A Different Poem for Maundy Thursday

Today is Maundy Thursday, the day that celebrates "The Last Supper" of Jesus.  Of course, it's not the last supper.  After his resurrection, he gets right back to having meals with people, cooking fish on the beach for breakfast.  But it's the last supper on this side of the crucifixion.

If you'd like a serious Maundy Thursday sermon, I've posted the manuscript (which might change a bit between now and tonight's 6:30 worship service at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, TN) in this blog post.

On a less serious note, I pulled a loaf of bread out of the freezer for tonight's worship and realized that I had pulled out a chunk of fatback.  Happily, I realized it right away and pulled out the correct bag that contains bread not pig fat.  I double checked and will double check again, probably several times before I leave for school.

My poet brain is already making connections.  But it won't be in time for today's blog post.

Instead, let me post an earlier poem.  It's never been published, and it's not my favorite Maundy Thursday poem (those are here and here).  I wrote it back in 2012 when I was filling in for one of the deans who was away for a week on vacation.  It was a high traffic time in the dean's office when students would come in to discuss their failures and their options, so the office needed to be staffed.  I was a department chair who volunteered.  It was also Holy Week, which provided me all kinds of interesting parallels and possibilities.

The Dean Hears Student Appeals During Holy Week


On the Monday after Palm
Sunday, the students form
a line outside the office of the Dean.

The students come to protest
their sudden change of fortune.
They’ve always been good
students! They can’t fathom
why they’ve been forced
to leave school.

The dean drifts off during
their pleas. The dean thinks of palm
branches, donkeys, and crowns of thorns.
The dean studies transcripts
and hears sad tales of woe.
Like Pontius Pilate,
the dean, several steps removed, asks
questions but never knows for sure:
each decision, a shot in the dark.

Unlike Pontius Pilate, the dean never
has scrubbed hands. The dean listens
to each appeal and offers second
chances, even if undeserved,
a gleam of grace
in a world where redemption
seems impossible.

Running, Running, Running into National Poetry Month and Holy Week: An Unfinished Post

It's the kind of week where I feel like I'm running, running, running.  Even though I have a plan for my classes, there's still prep work to do, and I'm behind in my grading.  It's Holy Week, so I have two sermons, not my usual one.  It's a good kind of tired I'm feeling, since I like everything I'm doing, but tiredness is tiredness.

Let me record a few fragments, so that I don't lose them.

--It is National Poetry Month.  I will probably not do as much as I have in past years.  But I will mention it to my English students.  Maybe I shouldn't--I didn't mention Women's History Month or Black History Month.

--Yesterday I did my communal poetry project with my English 102 class, a project that I first described in this blog post.  I can't always tell what my students are thinking, and yesterday, although I tried to have class conversation after the creating of the poems and my reading of them, they were stonily quiet.  So I decided to have them write about the process.  I was surprised by how many students enjoyed it.  I do realize that some of them might have been telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, but I think that some of them were genuine.  It's good to remember that I might be misinterpreting my students' silence.  Across the classes that I teach, semester after semester, I don't find students wanting to be verbal in class.  It does seem like a generational shift.

--Yesterday I heard about a different kind of writing process, the Frederick Buechner Writing Competition.  I was particularly intrigued by the wide range of types of writing the judges will consider, but this passage made me decide to enter: "The editorial board will give special consideration to pieces that discuss Buechner’s work and themes, to literary and theological essays, and to sermons — the written sermon being an undervalued art form that was particularly close to Frederick Buechner’s heart."  So I decided to enter:  more in this blog post.  

--I've been thinking about the life of a sermon writer.  Some sermons are so much easier than others--and it's often not the ones I would have thought would be easier, back before I was writing sermons every week.  And it's interesting to think about how writing a weekly blog post about the Sunday Gospel text is different from a sermon.  My blog posts are usually half the length of a sermon, and for much of my blogging, I've been able to assume that no one would be reading my blog.  Sermons are so different.

--My congregation in Bristol, TN is the most attentive group of listeners I've ever had, more so than students certainly, but also more so than other congregations.