Author Archives: mbj

Love one another as I have loved you

Twenty-five years ago, when I was in seminary, someone told me that a preacher should never say the word ‘love’ in a sermon unless the readings assigned for the day clearly justify it. It turns out that this is advice that I’ve managed to ignore in pretty much every sermon I’ve ever preached. Of course, the difficulty in talking about love is that the word is overused, misused, and trivialized in this culture, just as Mother’s Day, which we mark today, can be sentimentalized as nothing more than a “Be Nice to Mom” day — though, hey, that’s a good start.

For all its misuses, love is a valuable word, pointing to one of the most essential qualities of human life. And love is a gateway to God, for God is love. So let’s talk about love — today’s readings are practically awash in it. By my count, the word “love” shows up a full nine times in today’s Gospel: Jesus said to his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love… This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:9-10, 12). And so on. The passage from the First Letter of John covers the same territory and mentions the word ‘love’ five times.

Today we proclaim the love of God, and that message may ring especially sweetly in the ears of those of you who just saw the film “Love Free or Die,” a documentary about the first openly gay bishop in Christendom, Gene Robinson, and those of you who walked in yesterday’s Gay Pride march in Northampton. We’ve been reminded this week of the damage that blind hatred has caused — and continues to cause — to our gay, lesbian, transgendered, and bisexual brothers and sisters, and we grieve that so many Christians are still proclaiming a gospel of hate.

What I want to lift up this morning is that Jesus preaches a gospel of love and calls us to bear witness to love. That’s a message that we and the whole world need dearly to hear. In fact, Jesus gives it to us in the strongest possible terms — he commands us to love. In the two passages I just cited, the word ‘commandment’ shows up almost as frequently as the word ‘love’ — five times in the Gospel reading and three times in the epistle. “If you keep my commandments,” Jesus says to his disciples, “you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love…This is my commandment… that you love one another as I have loved you…” And so on. (John 15:10, 12).

But can love really be commanded? You know as well as I do that we can’t force ourselves to feel loving. We can’t make ourselves love anyone by sheer force of will, and we certainly can’t compel someone else to love us. By its very nature, love can only be freely given and freely received. So what’s all this talk about Jesus commanding us to love each other? Besides, isn’t there something in us that resists being told what to do, even if we know it’s the right thing?

I’d like to repeat a story that I know I’ve mentioned before — a true story. A friend of my husband was driving with his young daughter, and the girl was sitting in the front seat beside her father. I don’t know what they were talking about or what was going on in their relationship, but for some reason the little girl took it into her head not only to unbuckle her seatbelt, but also to stand up in the passenger seat.

“Sit down!” her father said, with some alarm.

The girl refused.

“I’m telling you — sit down!” he cried.

Again the girl ignored him.

“I mean it,” said the father, by now quite upset. “Sit down right now.”

The little girl glared at him, slid back down into her seat and buckled her seat belt. They drove on for a while in what I imagine was a rather electric silence, and then the girl turned to her father and announced, “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I am standing up on the inside.”

No, we don’t like commandments, even when they are issued for our own good. So if we imagine God as an authoritarian, power-hungry boss “out there” whose job is to control us and order us around and tell us what to do, when we hear the word “command” we are likely to rebel quite a bit, or at least to dig in our heels. And if we do carry out what we think we’re supposed to do, we may do it with a kind of grim compliance, while feeling secretly resentful — in short, sitting down on the outside but standing up on the inside. Where’s the joy in that?

I don’t think that a dutiful or sullen obedience was what Jesus had in mind when he commanded his disciples to love. The God that Jesus loved was not some belligerent commander-in-chief with a habit of issuing directives, but an intimate Presence that Jesus discovered in his own depths and whom Jesus adored in all things and beyond all things. I take Jesus’ “commandment” that we abide in his love and that we love one another not as an external directive but rather as a description of the inner structure of reality. Maybe the commandments of God are something like the laws of nature — like gravity, maybe, or like the speed of light. When we love each other well — when we try to be real with other and to tell the truth in love; when we give each other encouragement and support; when we try to ‘be there’ for one another, even if it comes at a cost to ourselves; when we reach out in love to those who are different, to the stranger, the marginalized, the forgotten and the lost — then we’re living in alignment with divine reality. We are tuning in to the hidden life of God that is circulating through all things.

Conversely, when we hold back from love — when we refuse to notice how our actions affect other people and the rest of creation; when our underlying purpose in every conversation is to get attention and to be admired; when we cling to our own opinions and insist on winning and being right; when we turn up our noses at certain people and write them off as lesser than ourselves or get busy trying to force them to change — well, we’re living against the grain of divine reality. We’re cutting ourselves off from the flow of love that God is always pouring out to us in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. We’re stepping away from the dance, turning away from the feast.

Some of us have been watching a video series on Wednesday nights that features contemporary theologians, and in one of them, Cynthia Bourgeault commented that we tend to think that we need to reach out for God, as if God were some far-off destination that eventually we might get to. In fact, she says, through an attentive practice of prayer we come to realize that God already abides within us, that God is our Source. Then every day, in all our decisions large and small of what to say and how to say it, of what do and why to do it, we can show forth that invisible, holy Presence within us, and can make it real and give it form. We don’t need to invent love from scratch; love wants to flow from us already. All we have to do it to let it happen.

That, I think, is what Jesus meant when he said to his friends, “I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last” (John 15:16). Fruit emerges naturally from the vine; it is connected to the vine; its source is in the vine; its DNA comes from the vine. And so it is for us: when we are intimately connected with the vine of God’s love, we can’t help but bear fruit.

Priest and writer Henri Nouwen once made a useful distinction between “products” and “fruits.” Products are what the isolated ego creates; “fruits” are what the self-connected-to-God creates. When our isolated ego-self makes a product, we claim all the credit. We strut; we’re proud; we imagine we did it ourselves. But when our self-connected-to-God creates, we bear fruit. Even if our accomplishment took a lot of individual effort and determination, it emerged out of a loving relationship with God. It is filled with God; it is animated by God. And Jesus assures us that such fruit will last. Even if what we’ve done is very small — if love has moved us simply to smile at a stranger on the street, or to take a breath and center ourselves instead of reacting angrily to some perceived offense — even if what we’ve done is as small as picking up the phone to call someone who is lonely or sad — Jesus assures us that these fruits of love will last. They will make a difference in the long run, even if we know nothing about it.

I had a chance a couple of weeks ago to meet someone who knows how love can change your sense of who you are. I was on the grounds of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., watching poet-farmer Wendell Berry receive the 2012 Steward of God’s Creation award from the National Religious Coalition on Creation Care. Like many of you, I’ve admired Wendell Berry’s work for a long time. His poems, novels, and essays are full of reverence for the Kentucky land that he has farmed for almost fifty years, and his perception of things is lit up with a sense of the holy. He is an old man now, and deeply connected to everything he loves, and when he was singled out for this award, he didn’t express one bit of interest in taking any credit for himself as an isolated human being. In his acceptance speech ¹ he remarked that what he had done wasn’t really traceable to any gifts that were innate to him. In fact, he said, “If you subtract from me and what I’ve done — my birthplace, my family that I got by birthright [and by marriage], and all that has been put in this world and that is still left in it to admire and be grateful for, all the beautiful things there are to read and look at and be grateful for, all the teachers I’ve had, a good many of whom didn’t even know they were my teachers, and all my friends and allies — if you took all these things away from me and what I’ve done” — and here he grinned and looked slowly around the room — “I and what I’ve done would disappear with a barely audible pop. I can’t thank you for this on behalf of myself. I thank you on behalf of my good fortune, which includes everybody here and a lot who aren’t.”

That’s the voice of wisdom and humility, the voice of someone whose life has born fruit because he knows his deep connection to everything he loves.

How is God luring you to grow in love right now? What happens when you rest a while in the company of that deep inner voice that says, “Abide in my love”? I suggest we take a few moments to breathe in God’s love in the silence, for the God we’ve been searching for is already here, closer than our heartbeat, inviting us to bear fruit, and blessing us with joy.

1. My husband, Robert A. Jonas, videotaped Wendell Berry’s remarks, which are posted here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phPBJlJmWXM

“I am the good shepherd”

What do you make of the image of Jesus as the good shepherd? Does this image hold any interest to you, any power? Except for folks who have some contact with a farm, I expect that most of us here don’t have much of a relationship either with shepherds or with sheep. At least that’s true for me. I haven’t spent time at Hampshire College watching the lambs being born, and I haven’t gone to the Holy Land and seen how shepherds work with their flocks. At first glance the imagery of sheep and shepherds may feel rather quaint and out of touch, as if in pondering this image of Jesus, Christians were reaching back to some distant and long-gone agrarian past that has no relevance to today’s urban, fast-paced, and technological society.

And yet, interestingly enough, the image of Jesus as a good shepherd is one of the Church’s best-loved images of Jesus. Every year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, we celebrate what is sometimes called Good Shepherd Sunday and we read a passage from the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John. What meaning does this image have for us today, and why does it carry such appeal? How we answer that question may change over the years, since every religious image has multiple meanings, and at different points in our individual lives and in our life together as a community, one or more of those meanings may suddenly stand out for us and have particular energy or ‘juice.’ What aspects of the good shepherd image speak most vividly to you this morning?

The first thing that I notice is that, as as our good shepherd, Jesus holds everyone and everything together. A shepherd is the person charged with keeping the flock intact, united, and heading in the right direction. I find something wonderfully reassuring about the image of God in Christ drawing us into something unified and whole, because at present we live in a world in which a good many things seem to be flying apart. Most Americans these days don’t put much trust in the institutions that we share — in the courts, the school system, the health care system, the political system, the financial system. Even the church as we’ve known it is in upheaval, as traditional denominations break down and new forms of worship emerge. In the midst of so much flux and uncertainty, it is comforting to muse on the reality of an abiding holy Presence, to ponder the good shepherd who contains and holds together all things. We don’t have to fear change — in fact, we may even want to throw ourselves with gusto into creating the changes we wish to see in the world — because within and beyond all the changes of life, there abides a loving Good Shepherd who is always drawing us into community and into communion with him.

Maybe you remember that puzzle¹  in which you are presented with nine dots on a page, lined up in rows of three, and you’re asked to connect the dots by making four straight lines without once lifting your pencil from the page. Try it however many times you like, but the only way to connect all nine dots with just four straight lines is to go outside the borders of the box. Solving this puzzle is an example of “thinking outside the box,” of moving beyond a given paradigm in order to perceive or to accomplish something that otherwise couldn’t be perceived or accomplished.

When we turn to the good shepherd of our lives, we do the same thing: we move outside the realm of our five senses, where we normally perceive everything as separated, and we open ourselves to the larger, sacred Mystery that embraces our complex, dynamic world. In turning to the Good Shepherd, we turn to the sacred unity within and beyond all things; we encounter the Absolute, the Ground of our being, the One in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). In the presence of the Good Shepherd, we know that there is more that unites us than divides us. The most breathtakingly diverse and varied group of people can be brought together and share a common vision and purpose because the Good Shepherd is with them, guiding them and loving them.

And that movement toward unity keeps getting larger. As Jesus says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:16-17). Wherever I see communities gathering together in love and opening their borders in a larger and larger embrace to welcome the stranger, the “other,” the one who is different, I see the Good Shepherd at work, whether or not those communities name themselves as “Christian.” So that’s one thing I treasure in the image of the good shepherd: the crucified and risen Christ is the hidden unity at the center of things, and the one who inspires and impels us to create communities of love in which no one is left out.

And here is something else: the good shepherd that we meet in Jesus is someone who “lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). The hired hand doesn’t care about the sheep; he leaves the sheep and runs away when times are tough and things get scary. But Jesus the good shepherd is not like that. If, like a dim-witted sheep, you wander off somewhere along the edge of a precipice, as we often do, Jesus the good shepherd will come looking for you. If you get lost, he will search until he finds you. If you are abandoned by those who couldn’t care less, he will stand with you. If you are assaulted or bullied, he will weep with you and plead for you and work to turn the abuser’s heart. And if you are a hopeless case — as we all are, really — he will lay down his life for you. Wherever I see communities whose members are moved to reach out with compassion to each other and to the world, I know that they are listening to the Good Shepherd and that his presence is alive among them.

And what about our inner lives? What about all those energies and impulses within us that can be as chaotic as a bunch of sheep who have scattered hither and yon and who are vulnerable to hunger and thirst, to wolves and thieves? Can we learn to listen to the good shepherd who dwells within us and who gathers together all the various parts of ourselves and forms within us a unified community of love?

I remember sitting in prayer one day, patiently trying to keep my attention turned to God, when I noticed that a contemptuous inner voice was starting to lay into me, accusing me of one failure after another. To my great surprise, something else in me at once rose up and declared: “We don’t talk to each other like that in this house.” Whoa. The good shepherd had spoken. Out with the voices of self-hatred and contempt; it was time to listen to the inner voice of love.

In order to listen to the good shepherd who abides within us, we have to pay close attention. We have to listen with great attentiveness to our self-talk, and to notice whether it is loving and true. And we probably need to spend intentional time listening to the God who is greater than our hearts, and who does not condemn us, even when we condemn ourselves (1 John 3: 19-20). We hear the good sheperd in the divine voice of love that always speaks within us, for his voice calls us each by name, and he knows us through and through.

Before closing, I want to turn for a moment from the Good Shepherd of our souls to the good pastor of the Grace Church community. You may know that tomorrow Rob Hirschfeld is heading off to New Hampshire with his wife Polly, to take part in a series of interviews as he and the other candidates for bishop in the Diocese of New Hampshire meet and greet the people of the diocese. A bishop is something like a shepherd of the flock, and that big staff that a bishop carries — called a crozier — is shaped like a shepherd’s crook. It’s possible that Rob will become the next bishop, the next shepherd, of New Hampshire.

Now, the election won’t take place for three weeks, but already I’ve heard a few of you wonder: Will we be OK? Will it be OK if Rob leaves? And I have to say that, much as I would like Rob to stay here forever and for everything to keep going as it has for the past many years, whether he stays or whether he goes, we will be fine. This community will be fine. Thanks in good part to Rob’s devoted service among us, we know that we are held together by the Good Shepherd who is Christ. We have pulled together as a community. We are open to enlarging our boundaries to the wider world and to all who venture through our doors. We are learning day by day what it means to lay our lives down for each other, to offer each other a word of thanks or forgiveness, a listening ear or a helping hand. We are supporting each other to listen inwardly in prayer to the Good Shepherd who speaks within our souls.

Rob has been a dedicated pastor, and because of that, we’ve become a vibrant community. Paradoxically, the more faithfully a congregation follows Jesus Christ and the more carefully it listens to the voice of the Good Shepherd, the more we members of the community are inspired to become leaders ourselves — to step out and serve, to encourage and to guide, to take risks and to think outside the box. I don’t know what to pray for, when it comes to the New Hampshire election, except to pray that God’s will be done. But I do know that whatever happens, the Good Shepherd will be with Rob and with each one of us, calling us each by name, urging us to follow, and empowering us to become the servant leaders that the world needs. God willing, we will joyfully say yes, wherever the road takes us — and if there are no roads, we trust that the Holy Spirit will create them out in front of us as we go forward.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box

At the foot of the cross

A few weeks ago I was sitting over supper with a group of family members.  As we finished our dessert, we started chatting, as our family does sometimes, about what Garrison Keillor would call “life’s persistent questions.”  For instance, in what ways do we change when we know that we are deeply loved?  What makes us feel creative and alive?  What happens when we die?  I can’t remember what sparked it, but with a burst of energy, my ten-year-old grandson, Noah, suddenly exclaimed, “What I want to know is: what’s up with having a crucifix in church?  It’s so gruesome.  Come on, there are children here!”

A ripple of laughter flowed around the table, followed by a rather pregnant pause.  I had the distinct impression that all eyes were about to turn toward me.  Was I going to answer Noah’s question or not?  I looked at him for a moment, considering what to say, and finally offered a few thoughts.  The conversation moved mercifully on.  But it is to Noah that I want to dedicate my homily tonight, for he asked a question that deserves a more complete answer.  Why do Christians focus so much on the cross?   What does the cross mean to us? 

Some critics dismiss the cross as proof that Christians are ghoulishly, even morbidly, fascinated with suffering and death.  But it’s obvious that Jesus didn’t value suffering for its own sake, as if being in pain were inherently virtuous or ennobling.  Jesus was not a masochist.  In all four Gospels there are times when Jesus deliberately avoided attack.  In John’s Gospel, the one from which we read tonight, Jesus sometimes steered clear of trouble by traveling in secret (John 7:10; 11:54), and during a visit to the temple he hid from an angry crowd that was about to throw stones at him (John 8:59).  After his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, he removed himself from public view and hid with his disciples until the night of the Last Supper (John 12:36b). 

Jesus did not seek out suffering.  Suffering was not his goal.  What Jesus did seek was to do the will of God.  His goal, as we heard in tonight’s Gospel, was “to testify to the truth” (John:18:37): to let the divine life flow through him and to carry that healing, redeeming, transforming love into every situation, whatever the cost — “to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18, citing Isaiah).  When that message of liberating love came up against the powers-that-be of this world — the forces of cruelty, hatred, greed, and injustice — Jesus stood with the powerless and poor, the oppressed and forgotten, and was willing to suffer pain and be crucified. 

Love shone out from the cross that day, a love that has never died and that can never die, a love that continues to abide at the center of things and whose length and depth and breadth and height we humans are still groping to understand.

Yes, Noah, the cross is gruesome, but to Christians it expresses a divine love that is willing to go anywhere, even into the darkest, loneliest, and most brutal places of the world, and of our own selves, to embrace and transform everything it touches. 

I want to tell about a time I glimpsed the power of the cross with particular clarity.  One April morning back in 1995, a bomb exploded in a federal building in Oklahoma City.  I’m sure that many of you remember that event.  One hundred and sixty eight people were killed that day, including nineteen children. When I heard about it on TV and in the newspapers, I resolutely did not pray.  I refused to pray the next day, too.  Who wants to pray about suffering like that?  Who wants to get close to that much pain, or the evil that caused it?  Far better to keep busy, keep moving.  I intended to put my head down and look away.  I was sure that the bombing had nothing to do with me.

I held out for as long as I could, but within a few days I was practically propelled to my prayer cushion, as if my whole body had taken in what had happened and needed to pray every part of it through, as if my own body needed to find Christ’s body in the enormity of that pain.  When I was finished praying, I scribbled down what I had seen and heard in the silence of my heart.  I called it “A Prayer after the Oklahoma City Bombing”:¹

I am the building that was blown apart by a bomb in the “heartland” of America.  My heart is blown open.  The front of me falls away: I am the gaping floors, the broken glass, the dangling wires, the film of concrete dust that rises into the air.

This is my body.

I am the children who were killed: the little ones, the innocent, tender little people full of play and laughter.  The babies.

This is my body.

I am the women and men who were killed, the mother, father, husband, wife, grandparent, neighbor, relative, friend, startled by death on an ordinary day.

This is my body.

I am those who mourn: the suddenly bereaved, the shocked, the bereft.  I am the mother clutching a picture of her two children, the husband grieving his newly-wed wife.

This is my body.

I am the rescue workers, the medical personnel, those who hope against hope, and those who are faithful even when there is no hope, those who press on into the rubble, searching for the living, the wounded, the dead, searching for what is human, for what is loved.

This is my body.

I am the ones who planned and planted the bomb: the hardhearted, the fearful, the numb and angry ones who no longer care.  (When Timothy McVeigh is shown pictures of the dead, particularly dead children, he has no reaction at all.  Says one source, “[There was] nothing.  Zero reaction from that son of a bitch.  This guy is a stone.”)

This is my body.

I am the ones who fill the airwaves with venom and hate.  “Take them out in the desert and blow them up.” “Shoot ’em.”  “I hope they fry.”

This is my body.

I am the Holy Spirit, brooding over our bent world with bright wings.  I am the wings of Jesus, tenderly outstretched above the city, sheltering everything and everyone beneath.

This is my body.

I cannot hold it all.  I hand it to you, Jesus.  Hold it with me. 

And suddenly I see that I am handing you the cross: here, you carry it.  I cannot.

And he has taken it up.  He is carrying all of this, all of this.  The dead, the wounded, and those who mourn; the killers and those who were killed; the frightened, the angry, the sorrowful — he is carrying all of this, all of us, every part of us, into the loving heart of God.

 Looking back on that prayer, I am reminded that we hold everything in our bodies, that our body-selves already sense – even if dimly – our kinship with all things.  The moment we discover that kinship and make it conscious, compassion is born.  Everything is in us, and everything is held in love.

That long-ago prayer, which began in anguish and ended in joy, also showed me that if I prayed everything that was in me, eventually I would perceive my connection with everyone else.  I am the murderer and the one who is murdered; I am the abuser and the one who is abused; I am the hunter and the animal that is shot.  I am human, and everything human is in me — as it is in you.  And all of it is joined to the body of Christ, whose incarnation catches up every aspect of humanity and whose suffering love, poured out on the cross, embraces the lost and the forsaken, the embittered and the angry — even someone like you, even someone like me.  No one is left out of that loving embrace — neither the torturer nor the tortured, neither the perpetrator nor the victim.  I agree with theologian Richard Rohr, who says that this is exactly how Jesus redeemed the world “by the blood of the cross.”²   The crucifixion, he writes, “…was not some kind of heavenly transaction, or ‘paying a price’ to God, as much as a cosmic communion with all that humanity has ever loved and ever suffered.”

So when Noah asks, “Why do you care about the cross?” I want to tell him:

Because it is here at the cross that Jesus holds what we can’t hold, and bears what we can’t bear.

Because it is here at the cross that all our malice and ignorance, all our willfulness and pettiness and hardheartedness are continually met by the love of God.

Because it is here that we see God’s willingness to be utterly vulnerable, and here that we learn that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Because here we are set free from the power of death, and set free as well from the endless, futile attempt to save ourselves and to earn our own salvation. 

What do we see when we gaze at the cross of Christ?  A love without bounds, a love without limits.   

Tonight we venerate the cross, and we give thanks.

1. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, “A Prayer after the Oklahoma City Bombing,” Women’s Uncommon Prayers, ed. Elizabeth Rankin Geitz, Marjorie Burke, Ann Smith, Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2000), pp. 276-277.

2. Richard Rohr, “Holy Week: Good Friday, April 6, 2012,” daily email meditation adapted from The Great Themes of Scripture (no longer available; see New Great Themes of Scripture”: http://store.cacradicalgrace.org

Unless a grain of wheat falls

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
–John 12:24

I am thinking that when you heard this evening’s Gospel, you probably thought to yourself — hey, wait a sec, didn’t we just hear this passage? The answer is — yes, we did. We heard virtually the same passage from the Gospel of John less than ten days ago, on the Fifth Sunday of Lent. The story of some Greeks asking to meet Jesus is important, because Jesus takes this encounter as the sign that he has been waiting for, the signal from God that the decisive moment has arrived: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23). Passover is at hand, and Jesus has made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The crowds are coming out to meet him, eager to see what he will do and whether he will lead a violent rebellion against Roman authority. When Andrew and Philip tell Jesus that the Greeks want to see him, Jesus answers, “The hour has come” — in other words, the chain of events that will lead to his death, resurrection, and ascension — will now begin. The Greeks symbolize the world that wants to see Jesus, and Jesus will now give his life for the world.

And then he says that line that we know so well: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” This saying of Jesus was so basic to his mission that it shows up in each of the four Gospels, and twice in Luke (Matthew 10:39, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:23-24, Luke 17:33). Christians call it the Paschal Mystery, that process of going down into death and rising up to new life. It is the mystery that Jesus expressed in his teachings and parables, and that he embodied in his self-giving on the cross. There is a death we have to die, if we want to save our life — a life we have to lose, if we want to be truly alive.

What needs to die in order for you to be fully alive? What do you need to relinquish and let go — to drop, to renounce, to stop doing — so that divine life can move through you and so that you can bear fruit? Exactly 30 years ago I walked into a Good Friday service and realized that I needed to die — my way of being needed to die; my way of thinking needed to die. I was like an isolated grain of wheat that had been refusing for too long to fall into the earth and die. That night I saw that if I wanted life to flow through me, if I wanted to bear fruit, then I needed to die.

Pretty much every religion says the same thing: we need to die before we die, if we want to be fully alive. There is a life that can come to us only if we let our small selves die, and open ourselves to the divine life that wants to flow through us.

Where do you identify with that hardheaded, hard-hearted seed that keeps itself isolated and apart? Maybe you know what it’s like to have your life close in on its small ego-self and its insistent ambitions and needs. Maybe you cling tight to a certain point of view, and you keep advocating for it over and over, and you know you’re right, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right, and the other person is wrong! (I know about that one.) Maybe you race through the day clenched by anxiety or stress, too busy to let go in love. Maybe you simply feel alone and small — that your life can’t possibly make a difference, and that essentially you’re on your own. All kinds of things can close us in on ourselves – pride or fear or shame. Many of us suffer from the illusion that we are completely separate from each other and that our identity stops with our own skin.

Well, here comes Jesus, telling us not to live like that isolated grain of wheat but to go ahead and die. Die to yourself! Die to your worries! Die to your fear and your shame, and give yourself away in love! Even die to who you think you are! You’re not who you think you are. God has a larger identity to give you. Let God break open that hard shell of yours! Step out of your smaller self and into your true, free self in God! Let the love that is in you begin to flow!

We may have to weep when that happens, for we release a lifetime of pain when we open ourselves to love. And we may have to laugh when that happens, for it brings joy when we give ourselves fully to each moment, with nothing held back. We may have to dance when that happens, and we may be led to search out new ways of living with other people and with nature and with the world around us.

When our hardened hearts break open – when we die to our habit of self-absorption and self-promotion, and live no longer for ourselves alone – God can move through us at last and our lives can bear fruit. What within you needs to die tonight, what needs to fall away, to break open — so that new life can flow through?

I want to leave you with a poem that uses some different imagery. Imagine a barbed wire fence with strands just 18 inches apart. Imagine a deer approaching that fence, and finding a way to move through it. The poem is by Jane Hirshfield, and entitled “The Supple Deer” ¹ :

The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches

Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer:

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

I invite you in the silence to be that porous, to have such largeness pass through. Whether you imagine strands of barbed wire around your heart, or a hardened shell, I invite you to ask God to open you, so that God’s love can pass through.

1. Jane Hirshfield, “The Supple Deer,” Come, Thief, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, p. 89.

Purified and set free

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.”

A preacher who tackles today’s readings will probably take one of two roads.  One road is to consider how these readings relate to current debates in the public sphere.  For instance, if the Ten Commandments provide the ethical and moral foundation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, should copies of the Ten Commandments be placed inside public schools and inside American court houses?  How do Americans honor the Ten Commandments while also respecting the Constitutional separation of church and state?  How should particular Commandments be applied to issues of public policy?  How, for instance, do we interpret the injunction “You shall not murder” when we consider the moral complexities of abortion or assisted suicide, of capital punishment or war? 

Today’s Gospel can be applied just as vigorously to contemporary social and political issues.  Here comes Jesus, charging through the temple with his whip of cords, maybe not hurting anybody but certainly making a good deal of commotion as he drives out the sheep and cattle from the temple’s outer area, pours out the coins of the money changers, and overturns their tables.  “Take these things out of here!” he cries.  “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” (John 2:16)  Jesus’ zeal to restore the purity of the temple and to put an end to the fraud and greed that corrupted its transactions surely resonates with an analagous moral outrage in our public life today, as American citizens — especially those in the Occupy movement — rise up to protest the corrupting power of money in our democracy, where Superpacs can unduly influence elections, lobbyists can pay bribes for votes, big banks can willynilly foreclose on homes, and corporate executives can award themselves lavish salaries and bonues while cutting out employees’ jobs.  Just as Jesus cleansed the temple and the religious practices of his day, so we followers of Jesus want to cleanse our economic and political institutions so that they more faithfully serve the common good.

So that’s one road to take in preaching on these texts — to focus on our yearning for political and social justice.  And I have to say: that’s one thing that has delighted me about this parish ever since I arrived here seven-plus years ago — you understand and feel the connections between your faith and the world beyond the church’s doors.  You and I know that Christianity has an outer dimension: we want to take part in the healing of the world; we want to turn toward the suffering around us and to do what we can to bring good news to the poor and to set the captive free (Luke 4:18).  We want to build a fair and just and sustainable society in which all people and all creation can thrive.

But the other road that a preacher might take is the road that I feel led to walk this morning.  What interests me most this morning is not how these texts speak to contemporary social issues outside us, but how they speak to our interior selves, how they speak to our hearts.  Today we’ve reached the midpoint of Lent, the very center of this season of self-examination and repentance, and I wonder how these texts can help us become more conscious and self-aware, how they can help us grow in wholeness and holiness, so that God’s love can flow more freely through our lives.  

Let’s hear the ancient and familiar words again: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”  Please notice that our God is a liberating God, a God who wants to set us free.  God sent Moses to lead the people out of slavery in Egypt, and God sent Jesus to free us from sin and death.  The Ten Commandments, or, as they are often called, the Decalogue — literally, the “ten words” of God – are given to us by a “jealous” God — that is, by an impassioned God — who longs for our liberation.  What does that liberation look like?  “You shall have no other gods before me… You shall not make for yourself an idol… You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God… Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy… Honor your father and mother…You shall not murder… You shall not commit adultery… You shall not steal… You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor… You shall not covet your neighbor’s house… or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:1-17).

If we meditate on these Commandments, they can attune us to the liberating presence of God.  Take, for instance, the First and Second Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me.  You shall not make for yourself an idol…”  When these commandments were first articulated, more than 3,000 years ago, they referred to the idols of ancient Palestine, the statues of animal and human figures that were worshipped as gods.  These idols no longer tempt us today, but surely other idols have rushed in to take their place.  What are your idols?  What sorts of things get in the way of your putting your ultimate trust in God, and God alone?  Maybe you find yourself scrambling for money or material possessions as your ultimate source of security.  Maybe you cling to work as your deepest source of meaning — and it’s no wonder, if you do: we live in an aggressive, fast-paced, and competitive society that tells us that our value as human beings depends on what we do and how much we achieve.  Maybe you are driven by the longing for prestige or popularity, to be well-known or liked.  Maybe you cling to a particular relationship to solve your deepest needs.  Maybe, in times of anxiety or stress, you turn to food or alcohol to give you the apparent comfort of escape.  Many of these things may be good or neutral in themselves — having money or possessions, having good work to do, being liked, and so on — but when they become our source of ultimate security, they become demonic.  They trap us; they make us small.  So it’s worth asking ourselves, in the words of the Twelve Step program, to what “people, places, and things” do we cling?  If we dare to look closely within ourselves, we will discover that we, too, are often idolators, we, too, can cling for dear life to one thing or another, and look to it, rather than to God, to keep us safe.  If God, the lover of your soul, were to approach you now and look at what you’re clutching so tightly in your hands, what would God invite you to let go?

Or take the Sixth Commandment, “You shall not murder.”  That seems simple enough: most of us haven’t killed anyone, so we think we’ve got this one handled.  But if we take a while to pray with this commandment, we begin to realize that God is speaking to our inner selves.  For there is much that we do kill every day.  We can kill time.  We can kill hope.  We can kill a dream.  We can kill someone’s spirit with a glare or by rolling our eyes, by keeping an icy silence or by uttering a word of contempt.  We can kill off parts of ourselves by stifling our longings or choking off our feelings with the ruthlessness of a hired gun.  What do you kill?  Where do you shut off the stream of God’s love, which longs to bring life and to enlarge our connections with ourselves and one another?

Or, as a last example, let’s consider the Ninth Commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”  In its narrowest interpretation, this commandment means only that we do not lie on the witness stand; we do not lie in any legal proceeding against our neighbor.  But if we look into it more deeply, we begin to sense something much larger: God’s plea that we take care with our words, that we pay attention to what we say.  Whether we know it or not, our words have power.  A single word can harm or heal.  Words can alienate us from each other or can open us to each other.  But how easy it is to forget the power of words!  We live in a society in which we have learned to cast a sceptical eye at the promises made by political leaders, and to tune out the incessant half-truths of advertising that bombard us every day.  We live in a world in which words are often cheap.

But the Ninth Commandment reminds us of the true power of speech, the true power of what we do and do not say.  When my son was in preschool, he was taught not to use his fists to resolve an argument, but instead to “use his words.”  How are we using our words?  Do we use them wisely?  Are we caught up in one lie or a web of lies?  Do we use harsh speech?  Are we tempted to gossip?  Where do we slip into idle chatter, into trivial and vacant talk that has no purpose and that wearies our listeners and ourselves?  How clearly do we intend, as it says in the New Testament, to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15), so that what comes out of our mouth is both loving and honest?  Have we discovered the joy of not speaking, and instead of listening, really listening, to someone else?

The Ten Commandments give us a tool for examining and amending our lives, and they can help us to grow in moral integrity.  If you want some company in the journey of self-exploration, you might want to join us on Wednesday nights during Lent, when some of us are meeting to talk about forgiveness and the places in our life where we carry burdens of guilt or feel trapped by resentment, bitterness, or the wish for revenge.  We want to set aside those burdens and to be released from those traps.  We want to open ourselves to the liberating and merciful power of God.  We want to be set free.  On Wednesday nights the topic of forgiveness is our doorway into an experience of freedom.

If I’m looking for an image that gives me energy to clean out my inner life this Lent, I’m going to try out the image of Jesus cleansing the temple.  Here he is, as fierce as a warrior, bursting into the temple of our selves to overthrow whatever is corrupt and deceitful and to chase away whatever is doing us harm.  Are we willing to welcome him in?  Jesus came among us to bring us life, and life to the full (John 10:10), and this Lent we have an opportunity to open our interior lives very honestly to the Holy One whose deepest longing is to set us free. 

It turns out that the two roads that a preacher can take in considering these texts eventually connect, for the more we open our interior lives to God – the more we allow God to love us, heal us, and set us inwardly free — the more wisely and effectively we will share in God’s great work of loving, healing, and setting free the world outside.

For this I want to say: thanks be to God.

Alexandra D. Dawson
December 30, 2011

“They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD,
to display [God’s] glory.”
 —Isaiah 61:3

Late one winter afternoon, I got a phone call from Rob: could I possibly stop by the home of Alexandra Dawson to pray with her as death approached? Rob was out of town, and a priest was needed quickly. I put on my clerical collar, picked up a prayer book and a container of blessed oil, and headed to my car for what would be my first and last meeting with this great lady.

Of course I had heard of Alexandra Dawson. You don’t have to have lived long in the Pioneer Valley — or anywhere else in New England, for that matter — to know Alexandra’s name! Everyone recalls her in terms that suggest a force of nature. She was a woman of formidable intelligence and wit — someone with an imposing physical presence and the kind of driving will that could make things happen. Even a brief sketch of her career reveals a life of extraordinary dedication and accomplishment. Alexandra was a life-long champion of the environment, a lawyer and educator who was widely known, respected, and loved for her long career defending the rights of wildlife, wetlands, and woodlands. From teaching at Antioch University Graduate School, Tufts University, the Kennedy School of Government, and Rhode Island School of Design to serving on the Kestrel Trust, the Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissions, and the Hadley Conservation Commission, Alexandra’s clients were the critters. I’m told that she loved the outdoors, and with her friends and beloved family circle — her husband, Jim, and their three children, Rachel, Alexander and Adam, his wife and two grandchildren — she hiked, camped, biked, canoed and kayaked. Obviously this feisty, gifted, passionate woman delighted in the beauty of the Earth, and even though she was at home with language and knew how to wield the spoken and written word on behalf of the Earth, I imagine that she also delighted in the stillness of the natural world, in the silent gift of light shining through trees and reflecting off a stream, in the sound of birdsong and the joy of gazing quietly at a distant horizon. Perhaps being out in nature was one place where she regularly communed with God.

I can’t speak about Alexandra’s faith. I never had a chance to talk with her about it, as some of you have. I’m told that she was drawn to these Wednesday Noon healing services at Grace Church when a beloved daughter-in-law became ill, and that she found deep solace and meaning in her friendship with the Companions of the Holy Cross, and in her participation in silent retreats. Intercessory prayer and prayers for healing were important to Alexandra, practices which of course remind us of our deep kinship with one another, with God, and with all creation. At some deep level of reality we are all connected to one another, and through the grace of God, we can participate in and encourage each other’s healing and flourishing.

I don’t think Alexandra ended up being much of a churchgoer. As her husband Jim explained to me a couple of times, “She thought her way into the church and then she thought her way out.” But however she articulated her faith to herself, I think we could make a good case that — whether in church or out — Alexandra’s whole life was a life of faith. She was lit up by a vision of the natural world restored, protected, and renewed. She was fired by a passion for right relationship between human beings and our other-than-human kin. She was a woman with a mission, and she threw herself wholeheartedly into the battle to bring that vision into being. As her long-time friend Judy Eiseman commented, “Everything she did, she did… with intensity, accuracy and precision.”

And like everyone who walks in faith, Alexandra had no way of knowing whether her efforts would ultimately be successful, whether in the end we humans will learn at last to be a blessing on the Earth. Yet she did everything in her power to realize that vision — to make it real — and it’s already clear that the fruits of her life are abundant. Just think of the thousands of acres of land preserved for future generations, the hundreds of graduate students equipped and inspired, the key environmental legislation that she helped to draft, the voluminous writing, the innumerable people converted, supported, and challenged to honor the needs of the natural world — to say nothing of the countless non-human creatures who flourish today and who will flourish in the years ahead — thanks to Alexandra’s unwavering faith and tireless efforts. We have much to thank her for, much to honor.

And then — after eighty years of life — the moment came, as it will come to us all, when Alexandra reached the doorway between this world and the next, when she prepared to hand over her last breath and to give herself back to the great Mystery who dwells within and beyond created things. That was the moment when I met Alexandra and shared some time with her, her dear husband Jim, and her son Alex, there in the upstairs bedroom of a quiet old house, built in 1797, that stands beside the Connecticut River in a cluster of trees.

In the preceding hours and days, Alexandra had often been unconscious, but, as grace would have it, she was quite present and alert when I arrived. As she sat up in bed, bent over but listening closely, I prayed with her and for her. I thanked her for everything she had given to so many people. I thanked God for sending her into the world and for receiving her home at her journey’s end. I anointed her forehead with sacred oil in a ritual in which all of us may participate in a few moments, marking the place on her brow where she was baptized, and praying for her healing and wholeness as she left this life, which would happen just a few hours later. As I prayed the Lord’s Prayer, she murmured the words along with me.

I can’t tell you how peaceful the room felt that night, how filled with love. Here we were, a dying old woman, her grieving husband and son, and a priest, the four of us gathered in an old house beside a river, with tree branches moving overhead, and above the branches, stars. Outside, the night was dark, and inside, the room seemed filled with light.

“God bless you,” I said to Alexandra as I left, and I heard her murmur in reply, “God bless you, too.”

We are gathered in God’s presence now as we celebrate Alexandra’s life and faith, as we share in the sacrament of the laying on of hands for healing, and above all as we share in the Eucharist, that sacrament of very earthly things — bread and wine — that are lifted up and blessed and filled with holy Presence. Here at this table our union with each other, with God, and with all creation is restored, and from this table we will be sent out, just as Alexandra was sent, to share in God’s mission to be agents of healing and justice in the world. Like her, may we too be “oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, to display [God’s] glory.”

Angel in the doorway

“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
 (Luke 1:38)

I want to tell an Advent story that took place six years ago.  You’ll  remember that in the fall of 2005, two hurricanes, strengthened by the unusually warm waters of the Gulf, plowed into Louisiana and Mississippi.  Millions of Americans were evacuated.  Within a matter of hours, most of an American city lay in ruins.  With characteristic generosity, a group of you from Grace Church immediately began organizing a service trip to Mississippi.  In late November we would drive down a truck full of supplies, sleep in a makeshift camp, and do whatever was needed – haul debris, dig mud, or just listen and pray.  I was eager to go, but then received an invitation to join a group of religious leaders who were planning to attend the upcoming U.N. climate change conference in Montreal — the same international gathering that just met in Durban, South Africa.

The trips to Mississippi and Montreal overlapped, and I couldn’t take both.  I decided to go to Montreal, so for several days in Advent I mingled with delegates of the World Council of Churches, listened to speeches, wrote editorials, and joined thousands of citizens in marching through the city’s streets.  It was the most vigorous celebration of Advent I could imagine, for the placards and banners rang out the season’s urgent themes: Now is the time to wake from sleep, to clean up our act, to sort out our lives, to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

That exuberant march was one of the Advent gifts that I received, a glimpse of the burgeoning worldwide movement that draws on humanity’s deepest reserves of hope.  The other gift came as a surprise, when I was alone in my hotel.  By then I was steeped in the stark reality of climate change.  I had studied the aerial photographs of Mount Kilimanjaro without any snow, listened to climate reports from the Arctic to Argentina, heard survivors of Katrina describe the vulnerability of the poor.  As for my government, it seemed incapable of taking the issue seriously.

After a restless night, I woke up filled with anger and sorrow, needing badly to pray.  I pulled a chair over to the window and let my anguish spill out before God – grief for what is irreparably lost, rage at the inertia that kills with such abandon.  I felt helpless.  Dear Lord, what can I do?  What can anyone do?  Then I heard something.

I put my trust in you. 

Startled, I opened my eyes and looked around.  Who said that?  I had heard the sentence as clearly as if someone were standing in the room.  I often say those very words to God, but now the message was addressed to me.  Its meaning was: Fear not.  Keep going.  I am with you. 

I was incredulous.  Was there some mistake?  How could God trust me?  I had a choice: to accept or reject that assurance, to believe it or to blow it off.  What I heard seemed as unlikely as what Mary heard from the  angel: the Lord is with you; do not be afraid; by the power of the Holy Spirit you will conceive and bear a son; and he will be the savior of the world. 

Absurd!  Yet God’s hope for the future hung on Mary’s willingness to consent.  Maybe it hangs on our willingness, too.  Who knows how many messages God delivers daily to the countless faithful of every religion, and of none?  Trust the good, wherever you find it.  I know you are afraid, but trust the truth.  Trust love.  Trust yourself.  Above all, trust me.  Let my life be born in you.  Who knows what power will be released in us when we dare to believe those unseen encounters that offer a divine word of love?

Here on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, on the brink of Christmas, there is a Love that wants to be born within us and among us, a love that knows no bounds.  It begins as a whisper in the ear, a tug at the heart, a message from an angel inviting us to welcome a Divine Guest whose effect on our lives we can neither predict nor control.  What will happen if we truly give ourselves to this love?  What will we do?  Who will we become?  “Really,” we may say to ourselves, “I’m kind of used to being who I am.  Sure, I want God to come into my life, but let’s not get carried away!  There’s something to be said for staying in control.  It’s risky to let go.  I’m not sure.  Let me get back to you on that.”

Can you feel the pull between attraction and fear, between trust and hesitation?  Like every love song, the love song between God and the soul is about longing and resistance, about desire and holding back.  If we could put words to it, the conversation might go something like this.  Here is a poem (“Covenant”) by Margaraet Halaska, a Franciscan nun:

                   The Father
          knocks at my door
seeking a home for his son:

          Rent is cheap, I say.

I don’t want to rent, I want to buy, says God.

          I’m not sure I want to sell,
but you might come in to look around.

I think I will, says God.

I might let you have a room or two.

I like it, says God.  I’ll take the two.
You might decide to give me more some day.
          I can wait, says God.

          I’d like to give you more,
but it’s a bit difficult.  I need some space for me.

I know, says God, but I’ll wait.  I like what I see.

Hmm, maybe I can let you have another room.
          I really don’t need that much.

Thanks, says God.  I’ll take it.  I like what I see.

I’d like to give you the whole house
          but I’m not sure —

Think on it, says God.  I wouldn’t put you out.
Your house would be mine and my son would live in it.
You’d have more space than you’d ever had before.

          I don’t understand at all.

I know, says God, but I can’t tell you about that.
          You’ll have to discover it for yourself.
That can only happen if you let him have the whole house.

          A bit risky, I say.

Yes, says God, but try me.

          I’m not sure-
          I’ll let you know.

I can wait, says God.  I like what I see.

You will notice that God does not force or compel, because that is not the language of love.  God simply longs and waits and asks to draw close.  When we dare to say Yes, Christ is born again.  Two thousand years ago God entered human history and became one ­of us, one with us.  God came then, and God comes now, because God longs to join us on our journey, in our daily life and relationships, in our pain and worry and hope.  Will we consent to God’s birth within us?  Like Mary, will we say, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word”? 

Right now, can we close our eyes and silently say to the Holy Spirit, “Come.  Come into my life, just as it is, and help me find my way to You.  Help me step through my fear, my anxiety, my worry, my need to be in control.  Help me find You in my ordinary, everyday living.  I trust You more than I trust myself, and I thank you for your trust in me”?

Longing for God

Gracious God, stir up your strength and come to help us. Restore us, o God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.
Amen.

Welcome to Advent and the beginning of a new church year. As you can see, the frontal hanging over the pulpit, the clergy stoles, and our brand-new Advent chasuble are all blue. Like me, you may associate Advent with the color purple, for the four Sundays before Christmas have often been called a “mini-Lent,” or “little Lent.” Lent is the long season of repentance as we prepare for the joy of Easter; it has a solemn, somber tone, and its color is purple. But that’s not quite the mood of Advent. There is a movement afoot in the Episcopal Church to re-claim the other ancient color for Advent: the color blue — a color associated with Mary, the mother of Jesus, with whom we wait this season for the birth of the Christ child. Blue is also the color for hope, expectation, and confident anticipation. Advent does include elements of repentance, but above all Advent is a season for hope. Ahead of us is the celebration of Christ’s birth, and beyond that we look forward to the Second Coming of God in Christ, to the consummation of history, to the Last Great Day when all things will be gathered up in love.

So here on the First Sunday of Advent, we ask ourselves: What are we waiting for? What is it that sets our heart on fire with longing? What is it that we await with eagerness and hope? When we ask ourselves such questions, no doubt all sorts of answers spring to mind, for all sorts of things may seem desirable in the course of a day. Maybe we look with hope toward getting a job or getting a better job, to going on vacation or retiring. Maybe we long for the next family reunion or for our family to get along better. Maybe we long for good health for ourselves or someone we love, or for Congress to get its act together, for some piece of wild land to be protected from development, or for an end to poverty and hunger. At certain moments, sometimes our most ardent hope is simply for the traffic light to turn green.

All kinds of longings flow through us in a given day, desires large and small, petty and noble. But within all our desires streams one basic desire, a desire that God has planted in our depths and that awakens and sings through us whenever we dare to give it voice. Here on this First Sunday of Advent, we open ourselves to our deepest desire, our deepest hope: the desire for the fullness of God, who is the fulfillment of our lives.

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence!” cries the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 64:1). The fullness of God’s presence is like a fire that kindles brushwood, a flame that causes water to boil. It is not enough for God to look down from the heavens, remote and impassive: God must split the heavens apart, and reveal God’s self, so that everyone may know that this alone is God, who responds actively to those who wait for God, who meets those who repent and those who prepare a place for God in their hearts.

The prophet’s passion is echoed in today’s psalm, with its urgent, pleading verse, “Stir up your strength and come to help us… Show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved” (Psalm 80:2b, 3b). Advent is given to us because we are a waiting people, an expectant people, a longing people. We are restless with the status quo, impatient with business as usual, because God has planted within us a vision and hope of what life could be. Advent is the season to claim our desire for God and for the fullness of God’s reign upon this broken, lovely earth. Christians stand open-heartedly in the present, but we are oriented toward the future. We turn toward the future and long for God to come in power and great glory. We look ahead with hope to the future of who we will be — of what the world will be — when everything in us and around us is reconciled, when everything that has grown old is made new, everything cast down is lifted up, everything hurt is healed, everything unjust has been made right, and the love that gave birth to the universe is visible at last in all its glory.

Advent invites us to become people who dare, as Walter Wink puts it, ¹ to “believe the future into being.” “This,” he says, “is the politics of hope. Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the future for which it longs. The future,” he says, “is not closed… Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes. These shapers of the future… call out of the future the longed-for new present. In the New Testament…the name and texture and aura of that future is [called] the reign of God.”

The simplest Advent prayer is the ancient prayer found in its original Aramaic in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: “Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus” (1 Corinthians 16:22). We are hungry for you, Jesus. We long for your love. We yearn for your justice. It is you who came to cast fire upon the earth, you who longed to set us ablaze with your love. It is you who gave us the parable of the doorkeeper, commanded by his master to be on watch until the master’s return, so that when the master comes back and knocks on the door, the doorkeeper can fling it open and let him in. “Watch,” you tell us. “Keep awake.” For you will come again.

How do we stay awake? How do we wait well? I will give you two small words that can help us this Advent to wait for the fullness of God, to keep awake for the coming of the Lord: prayer and generosity.

Advent is a time for prayer. Our hearts must be open if we are to hear new things and see new things, and so we pray the basic Advent prayer of desire and hope: “Come, Lord Jesus.” In prayer we listen carefully to the voice of God who calls us beloved. Roman Catholic priest and writer Henri Nouwen used to say that if you think you are worthless, you can’t wait well. You won’t see the One who is coming, because you won’t think you are worth coming to! So we listen to that gentle, inner voice that is always saying to us, “I love you. I created you. I sent you into this world. I want to come closer to you — because you are worth it!”

This brings to mind a story by Richard Foster from his book about prayer. As Foster tells it, “One day a friend of mine was walking through a shopping mall with his two-year-old son. The child was in a particularly cantankerous mood, fussing and fuming. The frustrated father tried everything to quiet his son, but nothing seemed to help. The child simply would not obey. Then, under some special inspiration, the father scooped up his son, and, holding him close to his chest, began singing an impromptu love song. None of the words rhymed. He sang off key. And yet, as best he could, the father began sharing his heart. “I love you,” he sang. “I’m so glad you’re my boy. You make me happy. I like the way you laugh.” On they went from one store to the next. Quietly the father continued singing off-key and making up words that did not rhyme. The child relaxed and became still, listening to this strange and wonderful song. Finally, they finished shopping and went to the car. As the father opened the door and prepared to buckle his son into the carseat, the child lifted his head and said simply, “Sing it to me again, Daddy! Sing it to me again!” ²

In Advent, we take time to pray, to “let ourselves be gathered up into the arms” of the Father, the Mother, of our souls, and to let her “sing a love song over us.” ³

If one way of staying awake is to be faithful in prayer, another is to be generous to those whose needs are greater than our own. The root of the word “generosity” is the Latin “genus,” which means “race, kind, or kin.” When we are generous, we make others kin. Do you know anyone who is lonely? Do you know anyone who feels bereft, forgotten, or rejected? Do you know someone who might have woken up this morning wondering if it was worth trying to get through one more day, and whether anyone cares? Think about it. Maybe you are just the person who can give that person a word of support, a visit, or a phone call. Maybe you can give someone a good listening-to, like they’ve never been listened to before!

When we are generous, we do what is ours to do. We don’t have to do it all or do it perfectly. We need only to offer the gift that we alone can offer in the midst of the particulars of our lives. Have you ever noticed how particular Jesus’s gifts are? “This is my body,” he said. “This is my blood.” ⁴ We offer what we in particular can offer — and who knows what will happen then, what creative next step will then be possible? Who knows how God will make use of that gift, so that it multiplies in ways we could never have imagined?

If we do these things — if we’re faithful in prayer and generous in love — then we can rest assured that Christmas is coming. God is coming. For Christ was not just born long ago, but is even now being born in our hearts.

God is with us in our hope and longing. To quote Brian Swimme (“Canticle of the Cosmos”):

The longing that gave birth to the stars
The longing that gave birth to life
Who knows what this longing can give birth to now?

1. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Minneapolis; Fortress Press, p. 299.

2. Richard J. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, HarperSanfrancisco, 1992, pp. 3-4.

3. Ibid., p. 4.

4. Ann and Barry Ulanov, Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer, Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982, p. 96.