Rivetti's Blog

Back on the Palouse and a warm welcome into the blessing that is St. James’ Episcopal Church. The day after my arrival, my stepson Steven, who hosted me when I began my journey, arrived with his two children to begin work on the Rivetti memorial fence. I learned a lot through watching him work with the army of parish volunteers the importance of measuring, re-measuring, checking and re-checking the level before any piece of wood went up.

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost – July 11, 2010

Amos 7:1-17; Luke 10:25-37

Midway through my sabbatical I spent a relaxing ten days in the home of my friend and seminary classmate, the Rev. Carol Westpfahl, in Newtown CT. Carol graciously welcomed me into her home, warning me that although we might make a few sightseeing trips into New York, she had a lot of work to do which meant that I, poor me, had hours on end to read, to pray, to reflect.

On Carol’s refrigerator is the usual sort of collection one might find especially in a home without children. Calendars. Notes from friends; a card from her ordination; and a picture that I remembered from the last time I visited her in the fall of 2005. A grainy photocopy of an even grainer black and white photo apparently clipped from a book or article, with the caption “Thomas Merton said this is the only known photograph of God”– with photo credits to Thomas Merton. There’s no background – only a somewhat familiar object rendered unfamiliar by it being suspended as if in space, or no space. A cable hung with a lead weight – an industrial strength plumb line in fact – at the end of which is attached a powerful grappling hook.

Maybe it’s the hours of solitary thinking, but the picture just rang true.

The Lord God said to Amos, “Amos, what do you see?” The text we hear in the prophet is one of judging. The wall is going to fall down; Israel is going to collapse. If we’ve heard this story before, perhaps a hundred times since we were children, it’s always one that seems to chastise, to tell us to get into shape, rise to Level 4 Christianity, get right with Jesus — or else. Or else. But Merton’s photo reminds us that the snapshot of God we hear about in Amos is only part of the story. There’s the hook made of the same hard metal – the unyielding embrace of God pulling us always back.

The legal expert asks Jesus for a judgment. For holding up the plumb line and saying, yep, you’re good. You fit. You’re upright and righteous. But Jesus adds the hook. Jesus summarizes the law and includes that bit about the neighbor, and the lawyer asks that question, just to make sure we’re clear about which neighbor we’re supposed to love with the same impractical and outrageously over the top love we’re supposed to give to God. And before we get to the rest of the story, let’s think about another time when a young man asks Jesus about how to inherit eternal life. Remember how Jesus says you know the commandments – and proceeds to enumerate the neighborly ones. Not the ones that get carved first in those tablets you can buy for your display. About God and graven images. But the ones that talk about relationship with our neighbor. Stealing, defrauding, cheating, honoring elders, releasing workers on the holy Sabbath – those commandments are the ones that roll off Jesus’ lips that time. And the young man answers, I have kept all these my whole life. Well, there’s just one more thing – we know it, right? Sell all you have and give it to the poor.

Plumb line. Oops. The young man is on the wrong side of it. He goes off in despair because he has many possessions.

And today there’s another guy asking for the plumb line again – you know the law says Jesus – love God, love neighbor. And he thinks, I’m doing better than that poor guy who was told to give away all his stuff, but JUST in case, I want to make sure I’ve got the line in the right place. OK, I’ll bite. Who’s my neighbor?

A man went to Jericho. …Who’s my neighbor?

I was riding in to Whitefish, Montana, on the train, having departed at 11 from St. Paul, and not succeeding in getting much sleep. The car was cold, and in my rush to check my bags I had left my Amtrak blanket packed in my checked luggage. That and the steward kept coming through to rearrange the seating and to warn us not to get too comfortable since there would be passengers getting on in the middle of the night. My neighbor was a woman in her 70s who got on in the middle of the night. We exchanged brief greetings then went back to the business of closing our eyes. When morning came I crept over her to go downstairs and buy a cup of coffee – and another Amtrak blanket so I could fall back to sleep while we crossed North Dakota and Montana. When we both woke up she told me she had had to leave in a hurry from Brainerd because her son was not well, and she was hoping to get to Sandpoint in time. Hurry up and wait – ride a train across the country because that’s the only way to get there in time. To pass the time I asked for her story and she told me of her life growing up as one of 10 children on the plains, and marrying her husband who worked on the railroads his whole life – he built and maintained the tracks – and who retired as the writing appeared on the wall when Burlington Northern was sold. Her story sounded like the stories I’d been reading in Kathleen Norris’ books about life on the northern plains, about the lives described in Amazing Grace, Dakota, Acedia and Me. Hard lives, with joy carved out in snatches of memory against harsh elements, joy and loss shared with tenacity and fierce neighbors. She worked in the schools as a classroom assistant. She worked in her church as the secretary of missions. Her son had been an adventurer, hard time settling down, traveled to Alaska, then the wilds of Idaho. Life ate him up from the insides. When she was able to get cell phone reception in Havre, she learned he didn’t make it. We prayed together in that train car, we told stories, we laughed a little, we passed the hours, now longer and slower as we approached the point of my departure. She’d be getting off in the middle of another night. Meeting a daughter who had driven up from Billings, before they made that hard journey to Sandpoint to join her daughter-in-law and take on that solemn task no mother dreams of doing. I told her that if she were in my parish we’d have a prayer shawl for her to remind her of the prayers of our community. Oh, yes, they had a prayer shawl ministry in her own congregation back in Minnesota. Fortunately there was this new Amtrak blanket that I could place over her shoulders with another prayer for her safe journey.

Well, I don’t know who got the neighborly treatment that long day on the train. Was it my seatmate who got the pastoral presence she deserved as she went to join her family in their awful duty of burying her child? Or was it me, after two months of traveling away from this place, after a week spent in quiet prayer with monks in Minnesota, who had the honor of remembering my priestly care of souls?

The plumb line of judgment is never there because God wants to knock down crooked walls. The plumb line is there so we can remember, we can be recalled If we have a hard time remembering, the hook is there, too. The story that grabs us, recalls us, brings us back.

When we were talking on the train my neighbor tentatively ventured a question, careful in that she knew I was an Episcopalian, about whether we’d had, um, problems in our churches, you know, with the gays. Oh, how to be gentle with a grieving mother now! I think all of our churches, I replied, your church as well as mine, have been disrupted from their comfortable places as we keep remembering how to do what we’re supposed to do. Heck, my church has been in turmoil ever since they started ordaining women, and that was back in the 1970s.

I’d only earlier that day been reading about the dustup over the Archbishop of Canterbury making our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, present evidence of her credentials before being allowed to celebrate and preach in Southwark Cathedral in England. A dustup that makes us wonder whether our church can ever be relevant. What are we supposed to be doing? Fighting over mitres and credentials? Or proclaiming God’s new creation, God’s constant outreach to us throughout time and most especially through Jesus, the incarnate Word.

Urgency about embracing our neighbor, the ones who seem so different from us all, so scary. We have an opportunity coming up next month in fact to participate in the Diocesan Training in Anti-Racism, “Seeing the Face of God in Each Other,” in Moses Lake at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. We who take this course, who train others in this course, are building a grass-roots cadre of people who unite as allies in combating racism. All the clergy of the diocese are required to take it; all the lay leadership of the diocese are required to take it. But it’s open to anyone who wants to join.

As we find ourselves stumbling in national discourse about immigration, reaching for just solutions that are also compassionate, we may think of the plumb line and the hook. My father-in-law, that French chef whose picture you see guiding you into my kitchen, was an illegal immigrant from the south of France when he came to this country in the 1920s. He worked in Hell’s Kitchen in New York, and married a young woman from Connecticut who had been brought here from Italy when she was a toddler. They moved to New York and had a son, Robert, within their first year of marriage. And only after that did Michel Henri Rivetti go to Cuba and re-enter the United States with a valid US passport. ICE raids in the fruit-growing communities of Eastern Washington tear apart families, exiling to Mexico children and adolescents brought here as toddlers by parents risking their lives to pick in our fields the fruit that goes rotten when the immigrant workers are removed because no one else will pick the fruit. Our fear is of the less than one percent of illegal immigrants who are involved in the drug trade; our fear is of too few jobs going to people who do not deserve them. Our fear is of losing everything we have. Our hope is in the one who enables us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light, whose perfect love casts out fear, and holds us ever upright and true in the holy fellowship of righteousness and peace.