Author Archives: mbj

For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free

I would like to say a few words about freedom, because freedom is in the air. For one thing, it is summer, when many of us go off on some sort of vacation and are free of our daily schedules and routine. Freedom will be the national focus in a few days when we celebrate the Fourth of July. And freedom is a theme that runs through Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, from which we read this morning as we’ve done for the past three weeks. Galatians has been called the Magna Charta of religious liberty, for in this epistle, Paul proclaims our freedom in Christ. “For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” [Galatians 5:1]

What does it mean to be set free in Christ? What does it mean to be set free, period? If I asked you, right now, to imagine that you were free, completely free, I wonder what would happen in your body, where you would feel it, how your body would respond. I imagine that many of us would take a long, deep breath. When we feel free, it is like a burden lifting, as if the space around us and inside us has become larger and more open. We may feel less constricted, lighter on our feet, and suddenly aware that we have room to move.

I suspect that for many North Americans one thing that curtails our sense of freedom is the relentless pressure of having too much to do. Many of us live quite frantic lives as we hurry from one task to the next or juggle multiple responsibilities, caring for children or aging parents, handling the demands of one job or two, squeezing in a dash to the grocery store or the post office. Many of us have little time for silence or solitude, or for the kind of contemplative listening that helps us know what’s going on inside us or where God might be.

I remember a particularly busy period, years ago, when I found it appealing to consider conducting a sit-down strike. Above my desk I taped a cartoon of a train sitting motionless on a track. The train was glaring straight ahead and saying to nobody in particular, “Get lost.” The caption read: “The Little Engine That Could, But Just Didn’t Feel Like It.”

Around that time I served as chaplain at a clergy conference in another diocese and I read to the assembled priests part of an essay from The New Yorker. A young mother had sent the magazine a kind of song or chant or poem that her four-year-old son had invented and liked to sing every evening in the bathtub. She explained that the chant went on forever, like the Old Testament, and she was able to copy down only a fragment. It is sung, she said, entirely on one note, except that the voice drops on the last word in every line. This is how it goes:

“He will just do nothing at all.

He will just sit there in the noonday sun.

And when they speak to him, he will not answer them

Because he does not care to.

He will stick them with spears and put them in the garbage.

When they tell him to eat his dinner, he will just laugh at them,

And he will not take his nap, because he does not care to.

He will not talk to them, he will not say nothing.

He will just sit there in the noonday sun.

He will go away and play with the Panda.

He will not speak to nobody because he doesn’t have to.

And when they come to look for him they will not find him,

Because he will not be there.

He will put spikes in their eyes and put them in the garbage,

And put the cover on. . .

He will do nothing at all.

He will just sit there in the noonday sun.”

The clergy to whom I read this poem responded pretty much the way you did, and then there was a thoughtful silence. Finally, one of them observed, “I think we should declare this the 151st psalm.”

Maybe so. Surely human freedom includes having some space for leisure, for being rather than doing. And surely Christian freedom includes knowing that we don’t have to earn our salvation — we are not work-horses whose value and identity depend on how much we accomplish, and how fast. This is good news both to those of us who feel internal pressure to work too hard and get caught up in the willful, anxious drive to produce and achieve, and to those of us who feel squeezed by very real external demands and responsibilities. The truth is that we are deeply loved by God not for what we do, or what we accomplish, or how much we earn, but simply for ourselves. If we want this summer to explore our freedom in Christ, we might begin by carving out time to rest and play and pray. Giving ourselves space for rest and refreshment can be our own first step in re-claiming the gift of Sabbath.

Our rector is on sabbatical this summer, and so are you, so am I, whenever we are able to set aside — at least for a while — those urgent lists of Things To Do and can begin to find out what it means to be free. One of my great pleasures has been to work on the Creativity of Grace committee, and we’ve begun to put together what I consider a quite marvelous array of workshops for the summer and fall. Just as the Restoration Project is dedicated to re-building and renewing the outer structures of our parish, so our Creativity of Grace events are intended to renew and refresh our inner selves. Most of these workshops will be led by people from within our own parish community, offering their time and talent to us from the goodness of their hearts. As I imagine it, these workshops will give us a variety of creative spaces in which to explore parts of ourselves that we may not have heard from for a very long time. They will give us spaces in which to try out new ways to hear and respond to the Spirit, new ways to let the breath of God blow through us and open us up. And as Paul writes in another epistle, Second Corinthians, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” [2 Corinthians 3:17).

The children will lead off with a one-week liturgical arts camp that begins on Monday, July 9. As for us grown-ups, there are all kinds of possibilities to choose from.

For instance, maybe you’ve always wanted to learn how to cook, or want to sharpen your culinary skills, or wonder how preparing and serving a meal can become a spiritual practice. On three Saturdays this summer you can join a small group that, under the guidance of a fine local chef, will head to the farmers’ market on the Amherst town common, buy armloads of fresh, local produce, and then head inside to cook, prepare, and serve each other some really good food and discuss food’s connections to our life of faith.

Or maybe you want to try your hand at writing, or want help with a writing project already underway, or want to overcome your total aversion to writing. We have all kinds of writing workshops for you in the weeks ahead — workshops on writing memoir, on writing as a spiritual practice, and on ways to make friends with writing, so that writing becomes “more natural, comfortable, satisfying, and even pleasurable.” There will even be a writing workshop with the provocative title “Street-Fighting with the Universe,” a name that aptly conveys writing’s challenge and peril and excitement.

Or maybe you would like to explore drawing as a contemplative practice, and would enjoy a workshop that gives you skills and support to draw a small page every day as an act of prayer. By the end of the workshop you will have made a long series of drawings that open and close like an accordion. Or maybe you would like to explore icon writing. In a weekly series that will begin sometime in August, everyone in the parish of any age and any level of skill will have a chance after the 10:30 service to “join in the prayer of creating a large icon that can adorn a variety of sacred spaces at Grace Church.” In a very informal, drop-in way, right here in the Parish Hall, we will “express our spiritual renewal and honor our parish restoration by creating an image of ‘Christ with the New Paradise.'” As someone with no painting skills at all, I was quite reassured to read in the workshop’s description, “if you can breathe, you will be able to apply gold leaf.”

Coming in the fall will be a series of workshops on music, including one that encourages our creativity by giving us a chance to improvise with sounds in the natural world. Our own Brooks Williams plans a series of group guitar lessons for beginners; Beth Hart will lead a workshop on freeing the natural voice; and we may also have a workshop on African drumming and dancing.

All these events will climax on the weekend of November 17^th and 18^th, when we will have a chance to share together the fruits of our journey into the freedom and creativity of the Holy Spirit, and will celebrate an Earth Mass – featuring jazz-gospel compositions by Horace Boyer – that by all accounts promises to be quite extraordinary.

Can you tell that I’m excited about this? It’s true. I am. We have begun making workshop flyers with information on when and how to register, and I hope you will pick one up, or check the announcements printed in the service leaflet over the coming weeks.

No one knows what will come from these projects, what tangible creations to be eaten or read or gazed at or listened to or touched. And that’s the point: it is when we open the door to the unknown, when we step out of the familiar and predictable, that we experience both our freedom and our creativity. Creativity enlarges our sense of inner freedom, and inner freedom enlarges our capacity to create.

I think of that little boy in the bathtub, savoring his freedom and chanting a poem that he made up as he went along. That is what I hope we grownups will experience this summer: something of the freedom of a child at play. We live in a stressed and fast-paced world, and we have many responsibilities, so claiming our creativity and making space for the Spirit will take some commitment on our part. It is a kind of spiritual discipline or practice. I think of the powerful image from today’s Gospel of Jesus “set[ting] his face to go to Jerusalem” [Luke 9:51]. Jesus knew exactly where God was calling him to go, and he didn’t let anything stop him. We may need that kind of fierceness if we want to say Yes to our freedom and creativity, for we will have to say No to something else. But, as Paul once put it, “For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

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Stories under the Stars

“The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail…”
(I Kings 17:16)

Last week Ton Whiteside commented that worshipping in the Parish Hall would be a bit like going to church camp, and I think he’s right.  I never went to church camp, but I did go to regular camp, and I see some resemblances to what we’re doing here.  We don’t have a campfire, but in a while we will gather in a circle around the altar, our own center of energy and warmth.  We won’t eat hotdogs and lemonade, but we will be fed with food and drink that satisfy the soul.  We can’t look up and gaze at stars shining above us in the night sky, but because we are gathered in God’s presence, we are opening ourselves to the big picture, the long view, the larger mystery in which we swim.  We know that the stars are shining, and that God’s light shines within them all.

And like campers everywhere, we will tell stories.  Today’s readings give us two wonderful stories, and after saying a few words about them I will tell you a third story. 

Story #1 is from the First Book of Kings, and it might as well begin like this: “Once upon a time there was a widow who lived with her only son in the city of Zarephath.”  The land was undergoing a terrible drought, and the woman was so poor that she had no fuel for her fire and no food except one last handful of meal in a jar and a bit of oil in a jug. Now the word of God came to the prophet Elijah and told him to visit the poor widow, for – surprisingly enough – God had commanded her to feed Elijah.  Elijah set out, and at the gate of the city, Elijah found the desperate woman gathering a few sticks for a fire.  She figured that, after cooking the morsel of food she had left, she and her son would just lie down and die.

But Elijah interrupted her despairing slide toward death.  “Bring me a little water,” Elijah told her, “and bring me a little cake of the oil and meal, and don’t be afraid.  There will be enough left over for you and your son.” I imagine the woman staring at him in amazement.  She must have thought he was crazy.  But then it got even stranger – Elijah promised that not only would she and her son be fed, but God wouldn’t let the jar of meal be emptied or the jug of oil run out until the rains returned and the drought had come to an end. 

And it was so.  In an act of quite astonishing trust, the generous widow placed the little she had into Elijah’s hands, and lo and behold, God kept re-stocking that jar of meal and re-filling that jug of oil.  And for days on end, until the rains came, everyone ate and was satisfied.

This wonderful story shows what God wants – for the hungry to be fed, for the weak to be protected, for the poor to be satisfied, and for all of us to be caught up in the life-giving, liberating, and loving energies of God. Sometimes we feel like the widow of Zarephath, desperate, helpless, and afraid, and are astonished by God’s power to rescue us when we’ve reached the end of our rope.  And sometimes we feel like Elijah, listening to the urgings of God and heading out into our family, or out into the world, to bring a word of hope.

That is Story #1: Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.

Story #2 is from the Gospel of Luke.  Jesus was like Elijah, traveling where God sent him, and like Elijah, when he reached the gate of the town – in this case, the town of Nain – he saw a desperate widow.  As in our first story, this widow was probably poor, or soon to be poor, for her only son had died and the young man was probably her only means of support.  And now she was alone in the world, grieving and bereft. 

At the gate of the city, the two large crowds met, approaching from different directions – on one side, Jesus, his disciples, and a great throng of followers; on the other, a large funeral procession made up of family members, friends, and hired mourners and musicians, as the dead man was carried on a bier, a kind of wicker-work basket or frame, for burial outside the city gates.

When Jesus saw the grieving mother, he had compassion for her, for that is God’s way.  That is the nature of God.  And in a miracle story that couldn’t be told with greater simplicity, Jesus came forward, touched the bier, and the bearers stood still.  The walk toward death was stopped.  We can imagine silence falling over the crowd as the flutes and cymbals were hushed and the cries of grief were stilled.  Confused, startled, maybe even resenting this interruption, everyone looked at Jesus. Then, very simply, without any drama or ritual, without even saying a prayer, Jesus commanded the young man to rise.  And, the story tells us, “the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother” [Luke 7:15]

It is another miracle story, another tale that expresses both the depth of human misery and the compassion of God, the power of God to set us free.  Where should we look for God?  Wherever people are suffering, lonely, and lost.  Wherever people are marching or sliding toward death.  That’s just the place where God is likely to show up and say Stop! Or Rise! Or Be healed! as Elijah did for the widow of Zarapheth and her son, and as Jesus did for the widow of Nain and her son.

Stories like these remind us that God is with us in our longing for life, and that God yearns to work through our hands and minds and hearts so that we too can bring healing to the world, so that we too can stand up for life.  Sometimes we do this very explicitly, knowing that our longing for life is God’s longing, too.  Elijah knew what he was doing when he reached out to the widow of Zarephath, and Jesus knew what he was doing when he reached out to the widow of Nain and her son — they were listening to God, and filled with God, and allowing the power of God to flow through them.

But sometimes God uses us to bring life into the world in ways we never intended or expected, and in ways we may never even know.  Which brings me to Story #3. 

This is a true story about a woman named Rebecca Parker, a woman who at one point in her life felt as hopeless as the two biblical women in the stories we just heard.  Someone close to Parker had died, and as the weeks went by, she began to spiral into deep despair.  During the day she worked dutifully at her job, but at night she couldn’t sleep, and would pace the rooms of her house and wail.

One night, she writes, “[my] sorrow, despair and isolation came to a crisis.  I was past living one day at a time, or even one hour at a time, and was down to the question of whether I was willing to continue to live at all.  In the depths of that sadness, I stopped pacing…  It was past midnight.  I left my house and walked down the hill to Lake Union.  The city was quiet.  My face was wet with tears as I set my course toward the water’s edge.  I was determined to walk into the lake’s cold darkness and find there the consolation that I could not find within myself.

“At the bottom of the hill, the street ended and the lake-side park began.  I walked across the wet grass and climbed the last rise before the final descent to the water’s edge.  As I crested the rise, to my surprise I discovered that between me and the shore there was a line of dark objects, stretching the whole length of the field, a barricade I was going to have to cross to get to the water. 

“I didn’t remember this barricade being there before, and it was so dark I couldn’t tell what I was seeing.  But as I edged closer, I discovered it was a line of human beings, hunched over some strange looking, spindly and bulky equipment.  Telescopes!

“It was the Seattle Astronomy Club.  A whole club of amateur scientists up and alert in the middle of the night, because the sky was clear and the planets were near.

“In order to make my way to my death, I had to get past an enthusiast in tennis shoes.  He assumed I had come to look at the stars. ‘Here, let me show you…” he said, and began to explain the star cluster his telescope was focused on.  I had to brush the tears from my eyes in order to look through his telescope.  There it was!  I could see it!  A red-orange spiral galaxy!  Then he focused it on Jupiter and I peered through to see the giant, glowing planet.  I could not bring myself to continue my journey.  In a world where people get up in the middle of the night to look at the stars, I could not end my life.

“I know there is grace,” she goes on, “because my life was saved by the Seattle Astronomy Club, by those human beings that night who held fast to the desire to see the beauty of the universe, in spite of the cold or the late hour.  I was saved by the human capacity to love the world and the distant reaches of the unknown.  I was saved by one particular human being who assumed I shared a desire to see the stars.  I was saved by being met, right in the pathway of my despair, by one – actually one hundred – who wouldn’t let me go that way.  I was saved by the stars, by the cool green grass under my feet, by the earth, the cosmos, its presence, which won me over and persuaded me to stay.”

So here we are, campers all, pilgrims, listening to stories, and I have to tell you, I want to be like those amateur astronomers with their telescopes pointed at the stars.  And I want us all to be like them, too – so caught up in the beauty of life, so grateful for the fact that we are here, that anything is here at all, so convinced that life is good and worth living – that we become a barricade for anyone who is openly or secretly on a march toward death.  If it hasn’t happened yet, I hope it will happen now – I want us to fall in love with life this summer, to fall in love with God. 

So I give thanks for the jar of meal that is never emptied and the jug of oil that never runs dry, thanks for the God who has compassion for the poor and raises us from the dead, thanks for the God who can use anyone – even you, even me, even “an enthusiast in tennis shoes” – as a channel for grace. 

Doubt, Faith, and Fire

 “Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 
-John 20:27

Today is a good day to talk about doubt: yours and mine.  We have just shared the marvels of Christianity’s most sacred week.  Most of us here this morning participated to one degree or another in the experiences that make up the journey from Palm Sunday through Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter – candle light and star light, attentive silence and ringing bells, the raw wood of the cross and the scent of Easter lilies.  We listened to the core narrative of Jesus’ dying and rising.  We re-told, re-lived, and reaffirmed the foundational story of our faith.

And today, as we do every year on the Sunday that follows Easter Day, we make room for doubt.  Thomas is remembered for many things: he is the disciple who asked Jesus to show him the way to the Father’s house [John 14:5]; tradition says that Thomas brought the Gospel to India; and there is a non-canonical Gospel that bears his name.  Still, because of the passage that we heard this morning, Thomas is remembered above all as “Doubting Thomas,” as the disciple who wasn’t there when the risen Christ appeared to the other disciples and to the women, and who insisted that he would not believe until he had seen the evidence for himself.  When the other disciples tell him, “We have seen the Lord,” Thomas replies, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” [John 20:25].

Thomas is a man of doubt, a skeptic, a man who insists on evidence. Second-hand testimony is not enough for him.  Someone else’s belief is not enough for him.  He wants to know the truth for himself through his own direct experience.  And I want to say: let’s hear it for that kind of doubt.  We need critical, analytic, and doubting minds to break the spell and cut through the fog that cloud our consciousness. 

Years ago I saved a New Yorker cartoon entitled “Fatalism… and the seeds of doubt.”  A family leans over a toaster that has just burned two slices of bread to a crisp.  Smoke rises into the air.  With a tragic face, the mother declares, “It is God’s will.”  The father declares, “Had the toast been destined to be edible, it would be so.”  Their startled son looks up at his parents and says, “B-b-but…”

Thank God for the “But’s.”  Thank God for the seeds of doubt.  Thank God for the questions that propel us to explore the truth, to look for answers, to discover for ourselves what we really know and trust and believe.  Doubt can impel us to test our experience and to refuse to settle for believing something just because other people say it’s so.  What’s more, doubt is part of being human, and, as the writer Frederick Buechner once put it, “If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.” 

It seems to me that the Christian life needs both faith and doubt in the same way that a fire needs both logs and space in order to burn.  Here is part of a poem by a poet named Judy Brown.

What makes a fire burn

Is space between the logs,

A breathing space.

Too much of a good thing,

Too many logs

Packed in too tight

Can douse the flames

Almost as surely

As a pail of water would.

 

  You know how it is when you build a fire.  You have to pay attention not only to the wood but also to the spaces between the pieces of wood.  As Judy Brown goes on to say, “It is fuel, and absence of the fuel/Together, that make fire possible.” (1)

If we hang on to faith too tightly – if we banish all doubt and cling rigidly to our convictions – before long we’ll turn into a fanatic enclosed in our own small world, our own narrow ideology.  Without some space for doubt, faith morphs into self-righteousness, and before long we’re likely to pick up the logs of our convictions and start wielding them like weapons against someone else. 

Doubt gives us space for humility, space to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers or possess all the insights.  We know what we know, but we also know that there is more to know.  Doubt keeps us open to fresh evidence and makes us eager to learn.

On the other hand, if all we hang on to is our doubt, if we trust nothing but our doubt and our capacity to criticize and challenge, if we question and belittle every expression of faith in the people around us and in ourselves, then we will stake out for ourselves a very small world and hold ourselves back from the fire and mystery of life. 

I think of doubt and faith as existing at their best in a kind of dynamic tension: faith gives us the willingness to believe, to trust, and to give ourselves in love.  Doubt gives us the willingness to question, to stay humble, and to admit that there is more to learn.  Together, faith and doubt are like logs and space that make a powerful and life-giving fire. 

Take Thomas, for instance.  He is called “the Twin,” the Gospel tells us, and he is our own twin, too.  He is a man of faith, for he is a disciple who has followed Jesus through thick and thin.  But Thomas has now reached an impasse.  He’s been stopped by a wall of doubt.  “Unless I see for myself, I won’t believe.”  It’s not that Thomas refuses to believe – we don’t get the sense that he is invested in clinging to his doubt.  It’s just that he needs more evidence, some direct experience of his own, before he can take the next step in faith. 

        And so, the story tells us, the risen Christ appears again, says “Peace be with you,” and invites Thomas to reach out and touch his hands and side.  “Do not doubt but believe.”  And Thomas answers, “My Lord and my God!” [John 20:27-28]

What just happened?  Jesus had mercy on Thomas’ doubt and on the suffering that Thomas must have felt in holding back.  Thomas was searching for a deeper, more direct experience of the risen Christ, and that is just what Jesus gave him.  Jesus went looking for Thomas, even moving through closed doors to find him.  He spoke gently to the astonished disciple with words of peace, and then invited him to reach out and touch his wounded hand and side.  And in the intimacy of that mysterious encounter, Thomas’ faith caught fire.  He experienced some kind of inner transformation.  His doubts fell away, his fear turned into boldness, and his sorrow into joy.  “My Lord and my God!” he exclaimed, in what is really the climax of the Gospel of John. 

It’s that kind of release of energy and hope that marks the early Church.  The Book of Acts is full of stories of men and women so filled with confidence in the reality of the Risen Christ and the transforming power of the resurrection, that they stand up again and again to the political and religious powers of their day in order to proclaim the power of the kingdom of God.  As Peter and the other apostles announce in the passage we heard this morning, “We must obey God rather than any human authority” [Acts 5:29].  That is where the life of faith and doubt can take you – out into the world, on to the streets, to proclaim that love and not death will have the last word.  It’s the kind of energy that sent tens of thousands of Americans on to the streets yesterday – including a fine group from Grace Church – to proclaim that carbon emissions must be cut 80% by 2050 and that we will not stand idly by and watch climate change take down this planet’s web of life. (2)

And notice this, please: Jesus is talking to you in today’s Gospel.  He is talking to me. Turning to Thomas and to every one of us down through the ages who has wrestled with doubt and with faith, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” [John 20:29].   Here we are —  partly believing, partly doubting — and Jesus is giving us his blessing.  Bless you, he is saying to you and to me.  You may not see me fully.  You may not understand completely who I am, or who you are to me.  But I know you are searching, and I know you are coming to believe.  And I bless you.  I bless you. 

A friend of mine, poet and teacher Annie Rogers, joined us at Grace Church for the Easter Vigil.  She told me a while ago that although she grew up attending church, somewhere along the line Christianity stopped singing to her. And so she stayed away.  But something drew her back last week, some mixture of uncertainty and desire, doubt and faith that only she can name.  

Annie wrote a poem about what happened at the Easter Vigil, and she has given me permission to share it.

 Still in our winter coats we wait
in the dark for it all to start. 
At the back of the church a fire
flares in a barbecue pit, and the
 
tall candle’s lit.  We walk around
to the front, while in the Lord
Jeffrey Inn, the dining room is full
and over on Pleasant Street, friends
line up for the cinema because
something good is playing.

 

The poem goes on to portray the entry into church, the acolytes who lit our candles, the biblical stories we listened to.  Finally the time comes for the Eucharist, and Annie ventures to come forward.  Annie writes,

  … A man
in a red t-shirt kneels beside me, crosses
his arms on his chest, and the priest’s hand
 
falls light on his head to bless his refusal. 
I have teetered with disbelief, and were I
truthful, I want only this: a blessing
on my incredulity…

 

“A blessing on my incredulity.”  That is what Jesus offers us this morning: a blessing on our incredulity, a space for our doubts, for they are part of who we are. 

Who knows what happens next.  Anything can happen.

As Annie leaves the church, she heads into “the cold Spring night” and hears bells pealing out over the Common.  And whatever she can or cannot say about Jesus, she does know this:

 …the sound invades me
hammers into me a strange joy
that defies all logic, all possibility.

 

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(1) Judy Brown’s poem appeared in an email from Spiritual Directors International.

 (2) For news of Step It Up – and for photos of our Grace Church contingent – visit StepItUp2007.org .

 (3) Annie Rogers, “Who answers?” unpublished manuscript.

Irrational, Pointless, and Necessary

Some of you may recognize tonight’s Gospel reading as the one we heard little more than a week ago, when the lectionary assigned most of this passage for the Fifth Sunday of Lent.  Rob Hirschfeld preached a wonderful sermon that morning, and being handed the same text on which to comment 8 days later leads tonight’s preacher to quote from Rob’s sermon: it “stinketh.”

I don’t know what the lectionary planners had in mind when they placed the passages so close together, but maybe they wanted to be sure that Christians had a chance to ponder deeply – and often – the story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet.  Luckily it is a story so rich in meaning that we can return to it again and again and discover something new.

All four Gospels include a scene of a woman anointing Jesus, but the details vary quite a bit, such as when and where the event took place, which woman did the anointing, and whether it was Jesus’ head or feet that she anointed.  Scholars attribute the differences partly to the particular meanings that each Gospel writer wanted to convey, for each Gospel has its own distinctive emphasis, its own way of making meaning of Jesus’ life.  But I have to say that John’s version of the story is to me the most irrational, even muddled, of them all – and, I would argue, maybe for that reason the most beautiful.

I’ll tell you why.  As we just heard, John places the scene six days before Passover at the home of Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from death.  While Martha, one of Lazarus’ sisters, serves the meal, his sister Mary takes a great quantity of costly perfume, bathes Jesus’ feet with it, and then dries his feet with her hair.

Now, really, what sense does that gesture make?  Anointing someone’s head with oil would have made sense.  Anointing the head of a dinner guest was a familiar gesture of hospitality in that ancient culture, so if Mary had anointed Jesus’ head with oil, her act would have been quite normal, a gracious and familiar expression of welcoming a guest.  What’s more, anointing his head would have recalled how in Old Testament times a prophet anointed the head of the Jewish king [2 Kings 9:1-13, 1 Samuel 10:1].  Anointing Jesus’ head would have meant that she recognized him as the Messiah – literally, the anointed one. 

But here Mary is anointing Jesus’ feet with oil – a gesture as unusual in that culture as it would be in ours today.  Not only that, she then wipes away the oil with her hair – an even more extraordinary gesture, to say the least.  Why apply perfumed oil to Jesus’ feet, only to wipe it off right away?  And why wipe it off with her hair?  No respectable Jewish woman would have appeared in public with her hair unbound – so this was a scandalous gesture, one that was unbecoming to be a respectable woman.

Mary’s gesture was lavish, irrational, and apparently pointless.  No wonder the reaction comes swiftly – what a waste!  How much more sensible it would have been to have sold that expensive perfume – worth nearly a year’s wages for a laborer – and to have used the money for something useful, like giving it the poor!  Mary, what were you thinking? 

Some scholars look at this apparently muddled gesture and explain that John’s Gospel was conflating two separate historical incidents. (1) In one event, an unnamed, penitent sinner knelt before Jesus, and when her tears fell on his feet, she hastily wiped them away with her hair.  Loosening her hair in public would have fit with the woman’s dubious reputation and character.  In a second event, a woman expressed her love for Jesus by anointing his head with expensive perfume. 

Maybe we should try to explain the strangeness of John’s version of the story by saying that he brought together and confused two separate incidents, so that the details of one story passed over to the other, giving us a scene of a woman anointing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair.

Or maybe we can defend the woman, as Jesus did, by saying that her gesture made sense because, whether she knew it or not, she was in effect preparing his body for burial.  After all, the world around Jesus that night was full of foreboding.  The tension around Jesus was rising to a breaking point.  The civil and religious authorities were plotting to take his life and looking for a way to arrest him.  By telling us that Mary anointed Jesus’ feet, maybe this Gospel intends to show that she intuited or anticipated Jesus’ approaching crucifixion, and anointed his feet as a mourner would anoint a dead body.

But I see more than that in this story.  To me it is the very pointlessness of this act of love that most moves me, for in a sense every act of love is pointless.  What is the point of love?  What is the point of beauty?  What is the point of existence itself?  Mary’s act of overflowing, extravagant love has no point, just has love itself has no point.  And yet how beautiful it is, how necessary!  It is an act that feeds the soul, and an act in which we give ourselves to God. 

Of course we do need to care for the poor – after all, Jesus himself came to embrace the lost and lonely and marginalized, and to set the captive free.  In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus even tells us that that he so identifies with the poor, that when we feed and clothe the poor, it is Jesus himself whom we feed and clothe [Matthew 25:31-45].

Yet in this story Jesus lifts up another truth, as well: there comes a time when we must set aside being efficient, useful, and sensible.  Tonight’s Gospel passage reminds us that every genuine act of love, however muddled – every gesture of kindness, however incoherent – every act of creativity, however wild and extravagant it may be – can be our offering to God, our way of giving thanks and of sharing in God’s love.

There is a quote by the novelist Gunter Grass that says this more succinctly than I have.  “Art,” he writes – and, I would add, kindness, beauty, and love itself – “is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same.  Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand.”

Tonight we lift up the beauty of pointless acts of love.  And maybe Mary’s extravagance is not excessive, after all, for she is responding to the extravagant love that Jesus would reveal soon enough on Good Friday. 

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(1) See The Anchor Bible, The Gospel according to John (i-xii), Introduction, translation, and notes, by Raymond E. Brown, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1966, pp. 445-454.

On the Move

In last Sunday’s sermon, Rob spoke of pilgrimage as an image of the Christian life.  Through baptism, we are drawn into intimacy with God in Christ, and – as I once heard someone put it – even though God loves us exactly as we are, God loves us too much to let us stay the same.  By the grace of God we begin in one place and end in another – we change along the way.  That’s what the early Christians called themselves – people “on the Way.” Lent, in particular, is often described as a journey, a pilgrimage to Good Friday and Easter, and this morning’s readings set before us two men on the move: Abram, whose faith in God sent him out to an unknown land, and Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem to confront the powers-that-be and to lay down his life for the world.

Two men on the move.  I thought about Abram’s willingness to honor God’s call to let everything go – his country, his kindred, and his father’s house [Genesis 12:1] and to set out to an unknown place, “not knowing where he was going” [Hebrews 11:8].  I thought about the night that God took Abram outside and showed him the stars, the night that Abram fully entrusted himself to God and accepted God’s covenant, wherever it would lead.  

Abram’s story brought to mind a long-ago summer in Colorado when my family and I spent a week hiking and horseback riding at a small family ranch.  We galloped along mountain trails with our hair, and sometimes our hats, flying in the wind.  We breathed the scent of dust and wildflowers, gazed at fields of purple thistle and sagebrush, and waded knee-deep into the cold water of the Colorado River.  Around us we sensed the silent presence of the mountains: snow-capped, enormous, and millions of years old.  In their presence the concerns and preoccupations of ordinary life suddenly seemed very small.

One night around 2 a.m. my husband slipped out of the cabin to take a look at the night sky.  After a while he climbed back into bed and urged me to go look for myself.  I’m not usually a stargazer, and who wants to crawl out of a warm bed?  But curiosity got the better of me, so I roused myself, threw on a bathrobe, pushed open the screen door, and went outside. 

Except for the burbling sound of the river beside the cabin, the night was completely quiet.  When I looked up, I was struck dumb with amazement.  I had never seen anything like it.  If you’ve been outside at night in the wilderness, you know what I mean.  The whole sky was lit up with stars: sweeping overhead was the arc of the Milky Way, and in every corner of the sky shone more constellations than I could begin to count or name.  Everywhere I looked there were stars – stars and more stars, an exuberance of light. 

“[God] brought [Abram] outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them'” [Gen 15:5].  Of course Abram couldn’t count them any more than we can.  “So shall your descendants be,” God tells him, and then comes the passage’s key line: “And he believed the Lord.”  He believed the Lord.  Abram heard the divine promise  and he accepted it.  No, let’s put it in stronger terms — he committed himself to it, even though there was no tangible evidence to support it.  Abram saw the stars, he heard the promise, and he put his trust in God.

The stars that shone that night in the deserts of Canaan are the same innumerable stars that shine today over the Rocky Mountains and over the Holyoke Range.  “Come out of your tent,” God says to Abram, and to me, and to all of us this morning. “Come out of your tent.  Come out of your self-enclosure.  Step away from your worries and preoccupations, and your anxious self-concern.  Come outside.  There’s something I want to show you.”  And then God spreads before our wondering eyes the infinite beauty of the stars, a glimpse of something larger, more ancient and more enduring than ourselves and our small world.  Suddenly we are caught up in beauty, caught up in mystery.  We are caught up in a Reality that is at once distant and intimate, a Reality that we suddenly discover has been sustaining us at every moment and whose presence fills us with both humility and joy.

That is how the spiritual journey begins, and is renewed: something lures us out beyond the small ego that likes to be in control and to declare itself the center of the world.  Our Lenten pilgrimage gives us a chance to notice and to repent of the ways that we lock ourselves into our small tents and never gaze at the stars.  I think that’s how sin often works: sin makes us close in fearfully upon ourselves, so that we evaluate everything only with reference to how it affects us.  I, for one, begin to imagine that I am the center of creation and that everything exists – or should exist – to please and serve me.  Sin can dull our awareness in all sorts of ways. Maybe we succumb to routine and the grind of ordinary life.  Maybe we fill our spare time with the drone of TV, or blur our perception with too much caffeine or too many drinks.  Maybe we get eaten up by anxiety or frantic busyness, or nurse some favorite obsession, such as the need to be perfect, or the need to be liked, or the need to be in control.  There are countless ways to retreat from life, from what that Dostoevsky wonderfully called “zhivaja zhizn,” “living life.”  I know that when I build my little tent, my world grows very small.  My worries loom large.  It’s when I’m hunkered down in my little tent that life gets urgent and stressful and oh, so serious.

 But then along comes the Holy Spirit, the wind of God, blowing open the flap of the tent, inviting us out to contemplate the stars.  Suddenly we glimpse again the true grandeur of what it means to be alive.  Suddenly we wake up and notice again that we are part of something much larger than ourselves, and that our life is not our own.  I love those lines in the Eucharistic prayer that the celebrant often says during Lent: by the grace of Jesus Christ, now “we are able… to live no longer for ourselves alone, but for him who died for us and rose again.”  That is a big shift in consciousness, when the center of gravity in our lives is no longer our own small self and our own narrow band of concerns, but God – our love for God, our desire for God, our longing to be of use to God, wherever that takes us.  We begin to taste the joy of knowing that true happiness is found in loving and serving God, not in staying put and staying safe and trying to make the world love and serve us.  We become willing to move. 

 There is joy in setting out on this journey with God, but of course it’s a fearful thing, too.  Abram knew it – otherwise God’s first words to him wouldn’t have been “Do not be afraid.”  Jesus knew the cost, too – the risk and the fear.  In today’s Gospel passage from Luke, some friendly Pharisees warn Jesus to turn back, because Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, is after him and seeks to kill him.  But Jesus refuses to step off the road along which God is leading him. “Today, tomorrow, and the next day,” he replies, “I must be on my way” [Lk 13:33].  In other words, he won’t be stopped.  He may be afraid, but, like Abram, he puts his trust in God and keeps going.  No wonder it is so inadequate to think of the Church as a fixed institution or a frozen set of beliefs.  The Church is not a building but a movement, a community of people joined with Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, and we are on the move. 

Images of pilgrimage, of following where God leads even if the cost is great, are especially poignant this year as we consider the turmoil in the Anglican Communion.  As you know, the Primates, or top leaders, of the worldwide Anglican Communion have presented the Episcopal Church with a deadline of September 30 by which it must declare that it will not consecrate gays and lesbians as bishops, and will not authorize rites for blessing same-sex unions – or risk expulsion from the Anglican Communion.  We in the Episcopal Church find ourselves in a decisive place, a place that calls for careful prayer and discernment.

As Gene Robinson, the openly gay man who was consecrated bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, recently wrote in an eloquent essay, this request is not consistent with the organization of our Church.  As Gene puts it, “The changes in our polity proposed by the Primates can only properly and canonically be responded to by the laity, clergy and bishops gathered in General Convention in 2009. The Primates’ demands can be seriously, prayerfully and thoughtfully considered at that time.”

But what’s more important, of course, as Gene points out, is that the Episcopal Church remain faithful to the Gospel.  What does it mean if we deny gays and lesbians full membership in the Body of Christ?  How can we do that when Jesus has given us a vision of the reign of God in which the hungry are fed, the poor are welcomed, and the oppressed are set free?  How can we do that when, in the baptism that begins our journey with Christ, we promise to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,” to “strive for justice and peace among all people” and “to respect the dignity of every human being”? 

These are questions that our Church will ponder in the weeks and months ahead.  The Episcopal Church is on a pilgrimage here, a journey to an unknown place.  It is a place of risk, and it is a holy place.  Gene Robinson writes in his essay:  “During the debate over the consent to my election, I am told that the Bishop of Wyoming noted that not since the civil rights movement of the 60’s had he seen the Church risk its life for something” Gene goes on to say, “Indeed, I think he is right. This is such a time. A brief quotation hangs on the wall of my office: ‘Courage is fear that has said its prayers.’ Now is the time for courage, not fear.”

Given the readings this morning, it seems a good time to ask ourselves, not only as individuals but as members of the larger Church: what kind of tents have we built that block out the grandeur of the sky and the reality of the love that longs to set us free?  Where do we close down and shut love out?  Where is God inviting us to step outside, look up at the stars, and renew our courage to take our next step in faith? 

Abram saw the stars, heard the promise, and put his trust in God.  Jesus said, “Today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way.”  Abram and Jesus are men on the move, and so are we.  So are we.

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Note:

• Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s reflections following the February 15-19 meeting of the Anglican Primates near Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, “A Season of Fasting: Reflections on the Primates Meeting,” may be found at:

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_82669_ENG_HTM.htm

 • The Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson’s “Response” to the Presiding Bishops’ reflections may be found at:

http://www.nhepiscopal.org/artman/publish/bishop_msg.shtml

If Anybody Asks You Who I Am

“If anybody asks you who I am
(who I am, who I am),
if anybody asks you who I am,
tell him I’m a child of God.”
–Traditional, collected in Louisiana and Georgia

I can almost hear a sigh spreading across the Pioneer Valley this morning – a sigh of relief, a sigh of rest.  Whatever we did or did not do in the countdown to Christmas – whatever cards we did or did not send, whatever Christmas tree we did or did not set up, whatever presents we did or did not give – it doesn’t matter now.  What’s done is done.  What’s not done is not done.  Let it be. (1) Ready or not, Christ is born.  New life has come into the world, and it is the life of God. 

If these moments here in church are some of the most peaceful you’ve had in a while, then I invite you to take a deep breath and enjoy the quiet.  Sometimes our busy preparations for the big day don’t help us open our hearts to the birth of Christ.  I think, for instance, of the hapless woman I read about who did a final check of her list of Things-To-Do-Before-Christmas and realized on the afternoon of December 24 that she had forgotten to send any cards.  Time was short, so she rushed into a store and grabbed two boxes of cards – already marked 50 percent off.  Without bothering to read what the cards said, she scrawled a signature, and addressed and stamped the envelopes.  Cards in hand, she dashed to the post office and shoved them onto the counter – and not a moment too soon, for the clerk was just reaching for the sign that said, “This window closed.”

“On Christmas Day, when things had quieted down a bit and some semblance of order had been restored, she noticed that one of those last- minute cards was left over.  She wondered, ‘What was the message I sent to my friends?’  Opening the card, she stared in disbelief at the words, ‘This card is just a note to say. . . A little gift is on the way.’ . . .I have a pretty good idea what she was going to be doing on the day after Christmas!” (2)

Well, never mind.  The good news is that even if our lives feel too complicated by half, Christ is born.  “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all” [Titus 2:11]. 

And “If anybody asks you who I am (who I am, who I am), if anybody asks you who I am, tell him I’m a child of God.”  I’ve been singing that verse over and over since our Advent service of lessons and carols, and I can’t think of a better way to welcome Jesus’ birth than to repeat it this morning.  For the Son of God, the child of God was not only born two thousand years ago in Bethlehem.  He is being born right here in our midst, right here in our hearts, if we are willing to make Him room.

How do you and I come to know that we too are the children of God?  I’ll make two suggestions. 

First: we practice radical self-acceptance.  We learn to say to ourselves, This is where Christ consents to be born, right here in the circumstances of my life, whatever they are.  Maybe we’re healthy and maybe we’re not.  Maybe we’re financially secure and maybe we’re not.  Maybe we’re surrounded by people we love, and maybe we’re not.  But whatever the particular struggles and joys of our life, this is the life into which Christ is being born.

Radical self-acceptance means saying: “I am no better than I am.  I am no worse than I am.  I am no different than I am.  I am who I am.”  It’s like standing up with open arms and slowly turning 360 degrees, seeing everything there is to see about yourself, every aspect of your life, every relationship, and accepting it for what it is – in all its messiness and beauty, in all its incompleteness.  This is the life – this life, my life – into which Christ wants so dearly to be born.

God isn’t going to wait to come to us until we clean up our act or save the world or otherwise earn our salvation.  God in Christ consents to be born among us just as we are, among the lowly and the poor, in the stink of a stable.  Accept yourself as you are and even that knot of anxiety, even that pit of despair, can become a manger for the Holy Child, the very place where the tenderness and compassion of God is born.  Your life is the poor stable into which Christ has come, and your heart is the humble manger that will hold Him.

So that’s one way to discover that you are a child of God: you practice radical self-acceptance.  And here’s another: you remember that you are more than you know.  Oh, we often think we know ourselves.  We have our little identities.  I’m a man; I’m a woman.  I’m part of the World War II generation, a Baby Boomer, a member of Generation X.  I’m a this or a that: a farmer, a teacher, a social worker, a lawyer, a retiree.  I’m a mother, a father, a son, a daughter.  I’m a member of this or that profession, this or that political party.  I’m an introvert, an extrovert; a dog person, a cat person – there are so many roles we play, so many ways to name ourselves.  The world around us is eager to give us an identity. Corporations would be glad to convince you that your deepest identity is to be a consumer. 

Such things may be part of who we are and some of them may be true, as far as they go, but do they express the essence or totality of our identity? They don’t.  The truth is that we are more than we know.  That is the mystery of the Incarnation.  God came down to earth in Jesus and was born in human flesh, and through God’s Son we have, as the Collect says, “been born again and made God’s children by adoption and grace.”  What does that mean?  It means that every part of us – every cell, every atom – is now penetrated with the infinite, mysterious Presence that we name “God.”  It means that we breathe in God through the air; we walk on God’s earth as our feet touch the ground.  It means that our deepest self is in God.

Recently, astronauts voted on the top ten photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in its voyage into deep space.  Reporter Michael Hanlon commented in his article for the Daily Mail that these images “illustrate that our universe is not only deeply strange, but also almost impossibly beautiful.” (3) The winning photograph is of a galaxy that is 28 million light years from Earth.  It is 50,000 light years across and contains 800 billion suns.  800 billion!  The photograph is spectacular – a blaze of light.  Who knew that deep space had such majesty?  That it shone with such light? 

The One who made the sun and moon and stars has been born among us, born within us.  In prayer I sometimes experience a radiance shining inside me.  It shines inside you, too.  It is the light of God, the light of Christ, and it is as bright as the sun, or 800 billion suns.  In my prayer I sometimes see it shining like a light through the holes in a colander.  Who knew that you and I were home to such majesty?  That deep within, we shone with such light?

We don’t own that light.  We can’t possess it or control it.  But we can receive it with joy.  We can honor it and protect it, this seed of God that has been planted deep within us and that longs to grow up, and grow strong, and to melt away everything in us that is petty and small, just as sunshine melts away the morning fog.  When we greet each other in Christ’s name at the Peace, it’s as if we were saying, “The light in me sees the light in you.”

In the days ahead, together you and I will do what we can to shine the light of love into our suffering, frightened, and violent world.  In the days ahead we will listen for the guidance of the One who comes to bring peace on earth, and peace with earth, peace to the whole Creation, for, as today’s psalm tells us, when the Lord comes the earth is “glad,” the field is “joyful” and “all the trees of the wood shout for joy”  [Psalm 96: 11-12]. 

But for now it is enough just to rest, to welcome the baby Jesus, and to give thanks for his birth, thanks for the birth of our own true selves.  We practice radical self-acceptance because God in Christ has radically accepted us.  We remember that we are more than we know.

And if anybody asks me who you are (who you are, who you are), if anybody asks me who you are, I’ll tell him you’re a child of God.

 

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(1) See “Night Prayer,” A New Zealand Prayer Book, p. 184.

(2) As told by J. Walter Cross, Bradenton, Florida, 26 Dec. 1993, quoted in Homiletics, Oct/Dec, 1994, p. 49.

(3) Michael Hanlon, “Hubble telescope’s top ten greatest space photographs,” Daily Mail.  Viewed 12/23/06.  Thanks to Fred Krueger and Gary Debusschere for bringing this to my attention.

Casting Our Lot With Hope   

Come, Lord Jesus.  Take our minds and think through them.  Take our mouths, and speak through them.  Take our hearts, and set them on fire.  Amen.

Today is the first day of Advent, the period that starts four Sundays before Christmas, and today we begin a new church year.  We often think of Advent as the season in which we prepare for Christmas, and of course that’s true: our English word “Advent” comes from the Latin word for “arrival” or “coming,” and during Advent we look back to the first coming of Christ, when God became incarnate in Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem.  But Advent means much more than that.  Advent is the season in which we reflect on the Lord’s coming in its many dimensions – not only on God’s historical coming in the past, but also on what we might call God’s existential coming to our lives in the present, and above all on God’s coming at the end of time in some unknown moment in the future. (1)

Advent is a season of longing and hope. “O come o come, Emmanuel” – that is the great cry of Advent. Come, Lord, not only as you first came long ago, when the divine took human form in a baby.  Be with us here today, as we go through our mortal lives.  And come again on that great Day in the future, when, as today’s Collect puts it, “in…glorious majesty [you will] judge both the living and the dead.”

Advent invites us to ask big questions about what lies ahead.  How do I view the future? What do I dare to hope for?  What is my final destiny as an individual person?  And what about the final destiny of the world?  The destiny of the whole cosmos?  Where are we headed?  Will human history come to an end, and if so, when and how?  And what is the best way for us to live in the meantime?  These are the kinds of questions that Advent sets before us, questions we may not often ask ourselves.  But how we answer them will deeply affect the way in which we go about our daily lives, and whether or not we live with a sense of purpose and hope.

I don’t have to tell you that we don’t always look to the future with hope.  We may be so busy putting one foot in front of the other and taking care of the immediate tasks at hand that we have no time even to think about the future. Or when we do think about the long-term future, it may be with the uneasy sense that the end of human life – if not the end of life on this planet – is a not-too-distant possibility, whether it comes from nuclear holocaust or ecological collapse. 

So Advent may come as a bit of a shock with its insistent message that Christians dare to look toward the future with expectation and hope.  It’s not that Christians deny the reality of endings.  Christianity has always been realistic about the fact of limits, the fact of death.  Everything mortal will at some point die.  Everything created will at some point pass away.  Christianity has always seen human beings as pilgrims on the earth, and eventually that pilgrimage will come to an end.  “All flesh is grass,” said the prophet Isaiah [Isaiah 40:6], and I assume that that goes not just for our individual life but also for our existence as a species.  No one knows how long human history will continue. The ending may come at some indefinitely remote time or it may come soon, in the very near future.  Christianity accepts the fact of endings, though it does not speculate about the length of human history.  As theologian Paul Tillich once put it, “Scientists speak today of the millions of years that human history could continue. Millions of years, or thousands of years, or tomorrow – we do not know!” (2) 

But if Christianity does not speculate as to the length of human history, what Christianity does provide is deep insight into history’s meaning.  It gives us a vision of our common destiny: at the end, all things will be gathered up in God.  All things will be brought to their fulfillment.  The One we name God is both the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the One Who creates all things and the destiny toward which all created things are drawn.  Since the days of the early church, Christians have longed with passionate and fervent hope for the second coming of Christ, for the final consummation when at last evil will be transformed into good, when everything that was injured or broken will be healed, and everything that was destroyed or distorted will at last be made whole. (3)

The Christian vision of the end of time is a vision that is charged with hope.  It is a vision that is based not on our trust in the success of human effort and striving, but rather on our experience of the power of God.  It is a vision that proclaims that God’s promises will be fulfilled.  Whenever we proclaim every Sunday in the Creed – “Christ will come again” – we are casting our lot with hope.

In the light of God’s intended future, what might we keep in mind this Advent?  Today’s Gospel reading from Luke offers three suggestions.  The first is: Do not be surprised by suffering.  Luke’s Gospel is very clear: before the end comes, there will be wars and persecution on earth, and there will even be cosmic signs in the sky, “signs in the sun and moon and stars” that cause such distress that “people will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken” [Luke 21:25,26].  Don’t be surprised by suffering, Luke is telling us.  Don’t take your suffering or the world’s suffering to mean that God is powerless or that God doesn’t care or that God has abandoned us.  To use the image that St. Paul gives in the Book of Romans [Romans 8:22], the whole creation is groaning in childbirth.  Do not be surprised.

Second, Luke’s Gospel tells us, do not be afraid.  As everything breaks open, the Son of Man will come “‘in a cloud’ with power and great glory” [Luke 21:25-27].  This apocalyptic image, which was taken from the Book of the prophet Daniel, expresses Christ’s mysterious and triumphant return.  And though many people “will faint from fear and foreboding,” Christ’s followers should take heart.  “Now when these things begin to take place,” says Jesus, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” [Luke 21:28].  

Stand up, because the one who is coming to judge you is also the one who has given his life to redeem you. 

Stand up, because the one who is coming in majesty and glory is also the one who loves you to the end and who gave his life for your sake. 

God’s judgment will pierce me – and you – to the core, sifting out whatever is evil and distorted, but God’s grace will always embrace us.  And so we dare to meet our Judge with heads raised high in joyful expectation, for in him we also meet our redeemer.  Do not be afraid.

Finally, Luke tells us, do not fall asleep.  It is so easy to slip into absorption with the pressing tasks of everyday life, and into all the ways we can dim and dull our awareness: too much food and drink, too much shopping, too much worry, too many things to do.  Such ordinary preoccupations can cloud our awareness, so that we forget the urgency and decisiveness of each present moment.  At any moment, at every moment, we face the possibility of the end of time and the sudden coming of Christ. 

I have to tell you that I find something thrilling and sobering and enlivening in remembering that.  I agree with the theologian who commented that “. . .This world looks different when seen from the End.  The neutrality goes out of it.  It is as though the beam of a searchlight has been turned upon it, immeasurably deepening the contrast between light and shade. The flatness is taken from living.  A new edge and tone is given to it.  The common round becomes charged with fresh moment and decisiveness.” (4)

In other words, when seen from the End – the end of time, the end of our lives – every moment matters.  What we do matters: whether or not we said the kind word; whether or not we took the time to pray; whether or not we made space to listen to God in silence; whether or not we did that brave thing we should have done long ago but somehow always put off to some other day.  So keep the searchlight turned on!  Do not fall asleep. 

Here on the First Sunday of Advent we remember Christ’s coming in the past, and we wait with eager hope for his coming in the future.  Past and future meet in this present moment, for all time is equally embraced by God: Christ has come, Christ will come again, and Christ is here – right here with us, now, in this room.

May Jesus keep us steadfast and faithful and abounding in love for one another and for all, until his coming in glory.  Amen.

 

 

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(1)  Paraphrased from Preaching through the Christian Year: Year C, ed. Fred B. Craddock, John H. Hayes, Carl R. Holladay, and Gene M. Tucker (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press, 1994), p. 3.

(2) Paul Tillich, “Man and Earth,” The Eternal Now, p. 74.

(3) See John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, 2^nd edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966, 1977), p. 365.

(4) John A.T. Robinson, In the End God, quoted by Owen Thomas, Introduction to Theology, p. 221].