Every Skinny Tree

Deut. 18
Raise up a prophet from among your brothers... For this is what you asked of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said, "Let us not hear the voice of the LORD our God nor see this great fire anymore, or we will die."

1 Corinthians 8
1Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that we all possess knowledge.[a] Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. 2The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. 3But the man who loves God is known by God.

We went to the dump the other day. We loaded up a half-ton truck with things we were sure we wouldn't need again.
when we arrived the attendant looked at my husband's face,
rather than in the bed of the truck, and asked him,
just to be sure.
"Garbage?"
Yes,
he answered with authority. The sheetrock, broken bricks, bits of wood, empty paint cans, old,
rolled up bits of carpet and linoleum
had served well for at least a decade
they were now destined for the pit.
To be honest, we had fought, there were plenty of angry words, about most of the so-called garbage,
until this moment we had not been willing to name it.
Who were we to call it garbage?
I felt guilty for throwing it away, for our inability to redeem all this stuff. Were we just too ignorant to find a better way?

"Do you really want to throw THAT in a landfill,
what if we could use it...later? What if it could be recycled or reused?" My ever-green husband asked.
To which I almost always answered:
Good grief, I just can't look at it anymore!
We were only loading something into the truck if we were going to absolutely love tossing it overboard. If there was even a tiny twinkling of hope for a broken brick with a nice marbling or a hinge that hadn't yet rusted through, it stayed.

We figure
if a particular piece of possible refuse inspires you to greatness, you get to keep it--but you have to know, for sure, it can be used.

Martin knows what to do with scrap
wood: he is the authority on which scraps we keep, where they are stored and when they will be used.

I know what to do with broken dishes and dying plants, and I do not hesitate to salvage shards of hand-painted china or nurse a geranium through a snow storm.

Authority was a big deal to the Scribes and Pharisees in Jesus day. They wanted to know,
for sure, exactly how Jesus knew what he knew or
said what he said. They checked and double checked
prophetic texts, they studied the signs of the times
and were sure that when the Messiah arrived, they would be first to KNOW.

We look back on them in judgment because we see Deuteronomy through the lens of Mark's Gospel and Paul's letter to the Corinthians.
We give the New Testament authority because we figure it all adds up,
to an extent:
Deuteronomy predicted it,
Mark recorded it
and Paul summed it all up.
It makes sense to us, in a way, Jesus as Messiah seems obvious, almost a fact of life at times.

But there is something to be said for those who were surprised by Jesus' authority
as much as we know about Jesus being God, we will never reconcile his authority with facts and figures.

Jesus' authority is a mystery. Sometimes I try to settle into one pat answer for questions about who/why and how long of authority according to human understanding of historical figures, war, famine, economics, chaos theory and psychoanalysis.

But Love has a different way.

When Love gives authority it goes like this:
In our house, if it isn't your turn to be in charge of cooking dinner, you offer your services as sous chef and do your best not to get overly emotional when something seems about to burn
You try not to roll your eyes when the head chef needs help finding the chocolate chips in the back of the deep freeze.
It has to be about more than which of us KNOWS how to cook,
it has to be about loving each other in spite of impending doom in the form of charred
onions and missing ingredients.

The text today says plainly that knowledge, which is so often requisite for authority, only puffs us up. But love builds us up.

These texts don't ask us to mimic the mvp on the high school debate team, they don't encourage a battle of wits or
conjure an image of Jesus calculating his next move in some
salvific chess game.
A superior intellect seems to have very little to do with it. It is not about being right,
it is about
grace.

Today's text ignores those who seem to know more, in favor of those who are willing to love more,
imagine more,
redeem more, even when it seems ridiculous to do so.

the text for today calls me to reimagine authority as loving assuredly rather than knowing for certain.

Before we left for the dump we scoured our house and yard, looking for things we ought to throw away. Hidden behind the shed lay a cement birdbath, left to us by the previous owners, in three
ugly, awkward lumps. I had plotted against it before we even bought the house. I was sure it was missing huge chunks and I had it destined for the dump
TODAY.

Martin and I stood over it,
me: calculating
how many mosquitos would be born in it if I let it stay. I asked him to help me put it in the truck.
He just looked down,
hopefully and told me, once more, with gusto that
he wanted to fix it,
that he could fix it, it could be great. I was sure the
data proved otherwise.

somehow he managed to crack my resolve with his optimism. He bent down and fit the pieces of the pedestal together,
like a puzzle. Then we both, almost kneeling in the dirt, bowed down
I to his hope and he to my skepticism,
We hoisted the shallow bowl of the bird bath and I found myself saying, "this should fit perfectly on top."

We stood back and admired
how lovely it had become,
suddenly full of the possibility of happy birds splashing and shaking and it stood, proudly, like a baptismal font
poised perfectly between the heat of the compost heap
and the alley where the neighborhood kids
smoke
pot.

To be honest, Martin had no way of KNOWING
how I would react when the pieces came together; he had only imagined.
He had not calculated this outcome;
he had only hoped,
for over a year, that he could put together all the pieces of the birdbath puzzle and I would suddenly
see its glory.

His authority (over the birdbath)
came like Christ's--
from his hope for redemption, for his creation to be beautiful in the eyes of the beloved. He had preached a gospel
of
cracks in the stone
that didn't make any sense,
he had taught a lesson
that flew in the face of my facts and figures about
what is garbage and what is NOT garbage,
what is to be rebuked and what is to be admired.