AROUSING TOTAL OPPOSITION

 

AROUSING TOTAL OPPOSITION

Down from the mountain, legs worn,

stretched and dry from leather boots,

Chafed muscles cry for lotion. Waking in bed,

the lost pencil for margin notes

in the library-loan book of Bultmann

sermons* on living room floor

under footstool. I get up to pee,

applying lotion while retrieving

the pencil. The old man must die,

Bonhoeffer says. Bultmann turning

the parable every possible way.

Workers in the vineyard,

can they not see God’s generosity?

Even when crops fail? Remembering

an old man talking about his pastor-

father, You were able to work, no!

Bultmann, too, like

a Navajo Blessingway Singer

from another world. Hozho.

And Tillich arrives in the mail.

Nothing can be hidden—It is always

reflected in the mirror in which nothing

can be concealed. My old pastor

brought you to me. Dear Paulus,

You learned men of crises

at my door, me, the worst of sinners

as Bonhoeffer says to seminarians,

common, a Dakota prairie dog.

How else to have hope?

The parable insists the vineyard owner speak.

Do you begrudge my generosity?

So many helping to understand.

Poverty written on my face. Bultmann ending

his sermon at the beginning,

August, 1942, with lines from the poet,

another Paul, Gerhardt, (the poets

at every trailhead with Bultmann),

We are guests at a strange hearth.

Too many houses have been built

in the forests. The cities are on fire.

Holderlin, C. F. Meyer, Rilke,

signs themselves, declarations

of suffering leading to grace.

Unarmed in a simple message.

Salve from poets rubbed

into an old man’s legs.

To be nothing here.

*Rudolf Bultmann, This World and the Beyond: Marburg Sermons, 1936-1950.

Jim Bodeen

15 January 2025