Poolesville Presbyterian Church
05.10.15; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: 1 John 5:1-6
LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:
For the very longest time, I had a thing about blood.
I can’t remember exactly the first time I realized blood freaked me out, but I think it might have been at around the same time as a very very old memory. I have no idea how old I was, but it’s there in my head, of me on the front porch of our little house in Kenya. It was beautiful and cool, and sunny, and my Grandmother was there, towering huge above me as all adults did. Grandmother was, in actuality, a very small woman, slender and filled with mischief, but I was a very small child. Maybe three, or perhaps four.
I’m not even sure it’s an accurate memory, as those neurons have been written and re-written over hundreds of times. But there it is, a little faded, like the cover of an old comic book left out too long in the sun. I close my eyes, and I can call it up, flaws and all.
I was messing around in the way that little boys did back then in that unmediated era, noodling about in the dirt, and had found something on the ground that I didn’t recognize. It was a little metal rectangle, all shiny and interesting and impossibly thin. What could it be? I had no idea, so being the curious little monkey that I was, I picked it up to inspect it. I passed it from hand to hand. So light! So interesting! What could be its function?
I walked it over to Grandmother, who I assumed must know everything about everything, because she wasn’t just an adult. She was a double adult, a mother to mothers. A super-adult.
I remember holding it up to her, there in my hand, and asking, looking up into her face. I don’t really remember what my voice sounded like. In my memory, it’s my voice, which is probably wrong, because I don’t think I was a baritone when I was four.
But I do remember, faintly, the look on her face. Concern, not panic, because she was not a panicky person. “Oh dear. Let me have that, Davidy.” And she took it from my hand, because it was an abandoned razor.
That was when I saw my hand. There was no pain. Not at all. Razors are too sharp. But there was blood. I looked at my other hand. There was blood. It was my blood.
Not a lot of my blood. I wasn’t badly hurt, or deeply cut. Not that you would have known it from what I recall as my response, which was analogous to one of those air-raid sirens they set off at the beach from time to time.
My inside juice was outside! My life-stuff was leaking! AaaaaaaAAAAAAAA! I am damaged! aieeeEEEEEE! But Grandmother cleaned me up, and washed my hands, and calmed me down, and may have given me a cookie or seven.
I was, for quite a while after that, squeamish around blood. At least until my early twenties.
Blood and life have always been woven up together in the minds of human beings, which is why in the ancient world “blood” was considered a sacred thing. This is particularly true of the worldview of the Torah, that five thousand year old tradition from which our faith arises. Many of the Jewish laws of kashrut, of keeping kosher, are about far more than keeping us from eating delicious bacon cheeseburgers. Kosher regulations often revolve around dealing appropriately with this peculiar fluid, of how it does and does not mingle with the meat. The ancient codes of cleanliness and sacrifice that rise out the Jewish temple tradition are similarly focused on dealing with life fluids.
Now, of course, we know so much more. Blood is a wildly complicated organic slurry, fifty-five percent plasma--a mix of water and proteins and minerals--and most of the rest a slush of oxygen-bearing erythrocytes and body defending leukocytes and self-repairing platelets. Blood binds us to both air and earth, as it bears the oxygen for our respiration and the nutrients from our digestion.
Blood is the stuff of life, so complex that it’s a little magical, more than a little dangerous, and it tends to freak us out a little bit.
Even when we’re not a panicky three or four year old, the idea of it tends to be written into our stories of fear, of terror and violence. And sure, that’s strange, because we need it to live, as our bodies take in oxygen and distribute it throughout our beings.
Which I think might be one of the most significant reasons we encountering passages like the one from 1 John today. It’s a lovely little bit of writing from the early church, this letter, filled with passages that soar and resonate and sing to our souls. Like all of the Johannine literature, meaning The Gospel of John and the three letters, it is simultaneously simple and sophisticated, capable of expressing meanings that speak beyond the spare language used by the author.
Johannine writings are a bit like Dr. Seuss, I think, with a richness that burns bright even though the vocabulary itself is very simple. And so, from First John, there are all manner of simple grace notes that have those of us who live two thousand years later nodding our heads.
“Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light,” we hear, earlier in this little book. “Little children, let us love in in word or speech, but in truth and action.” Yeah! We can do that!
But then we hear talk about the blood? Oh, that sounds weird, sort of freaky, more than a little bit vampiric. Blood? We get squeamish. It can bother us, this talk of being Jesus being the one who came by the blood...not just the water, but of the blood. We can recoil a little bit at the thought of it. It’s barbaric!
And in the context of the cross, it’s even harder.
Blood and hardship and mess are just not how we’re told to expect a new life. New lives are born when we’ve purchased a 12 DVD set of inspirational lectures from Amazon, or downloaded that self-help ebook with the smiling man on the cover, promising to turn it all around if only you can learn these seven amazing life hacks. New lives are made when we purchase that treadmill or that new car or that new flat screen, a convenient consumer product that will magically make us anew. Newness, or so we have been made to think, is the result of a transaction, easy and anodyne, clean and unthreatening.
Which, as this scripture shows up coincidentally in the lectionary on the day when we celebrate the women who gave birth to us and the women that raised us, strikes me as particularly odd.
Because if you’ve been around the event that makes for motherhood, there is both water and blood.
Who here has witnessed a birth, been there through the whole of it? It isn’t easy.
Birth is mess and risk and the unknown, even in this age where everything is carefully managed and contained and controlled. Because although our society would like us to think of the moment of new life as a transaction, as neat and orderly as the ten page itemized bill we receive from the hospital, the reality is that new life is a relationship.
New life is not a transaction. It’s a relationship, woven of the stuff of existence, of water and of blood.
And relationships, like blood, are the stuff of life. They are complicated and messy, both a little bit magical and a little bit frightening.
Which, on this Sunday, we choose to remember.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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