I recently had the great privilege to hear in person a song that has carried me through some really hard times. The singer-songwriter Spencer LaJoye is a nonbinary Queer artist with a Masters in Divinity and an incredible gift for telling the beautiful truth. When introducing this song at their concert in Roanoke last week, they started by asking the audience if we knew what a plowshare was. Someone shouted “you can make them out of guns,” which might not have been the answer Spencer was looking for, but nonetheless its true. A plowshare is the blade of a plow, the tool that parts the soil and softens the ground for planting. In Scripture, the prophets exhort us to beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. God promises that a day will come when all our weapons will become tools of growth, and nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall we learn war anymore. There are some creative and faithful people who are already doing this, melting down guns and resurrecting them as shovels and spades. In the same way, songwriters like Spencer reshape words of harm into tools of healing.
Spencer’s song, Plowshare Prayer, is written in the spirit of the prophets, a message of defiant hope to a struggling and grieving people. I could bypass my own sermon altogether and simply read you the lyrics in their entirety, but I hope instead you’ll find the time to look it up and listen for yourself. I think there’s something in it for every one of us.
The part of Plowshare Prayer that lingers most for me is this:
I pray if a prayer has been used as a sword
Against you & your heart Against you & your word
I pray that this prayer is a plowshare of sorts
That it might break you open
It might help you grow
I pray that your body gets all that it needs
And if you don’t want healing
I just pray for peace
If you don’t want healing, I just pray for peace. That line, those words, break my heart open every time. Because for those of us who have lost someone, who miss someone, whether because they have gone ahead of us to Glory or because they’ve simply become someone we no longer know, the promise of healing isn’t always a welcome one. Because for some of us, to stop hurting would feel like a betrayal, or a loss of another sort. For mourners and grievers and deep feelers, there are wounds we might never wish to become scars. The bleeding may stop, we may find peace, but some healing cannot be achieved this side of heaven.
I believe that is why Jesus came back broken, with holes in his hands and an open wound in his side. I believe that is why Thomas asked to see them, to see for himself that the hole in his own heart was real. Because our God knows that some wounds can’t ever fully heal, because love is stronger than death. Love remains, scarring us like the body of Christ, resurrected to show us that there is nowhere we can go that is beyond Love’s reach. When we offer ourselves up to God’s healing touch, it is not so that God can wipe away the grief that is love persevering. When we seek God’s healing, we are reaching out for the wounded hand, the wounded side, the God who knows what it is to bleed, to weep, to feel alone in the world. God knows we may not want healing, so God grants us peace. I pray that this service is a plowshare of sorts, that it might break you open, it might help you grow. And if you don’t want healing, I just pray for peace. The peace which passes all understanding, and the love that outlives death.
Mother A Writes 