Mtr Paula Barker Datsko

Dear friends,

 As mature people, each of us has developed reliable ways of functioning in the world. Our habitual ways of understanding what is happening in any situation and how to respond have worked pretty well for us. We think we have a good grasp of reality. But then God’s reality breaks in, shattering what we had thought we could take for granted. Things aren’t what they had seemed. 

Experiences like this are not unusual among people of faith. The Bible is full of stories of people being awakened to divine reality. The lesson from Numbers, for example, tells about Balaam setting out on a journey riding his donkey, who inexplicably veered off the road into a field, then brushed Balaam against a wall, and finally laid down under him. Balaam responded each time by beating the donkey, who surprisingly was empowered to speak in protest. Then “the Lord opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road, with his drawn sword in his hand.” Balaam was shocked to realize that the donkey’s disruptive behavior had been his way of saving Balaam’s life. Similarly, the lesson from Romans is part of Paul’s effort to help people see how the law, which they had assumed would bring them to holiness, is inadequate to bring them to fullness of life in Christ. Perhaps a change in perspective like this could account for the behavioral shift of the person Jesus describes in the gospel lesson who initially refused to obey his father but then does what had been asked after all.

Today, so much that we used to take for granted has been disrupted. We’re enduring a plague, economic upheaval and lost jobs, passionate uproar about racist injustice, climate changes and wildfires. This list continues in the particularities of our own lives.  And … we can’t even go to church.
 
This may be a good time to remember that Christian spiritual traditions consistently teach us to look for God’s grace at work whenever our habituated “normal” explodes. Not that God necessarily causes the explosion, but God’s grace will always be present in the chaos to nudge us towards new life that is infinitely beyond what we could have asked or imagined. As a friend told me years ago when she began to surface from devastation, “grace is when the shit dumped on your life becomes fertilizer.”

Disorientations like we’re experiencing now provide openings for grace to show us things about ourselves and our world that we managed to block out in our old way of being. While we may desperately want to just get back to that old normal, the wisdom of our spiritual tradition urges us to refrain from trying to duct-tape the blinders back on. Instead, let us help each other sit with the discomfort. Let us together pray the pain, moan the laments, name the yearnings, and watch for the glimpses of grace illuminating the way of love.  

Yours in Christ,
Mtr. Paula Barker Datsko

Scripture used today: Numbers 22:21-38; Romans 7:1-12; Matthew 21:23-32