Calling All Heroes
24 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
Much thanks to Heather Lee for preaching the following sermon this past Sunday, January 15!
I’ve known my husband a long time, and the whole time I’ve known him, he has collected life lessons. There are quite a few of them now, but the first one, from before we were even married is this, “the hero is the guy who just wants to finish his beer and go home.”
I believe that this life lesson just might explain why Jonah is his favorite story in the bible. Because Jonah was a guy with a good job as a local prophet, when God called him out to do something extra ordinary. Something he really didn’t want to do. In fact, it took being vomited out of a fish for him to finally, grudgingly, do what God asked.
So, being left with no choice, he proclaims destruction on Ninevah.
You will note, Jonah does not preach repentance. He does not evangelize. He couldn’t care less about the Ninevites, he is just trying to finish the job so he can go home. And yet, through Jonah, the kindgom of God draws near. The Ninevites believe God, they believe this cranky disgruntled prophet of God and their instinctive response is towards sackcloth and ashes. Towards repentance. And what happened? “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”
I bet you didn’t know Jonah was a hero. Unless you’ve been cornered by my husband at coffee hour, you might never have considered a hero in quite that way. We tend to think of heroes as doers, as people in charge of a situation, people who get things done. People who solve problems. Heroes are people who know that “any minute now, I am going to be called to be more than I am.” Clark Kent, awkward reporter, Peter Parker, inept photographer. But at a moment’s notice, Superman. Spiderman. Hero.
The disciples are heroes of this sort. The sort that make mothers and fathers and spouses fear for their sanity. Jesus wanders along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and I imagine he says this to everyone he meets. “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” I have to wonder if the gossip got ahead of him. “Some crazy man is walking along the beach looking for help netting people. I sure hope my kids don’t get any dumb ideas.”
What were Simon and Andrew thinking? Did Simon have a fight with his wife that morning? Was he already wondering, what if I just dropped this net and walked away?
What did Zebedee say to James and John, when they jumped out of the boat? Did he call after them, reminding them that this was their inheritance they were walking away from?
How did Simon and Andrew and James and John know that this minute was the minute they were being called to be more than they were?
How did they know, that this call was the call, the one worth walking away from what they had, what they knew, what they were? Like those fishermen, we are always facing choices that are bigger than we can really grasp at the time. Do I take that job? The one in a different state? Will it be good for my family? Will it change the world?
I believe we all want to change the world, we all want to do something that is bigger than ourselves, something that will leave a mark. That’s not the same as famous or popular or rich, although that is what it means for some people. I don’t want to be famous, but I’d still like to be a hero, even if I’m the only one who knows that I’ve done something heroic.
As Christians, we want to leave the world a better place than we found it, create a place that looks a little closer to the kingdom of God than we understood it, for people we know and for places we will never go. That’s what those fishermen did, even thought they had no idea, not in the moment, how it was all going to turn out. Still, somehow, by some faith, they knew they were being called to change the world.
Jesus is calling heroes. God is making heroes whether they want to or not. Are you already a hero? Or is there something holding you back? Is it the fear that you might have to leave everything behind? Do you believe being a hero is only possible if you go on a long perilous journey against your will or if you abandon your family to follow a man in strappy sandals?
Sometimes the most world changing thing we can do is stick around, to stay home, to keep on doing the right thing, the thing right in front of you, even if it’s boring, or frightening, or completely lacking in glamour and prestige. Sometimes staying in relationship with someone or something impossible is absolutely the most heroic thing anyone ever did. Sometimes, it’s letting someone go.
Sometimes the most heroic thing anyone can do is look at the present situation as though it were, in fact, part of the kingdom of God. It’s easy to say the future is going to be better, (or worse), than the present. It’s easy to look at the past, and imagine it could have been something else, it could have been perfect. It is often really difficult to look at the present and say, this is what it is, this is where I am, this is where God is doing great things. Even if we can’t see anything heroic about it.
This is what I think Jesus said to those fishermen. “Leave those fish for people who can only see fish. The kingdom of heaven has more than fish. I know you. I know you can see more than fish. Bring all that you are, all that you can see. It’s going to be more important and more useful than those fish.”
Jesus wasn’t looking for fishermen, because he wasn’t looking to catch some fish. He was and is looking for some visionaries, for some heroes – the kind who want to stay home and the kind who want to fly. He is looking for some people who can see the kingdom of God, and who can show other people, right in this present moment, that the kingdom of God has drawn near. Repent. Believe in the Good News. For the kingdom of God is here.
You talkin’ to me?
15 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
One of my favorite books is Tattoos on the Heart. The author is Fr. Gregory Boyle, who founded Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles to provide a whole lot of life-giving opportunities to gang-involved youth. The book is inspiring and poignant, and so funny in parts it makes you laugh out loud. One of those parts—at least for me—is when Fr. Boyle—whom everyone calls “G”—meets with a young man for an initial intake conversation. It’s just the two of them in G’s simple office and he starts out by asking the young man:
“How old are you?”
The guy answers: “Me?”
“Well, yes, you,” answers G. There’s no one else there.
“Oh, I’m eighteen.”
Then G asks: “Do you have a driver’s license?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
This story of Fr. Boyle trying to start a conversation with this particular homeboy reminds me of today’s story of God trying to start a conversation with Samuel. The difference is that that Samuel knows someone is talking to him, but he doesn’t know who.
Both stories—the one from Tattoos on the Heart and the one from Samuel—capture a thread running through all of our lessons today: We don’t always understand the implications of being in relationship with God, a relationship spelled out so beautifully in Psalm 139. You trace my journeys and my resting places/and are acquainted with all my ways…You yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Nathanael is a good example of someone who doesn’t entirely understand how God is speaking to him, or what it all means. Nathanael is completely captivated by Jesus’ having recognized him from an earlier encounter under a fig tree. There’s more too it than that, Jesus says.
And there’s a lot more I could say about Jesus and Nathanael from this morning’s gospel, but then I would just be avoiding the reading we just heard from the Letter to the Corinthians.
We enter a conversation already in progress, between the good people of Corinth and the Apostle Paul, in which Paul has some choice words for his readers:
The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body, he writes. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shun fornication! Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you….you are not your own.
These were not popular sentiments at the time of Paul’s writing, and I’m guessing they’re not popular sentiments now.
The city of Corinth was known as a licentious place, a bustling seaport full of people trading in money and power. In the city there was a temple dedicated to Asclepius, the ancient Greek God of healing and medicine. But the Corinthian version of this temple had a reputation for functioning more like the spa at an exclusive country club than a temple, and people who frequented it were used to having their own way in style and comfort, meeting their bodily needs at the expense of slaves and prostitutes.
Many of the Christians in Corinth understood that being Christian meant that they could continue to do whatever they pleased with their bodies, because all that mattered was their spirit. Their soul belonged to God, while their body belonged to them, to do with whatever they wished. Right? By no means! Our bodies are members of Christ, and are not our own. Our bodies belong to God because our whole self belongs to God. Remember the psalm? You yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb
For centuries, we have assumed that basically our identity as sexual beings, with physical bodies, is something that we should split off, separate from our lives with God. What Paul says here is that as people who strive to live in union with God with our whole selves—which is the only way to be in union with God—our sexuality is as important as any other aspect of who we are, more important even. The moral teaching here is not about the evils of sex, but rather that our sexual ethics must reflect our relationship with God. The word translated in this passage as body is soma, which actually means the whole self, body and soul. The body is not something we have, but something we are. This is why the Body of Christ is such a rich and multilayered metaphor. When we separate body and soul, we often don’t care for our bodies in the same way as when we see ourselves as body and spirit, body and soul.
When Paul writes about the evils of fornication, and uses the example of union with a prostituted woman, he is not calling her evil, but rather saying that physical relationships that do not include a whole, spiritual union, take us away from relationship with God.
We were bought with a price, Paul says, and God dwells within us. God is present in all of our encounters, not just the ones that we might think are appropriately holy. In order to be the body of Christ, the church, we need to think of all of our relationships as spiritual union, and shun relationships to which we cannot bring our whole selves.
All of our relationships? Really?
I had an experience the other day, a minor thing that I hope helps to illustrate what I’m talking about. I was driving around on the West side where I always get lost, looking for an Office Depot. By the time I found it, I was tired and hungry and disappointed that they didn’t have everything I wanted. I was checking out, paying for the things I did find, and I was really not nice to the guy behind the counter. I know some priests who I just know are nice all the time and I really wish I were one of them.
Then suddenly, in the last 30 or 40 seconds of our transaction, by some miracle of God’s grace I saw myself from the perspective of the guy behind the counter, I thought a little bit about his job, and I thought: I can do better than this. I made eye contact, I smiled, I thanked him for his help, and I told him to have a great day. I’m not saying this to point out how great I am, but because later when I was reflecting on this passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, I kept thinking about that guy at Office Depot and how, as brief as it was, I had a relationship with him, and I needed to bring my whole self to that relationship. Not just my credit card and my crabbiness. When I was able to make that little shift, I could feel for a moment that the Holy Spirit was indeed dwelling within me, just like the Good Book says.
*
Samuel said “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Sometimes I think we are more like the young man in Tattoos of the Heart who says “who, me?” We don’t think that we are candidates for God’s grace, for hope, for union with the Holy. But we are. We are the ones God speaks to. We are the ones God wants. Each one of us, with all of our whole selves.
Random Orchids
09 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Doing Church
Enough of serious posts like sermons and other deep theological reflections. Ponder this random orchid instead. Held by Matt. Matt who is on the altar guild at St. David’s. Matt who lends his wisdom, his grace, his good humor and his height to the deeply spiritual and deeply mundane tasks of preparing our space for worship. Matt who has that great gift so many of us envy, of being deeply serious and deeply unserious at one and the same time. Perhaps it’s the orchid that does that to a person.
Let there be light
08 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
God said, “Let there be light.” God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
This is the season for light.
I was at a diocesan committee meeting last Thursday at another Episcopal Church. Our group likes to think that we do some important work in the diocese, and we have been trying to create a better atmosphere in the room where we meet. So each month someone brings something nice to eat, and we take turns creating some intentional time for opening prayer. Thursday, I brought some candles, thinking that would make the space more conducive to our work. But I forgot the matches. I asked the person in the church office if she had any, and she said oh, no, you’re not allowed to light candles. No candles in the church? I checked in with the priest, who said oh, go ahead, of course you can light candles. Then he asked his parish secretary to call the diocesan insurance administrator. She did, and I learned something new: it’s okay to use candles for liturgical purposes, but not decorative purposes. So now you know.
What followed in our group was a lot of raucous conversation about what passes for liturgical versus decorative when it comes to candles. We concluded that any meal, anywhere, was a liturgical occasion, as was any kind of meeting that includes prayer, and some meetings that don’t include prayer. And so on.
This is the season for light.
At our 12th night party we heard the Epiphany story of the wise men following the star, which miraculously stopped to shine its light over the town where the Christ child lay. Light led them to Light. As we prepared for the party I put out a call for Epiphany poems. What was amazing to me was how dark many of them were, poems about fear and angst and longing.
There’s W.H. Auden’s “Christmas Oratorio”:
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off.
And T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi”:
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
This time of year is never easy to navigate, even for the three wise men. And even though the days are getting longer and Christmas is over and past, this is still a dark time of year.
This is the season for light.
There is perhaps no light brighter, no light more important, than the light I cannot help but imagine accompanied the Spirit descending like a dove at Jesus’ baptism. If light could talk, I think it would say something like “You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Those words mark Jesus’ anointing: he is God’s beloved, God is well pleased with him, and he and God have work to do.
So at our baptism, the light of Christ, the light of God’s Spirit comes into our lives and hopefully we, too, hear the voice of the Holy One saying to each of us: You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased. And, with God, through the example of Jesus and the prompting of the Holy Spirit, we, too, have work to do. In a dark world, we are to bear light and to be light.
What is this work, and how do we do it? How are we to be light? How are we to bear light? The work for which we are anointed is to continue the ministry of Jesus as proclaimers of good news, peacemakers, reconcilers, and healers, as people who break bread together and pray together. In a few minutes, we’ll renew our baptismal covenant, our condensed version of the playbook for being a Christian.
When we follow Jesus through the waters of Baptism, we promise to follow him in very specific ways which we reaffirm each time we renew our baptismal promises. This is how we live out our anointing to God’s mission, our belovedness.
Jesus doesn’t need to be baptized. He does it anyway. He does it in order to lead the way into and through the baptismal life, so that we, too, might see the heavens open, and know that we, too, are God’s beloved.
This is the season for Light.
There’s a beautiful Christmas collect which we didn’t pray this year because the Feast of the Holy Name fell on a Sunday, but it’s worth praying, and it goes like this:
Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives.
This new light is with us whether or not we are faithful at every moment, whether or not we feel enveloped by the darkness of fear or loneliness or cynicism, whether or not we feel God’s presence. We all know what it’s like not to feel God’s presence: when we yell at our kids or think bad thoughts about the person in line at the grocery store or otherwise fail to live up to God’s call to us as followers of Jesus. It makes no difference. We are God’s beloved. As a friend recently wrote to me: light is light.
God said, “Let there be light,” God separated the light from the darkness, and God saw that the light was good.
Jesus, occupy us
26 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
Jesus, come among us and occupy us.
Every year on the Sunday before Christmas, we pray the same opening prayer: Purify our conscience, Almighty God, that your son Jesus, when he comes, will find in us a mansion prepared for himself. This past week I have found myself reflecting a lot on this prayer and I’ve been wondering what it really means to prepare a mansion for Jesus, a mansion in our hearts.
One of my favorite people around here has been heard to say “you know, people in this neighborhood, they might get uncomfortable hearing the word ‘Jesus’ over and over again. Don’t say ‘Jesus’ so much in your sermons.” But Jesus is God walking around as one of us! What’s not to like?
If Christmas isn’t about Jesus, what’s the big deal? Why do we do this to ourselves, the shopping, the decorating, the cleaning, the airports…I thought about roaming through the crowd with a microphone to ask some of you: what’s the big deal about Christmas? Why are you here? Why are you here? What does it mean to you, to come to this drafty old pile of mid-century modern brick on this cold night?
For me, Christmas is a big deal because it’s a celebration of the word made flesh. It is so outrageous, when we really think of it, that God became human and was born in a dark, smelly stable in a little nothing town in the middle of the desert. I love it. The other thing is I love God’s outrageousness in sending Godself to become human in a family, a nuclear family of all things. Why didn’t God come to the synagogue when the wise teachers and leaders were gathered? Why wasn’t God born flesh in the middle of the Roman senate? Or at the very least, in the master bedroom of the rich landowner down the road? Jesus was born into a human family, that most fragile, easily broken unit of our society.
God chose to become human in an earthy, messy, unlikely, untidy place, as a reminder that that’s who we are.
Who we are—with all of our unique messiness—is where God wants to be. Who we are—with all of our messiness—is where God is.
Christmas is truly a Feast of the Incarnation. God’s fleshiness. Our Godliness. My favorite definition of incarnation comes from our friend saint Irenaeus: God became human, that we might become divine.
Some people squirm when they hear this because they think that in order to become divine, we have to behave ourselves a lot better than we have been. But what if that’s not true? What if incarnation—God’s fleshiness—means that we get to encounter God right where we are, tonight, this weekend, next week, last week, last month? What if God’s longing is to find a home in us, exactly as we are? This is the good news of Christmas.
And this good news is for everyone. Think about the most un-divine, ungodly person you can think of. Think about your worst enemy, or the person you envy the most, or some crazy, violent, unkempt stranger that makes you want to cross to the other side of the street. These are the people the grown-up Jesus hung around with, God walking around in the world loving the unlovable, seeing God in the ungodly. The good news of Christmas is that God is born in them, too.
This is the big deal about Christmas: that the word becomes flesh. St. John the Evangelist put it this way: The word became flesh and dwelt among us. My favorite translation of that verse is The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.
What would Jesus find in our neighborhood? Or, if you’re not from around here, what would the Word made flesh find in your neighborhood? And if the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood, would we recognize it? Look around. Look for the most unlikely place in your city for God to be, the most unlikely person to be occupied by God, and think about that place as holy. Think about that person as the home of God’s word made flesh.
Every year at Christmas we sing “Joy to the World.” One of the lines hidden among all of the let heaven and nature sing verses is “Let every heart prepare him room.” Jesus wants to find room in every one of us, to dwell in us, occupy us, transform us, take back our hearts from all the distractions of our lives. If Jesus moved into the neighborhood, would he find empty space in your heart, longing to be filled? If Jesus moved into your neighborhood looking for someone to be born in, maybe someone a little bit untidy, messy, and unlikely, would he find room?
We have much to celebrate at Christmas. Even if your house is a mess or your life is a mess or you know you won’t get the gift you think you really want, or you can’t be with the one you love, there’s good news to be had. Good tidings of great joy. God is coming. God is here.
Jesus, occupy us, dwell in us, give us eyes to see the world as you see it, give us ears to hear the cry of the poor, give us courageous hearts longing to love as you love, Jesus, be born in us.
What is the Longest Night?
19 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in Doing Church
The Longest Night is the eve of the winter solstice, which this year happens at 5:30 am on December 22. The Longest Night is the night before the light starts to return, and the days begin to get longer, as imperceptible as that lengthening may be until sometime in February when we suddenly realize it’s happened. The Longest Night Service is a service that commemorates all of the complexities of the holiday season: darkness, light, joy, loss, nostalgia, hope, sadness, celebration, death, and new life.
Many churches have “Longest Night” or “Blue Mass” services this time of year, and St. David’s is no exception. It’s a place to observe the season in a way that honors loss and sadness. A friend of mine once said about this service:
“it helps me compartmentalize all the sadness that I always feel this time of year for no reason. I come, I light a candle, I cry a little bit, and then I can get on with celebrating Christmas.”
Our personal longest night doesn’t necessarily coincide with the longest night of the year. The longest night you stayed up with a loved one who was dying, or stayed up waiting for a wandering child to call, or stayed up longing for something to be other than it was….The Longest Night service can be a time to remember those long nights, to mark them night with a candle, a song, a prayer, a bite of bread and a sip of wine in memory of the One who comes to us with the slow return of light.
The Longest Night Service is itself not long. It begins at 6 pm on Wednesday, December 21, and ends shortly before 7. We’ll have a place to light a candle, share a photo or another memento, sing, and listen to wonderful music from the Portland Women’s Threshold Choir. If you need a place remember someone you love and miss this time of year, or just to mark the ambiguity of this season, we hope to see you on the Longest Night at 2800 SE Harrison in Portland on Wednesday.
Nothing is impossible with God
18 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
The Rev. P. Joshua Griffin preached on Advent IV this morning.
In the name of God the Creator, Liberator, and Animator of the Universe.
In our reading from Second Samuel, King David finds it unfair that he is to live “in a house of cedar,” while “the ark of God stays in a tent.” As King, David has achieved some sense of stability in his life, some semblance of control, a sense of power, and he feels that the Lord deserves the same manner of comfort.
But God replies: “Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and tabernacle.”
And here it is: the fundamental transcendence, motility, vitality, infinity, irreducibility of God—or the Holy, or the Divine, or Love. Take your pick, none of these words can contain what they refer to. A transcendent universal Love so radical, so mobile, cannot be reduced to words.
The great Anglican poet T.S. Eliot reminds us:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
And yet words are what we have, and stories are one way we communicate the Mystery. This time of year we tell the story of infinity drawing near, of God coming to dwell in history:
In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a tiny town in Galilee, a remote backwater called Nazareth, to a Jewish virgin named Mary, who was engaged to a tradesman, a common laborer, named Joseph.
Gabriel said to her, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you. Do not fear, for you have found favor with God! And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, Jesus, and he will be great, and holy, a servant of Love, ‘the Son of God.’”
But she was afraid, terrified, mystified, and stupefied. “How can this be, for I am a virgin?”
The angel said to her “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Most High will overshadow you…. Oh, and by the way, your cranky old cousin, Elizabeth—the barren one—yeah, she’s pregnant too.”
Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.
These two stories, of King David and of Mary, present us with a paradox. Each reveals a fundamentally different image of God. The first presents a transcendent, wandering God, who cannot be contained by structure or word. In the second, it is announced that this same God will come to dwell in Mary’s womb, housed and held in human flesh.
And so we encounter a fundamental quality, not just of Christian life, but of all human experience. Theologians call this “the coincidence of opposites,” that place and moment when the transcendent collides with the imminent, the infinite with the finite. Too often we whittle down this paradox, yet the spiritual invitation is not to resolve it, but to live within it, to hold it as Mary did.
As God-bearers, each one of us trembles with Mary, even as we say, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” We live in service of an already/not-yet Kingdom, a paradox we feel at every level: in our hearts, in our families, in our parish, in our neighborhoods, in our Church, in our city, in our country, and in our world.
This Advent, as we struggle to make way for the coming of the Lord—the infant King who redeems all our earthly humanity, we might take comfort in the words of the great Trappist monk Thomas Merton, written to a younger monk:
“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on… you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”
The angel said to Mary, “Nothing will be impossible with God.”
The infinity of Love will be enfleshed in the womb of Mary, and will be born in a sordid encampment. Nothing will be impossible with God.
Mourning shall turn to joy, darkness to light, death shall give way to life. All tears shall be wiped away. Nothing is impossible with God.
The lowly are lifted up and the powerful brought down from their thrones. Nothing is impossible with God.
The hungry shall be filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty. Nothing is impossible with God.
Justice and peace shall encompass the earth. Equilibrium shall be achieved. Competition shall be set aside, cooperation shall be the norm. Nothing is impossible with God.
The infinite will collide with the finite, and the impossible shall be rendered possible.
As we labor for God’s Kingdom, as we labor with the earth, in our homes, and in our hearts, may we not fear what we do not understand. May we continue to seek after that which we cannot express —the infinite, uncontainable, unpredictable Love of God.
Amen.
God’s Dream
11 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
Who does Isaiah think he is? Can you imagine walking through town or standing on a street corner saying “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me?” And yet, after all the doom and gloom we’ve been hearing from the prophets the past few weeks, all the doom and gloom that we have been hearing in our own world, we could use a little good news, and Isaiah has it in abundance. I hope that if we have good news to share about God’s promises, we will proclaim it.
If you’ve ever read my office door really thoroughly, past the New Yorker cartoons, you’ll remember that there’s something posted right on the window glass that comes from a friend’s blog post last year. It starts with someone asking him: “What do you understand to be God’s Dream?” He replied: “Well, I don’t think it gets any better than this!” and proceeded to quote the first three verses of Isaiah 61, which we heard this morning.
Just to review, the prophet understands his mission to be
To bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;To provide for those who mourn…
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
God’s dream, then, is a dream of reversal—reversal of our expectations, faint spirits (ours included) lifted up by praise, and the transformation of the world’s economy into God’s economy.
About five hundred years after these words were written, St. Luke attributes to Mary the remarkable song that has come down to us as the Magnificat. And in the Magnificat, Mary the mother of God’s promises says pretty much the same thing that Isaiah said centuries earlier.
God has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
The God whom Mary knows is the God who promises to turn the world’s economy into God’s economy. When I was in England I came across a small book called “Mary the Mother of Socialism.” It’s a collection of essays by a bunch of Anglo-Catholic Socialists—my very favorite kind of Anglo-Catholics, and my favorite kind of socialists—essays on the Magnificat as a manifesto from God about very real redistribution of wealth.
A friend recently said: “using words ‘redistribution of wealth’ together in a sermon can be a career-changing sermon.” We are so afraid to talk about this stuff, and yet this is what Jesus talks about more than anything else! If it occasionally makes us squirm, it may be that we are, in today’s world, the mighty and the rich. But Jesus is not making this up. He gets it from Isaiah and from his own reading of his scriptures, of the world, and of God’s dream.
In the 4th chapter of Luke, Jesus gets up and reads aloud in the synagogue—right there an act of audacious reversal—Jesus reads this passage from Isaiah 61 and says: This is what I’m about. And people responded to him then in the same way they probably responded to Isaiah and would respond to you or me: who the heck does he think he is? Getting up here and saying God has anointed him to bring good news to the poor?
Do you have a favorite passage of scripture that you can point to and say: That’s what I’m talking about?
What does God’s turning the world upside down look like? The deaf hear, the blind receive their sight, the hungry become full. Last week God surprised and overwhelmed us through the Voices Unlimited Choir, a choir made up mostly of people with autism and other disabilities, singing carols and reading lessons with a passion and a clarity that humbled our hearts and made our hearts sing.
Today’s words from Isaiah and from the Song of Mary are our proof-text for what God promises to do in the world, but so is our own life’s experience. We have to look for it, and proclaim it. Last week’s lessons and Carols was one of those experiences. The image of a recently homeless family of five children, whose mother wants only winter coats and a Fred Meyer gift card, receiving the extravagance of response through our giving tree is one of those experiences. The unlikely people who gather in this building week in and week out is a proclamation of God’s reign.
What is your life experience of God turning the world upside down? As we prepare for the great Good News of the angel’s message to Mary, which we’ll hear next Sunday, and of the angels’ announcement to the shepherds, which we’ll hear the week after that, think about what your great good news is. God is coming, God is here.
God’s dream starts with the words of Isaiah, the words of Luke, the words of all the prophets before and since, and with story after story about God’s confounding our expectations and turning the world upside down. The dream continues with us, with our stories and our words. In this season of Good News, can we have the same audacity of Isaiah? Let’s try.
Repeat after me:
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
Because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
To bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And release to the prisoners.
You get the idea. God’s dream is our dream, God’s story is our story, God’s words are our words. God is coming, God is here.
Parallel time: baptism from the inside out
04 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
In accordance with God’s promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.
When I was in elementary school I used to rush home every day in order to get there by 4:00, to watch “Dark Shadows.” For those of you who have never heard of Dark Shadows, or who have heard of it but never watched it, or who used to watch it but have chosen to deny any knowledge of the show whatsoever, it was a genre of soap opera that never quite took off in the pre-Twilight era: a “Horror Soap.” This meant that in addition to the usual stuff of romance and family intrigue, about half the characters were in some way related to the local vampire or werewolf, or had some other macabre and magic powers.
For a while, one of the show’s subplots was something called “Parallel time.” In one wing of the mansion where much of the action took place was a pair of massive oak doors. Sometimes, one would open the doors and find a dark, dusty, empty room. Other times, they would open the doors and find they had entered into another drama entirely. Familiar characters seemed to be dealing with whole new sets of problems, or none at all. As the newcomer began to take all of this in, he or she would realize that this parallel time had been going on all along; it existed alongside of that person’s day-to-day existence, and yet at the same time, once aware of this other world, he or she became part of it.
Incarnation—God’s fleshiness, which we celebrate at Christmas—is all around us in this moment in time. If you walked into our building last Friday afternoon, you would have been greeted by the smells of delicious home-made soup prepared by Food Not Bombs. You would’ve heard children lovely violin music. If you came back Saturday morning, you would’ve smelled more deliciousness coming from the kitchen, as two of our prize-winning bakers were cooking up treats for this afternoon’s party. In the lower level, you would’ve seen people from all walks of life learning to make jewelry in the art studio. This afternoon, the Voices Unlimited Choir, who announce the kingdom of God by welcoming people of all abilities into their midst, will offer a traditional service of Lessons and Carols, and then we’ll all eat and drink and listen to more great music in the St. Nicholas party. God’s fleshiness, in a particular moment in time.
In our Advent worship, in our readings, and in the activities of our own December lives, we are all getting ready for a particular moment in time, the moment described in the story we hear every year on Christmas: the journey to Bethlehem, the overcrowded inn, the swaddling clothes, and the angels’ glorious announcement to the shepherds.
At the same time, we know that the story of the birth of Jesus, which we anticipate throughout Advent, is part of a completely different and eternal story.
John the Baptist knows this. Mark the Evangelist knows this. Mark doesn’t even bother with the shepherds and the swaddling clothes; did you notice that? For Mark, the Good News begins with John’s baptism and moves immediately to the grown-up Jesus.
I will baptize you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
I would like to suggest that in today’s gospel, John the Baptist opens a door onto parallel time. Imagine that we are standing on the threshold.
In one direction, we see John the Baptist appear and proclaim a baptism of repentance. He is there in a specific time and place, as familiar to Mark’s readers, then, and now, as this time and this place is to us. We know what John is wearing and what he’s eating. He’s an earthy, in-your-face, here-and-now kind of guy. We know what scriptures he’s been reading, and we know what he has to offer: baptism in the river Jordan, for the forgiveness of sins. An opportunity for the people of Judea to cleanse themselves and to turn with openness and hope toward the promise of someone much greater than John.
On the other side of the threshold, we see the time that stretches from the prophets to this moment, right here. In one line—I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit—John the Baptist tells the whole story. The story that began in creation moves through the lives of the people of Israel, broken and desperate for the glad tidings we heard from Isaiah. The story has no end: it continues with the One who is coming after John, the One for whom John is only a messenger, the One who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.
We have no record of Jesus ever actually baptizing anybody. So what is baptism with the Holy Spirit?
I would like to suggest that baptism in the spirit is baptism that will change us from the inside out. If John’s baptism with water is a baptism of repentance, of changing our ways in a particular time and place, the baptism of the Holy Spirit brings us into a new relationship with God, always and everywhere. This new relationship exists both within time, here and now, and in the world without end.
By his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus transforms the nature of baptism. It is no longer something we do to signify a change of heart. It is that, but it is more than that. The baptism of Jesus in the Holy Spirit is baptism into who we are. It is baptism into the faith community that shares, through time and beyond time, the whole story.
At the conclusion of the Chronicles of Narnia—another wonderful story of “parallel time”—C.S. Lewis writes about
“the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever, in which each chapter is better than the one before.”
No one ever has read this Great Story. And yet we tell bits and pieces of it every Sunday. We tell the story of God’s presence in history, in the lives and witness of our ancestors in faith. We tell this story in the Holy Eucharist, which is another example of a particular moment in time, bread and wine we can taste and see, which also contains the stuff of eternity for which we cannot even find words.
We are standing on the threshold between this moment, the Second Sunday of Advent, 2011, and the eternal time that the prophets are forever promising us.
Unlike the characters in Dark Shadows, we don’t have to leave one kind of time in order to be present for the other. Baptism in the Holy Spirit means that we can have it all. We can move through our lives, grappling with the day-to-day intrigue of being human. At the same time, we live as participants in that great story that has been going on before time. From both sides of the threshold, let us greet with joy the coming of Jesus.
Choosing God. Choosing Light. Choosing Now.
28 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
The Rev. Deacon Katharine Holland preached this sermon for the First Sunday of Advent.
“. . . we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” [Isaiah 64:8]
“Restore us, O God . . .” [Psalm 80:7a]
As we begin this Advent season, our readings focus on “end times,” when God will return in the form of Christ Jesus; & the history of the world, as we know it, will come to its conclusion. In the mean time, we are charged to “Keep awake,” to be ready for that ultimate reckoning with God.
If you’ve been reading the daily lectionary, you heard the prophet Joel warn of “Multitudes, multitudes, in the valley of decision! For the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision.” [Joel 3:14]. And it is a decision that we are each called upon to make. When faced with this ultimate decision, where do we fall in our beliefs? Have we gained the wisdom to choose God? Have we allowed God to be at work in our lives so that there is no question of where we stand? How much of a force is God in our day to day existence – how malleable have we become in his hands, how ready to give up our own desires for God’s more profound authority?
Choosing God means choosing Light, when all other options lead to darkness. It is only in being open to this God of Light that we allow ourselves to be molded in his image – “to put on the armor of light”, as it says in today’s Collect. We have the invitation in our grasp; but do we choose to accept its consequences, dying to self & putting on Christ?
Choosing God means allowing God to work in us right now, in the present. It’s not something to be put off to a more convenient time – when we’re more ready, less busy, older, more mature, ready to give up some of the worldly pleasures we enjoy; or, hardest of all, letting go of our own feelings of freedom – doing what we want, when we want, & the way we want, with no interference from God. This hope in God’s ultimate presence in our lives comes at a price, & it does not exempt us from acting in the present.
Christian hope lies in the turning over of our lives to God NOW . . . fully, without procrastination, without conditions, believing that the future belongs to God. If we are to have any hope of a future, it is with God & with God’s help, for only God can overcome our failings as they exist in us – personally, socially, economically, & politically. We must be ready to respond, to surrender to God’s grace, & be open to His will, so that the Word can become flesh in us. If we are not acting from this place of union with God, then we act alone from our own ego.
As committed Christians, we are being asked to act, “by faith, in the needy present [but] in light of the fulfilled future” which is yet to be revealed. [Craig Mac Coll 12/1/96] We can then act in harmony with God, to bring hope to a world mired in chaos & despair.
As one commentator observed, “When all the devices & desires of our hearts have been exhausted, & there is nothing more we can do – as persons, as communities, as nations, as a world – what is left? Watching & waiting. Yet many of us find waiting & watching difficult in our busy, activity-oriented lives. We like to keep busy. We like to do. We like to get on with it. Because, perhaps, if we stop to wait or to watch, we might discover the loneliness & emptiness that lie below the surface of our activity . . .
And that is the first step in Advent – the honest discovery inherent in waiting & acknowledging our need for God’s coming.” ["Synthesis", 11/30/08]
Advent is about our yearning for God & our seeking to find fulfillment for that yearning. It “is about waiting. About wondering. And yes – it is about fear, the fear that the way will be lost. And in that fear, Advent is also about hope.” [Richard J. Fairchild] Because “waiting,” says Henri Houwen, “allows us to be people who can live in a very chaotic world & survive spiritually.” [Henri Nouwen, "Watch for the Light"] We can make a choice to detach ourselves from all the busy-ness & hectic build-up to the holiday & instead learn to quiet ourselves – to watch, to ponder & to live into what is unseen, but infinitely more valuable in the end. “No wonder”, one author speculates, “the ambience of Advent – in contrast to the noisy agitation of the Holiday Season – is one of hushed wakefulness.” ["Synthesis", 11/30/08] Stay awake! Be alert to the movement of God in your life! And accept the challenge of living fully in each moment, in God’s present & into God’s future – for it is – all of it – in God’s hands & waiting – spread like a banquet – for our taking.
In closing, I’d like to share a prayer I came across from Richard John Neuhaus:
“Father in heaven,
you came to earth in the person of your Son, Jesus Christ.
As the coming of your Spirit upon Mary
inspired her to welcome the One who is her child and her lord,
so also open our eyes to the gift already given.
Forgive us our restless searching for your presence
according to our expectations . . .
Fill our every moment
with his threefold advent.
As then he came
and now he comes
and will one day come again,
awaken us to the then & now & one day
of his presence in this present moment.
As we put on the Lord Jesus Christ,
may all our time be clothed by eternity
until we find ourselves at last
in the home you have prepared for seekers & searchers
who, in our seeking & searching,
were hopelessly lost.
Give us the grace to surrender to being found.
This we ask in the name above every name, the name of Jesus Christ.
Amen. Let it be.”
