I have a very clear memory of biking down Gaffield street last summer in the afternoon sun, breathing in the smell of linden flowers blooming on the trees that lined the streets.  It didn’t matter how close you were to a linden tree – the scent permeated the air.

I’d been looking forward to a repeat of last year’s linden event – my memory told me it happened sometime in early June – and I would eagerly sniff the air as I biked home from work at the library.  It was both exciting and comforting to be in the same place for another summer, to watch the seasons change in a predictable way, to welcome the return of the flapping leaves on the cottonwood outside my bedroom, to see the light pour through my windows at summer solstice angles again.  I enjoyed being able to notice and predict the way my surroundings grew and shifted with the lengthening light; in doing so, I felt pulled deeper and deeper into the rhythms that connect our lives to the life of the world … and to the life of the One who makes it.  So much of my life has been spent moving from one place to another, and my longing to stay put in one place for a while is mostly rooted in this desire to enter the cyclical, predictable rhythm of things.

So I waited for the linden flowers.  I noticed the flower buds appear on the trees, but still, no unmistakable aroma.  As I prepared for various weekends away at out-of-town weddings, I worried I would miss the peak.  I returned from the festivities – still no pervasive linden scent.  I began to wonder if I’d made some sort of mistake: I noticed a slew of fragrant, white-flowered shrubs in many of the places where last year I had supposed I was smelling linden, and I thought perhaps these shrubs were what I had been smelling the previous year.  I suddenly felt like a stranger in my neighborhood.

And then, one damp early morning, I walked to the library, and I suddenly felt surrounded by an indefinably sweet smell.  I looked up.  There, spreading in the branches above me, were dozens and dozens linden flowers, fuzzy and open-budded, quietly perfuming the air.  And I was so happy.

My dried linden flowers jarred and ready for tea.

Later, the next day, as I cut off the fragrant blooms to dry for tea, I thought about rhythms and predictability and surprise.  The websites I’d consulted to learn the best way to harvest the blossoms said that the linden tree bloomed in June and July, depending on weather.  June and July – that’s two whole months of trees staggering their flowering, never going in the same order twice, never peaking on exactly the same day.  Two whole months to bud and bloom and wither at whatever pace they like.  Why would I ever have expected to enjoy the flowers at precisely the same time every year?

My desire to be rooted somewhere is good and beautiful and worth paying attention to, but seasons are never entirely predictable, even in one place.  As Aslan tells Lucy in Prince Caspian, “Things never happen the same way twice.”  Much of the beauty of the world – and its pain, it’s true – is held in the moments that surprise us, that take our breath away, that command our full attention.

If I lived near Gaffield Street for the rest of my life, I would likely enjoy the smell of the linden blossoms every summer.  But I think I would lose something precious the day they no longer had the capacity to surprise me.  Rhythmic does not mean predictable, and “rooted” is not equivalent to “same” – after all, those linden trees have deep roots, and they’re changing all the time, every season, every year.

Postscript:

A few days after my linden discovery, on July 5, I was paging through my diary and saw an entry from exactly a year ago.  It said, “I love the smell of Linden trees.  And I love how the smell simply inhabits the whole expanse of the air – the scent isn’t necessarily stronger when you stick your nose in a branch.  It takes up residence on the whole street.  It’s a Linden season.”

So it was my memory, and not the trees, that had shifted the dates of the peak.  I don’t think this invalidates anything above.  If our memories shift and twist, then everything I pondered about change and rootedness becomes even more necessary to internalize.  For even the selves with which we experience the world are never the same, both rooted and growing, both predictable and wildly mysterious.

I preached this sermon at 6:45am this Easter morning, standing on the Clark Street Beach of Evanston, with the sun rising over Lake Michigan.  We then shared in the sacrament of communion as we celebrated Jesus’ rising.  Jesus Christ is Risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia! 

The lectionary text was John 20:1-18. 

I spent the week before Palm Sunday in Turkey with a group of Northwestern students, visiting prominent historical and religious sites and engaging in interfaith dialogue. As we entered into the mosques and holy sites of Islam, I was captivated by the way the Muslim worshipers prayed in these spaces. 

The men performed their ritual ablution outside under awnings of stone and wood. They sat on stools with their pant legs and shirtsleeves rolled up, water pouring out of the spigots and into their hands. The women’s area was enclosed, with talking and splashing water echoing around the room. Headscarves came off and towels came out. In both places, the worshipers brought soap—this was no ceremonial splashing but real washing, up to their knees and elbows, behind their necks and ears. In the prayers themselves, the worshipers raised their hands, bowed to the ground, and came up again in a dance of devotion. The chanted call to prayer was loud and throaty and passionate. Theirs was not a religion that stayed only in their heads or existed primarily in some detached spiritual realm. Prayer was a place where their bodies and spirits were one, where the God they worshiped was intimately invested in their embodiment.

Sometimes we forget or gloss over the physical fleshiness of our own beings, let alone the physical fleshiness of Jesus. We forget that the God we worship had dirty feet that needed to be washed, cried tears that ran down his chin, got hungry and tired. Our God had a body that bruised, and bled, and died, a body that needed spices and aloes to keep the smell of death away.

When we forget that our God had a body, we run the risk of turning the resurrection of Jesus into a nice, clean metaphor about the cycle of new life rather than a tangible experience of God’s power for real life over real death. The Gospel of John confronts this kind of thinking. The passage we read begins the resurrection account with Peter and the beloved disciple discovering the empty tomb and folded grave clothes. But it doesn’t end there. God doesn’t leave us to go home wondering about the lack of a body. Easter is not just about an empty tomb but a risen Christ, about a God who is present in the real earthiness of our existence.

After Peter and other disciple head back home, Mary remains outside the tomb, not just crying but weeping with streams of tears. She, like the disciples, is confused, so confused and distraught that when Jesus himself stands in front of her, she doesn’t recognize him. For millennia Christians have speculated why Jesus was unrecognizable in this moment, but I think that the answer is very simple. Mary wasn’t looking for him. She and the disciples had encountered an empty tomb and were stuck in that emptiness.

We have been there, in that space. We have all stared into the face of death—into loss, into pain, into uncertainty, into utter abandonment—and felt the great gravity of emptiness pull us into hopelessness. I stood in that space a few months ago when I found out that a young friend and member of my home church had attempted suicide and was in a coma on breathing tubes, hanging between life and death. The day they were deciding whether or not to turn of the machines connecting her to life-giving breath, I stood in the shower and wept. The emotions would hit me in waves: one moment I’d be putting shampoo in my hair and the next I would be about to collapse, pleading with God. I couldn’t keep the prayers inside of me—they burst out audibly. At one point, I did fall to my knees, and kneeling in a shower feels somehow a little like drowning. Drowning in the awful reality of unstoppable death.

This is why we need a God with a body. When I knelt in that shower and cried and performed my own ritual ablution, I needed God to be present with me in that messy, terrifying moment of emptiness. A God of some non-material, non-embodied reality would not be able to enter into my experience of despair and sit with me under the pounding water and fearful tears.

This is the good news: God in Jesus Christ saves our whole selves through his embodied death and resurrection. Jesus is present with us not as an ephemeral spirit but as a God who chose to take on flesh, to take on material molecules and a thirsty throat and hands that could touch and hold. At the beginning of Lent, we smeared ashes on our foreheads and declared, “From dust you came and to dust you will return.” Our God became this dust that makes us up. There is something so good, so necessary, about our bodies that Jesus lived and died as a body so that, when he rose in the unexplainable power of God’s life over death, our bodies would be a part of that victory. Our emptiness would be transformed into abundant life.

When Mary, blinded by her tears and her grief, confronted who she believed was the gardener, he asked her a simple question: “Whom are you looking for?” Whom are you looking for? What kind of savior are you looking for? Are we looking for a God who floats above our material reality and rescues us from our bodies? Or do we bring our whole bodies to the worship of God and expect God to be present in our embodied reality?

Even when we are blind to the abundant life God offers, Jesus, as he did that first Easter morning, calls our names. Jesus speaks, and his voice echoes in our eardrums and pumps through our blood and calls us to the recognition of his presence in the very stuff of this here and now life. We turn around and see Jesus standing right in front of us, where we least expect it, in the mundane, every day, physical reality of our lives. In the sand between our toes, in the laughter of a loved one, in bread and wine and water, in grace that floods every moment. We touch and hear and see and taste that the Lord is good.

My friend from church who attempted suicide did not die that day. She miraculously not only lived but suffered just minor brain damage and memory loss. But I know that someday, like every one of us on this planet, she will die. She will be lowered into the ground and covered with the dirt from which she came and to which she will return. Just like each of us standing here on this beach. But because of the risen Jesus, we know that this is not the end of the story. Through the risen and transformed body of Jesus Christ, God holds our bodies and lives—hers and mine and yours—and, though we don’t yet know how, God will bring us all into completion and fullness. The resurrection of our embodied God will extend to us all.

So as we enter this season of Easter, we are called to pay attention to where the risen Christ shows up in our embodied reality, often where we least expect it. When we turn to Jesus and listen to his voice, we are invited into the miracle of God’s uncontainable, close-as-breathing presence, and we will be able to say, with Mary, I have seen the Lord.

Psalm 42 is one of my favorites – it speaks meaning into a variety of circumstances.  I’m taking a writing class this semester, and we had an in class assignment to write a prayer using the form of a “collect.”  The basic structure is a address to God, an attribution to God, a request from God based on that attribution, something we hope would result from the fulfillment of that request, and ending of praise.  Below is my collect.

You who are the Living Water,

you nourish our lives as you quench our thirst.

Fill our broken hearts with your deep wholeness,

that our longing for you might overflow into joyful praise;

we wait for you in hope, God our Source, our Life, and our Strength.

Amen.

June is the month of adventures in worship for me.

I began the month at the Forum for Theological Exploration’s Christian Leadership Forum, where I was a part of the worship planning team.  Then, the middle of June marks the beginning of my school’s summer session, during which I’ve joined with 2 other students and the Dean of the Chapel to coordinate the summer chapel worship services. Finally, on Wednesday, I’ll be headed to the Wild Goose Festival in Hot Spring, North Carolina, where I’ll be joining other folk from FTE to curate the chapel space.  (And in between all this I’ve come to Bloomington to perform a concert with my sister.)  It’s a doozy of a month.  Regular posts – and reflections on this month’s happenings – will resume in July.