How about them apples?

 I’ll never forget the day that someone told me about the secret star inside every apple.  No way, I thought.  We had always cut our apples from stem to blossom end, and it never occurred to me to try any other way.  What a revelation to see that pretty, 5-pointed star smack dab in the middle of my fruit.  Like a little miracle of love, unseen under the delicious flesh, ignored by many, but there none-the-less.

Rather like the first time I realized my parents loved me.  Not something we ever said in my family, and whenever I got into trouble for doing something mischievous, I was sure my parents hated me.  There were times when I did wonder if they could love me when I dropped plates, spilled milk, made a mess in my bedroom and other such monstrous misdemeanors. My parents did love me in their quiet and undemonstrative way, and showed it when I least expected it.  Flying to Halifax to see me convocated or tying up my shoes for me when I was eight months pregnant or quilting a beautiful runner for my coffee table.  Signs of love hidden like the apple’s star, unseen until I looked at their actions in a different way. Many people are not so lucky – the Blanket Exercise reminded me of the disruption of love caused by residential schools and generational trauma.  Parental love is missing from many people’s lives.  God’s love is not, even when it’s hard to see.

Jeremiah knew that it was hard to see God’s love in the midst of tragedy.  He had been preaching bad news for so long, it was unexpected to preach something different to the people.  And preach the idea of God loving us not because we follow a rule book that God gave us.  No, because God was reminding Jeremiah of covenant, like a loving spouse married to a troublesome partner, but not holding it against them when the partner breaks promises and gets things mixed up.  A partnership that God would not end or abandon, and thriving would happen once more. 

Jesus was preaching on a similar vein.  God more loving than a nagged judge, more patient than a wronged widow, in it for the long haul, in it because that’s what the character of God is.  Hard to see that when we are in difficult times, when the world around us seems empty of any sign of God.  How do we keep going with the news from Ukraine, or a premier who insults people facing real discrimination for their race or gender identity or their physical or mental abilities by comparing them to folks who knowingly chose to ignore science and medical best advice?  How do we keep going when the price of an apple at the grocery store is now 1.50/lb or more?

Jesus was also preaching about prayer.  And how important it is.  How we need to persist like a nagging street person at the gates of MaraLago demanding justice from a billionaire who wants anything but justice.

How often do we pray for justice?  How often do we nag God for fair play?  It’s an interesting question.  And how often does it feel like our prayers are falling on a God who can’t hear us?  Probably more often than we think or like to admit to ourselves.  It would be so easy to give up, to assume that there is no one listening, that God doesn’t care, God judges harshly without any love whatsoever.  And yet, and yet.

This week I came across a story about Frederick Douglass.  He was born in 1818 and looked as dignified as Morgan Freeman.  He was brought up on a slave plantation by his grandmother as his mother was not allowed to stay with him, most mothers were taken away from their children when they were very young.  He had four or five masters before he was even 16, and managed to learn his alphabet and to read, mostly without any help from a teacher.  One woman taught him a little before her husband convinced her it was evil to teach a slave to read.  But Douglass persisted and eventually took the Underground Railway to freedom where he changed his name and married.  He became a Methodist preacher and travelled to England and Ireland where he preached against slavery.  He wrote impassioned essays on abolition. He convinced Abraham Lincoln to let blacks enlist in the Union Army to fight against the Confederates.  But just prior to the Civil War, he was feeling frustrated and discouraged.  All his attempts to end slavery had bogged down.  He was feeling depressed and his speech at one conference lacked fire and compassion.  He was tired of praying for freedom, for justice, for equality, for everyone’s the right to vote, including women.  At that moment, in that hall of crowded people hoping to be inspired, another famous lady, Sojourner Truth, also a powerful speaker for abolition, was in the audience.

She heard his lackluster speech and stood up in the middle of it.  She hollered a question so loudly everyone in the room heard her.  She said it over and over until Douglass answered her.  That question changed everything.  Douglass remembered his passion, his love for justice.  He became reenergized and his speech energized everyone who heard him.  And it got him back into remembering why he was there.  The question she yelled at him with so much passion?

“Is God Dead?  Is God Dead? Frederick Douglass, Is God Dead?” “No,” Douglas replied, and that was the answer they all needed to hear.

We need to hear it too.  God is not dead!  God loves us and will hear our prayers for justice.  It’s not easy, it’s not fast, but God will answer.  The world does change.  Slavery does end.  Women do vote.  Love does change everything, maybe especially when it is as tiny as a star hidden in an apple!