In the reeds

So I'm missing a week "up north." Used to happen twice every year, summer and fall; but since retiring, moving out in the country, and building a house out here, it just seemed we were already on vacation--like, all the time. But I miss it, our little Minnesota sojourn. I miss fishing, even though I'm not a fisherman, not really, not at all. But dawn on a lake is pure delight, as are the reeds. Loved 'em.

To the Ojibwas all around, the reeds held the wild rice that once was--and in some cases still is--central to diet and culture, hard work, but a bit less bloody than killing buffalo. In the reeds--or close--if I was lucky, a lurking bass or two or three might come up. Okay, "three" is a stretch. Oh, yeah--and a couple dozen snags.

And then last night, after supper, the reading was about John the Baptist, and the crowd who followed along behind both him and the Master, a crowd who stopped Jesus in order to quiz him on some questions of interest--like what on earth was he up to?

Jesus replies, first, by healing some folks plagued by science or by spirits. Then he tells them all to go tell John the Baptist of the miracles they've just witnessed. Once they're gone, he turns to his own crowd and asks them why they went out to the desert to see this John the Baptist phenom. "What were you looking for?--a reed swaying in the breeze?" he says.

I had no idea where that line came from or just exactly what he meant to probe. Why "a reed swaying in the breeze?" (Luke 7:24)

N.T. Wright takes a shot at that oddly chosen swaying reed by describing contemporary coins. We have Washington, Lincoln, even a jolly Ben Franklin on ours. But Herod, Wright claims, loved reeds, "whole beds of them swaying in the breeze by the shores of the sea of Galilee. A reed would symbolize the beauty and fertility of that area." So Herod put lovely reeds on his coinage, the only bit of community people shared way back then.

In a flash, right here on the prairie, I was ejected from the cabin of our kitchen and put on a boat on some gorgeous, up-north lake, John the Baptist, N.T. Wright, and even Jesus left behind.

Well, not totally. I can't help thinking he's there in the reeds yet today--don't you think? Sometimes we still struggle, just like those multitudes, to know just exactly who he is.

But we know he loves us--and that's most of what we need to. After all, "a bruised reed he will not. . ." Well, you know.