange that we say a blessing for bread from heaven after eating bread that comes from the earth? Really, the blessing is not on the food itself. It’s on our satiation from the food. That makes things yet more puzzling. Manna was a food that never left you satisfied—for two reasons: Because you could not see what you were eating, and because you couldn’t save any of it for the next day. Why do we say a blessing composed for a food that left people unsatisfied to thank G‑d for a satisfying meal? Because, as the rabbis say, “A full jar cannot hold anything. But an empty jar can hold everything.” Those who see their income as a tangible asset, acquired and preserved by natural means, their possessions fill their lives so that they cannot see G‑d’s blessing. But those who know that everything is always in G‑d’s hands, like manna from heaven, they are empty and ready to receive. Whatever they have, they see it as a gift, a blessing, and they celebrate.” So this would suggest that we can hold our insatiability within a particular framework or attitude, a sort of mindfulness of our reliance upon God, and that in turn will help cultivate gratitude. In thinking about the trust aspect of this, I started thinking about how I work with engaged couples in pre-marital counseling in building trust. In a short video about how to build trust, relationship expert Dr. John Gottman says, “How do you build trust? You can turn to research because research will tell you what it specifically is that increases this trust metric and what it is that helps us understand the dynamics of betrayal. It turns out that trust is built in very small moments…because in any interaction there is a possibility of connection with our partner or turning away from our partner.” Gottman goes on to give an example from his own relationship, telling about a time in his marriage when he really wanted to finish his mystery book he was reading—he was pretty sure he knew who the killer was. He set the book down and went into the bathroom where his wife was brushing her hair. And Gottman noticed that his wife looked sad. In that moment, he had a choice. He could slip out of the bathroom and go back to his novel, or he could check-in with his wife. He ended up asking her what was wrong, and he said, “In that moment, I was building trust. I was there for her. I was connecting with her rather than choosing to think about only what I wanted. These are the moments that we’ve discovered that build trust. And one such moment is not that important, but if you are always choosing to turn away the trust erodes in the relationship very gradually, very slowly.” He continues, “The atom of betrayal is not just turning away, not just turning away from my wife’s sadness in that moment, but doing what Carol Rusbault called a ‘cl-alt’….and what that means is I not only turn away from her sadness but I think to myself, ‘I can do better. Who needs this crap? I’m always dealing with her negativity. I can do better!’….Cl-alt stands for Comparison level for alternatives, and once you start thinking that you can do better, then you begin a cascade of not committing to the relationship.”i These ideas about trust are true for our relationship with God as well. Trust in God is built in and through many small moments. In each moment, we have the choice to move toward God or to turn away from God. And when we turn away from God over and over again over time, then we begin to live into the cl-alt: “I can do better.” And in these moments, we let our insatiability rule our relationship with God as opposed to allowing it to deepen our gratitude. You invitation this week is to think about a time in a significant relationship from this past week when you turned toward the person and a time when you didn’t. And also to think about a time when you turned toward God and a time when you didn’t. Think also about that for which you long that only God can give, and offer a prayer to God of thanksgiving for your need, your longing. i. John Gottman on How to Build Trust. (from the Science of a Meaningful Live) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgWnadSi91s&t=263s

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 12B

9th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 12B July 25, 2021 Our family of four get along pretty well in most areas. But there is one topic on which we are grievously divided. When we argue, we usually argue about this particular topic, and stark battle lines have been drawn between for and against. The topic of contention is… leftovers. Some of us are often grateful for leftovers because it means that is one less meal that we have to cook. Those in the pro-leftover camp have been known to eat entire pyrex dishes of leftovers, meal after meal after meal, until they have been completely consumed and the eaters are well and thoroughly sick of them, but by golly, they will get eaten. Others of us will not deign to let any leftovers pass their lips. They scorn the lowly leftover and take great offense if it is suggested that they should eat them. One member of the anti-leftover party likes to refer to the lowly leftover as “old food,” which does not win them any points with those in the pro-leftover party. The anti-leftover faction is perfectly happy to let the leftover proponents struggle through their consumption of them, as long as they do not suggest they, too, should join in the consumption. I’ve been thinking about the contrast between leftovers and new food or “first fruits” as they are depicted in our readings, and about our feelings surrounding those, and about how that may impact our relationship with God. Our gospel and our Old Testament readings give us depictions of two miraculous feeding stories. One of the main differences I see is that the Old Testament reading gives particular attention to first fruits, and the Gospel reading gives particular attention to leftovers. In the Old Testament reading, an unnamed man comes to the prophet Elisha bringing an offering of first fruits. First fruits are the first and best of a person’s harvest, and people throughout the years have been encouraged to give the first and the best of what we have to God (and in this case, the prophets who are the servants of God). You may have heard preachers speak about “first fruits” during annual giving season, when we are encouraged to look at all of our resources and to give to God through the church off the top as opposed to giving out of what we have left. In the Old Testament story, the servant questions Elisha on how so many people can be fed by so little; Elisha replies, “Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’” And then what happens? They have plenty to eat, so much so that they actually have leftovers! The gospel story mirrors this and other feeding stories from the Old Testament. Jesus and his disciples have gone to a deserted place where the crowds have followed them. Jesus urges his disciples to feed the crowd, and they are initially flummoxed because there is very little food to be found. When a boy offers his five barley loaves and two fish, Jesus “took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’” So they gathered them up, and then what happened? They filled up 12 baskets with….leftovers. And it strikes me that Jesus is very insistent about how they deal with the leftovers: “gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” Why does Jesus care so much about the leftovers, especially when we’ve been taught over and over again, that it is the first fruits that are the best? What might be gained by thinking about how Jesus cares not only about the best of each of us, but also that he cares about the leftover pieces of our lives as well? How might if change us if instead of thinking about the leftover and broken pieces of our lives as something to be discarded or a sign of scarcity to see those broken pieces as Jesus sees them, as worthy of being gathered up, tended to, and cherished? How might it change us to reflect on the fact that rather than being a sign of scarcity, the left over broken pieces of our lives, of this last year….are not signs of scarcity but signs of abundance? Your invitation this week is to reflect on what you’d consider to the broken parts and pieces of your life, the leftovers that you are sick of eating. Name those before Jesus. It can be old broken parts; broken parts from this past year and a half of trauma that we have all lived out separately together. Now imagine Jesus gathering up those old, broken parts, those leftover bits of your life that you don’t really want and you don’t really know what to do with. Imagine he gathers them to himself with care. What do you want to ask Jesus to do with those leftover, broken pieces of your life? In what way might Jesus be inviting you to see those leftover, broken pieces of your life through eyes of abundance instead of eyes of scarcity?

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 10B

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 10B July 11, 2021 This week in the life of the church, we’ve been offering Vacation Bible School to children from the church and the neighborhood. Our theme has been “Who is my Neighbor?” and our curriculum has been modeled on the long-running popular children’s t.v. show Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. All week, we’ve been exploring with the children what it means to be a good neighbor. As a part of this experience, I’ve immersed myself in learning more about Fred Rogers, the man who was a formative part of my own childhood. I’ve read a book exploring his theology and how he was formed in it over the course of his life and ministry as a t.v producer and ordained Presbyterian Minister. I watched the documentary about him that showed clips of his shows and interviews with his wife, his sons, his friends, and many people who worked closely with him over the years. And a few things were made clear to me in all of that. Fred Rogers communicated his understanding of the gospel which can be boiled down to “Love your neighbor. Love yourself.” In all of his work with children, he faithfully worked to communicated two truths that he had learned. “I like you just the way you are,” he said to his audience over and over again, which flows from his understanding that God has created each and every one of us good. (Or as Fred often put it: “the bedrock of our being is good stuff.”i ). This was a core affirmation that Mister Rogers repeated over and over again. Mister Rogers was also very intentional in his use of the word “neighbor.” Those of us who are Christian can’t hear that word without harkening back to the question from the lawyer to Jesus that sparked one of Jesus’s most well-known parables which is the parable of the Good Samaritan. The lawyer asks Jesus, “who is my neighbor.” Jesus tells the story and then asks the man “which of these three was a good neighbor?” and the man answers, “the one who demonstrated mercy toward him.” In the book Exactly as You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers, author Shea Tuttle writes, “When Mister Rogers called his viewers “neighbors,” when he hosted us in his neighborhood for over thirty years, he was playing out his own greatest parable: calling us, gently but firmly, into lives of mercy and care for one another. He knew we wouldn’t always get it right, that we are prone, like the [puppet] king [Friday the 13th] that he so lovingly created, to bow to fear and to serve competition, to privilege our own safety and to neglect others’ real needs. Maybe, in calling us neighbors, he knew he was calling us something better than we actually were…and that maybe we could grow into real neighbors to one another.”ii In a perfect world, our lectionary would have given us the parable of the Good Samaritan for our gospel reading for today, and that would be the end of this sermon. But alas…we have this strange and macabre story of the beheading of John the Baptist. What on earth does that have to do with Mister Rogers? First, it’s important to notice the placement of this horrid story in Mark’s gospel. It’s actually wedged right in the middle of our gospel reading from last week—when Jesus sends out his disciples, telling them to take only what they immediately need, and gives them the power to heal people and cast out demons. This is actually what King Herod hears about, the work of Jesus’s disciples that is going on, that makes him reflect on what he did to his old friend John. And immediately after this story, the disciples return to Jesus completely elated and bursting to tell him of all the good works they accomplished in his name. Mark is setting up the dichotomy between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdoms of this world as presided over by the Herods. What is key to this story of Herod and John the Baptist, I think, is that Herod was sad to kill John but he wouldn’t stand up to those who tricked him into doing it because he was worried it would make him look weak. In talking about his own theology, Mister Rogers spoke about this: “Evil will do anything to make you feel as bad as you possibly can about yourself…because if you feel the worst about who you are, you will undoubtedly look with evil eyes on your neighbor and you will get to believe the worst about him or her.” In other words, evil travels, creating a kind of domino effect: “Accuse yourself. Accuse your neighbor. Get your neighbors to accuse somebody else, and the evil spreads and thrives.” “Jesus would want us to see the best of who we are, so we would have that behind our eyes as we looked at our neighbor, and we would see the best in him or her. You can be an accuser or an advocate. Evil would have you be an accuser in this life. Jesus would have you be an advocate for your neighbor.” Put another way, “if we are lovable and acceptable because we are God’s, then our neighbor, who is equally God’s, is also lovable and acceptable. And we are called into that work of that loving and accepting.”iii This week, as you go out into the neighborhood that is your life, may you be like Mister Rogers: looking at yourself through God’s eyes and seeing yourself as the best of who you are and seeing your neighbor through those eyes as well. May you look for ways to gently show mercy and care to people you encounter over the course of this week and beyond. In the words of Mister Rogers: “You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.” Tuttle. Shea. Exactly as You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers. Eerdmans Publishing: Grand Rapids, 2019, p30 Ibid pp101-102 Ibid. pp 59-61.

6th Sunday after Pentecost-July 4, 2021

6th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 9B July 4, 2021 Our readings for today remind me of some advice that a more senior colleague gave to my husband many years ago. “God doesn’t call us to be effective; God calls us to be faithful.” These words have helped shape my understanding of ministry, of discipleship, of parenting, of life, and I often need to return to them as a touchstone to help ground my first-born, over-achieving soul. “God doesn’t call us to be effective; God calls us to be faithful.” In our first lesson, Ezekiel has just had an up close and personal encounter with the Holy One. He is still visibly shaken from this encounter with God, and so God picks him up and tells him that God wants Ezekiel to go to the people of Israel, “a nation of rebels” who have rebelled against God. They’re probably not going to listen to you and you won’t be particularly effective, God tells Ezekiel, but I want you to go anyway, because I want them to know that I care about them enough to send them a prophet to warn them that they are headed for disaster. In our gospel reading, after encountering his own kind of ineffectiveness because of the disbelief of the people of his hometown, Jesus sends out his disciples two by two, and he encourages them to strive for faithfulness over effectiveness when they go out to preach the good news saying, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place.” Don’t try to move around from house to house to maximize your effectiveness, he tells them, but rather be faithful. Years ago, I read a book titled Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Richard A Swenson who is an M.D. This book was such balm to my soul that I used it as a young adult book study and saw those young parents drink it down like people who were dehydrated and didn’t even realize it. Swenson’s premise is that many of the ills that he encounters in his medical practice can be solved by people creating margin in their lives. He says our lives are like pieces of paper that are full up from side to side and top to bottom with writing. We have filled up all the empty space of our lives so that they are no longer able to reveal meaning. We are, as a society, marginless. He writes, “Marginless is being thirty minutes late to the doctor’s office because you were twenty minutes late getting out of the bank because you were ten minutes late dropping the kids off at school because the car ran out of gas two blocks from the gas station—and you forgot your wallet. Margin, on the other hand, is having breath left at the top of the staircase, money left at the end of the month, and sanity left at the end of adolescence… Marginless is fatigue; margin is energy. Marginless is red ink; margin is black ink. Marginless is hurry; margin is calm. Marginless is anxiety; margin is security. Marginless is culture; margin is counterculture. Marginless is the disease of the new millennium; margin is its cure.” i In order to reinstate margin in our lives, Swenson writes that we have to understand what has led us to our current marginless way of life, and that is progress. He writes, “Exactly what is progress? Simply stated, progress means proceeding to a higher stage of development. ‘The idea of progress,’ explains historian Robert Nisbet, ‘holds that mankind has advance in the past…and is now advancing, and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future. From at least the early nineteenth century until a few decades ago, belief in the progress of mankind, with Western civilization in the vanguard, was virtually a universal religion on both sides of the Atlantic.’ Progress was automatic, the inevitable function of chronology, and the flow of progress was assumed to be inherently positive.”ii Progress in and of itself is not an ill. Swenson as an MD writes about all the benefits we have found as a result of progress. But Swenson’s premise in his book is that we must regain control of progress because we have let it run rampant, dictate our priorities, and then we must redirect it. The first step in that is breaking our addiction to progress. The second step is to make progress subservient to our greater goals and needs, especially relationships. The goal of margin, for Swenson, is to nurture relationships because this is where we find meaning and purpose. This has all been especially through provoking for me as we have led up to this day, July 4th, when we mark the founding of our nation. We as a nation have accomplished so many astounding and wonderful things as a part of this drive for progress, and we have also sacrificed relationships and people along the way in pursuit of this goal. (This is echoed in our thanksgiving for the nation from our Book of Common Prayer that we are using today as our prayers of the people.) “God doesn’t call us to be effective; God calls us to be faithful.” Where in your life do you need to hear these words today? What might it look like for you to set aside your drive to be effective, so that you might live more faithfully? Where in your life might you need to examine your addiction to progress and look to tending relationships in new and different ways? i. Swenson. Richard A. Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives. Nav Press: Colorado Springs, 2004, p13. iil Ibid. pp 22-23

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B July 27, 2021 At first glance, our readings for today seem to be strange companions. “Our reading from the Wisdom of Solomon paints a compelling vision of human life, shaped in the image of the divine at creation, and bound for enduring relationship with [God].” It talks about how God created all that is generative and none of what is destructive, even death.i Our gospel reading shows Jesus, who is on his way to heal Jairus’s daughter and is interrupted by a woman who touches him and finds healing for her disease. One question that this passage can raise for us is “who-or what-claims our time and attention, and how [do] we determine the worthiness of those people and things.” ii I’ve been listening to an audiobook titled Sum: forty tales from the afterlives by David Eagleman. Eagleman is a neuroscientist who I heard interviewed on a podcast last year about his work on the brain, and the interviewer had recommended this book. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I guess I thought the book would be about our brains and the afterlife, but so far, the different “tales” that I have listened to are like fables or parables with many different interpretations and much to ponder. Last week, as I was walking, I listened to one that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about; so I’m going to read it to you. (Don’t worry! It’s really short.) It’s titled Circle of Friends. “When you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change, but everything looks approximately the same. You get up and brush your teeth. You kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There is less traffic than normal. The rest of your building seems less full, as though it’s a holiday. But everyone in your office is here, and they greet you kindly. You feel strangely popular. Everyone you run into is someone you know. At some point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of people you’ve met before. It’s a small fraction of the world population—about 0.00002 percent—but that seems plenty to you. It turns out that only the people you remember are here. So the woman with whom you shared a glance in the elevator may or may not be included. Your second-grade teacher is here, with most of the class. Your parents, your cousins, and your spectrum of friends through the years. All your old lovers. Your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who served you food each day at lunch. Those you dated, those you almost dted, those you longed for. It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time with your one thousand connections, to renew fading ties, to catch up with those you let slip away. It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn. You wonder what’s different as you saunter through the vast quiet parks with a friend or two. No strangers grace the empty park benches. No family unknown to you throws breadcrumbs for the ducks and makes you smile because of their laughter. As you step into the street, you note there are no crowds, no buildings teeming with workers, no distant cities bustling, no hospitals running 24/7 with patients dying and staff rushing, no trains howling into the night with sardined passengers on their way home. Very few foreigners. You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to you. You’ve never known, you realize, how to vulcanize rubber to make a tire. And now those factories stand empty. You’ve never known how to fashion a silicon chip from beach sand, how to launch rockets out of the atmosphere, how to pit olives or lay railroad tracks. And now those industries are shut down. The missing crowds make you lonely. You being to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.”iii Your invitation this week is to reflect on the two following questions. What are the most generative parts of your life right now? Who or what claims your time, your attention, and how do you determine who and what is worthy of that? i. Ed. Bartlett and Taylor. Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 3. Homiletical Perspective by Leanne Pearce Reed. Westminster John Knox: Louisville, 2009, p 171. ii. Ibid. Homiletical Perspective by Beverly Zink-Sawyer p 191. iii. Eagelman, David. Sum: forty tales from the afterlives. Circle of Friends. Pantheon: New York, 2009, pp 8-10.

The Third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 6B

3rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 6B June 13, 2021 We spent this past week at our family farm in Northeast Mississippi with my parents, brother and sister-in-law, and their two daughters. The four adults have joined together over these last few years to make their living by growing organic vegetables which they eat and sell through subscriptions to their CSAs or Community Supported Agriculture. In years past, when we have visited in the summer, we have helped with special projects that needed more hands, but this past week, it rained almost the whole time we were there, so no big projects were planned. During the few times I was able to get out and help, I spent the time cleaning out the old plants from the raised beds and the fields to make room for the new plants and seeds that they will plant in the coming weeks. At some point, I remarked to my sister-in-law that Jesus clearly didn’t know what he was talking about when he used these farm related parables that are our gospel reading for this Sunday. The sort of farming Jesus talks about makes it seem effortless. The farmer plants and then goes to sleep, and he wakes up just in time for the harvest. There’s no mention of all that can go wrong with farming—the 14 inches of rain that can fall in two days’ time; the bugs that eat the crops; the year that the watermelons just would not grow. Even though the ground was wet, the plants I was pulling up were deeply rooted and did not want to come out of the ground. I found my hands inexplicably sore the next couple of days and realized it was from all the grasping and pulling. And don’t even get me started on the ants. As I remarked on Jesus’s naivete to my sister-in-law, she began to tell me about her favorite new plant on the farm this year. It is elderflower bushes. The elderflowers are small, white, and delicate; they will eventually give way to elderberries, but she told me the elderflowers have all sorts of properties on their own. Elderflowers have been used in treating cold and flu symptoms along with sinus problems and swelling. The elderflower has a delicate, sweet fragrance that has been distilled for perfumes, and my sister-in-law used it to make a delicately sweet simple syrup which we used to make cocktails. She had spent significant time researching elderflowers and learning how to use it and what to do with it. And here’s the really cool thing about the elderflowers. They just showed up one day on the farm. Probably a bird was responsible for transplanting the berries from somewhere else but they just started growing all on their own. And she was curious enough to learn what they are and what to do with them. The kingdom of God is like an elderflower plant. You don’t know where it comes from; it just shows up one day and there is no work that you have to do to grow it or cultivate it. It offers bountiful gifts to you-first flowers and then berries- but it is up to you to notice it, to see it, to name it, to delight in it, and to figure out what uses you can make of it, how it can enrich your life and the world around you. This week, may you look for the Kingdom of God that is already within and all around you, through no work of your own. May you find ways to delight in it that it may be the free gift of God’s love and presence in your life.

The Second Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 5B

2nd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 5B June 6, 2021 As a spin-off of my work on family systems theory for my continuing education this year, I’ve been reading the book Friedman’s Fables by Edwin Friedman. Friedman was a Jewish rabbi, who used the psychological system of Bowen Family Systems theory (developed by Murray Bowen) and expanded it to think about how organizations, groups, churches, react in the similar predictable patterns through which families interact. In Friedman’s Fables, Friedman draws upon his knowledge of family systems theory and Jewish midrash (the process of taking a story from scripture and embellishing it or expanding upon it through imaginative interpretation), and he has written a series of stories to help the reader more playfully engage some of the principals that lead to deeper personal development through self-differentiation. This week, as I was reading, I came upon the story that is titled Raising Cain: A Case History of the First Family. It is, fortuitously enough for this preacher, Friedman’s form of midrash on our Old Testament reading for today. The basis of the story is that an angelic messenger has written a psychological case study of the first family—Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel. The case study says that they family came in for counseling because “the sons have been quarrelling a good deal, and both mother and father appear quite helpless to do anything about it. Most of the focus is on the older brother, who broods a lot, is extremely sullen, and is very jealous of his far more successful younger brother.” The story continues by looking at the parents (Adam and Eve) and their relationship: “At the beginning of their marriage, both husband and wife seemed to have lived in a very blissful state, naïve, it appears, about what was happening all around them. Something, we’re not sure what, changed that, and things have never been the same since. The husband growls continuously about his lot and why life has to be so difficult, whereas the wife never fails to remind him of how much pain she went through to bear him sons. But it is more than their discontent that seems to be seeping down, particularly to their elder son. More pernicious still may be their attitude toward their discontent. Neither husband or wife seems capable of accepting responsibility for their own destiny. Both are always claiming that their lives would be far different were it not for how the other behaved. The man tends to blame his wife, and the wife tend to blame the environment….Neither seems capable of taking responsibility for personal desires, loves, or hates. Each sees the other as causing his or her own pain. Ironically, they thus each give their partner great power to guilt the other.”i After focusing on the parents, the case study moves on to look at the children-Cain and Abel. The narrator reports: “There seems to be no strength in the family at all, by which I mean the capacity of some member to say, I am me, this is where I stand. I end here and you begin there, etc. It may be this constant expectation that the other should be his keeper that prevents each from taking responsibility for himself. And as long as this attitude persists in the parents, we can hardly expect the boys to act more pleasantly toward each another, still less at times to be watchful over the other. This situation will certainly leave a ‘mark’ on one of them.” He concludes, “In a family like this, with no one able to tolerate his own solitariness, or, for that matter, anyone else’s, I fear the weakness in the children will never be corrected. Actually, my fantasies are worse. For, if the current inability each parent manifests to deal with his or her own pain continues, I fear that Cain’s view of life will never truly focus on himself and, perceiving the source of all his problems in his brother, he may one day up and kill him.”ii In his commentary on this fable, Friedman cuts straight to the heart of it by inviting the reader to “suppose the human family’s original sin is blaming others,” and then asks, “How can the members of any generation modify that transmitted attitude?”iii “Suppose the human family’s original sin is blaming others.” It’s certainly in evidence in the Genesis reading. It starts with a simple question from God to Adam and Eve: “where are you?” and then devolves into Adam blaming Eve and Eve blaming the snake. We see rampant blame at work in the gospel reading for today. It starts with Jesus’s family’s anxiety about what he is up to and their attempts to restrain him because they believe he has gone crazy and then escalates into a full on blame-game name calling by the Scribes who accuse Jesus of being possessed by Beelzebub. All of these groups are reacting to change which naturally brings anxiety, but as opposed to dwelling with their own discomfort, they are quick to try to pass that discomfort on to others by blaming. “Suppose the human family’s original sin is blaming others.” Does that give us more of an explanation of the state of the world, the state of our country, or the problems that we see in our families, in our churches? How does Jesus offer the antidote to blame in his person, in his teachings? What role does blame play in your life on a regular basis? Who do you find your blame directed most frequently toward? Your invitation this week is this. To pay attention to the very first taste of blame that you feel on the tip of your tongue or in your heart, and to draw back from it. Before speaking or acting, be curious about what pain your blame is springing from, pay attention to where you end and the other begins, and then speak or act out of that space. i. Edwin Friedman, Friedman’s Fables (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), 47-48. ii. Ibid. 49. iii. Edwin Friedman, Friedman’s Fables: Discussion Questions (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), 9.