I’ve told the story many times, but I was in seminary when 9/11 happened. Classes continued that day, amid the shock and hurt; convocation had been scheduled for September 12 and went on as planned, though not as usual.
Some in the community criticized the administration for not cancelling regular activities. Walter Brueggemann wrote in response, “When the world is falling apart, plant a tree. We were planting trees.”
A member of the church recently sent this story to me. It seems fitting for today:
There was a woman who wanted peace in the world and peace in her heart and all sorts of good things, but she was very frustrated. The world seemed to be falling apart. She would read the newspapers and get depressed.
One day she decided to go shopping, and she went into a mall and picked a store at random. She walked in and was surprised to see Jesus behind the counter. She knew it was Jesus because he looked just like the pictures she’d seen on holy cards and devotional pictures.
She looked again and again at him, and finally she got up enough nerve and asked, ‘Excuse me, are you Jesus?’
‘I am.’
‘Do you work here?’
‘No,’ Jesus said, ‘I own the store.’
‘Oh, what do you sell in here?’
‘Oh, just about anything!’
‘Anything?’
‘Yeah, anything you want. What do you want?’
She said, ‘I don’t know.’ Well,’ Jesus said, ‘feel free, walk up and down the aisles, make a list, see what it is that you want, and then come back and we’ll see what we can do for you.’
She did just that, walked up and down the aisles. There was peace on earth, no more war, no hunger or poverty, peace in families, no more drugs, harmony, clean air, careful use of resources. She wrote furiously.
By the time she got back to the counter, she had a long list. Jesus took the list, skimmed through it, looked up and smiled, ‘No problem.’ And then he bent down behind the counter and picked out all sorts of things, stood up, and laid out the packets.
She asked, ‘What are these?’ Jesus replied, ‘Seed packets. This is a catalog store.’
She said, ‘You mean I don’t get the finished product?’
‘No, this is a place of dreams. You come and see what it looks like, and I give you the seeds. You plant the seeds. You go home and nurture them and help them to grow and someone else reaps the benefits.’
This meme has overstayed itself by about three weeks, but I couldn't resist. Inexplicably, this came up when I googled the phrase from Romans, "hope does not disappoint us."
There were many nuggets, stories and quotable quotes from last week’s Festival of Faith and Writing, and I’m sure some of them will make it into sermons and future writings. Here’s one.
The last presentation I attended was by Paula Huston, who presented on the topic “Writing as a Spiritual Practice”—incidentally, she did so with laryngitis. There was something fitting about preparing to leave the conference, about shifting my energies from festival to home… just as the words were diminishing into a whisper.
Huston spoke about waiting many years (thirteen?) for her novel to be published, and talked about struggling with impatience. I listened, but with a detached and clinical interest since impatience isn’t something I ever have to deal with.
~cough~
She finally decided to get some spiritual counsel and talked to one of the monks at a monastery she often visited for retreats. She asked, “How can I have more patience?” He replied, “Your problem isn’t a lack of patience. Your problem is a lack of hope.”
There was a palpable “aha!” that reverberated in the room when she said that. She elaborated: if you trust the process, and you trust yourself, and you trust that all things are working together for wholeness and good and abundant life, then patience and peace are the truest response.
I think I love this, even though I want to test the limits of her view against the kind of impatience that presses for change. We’re seeing that with the Columbia Seminary situation. Truth be told, I think the policy will change soon so that committed same-sex couples will have access to campus housing. Not soon enough, I know, for current students who are paying more for housing because they can’t live on campus, and not soon enough for people who’ve been waiting for justice for years. Agitating for change seems like a holy impatience to me, a faithful discontent with the way things are.
Even so, I wonder whether it’s possible to cultivate a patient impatience.
I’ve been tired and full since the Festival. Last night I wanted nothing more than to get the kids to bed and settle into my own with a book or two. But the kids were slow and needy, and every room I went into had yet another thing that needed to be done before I could read and rest. I know about resting when it’s time to rest and not when the tasks are all done—I wrote a book about it—but this was stuff that couldn’t wait. Like, giving the cat her medicine so she doesn’t seize.
I was testy and impatient over all of these things. So I began to mull Huston’s statement. What’s going on when I am impatient? What’s happening internally when I just can’t wait to get to the next thing?
Maybe I am acting, in the words of Paul, as one without hope. Maybe I need to cultivate hope. But not hope that everything’s going to be OK. I’m a fan of Vaclav Havel’s understanding of hope, which is not the assurance that things will work out, but a conviction that things make sense, regardless of how they turn out.
My life—cat medicine and all—makes sense. There is a strange coherence to it. And there is no next thing. There is only the current thing, whether it’s brushing James’s teeth or writing a blog post or reading My Life in France. This I believe.
A heart of stone... the cover of our bulletin on Sunday.
Here’s what I preached on Sunday. It is inadequate for the occasion, but it is something.
MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Idylwood Presbyterian Church
March 25, 2025
Fifth Sunday of Lent
Jeremiah 31:31-34: The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt-a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
My girls came bounding off the bus Tuesday afternoon, full of news. A sixth grade boy had been walking to school and had been stopped by a man driving a white van. The man had tried to get the boy to get into the van. The boy had refused, and run all the way to school. Police were called; procedures put into motion. “We’re going to have a lockdown drill on Thursday!” the girls clapped. They were concerned for the boy and a little wary, but mainly they were excited about a break in the monotony of the school day.
I was so grateful for their innocence — that they say something so potentially serious as a festive occasion and not one for fear.
But the other side of me, the side of me who’s seen too much, who had that innocence taken away long ago simply by living in the world for four decades, sucked in her breath.
My oh my, we live in a fallen creation.
We live in what our Presbyterian Statement of Faith calls a “broken and fearful world.”
One of my disciplines this Lent—in addition to fasting from dessert, fourteen more days but who’s counting—is to look around me to try to find just one scene of beauty: each day, to find one thing that takes my breath away that I might have missed if I hadn’t been looking, really looking for it.
I need that discipline right now. I need to look at the world in that way. I need to be a detective for beauty, a sleuth for grace. Because right now the world is a dead black boy in Florida and mean Internet comments and a law student from Georgetown who was called a prostitute for having an opinion. The world is protesters slaughtered in Syria and dead Jewish children in Paris and a soldier gone mad in Afghanistan.
I think Jeremiah would understand the need for some beauty. Jeremiah’s prophetic words were uttered in a time of crisis: Jerusalem has been destroyed by a foreign power; the people of Israel have been deported. Most of the book contains a harsh judgment on the leadership, who have not been faithful to God by maintaining justice and obedience. Exile is seen as a punishment for this failure.
The world is a mess, says Jeremiah. But let me be more specific: we have made it so.
And then comes chapters 30 and 31, right in the middle of the book, two luminous chapters called the Book of Comfort. That’s where we are today, nestled in that comfort, and it comes just in the nick of time.
The days are surely coming… I will make a new covenant.
I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
Just one chapter later, we are told that Jeremiah responds to these words, personally and powerfully, by buying a field at Anathoth. This field, it should be said, was occupied by a foreign power; it had fallen to the Babylonians. And yet Jeremiah stakes his claim on that land. The time will come when this land will be God’s again, and I will plant and build here, he says, and in so doing, he claims that covenant hope that God expresses in today’s passage. Jeremiah’s purchase of the land is more than a prophetic move; it is an act of daring, reckless hope.
~
Friday I took a trip downtown to see the cherry blossoms at their peak. As I walked around the Tidal Basin, I happened upon the Martin Luther King memorial. Amid the beauty of cherry blossoms floating down from the trees like pink snowflakes, and branches dipping into the water, the King memorial offered a different kind of beauty, a stark, stony beauty.
King of course was a prophet, as surely as Jeremiah was a prophet. He described the world that is not yet ours, but could be. Should be. Will be. And as I read the various quotes etched in stone on the inscription wall, I couldn’t help but see the sweet face of Trayvon Martin.
“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class…”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
The fate of Trayvon Martin affects us. Whatever investigation takes place—and an investigation is sorely needed—whatever truth comes out, whatever happens next—his death diminishes us.
We will never know what a grown-up Trayvon Martin might have contributed to his family and his community and the world. He was an A and B student who according to his teachers “majored in cheerfulness,” who had no criminal record and was studying to be an aviation engineer. He wanted to fly.
He is gone. And it falls to us then, the living, to say a reckless YES to the covenant God describes and promises, here in the Book of Comfort. Even if the world God describes seems so far from our own, we are called to step out in faith. The new covenant God promises Jeremiah hasn’t happened yet. The restoration has yet to occur, and God is speaking in the future tense. Here is what I will do, God says.
The when is not clear. But God’s intention certainly is.
There have been many versions of the covenant before this in scripture: covenants to Noah and Abraham, and covenants handed down to Moses in the Ten Commandments. But here there is a shift. The covenant will not be spoken to patriarchs, nor will it etched on stone tablets. It will be written on human hearts. Our hearts. Hearts that don’t just weep at the death of an unarmed black boy, but who work for a world where such a tragedy is a thing of the past.
In a moment, we will hear from John Dearie, a board member of the Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness.
That sounds impossible. End homelessness? It seems laughable in its audacity. Surely the problem is too big, the problem is too complicated, the problem is too expensive. If there were a way to end homelessness, we’d have done it by now.
But I invite you to listen with the ear of Jeremiah:
Jeremiah, who in the midst of the exile of his people said, “God is not finished with us yet.”
Jeremiah who saw the despair and the destruction all around him and dared to announce that there is still hope.
Jeremiah, who wrote 50 chapters of prophetic judgment but had the good sense to include 2 chapters of comfort. But the comfort doesn’t say everything’s going to be OK, that God’s going to swoop in and fix everything. The comfort comes in the form of a new heart beating in our chests, a heart that beats for justice and hope and abundant life for everyone. Everyone.
“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
In the spirit of “what’s not wrong,” I listened to two things while commuting/running today that lifted by spirit and gave me little shimmers of hope in a world that, quite frankly, feels like it’s going to the dogs right now.
First, the Freakonomics podcast asks, “Should there be a hitchhiking renaissance?” Did you know that the average vehicle commuting to and from work has only 1.1 people it? This means that about 80 percent of car capacity goes unused.
The podcast is an interesting exploration of why people don’t hitchhike anymore. I was excited that they profiled the Slug Line, which is one of my favorite quirks of the DC area.
Part of the decrease in hitchhiking is the fear factor, which the show’s hosts argue is overblown—the examples of hitchhiking gone awry, though quite dramatic, are extremely rare.
What are you scared of, and why? Are your fears rational? Or do you let the small likelihood of a terrible outcome stop you from doing things you want to do? You know what I think we fear most in this country? Strangers. We’ve done a great job – through our media, our movies, our politics – of convincing ourselves that strangers are dangerous. But if you look at the data, you might be surprised.
This is testimony!
What really struck me was something said at the end of the show: that hitchhiking (or sharing rides, if you prefer) is a way of embodying trust in one another. And the more we trust each other, the more trustworthy we become and the more pleasant our society is as a whole.
We have a better society when we can trust one another. And wherever and whenever there’s an evaporation of systems based on trust I think there’s a loss to society. I also think that one evaporation of trust in society tends to feed another, and that we would have a better society if we could, rather than promoting fear and working to reduce the places where terrible things happen, if we could promote trust and work on building societies in which people are more trustworthy. I think we’re all better off in a million different ways if and when we can do that.
I don’t know… I hear that and think there’s some glimpse of the kingdom of heaven there.
The second bit was the prologue to the latest This American Life. Did you know that there is a gathering called the 100 Year Starship Symposium? The people there are serious folks who are trying to solve the problem of interstellar space travel. They realize that we’re centuries away, yet they’re talking about the real scientific and engineering challenges. (They already have a solution to the space dust problem, by the way.)
Their hope is that people will look back hundreds or a thousand years from now and see that exploration of this new frontier had its roots in gatherings like the symposium.
I find that lovely.
What can I say… I take my hope where I can get it.
(I’m pretty heads-down on the book the next several weeks, so won’t be writing as much on the blog. Will likely share little tidbits like this from time to time.)