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The Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas preaches on 3-23-2014 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow, MA.

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent, March 23, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, St. Mark’s Church, East Longmeadow, MA.

Exodus 17:1-7       Romans 5:1-11 Psalm 95               John 4:5-42

Give us water to drink

It is a pleasure to be here this morning and to join you in worship and prayer. As you probably know, I am the diocese’s new Missioner for Creation Care, and I’ve been asked to reflect on how Christian faith connects with caring for the world that God made. I couldn’t have picked better readings than the ones our lectionary gives us today, for they are all about water, literal and spiritual. What could be more basic than water?

Water is what the Israelites in the desert were thirsting for, in a story that is told in Exodus, in today’s psalm, and in the Book of Numbers. Moses successfully led his people out of slavery in Egypt – which was all well and good – but here they were now, wandering in remote wilderness, with the sun beating down, everything dry as a bone, and not a drop to drink. As we heard in this morning’s first reading, the people complained to Moses, and they quarreled and pleaded with him, saying, “Give us water to drink.” If any of you have hiked a long distance and found yourself short of water, you can imagine what that was like – the dry mouth and parched lips, the flagging energy and rising anxiety, the perhaps desperate concern for your children and for anyone who is elderly, sick, or weak. Water is what drew the Samaritan woman to the well, where she encountered Jesus and where they launched into the long and many-faceted conversation that we heard in today’s Gospel passage from John.

Everyone needs water – what Nature Conservancy calls “that strange drinkable liquid that is not coffee or alcohol.” Water is what runs in our veins, what fills our lakes and rivers and seas, what covers 70% of the surface of the planet. Everything runs on water – our bodies, our farms, our power plants and cities and economies. Water is essential for life, yet because clean, fresh water is so rare, almost 2 billion people worldwide have no access to it. Yesterday we observed World Water Day, an annual event dedicated to the global effort to conserve water and to protect water supplies.

Today’s readings lift up the preciousness of literal water, but they also lift up another kind of water – what we might call the water of the Spirit, that unending flow of divine love that is symbolized in the image of Moses striking the rock with his staff and releasing a flow of water, and that Jesus in today’s Gospel describes as “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). God’s love is like water. Sometimes divine love pours down like a gentle rain that comes from above, softening our hardened hearts and refreshing our desert places. And sometimes divine love springs up from within like a fountain, or flows through us like a river, so that we discover, as St. Paul puts it in today’s reading from Romans, that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).

Finding that flow of living water, both literal and spiritual – that’s the theme of our readings today, and that’s the theme that confronts anyone who looks closely at the state of the world today. Whether we are keenly aware of it, or able only to glimpse it out of the corner of our eye, to some degree all of us are conscious that the web of life on our blue planet is unraveling. We live in an unprecedented moment in human history. In just 200 years, human beings have burned so much coal, gas, and oil, and pumped so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are higher today than they have been for at least 800,000 years. As I heard a climate scientist remark last year, “We are breathing from an atmosphere that none of our ancestors would recognize.”

By now we know that climate change is not a future threat – in fact, it is not a threat at all. It is our reality. As environmentalist Bill McKibben has written, “We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways… Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.”

That process is accelerating, and climate scientists are increasingly alarmed that many people don’t yet understand the urgency of the situation. On Monday the American Association for the Advancement of Science released a report for the American public that summarizes the science. The report – which is readily available online – says: “We are at risk of pushing our climate system toward abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts. Earth’s climate is on a path to warm beyond the range of what has been experienced over the past millions of years… The sooner we act, the lower the risk and cost… By making informed choices now, we can reduce risks for future generations and ourselves, and help communities adapt to climate change.”

Some people tell me that climate change is a partisan political issue and that polite people shouldn’t talk about it in church. But I have to say: as I see it, the Church was made for a time like this. Now is the time for us to proclaim our faith that God created our beautiful and precious world, that God delights in it, and rejoices in it, and declares it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Now is the time for us to bear witness to our faith that the Earth is the Lord’s, for, as we heard in today’s psalm, “in [God’s] hands are the caverns of the earth, and the heights of the hills are [God’s] also. The sea is [God’s], for [God] made it, and [God’s] hands have molded the dry land” (Psalm 95:4-5). God loved the world into being and entrusted it to our care (Genesis 1:26, 2:15), and to ruin that world – to scorch it, pollute it, and push it toward catastrophic climate disruption – grieves God’s heart and dishonors our Creator. Now is the time for us to tap into those springs of living water that well up within us through the power of the crucified and risen Christ, for that is how you and I will find the courage to face the challenges ahead and to take wise and effective action.

What can we do as individuals? Maybe we recycle more, drive less, and quit using bottled water. Maybe we eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. Maybe we install insulation, turn down the heat, use AC in moderation – hey, you know the drill.

What might we do as a church? How is St. Mark’s called to be a leader in this town and in this diocese? From speaking with your rector, I know that you’ve worked to install energy-efficient LED lights, to carry out energy audits of the heating and lighting, and to invite parishioners to sign up with Viridian for electricity that comes from the clean, safe, renewable power of wind and sun, and that gives the church a steady income stream. I know you’re exploring the possibility of installing solar panels on the roof, and I’d be thrilled to come back sometime and to see those panels blessed. What else could you do? We’ll talk about that at the forum after the second service, but for now I’ll simply say: imagine a church in which every aspect of its life, from its preaching and worship services to its adult education and Sunday School, from its prayers to its public advocacy, grasps the urgency of protecting life as it has evolved on this planet.

Working to stabilize the climate begins at home, in our congregations and places of work, but it can’t end there. The scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale. We need to make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our political leaders to get this country and other countries on track to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. What is the level today? 400 — and climbing. There is work to be done.

The good news is that we have an opportunity every day to bear witness to the God who loved us, and all creation, into being, and whose love is always being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. It is you for whom Christ came into the world, you for whom he died, you whom he now would fill with the living water of his presence. In a few moments we will share the bread and wine of the Eucharist, given to us by God in Christ with such tenderness and at such great cost. We will gather at that holy table, as we always do, so that everything in us and around us can be lifted up and blessed – not only the bread and the wine, but also we ourselves, and the whole creation, every leaf of it, and every speck of sand. Sharing the Eucharist helps us to perceive, at last, not only our own belovedness, our own blessedness in God, but also the fact that everyone is beloved, all beings are blessed. Everyone and everything is part of a sacred whole, and all living things are kin. In the strength of the blessed and broken bread, and of the blessed and poured-out wine, we dare to hope that human beings will respond with grateful hearts and come to treat the world not as an object to exploit, but as a gift to receive, as something perishable and precious. We dare to hope that we human beings will become at last who we were made to be, a blessing on the earth.

“I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.”

I cherish these words from the ancient prayer that we know as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” What would it be like to arise every morning experiencing that sort of kinship with the natural world?

Waking up with a visceral and grateful awareness of the living world may sound strange to us, even quaint. Most of the world’s citizens now live in cities, and many of us spend hardly any time outdoors – in fact, I read somewhere that the average North American spends 4% of a typical day outside, including time spent in a car. Many of us are more captivated by virtual reality and by staring at a screen than we are by contemplating light of sun or radiance of moon, stability of earth or firmness of rock. Besides, isn’t paying too much attention to the natural world a rather suspect practice for Christians? Aren’t Christians supposed to be focused on “otherworldly” things like heaven and the salvation of our disembodied souls? Some Christians scoff at people who emphasize the value of nature, charging that this is some kind of foolish New Age fantasy.  Christians who care about the Earth must be naïve and sentimental “tree-huggers” or “pagans.”

Yet as Christians we belong to a tradition that proclaims the basic goodness of the natural world: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Jesus certainly lived in kinship with the natural world. He spent a lot of time outdoors, walking from place to place. In the Bible we meet him on hillsides and mountaintops, beside lakes and in deserted places. He speaks of seeds and harvest, of fig trees, vines, and weeds, of clouds and storms, sheep and hens. He teaches about God in elemental terms, using images of fire, wind, water, and stones. Jesus knew that the birds of the air and the lilies of the field could teach us about our relationship with God (Matthew 6:25-33).  And he gave us bread and wine as an ongoing sign of his living presence with us.

Christian Scripture even dares to claim that Christ’s crucified and risen presence fills all things and redeems all things.  In Christ, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19-20).

Experiencing the sacredness of the natural world is neither an outworn heresy nor a newfangled fantasy. It is essential to Christian faith.  Our great Roman Catholic forebear, Thomas Aquinas, declared: “Revelation comes in two volumes – the Bible and nature.”  And our great Protestant forebear, Martin Luther, proclaimed: “God writes the Gospel, not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and the flowers and the clouds and stars.”

What this means is that the living Word of God is speaking to us not only in the pages of Scripture, but right outside the window and under our feet! The divine Mystery is addressing us in wind and rock, sparrows and grass. Indeed, the Book of Nature is where human beings have always encountered the sacred mystery of God. As St. Paul puts it, “Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things [God] has made” (Romans 1:20).

That is why instinctively we go outside when we need to connect with something greater than ourselves. When we’re stressed or anxious, saddened or afraid, many of us head for a place in nature – maybe a hilltop with a good long view, or a particular bend in the Connecticut River, or a certain oak tree in a city park. We want to feel the wind on our face again and to feel the good earth under our feet. We want to hear birdsong again and to notice how the sun is casting light across a field. Renewing our connection with the natural world restores us to our senses and to a felt sense of God. To adapt a line from Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Peace of Wild Things”: “for a time [we] rest in the grace of the world, and [are] free.”

In leading retreats, I often invite people to spend some time bringing to mind a place in nature that they love. It might be a place that they knew as a child or a place that is dear to them now; it might be a place that they’ve visited only once or a place to which they return again and again. I invite everyone to dwell imaginatively for a time in that special place – to notice what season it is and what time of day, to savor again the smells, sights, and sounds. “How does it feel to be there?” I ask everyone. “Let yourself rest in this place. Let your affection for this place become very clear to you.”

A hush falls over the room, and when the meditation is over, people speak with glowing eyes. One man recalls the beloved bush under which he often hid when he was a child; a woman remembers a curving stream, filled with sparkling light; someone else recalls how a forest smells, or the sound of waves beside the sea at night.

How much affection has been released in the room! What power these natural places have – even in memory – to heal the heart! My hope is that after meditating on nature like this, all of us will be drawn outdoors, for in a stressed-out, fast-paced, wired world, we need more than ever to reclaim our God-given relationship with the natural world. Study after study shows that exposure to nature contributes to physical and emotional wellbeing, and it certainly heals the soul. The more we contemplate the beauty and intricacy of nature, the more we see what the psalmist saw and want to join the universal cry of praise: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).

Here is a suggestion. Step outside today for a contemplative walk. Walk slowly and in silence, letting each step draw you into the present moment. Notice smells, sounds, textures, and colors. Bless the ground with each step. Feel the wind. Breathe. If you like, invite Jesus to walk beside you. What do you experience together?

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

–Wendell Berry, Openings (1968)

Copyright © 2014 Margaret Bullitt-Jonas

Margaret contributed fifteen meditations to a new anthology, Seeking God Day By Day, published by Forward Movement. For info and an excerpt, visit the books page.

 

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 22, 2013. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, St. John’s Church, Ashfield, Massachusetts.

 
Job 19:23-27a 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Psalm 17:1-9 Luke 20:27-38
 

Another look at Joseph

 

“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.”  So begins Matthew’s version of the Christmas story, a story that in his telling gives Joseph quite a significant role to play.  Maybe it’s because I’m a woman and a mother, but it’s Mary – not Joseph – whom I usually think about at Christmas, Mary who gets the spotlight as the mother of Jesus, the mother of God.  Of course no crèche would be complete without Joseph, but usually I don’t pay much attention to him.  He wasn’t Jesus’ “real” father, and in the story of Jesus’ birth and infancy, Joseph never says a word, he doesn’t even speak, whereas Mary (in Luke’s Gospel) gets to sing the “Magnificat.”  I usually think of Joseph as a minor character in the drama of salvation, and soon enough he slips off the stage upon which Jesus’ life plays out, a guy with a bit part who disappears quickly into the wings. My Bible commentary points out that Joseph is mentioned only a few times in the whole New Testament, and that he drops out entirely by the time that Jesus begins his public ministry.

 

Yet here is Matthew in this morning’s Gospel, speaking of Joseph’s place in the story of Jesus’ birth, and I thought: maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at Joseph. Who was this man, and what did he do that enabled Jesus to be born?  Here we are, on the brink of Christmas, longing for Christ to be born afresh in our hearts, in our lives, in our homes, and in this world, and what can we learn from Joseph?  How does he help this birth to take place?

 

The first thing to say is that Joseph was a “righteous” man.  That’s not a word we often hear these days, unless we place in front of it that troublesome little word, “self.”  Self-righteous – now that’s a word we recognize.  “Self-righteous” conjures up images of a holier-than-thou kind of person who looks with contempt on lesser mortals.  When we feel a surge of self-righteousness, we pull back from other people, and look down on them with pity or scorn.  Self-righteousness makes us feel superior and gives us permission to blame and shame and to point an accusing finger at another person.

 

But that’s not how Joseph was.  He was not a “self-righteous” man but a “righteous” man.  To be righteous is to live in right-relationship with God, to be straight with God, to seek to do God’s will.  A righteous person is someone who in every situation keeps asking: What is the most loving thing I can do right now for this person or for this community or for the Earth on which all life depends?

 

Joseph didn’t indulge in self-righteousness, even though the culture around him would quickly judge and condemn a young woman who got pregnant out of wedlock.  When Joseph heard that his betrothed had conceived a child, I can imagine his confusion and anger and sorrow.  I can imagine him wrestling with shock and disappointment.  But it seems that Joseph’s deepest commitment was to do what was right in the loving eyes of God.  He asked himself: What is the most loving thing to do?  Rather than rush to judge or condemn, rather than take revenge by exposing Mary to public humiliation, Joseph treated Mary with respect and tried to protect her from the jeers of the crowd.  And so, the Gospel tells us, “[he] planned to dismiss her quietly” (Matthew 1:19).  That decision must have been a costly one, one that required a strong dose of self-discipline and self-restraint.

 

So that’s the first thing I see in Joseph: a man who wanted to do what was right, even when it came at a personal cost. I see Joseph in every person who is quietly trying to do the right thing, the loving thing, even when there are no reporters or cameras around to make it public, no witnesses but the eyes of God.  Some of you may have come across the rules for a good life that were laid out in the 18th century by John Wesley, the Anglican priest and early leader of the Methodist movement.  Here is what John Wesley wrote:

 
Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can.
 

I was so taken by that quote that for years I kept it on our refrigerator, and then finally went and got it framed.  I think those words fit Joseph.  He was a righteous man; he wanted to do what was right with God.  That’s our own first step, too, in preparing for Christ’s birth.  We clean up our life.  We re-commit ourselves as best we can to doing what is right.

 

Here’s a second thing I see in Joseph: he was open to God’s ongoing revelation.  He was open to surprise, available for fresh encounter.  When an angel of the Lord spoke to him in a dream, Joseph paid attention.  Joseph knew, as we know, too, that the holy Mystery we call God can speak to us in our dreams, in our intuitive hunches and flashes of insight.  I don’t imagine that Joseph went dutifully through the day following a rigid set of rules, as if being a faithful person is like having a paint-by-number kit and all you do is color inside the lines.  I imagine that Joseph lived with a prayerful awareness that the universe is much more magical and mysterious than that – that reality is not a closed system that contains a linear, logical, and predictable series of events.  No – reality is wide open.  An angel can speak to us in a dream; a voice can sound from a burning bush; we can quiet our minds in prayer and suddenly see something we’ve never seen before. As Hamlet says to Horatio, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”

 

And so, “when Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took Mary as his wife” and he named the child Jesus, which means Savior, just as the angel had told him to (Matthew 1:24-25).

 

So that’s the third thing to say about Joseph.  Not only is he a righteous man, committed to living in right-relationship with God and to doing all the good that he can; not only is he a prayerful man, listening to his inner wisdom, ready to let God speak to him in a dream; he is also a man of action.  He hears God speak in his depths and he brings it forth into the world.  He makes manifest the word from heaven that came to him in secret; he listens to it and decides to change course.  “Yes,” he says to God, and to Mary, “I will be a father to the child.  I will claim him as kin.  I will guard him and stand by him and keep him safe from harm.”

 

Because of Joseph’s willingness to respond to God and to accept the task that was given to him to do, Jesus Christ was born.  Joseph may not get all the glory at Christmas, but without him – without his commitment to doing what was right, without his prayerful, willing spirit, without his decision to take the action that God was calling him to do – who knows whether Jesus would have been safely born into the world.  It was Joseph who ensured Jesus’ safe delivery, and it was Joseph who protected his wife and newborn son by fleeing into Egypt and returning only when it was safe.

 

I’ll tell you why I am drawn to Joseph this year: because he was an ordinary man trying his best to listen to God.  And his willingness to serve God turned out to be enough: he had a role to play in the larger drama of salvation.  Some might say that Joseph’s role was only a small one, but who can measure such things?  What he did was necessary.  In fact, it was essential.  And that goes for us, too.  For all we know – and we may never know – the small good thing that you do, and that I do, today will make an immeasurable difference to someone else, and an immeasurable difference to God.

 

I think of Helen Keller, and her willingness to do whatever next good thing came across her path.  She knew her limits.  She knew that she was only one person, and that she herself couldn’t save the world.  But as she wrote somewhere, “I am only one, but still I am one.  I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something I can do.”

 

Joseph did not refuse to do ‘the something’ that he could do, and so Jesus the Messiah was born and life was changed forever.  What helps you to listen deeply to the voice of love that is speaking within you?  What is love calling you to do or say?  With Joseph beside us to encourage us and give us strength, perhaps we too will respond and will follow where love leads.  Perhaps we too will stand with Joseph in that Bethlehem stable, gazing at the newborn Jesus and marveling at the ways of God.

 
 
 

Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent, Saturday, December 7, 2013. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at Dominican Retreat & Conference Center, Niskayuna, NY, for the weekend Advent retreat, “Awakening the Heart”.

Isaiah 11:1-10 Romans 15: 4-9
Psalm 72: 1-2, 7-8, 12, 13, 17 Matthew 3:1-12

God of steadfastness and encouragement

May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant us to live in harmony with our selves and one another, and may the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing, so that we may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

How good it is to be on retreat with you!  In the world outside, the weeks before Christmas are marked by an inextricable blend of the tacky and the touching, the paltry and the poignant.  One minute we’re deafened by the jingle-jangle of cash registers springing open, the tap-tap-tap of innumerable fingers on innumerable keyboards pressing the “Send” button, the whoosh of millions of plastic credit cards sliding along a metal track.  The next minute we’re listening to music so beautiful, it melts the heart.  One minute our jaws are dropping at the crass commercialism of the season, the flood of catalogues pouring into our homes, the advertisements relentlessly plugging the greedy message that I actually heard on the radio, “Aren’t the holidays all about getting what you want?”  The next minute something surprises us by its tenderness – maybe a kind word, an unexpected phone call from a friend, or the sight of a December moon rising in the sky. 

I’ve been thinking about the enormous machinery of the quote/unquote “holidays” that kicks into high gear between Halloween and Christmas.  Some of us are making an effort to unplug from the “Christmas machine,” for it’s easy to be flattened this time of year by the frenzied pressure to buy, eat, and drink more than we really want to.  Just about everywhere we go during Advent the message is pounded into us that our true identity is to be a consumer and that our noblest purpose is to shop.  “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” cry so many voices around us.  “Only so many shopping days ‘til Christmas!”

But just when we’re feeling most overwhelmed or saddened by the absurdity of this season, by the ways that a secular society tries to co-opt our religious longings and channel them into the idolatry of things, we are touched by a quiet moment of grace.  I remember visiting a mall one Advent, and passing a baby in a stroller who was looking up into an older woman’s face.  Crowds of shoppers were hurrying past, but the child and the woman seemed entirely oblivious.  The two of them were exchanging a gaze of such steady, mutual delight that I couldn’t help stopping to look.

The woman glanced up at me and smiled.  “This is my granddaughter,” she said.  “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Yes,” I said.  “She is.”

In fact, they both were.  So much beauty is released in the world whenever we love each other, whenever we remember what matters most.

A voice is calling to us today out of the wilderness of materialism, out of the wasteland of worry and loneliness, out of the barren places of regret, nostalgia, and greed.  “Repent,” says the voice of the prophet, the voice that rings in our own deep core.  “The kingdom of heaven has come near.  Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” Someone is coming among us.  Someone is longing to be born.  Get ready to welcome Him.  Prepare for the birth.

How do we prepare?  By listening to the inner voice of love that is always sounding deep within us.  By attending to the steady pulse of God.  Here in the darkest month of the year, Advent invites us to rest our souls in the steady presence of God.  God is something like the basso continuo in a Bach cantata, that steady bass line that gives the music its foundation.  In the music of Bach, instruments carrying the melody often swoop and plunge and rise and soar, but beneath them all we hear the abiding, steady pulse of the bass line.  God is like that.  God is like a melody that plays under the surface agitations and changes of life.  In Advent we listen for that hidden music, the steadfast love that quietly sustains all things. 

Steadfast.  That’s a good word for God.  It’s a word that St. Paul uses in the passage we heard from his Letter to the Romans: “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus” (Romans 15:5).  In English, the word “steadfast” comes from two old words that mean “a place that is fast,” “a place that is stable.”  When you are steadfast you have a place to stand.  You are firmly fixed, established, constant, resolute.  “Steady!” That’s what the helmsman cries in a rough sea to keep the ship on course.  “Fast” in this usage means firm.  Just think of that lovely line from one of the psalms: “Your right hand holds me fast” (Ps 63:8).

That is what Advent is about: an invitation to dwell in the steadfast love of God.  Life may be full of change and challenge, loss and stress, but behind and beneath and within all things, we abide in the steadfast presence of God. Trusting in that steadfast love, we set aside time to pray, to rest a while in the quiet running bass line.  Trusting in that steadfast love, we pause a while and share openly with God everything that lies on our hearts–our sadness and loneliness, our disappointment and frustration. Trusting in that steadfast love, we pray our grief and longing, our anger and hope, only to discover again–often to our surprise–that God is unimaginably close.

But as that prickly prophet John the Baptist reminds us today, God’s steadfast love does not only comfort and console.  It also breaks us open.  It creates upheaval.  John the Baptist proclaims that the one who is coming “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Mt 3:11b). Jesus comes not only with the sweetness of a baby, but also with the turbulence of an earthquake.  In his baptism of fiery love, everything less than love is revealed and burned away.  As John the Baptist declares, the one who comes after him will take “his winnowing fork in his hand, and he will clear the threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Mt 3:12) – vivid words that describe the upheaval we experience in God’s presence, when the blaze of God’s light illumines our darkest corners, and everything that is false in us – all our patterns of lying, selfishness, and deceit – are revealed and stripped away, and everything that is sound in us is welcomed and gathered in.  Trusting in God’s steadfast love, we let ourselves be changed.  We let God’s love burn through us, like a purifying flame.

Expect disturbance when Jesus comes, not just quiet.  His all-inclusive love shakes up our inner lives, our relationships with each other, and the world’s status quo, upsetting every kingdom that hoards power and privilege for the few.  Expect agitation and upset.  The holy love that wants to draw the world to itself will always contradict the forces of injustice, intolerance, and greed.  Expect disturbance.  In the aging, overgrown forest of selfishness and empire building,  of militarism and over-consumption, “even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees” (Mt 3:10a).

When we trust in God’s steadfast love, we listen to our heart’s deepest desire.  We listen to our deep yearning for the fullness of God, for the coming of God, for the reign of justice and peace in this beautiful and broken world.  Come, Lord Jesus, we cry in Advent.  We are hungry for you.  We long for your love.  We yearn for the day when the harmony of humanity and nature will be restored, for the day, as the prophet says, when “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6).  The longing we feel for justice and peace is a God-given longing, a longing that God has planted in our hearts and that we hope never to betray.

So, friends, on this quiet Advent night, I invite us to listen for the melody of God’s steadfast love, that basso continuo that sings beneath all the changes and the stresses of our lives.  Come, Lord Jesus.  Help us discern your presence in silence and in upheaval.  When we are confused by the clamorous voices all around, sing us your inward melody of peace.  Transform us, change us, and make us your own.  Fill us, we pray, “with all joy and peace in believing, so that [we] may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).