Church:

Let us not give up meeting together.

(Hebrews 10:25)

I respect anyone who makes it to church on Sunday morning. For fifty years or so, I didn’t have a choice in the matter. If I didn’t show up for church on Sunday morning, I’d get fired. But now, in retirement, I don’t have to go to church. We are free to stay home and watch the football game.

It is work to go to church. You have to rally the whole family; or, in my case, there’s always some part of my physical body that’s malfunctioning enough to provide an excuse to forgo the task.

That is how we felt last Sunday. But we rallied. We put ourselves together. We made it to church. We did “not give up meeting together.”

Church was good. Church most always is. It’s just the getting there. There’s goodness in singing our songs of praise and in praying our prayers and in listening to the message and then participating in the Table; but last Sunday, I was reminded of the goodness of just being “together”. We lingered about so long after the service that we bumped into folks making their way to the second service. One couple we met, Kevin and Ellen Gray, we had not seen for a spell. Ellen, a poet, thanked me for a poem I had Kevin give her awhile back.

This encounter prompts Ellen to send me one of her poems: “Pilate’s Wife Listens for Crickets”. It was worth going to church on Sunday morning just for that—that poem. I’ll pass it on. It’s a reflection on a single sentence, one verse: “While Pilate was sitting on the judge’s seat, his wife sent him a message…” (Mt 27:19). The man with all the power gets it wrong. The woman, like Mary and Elizabeth and Mary of Bethany along with all those Galilean women; get it—or, sort of get it. These women somehow get that Jesus is more. Give the poem a few reads, and imagine Pilate’s wife:

            Pilate’s Wife Listens for Crickets, by Ellen Gray

The crucifixions come after Passover

the chant of Pharisees

the cry of thieves

and what about me?

when your days are a lie

and your mirages are true

you go a little bit mad

from the window I see hanging

dead bodies, I shiver in loneliness

pacing over palace floors

rolling my sins over and over and

over, into an obsessive stone

standing like a cruel idol

on the path to green pastures

how unfixable living is

the weakness of laws

the losing rebellions

the blind violence of driving

a rusty nail through a human hand

three nights on earth

can feel like an eternity

waiting at the window

waiting at the door

waiting at the gate

for something like good news

the little chirp of life

almost starts too late

the silent grip of the night broken

by a beating chorus

neither seraphim or cherubim

but the lyrics of crickets

singing in the dark garden

repeating and repeating,

notes like a heartbeat

the comfort of call

and answer, assurance

revealed in the song

of a humble creature's wings.

One other surprise, it just so happens that the pastor spoke from the Epistle to the Ephesians about how we are God’s “poem” (2:10), from the Greek word poiēma from which we get our English word “poem”. It speaks of God’s special, thoughtful, creative work. We are God’s poem, isn’t that something?