When Is It Time For Love To Be Born?

“When is the time for love to be born?”

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it… The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” John 1

The presents are all open, the wrapping paper bagged up and put in the trash. The pageants have come and gone, the crowds on Christmas Eve are come and gone. The days of gift returns and post-holiday bargains underway.  

Now we get John’s version of what we nostalgically refer to as “The Christmas Story.” John’s take is very different from Luke and Matthew.  No angels, no shepherds, no star, no manger, no Bethlehem, no Joseph, not even a mention of Mary!

With three words John links Christmas with the time before time itself, the time before creation begins: In the beginning… The very first words of Holy Scripture. The foundation of the world, of the universe itself. Words about a Word. The Word. This Word we are told “was God.” Christmas for John is the birth of the universe!

Which is fitting since it is this Word who spoke the word, “Light!” And things came to be. All things. As John tells us, not one thing came into being that did not come through the Word.

All speculation about big-bangs and the like aside, John’s Christmas Story is a much quieter affair. No crowds of people flooding the streets of Bethlehem for the census. No Choirs of Angels, crowds of shepherds, animals in the manger and so on. All we have is this poetry of John’s, God and God’s Word. But of course, that is all we really need.

Like the First Sunday after Christmas itself, things are quieter. As it should be it seems. To contemplate the Word through which all things came to be and continue to come to be ought to leave us breathless. Awe struck. Like that old priest Zechariah, father of John who was not the light; Zechariah who could not speak until John who would be Baptist was born.  

Let all the earth keep silence before him. Before the Word which is also the true light which enlightens all people. This Word who is coming into the world enlightens not some people, not a lot of people, but all people. Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew, Daoist, Agnostic, Atheist. All people.

This is why we seek and serve Christ in all persons as we promise in our baptism. Because the Word who enlightens us enlightens everyone, everywhere, for all time and forever. Ever since the beginning. Christ the Word is in all things. All things. This is big news, even if it is less adorable than children running up and down the aisles in their parent’s old bathrobes!

The even bigger news, of course, is that the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us. The word “dwell” in the Greek means something like to pitch one’s tent. Like the tent in which the Ark of God’s Covenant travelled with Israel from Egypt to the land of Promise. The Word prefers a tent to live among us, rather than a house or temple. Tents are rather portable and temporary structures. I have always imagined that this means whenever we pick up and move, the Word picks up his tent stakes and moves with us. Our God is a nimble and mobile God. He promises to be with us always. This means he is always nearby in his tent.

In many respects we are still a nomadic people, transient, racing from pillar to post in fossil-fueled vehicles. Fossils that go almost back to the time of “in the beginning” keep us on the move. Fascinating this stuff that God speaks into being by saying, “Let there be…”

As John seeks to tell this tale of Love come down to dwell amongst us all he can do is write poetry.  A Hymn to the Word. The Word which is life, light and love. It is John’s attempt to get it just right. John’s attempt to give us a glimpse of the Word’s very essence.

A poet of our own time also struggled to get it just right. Madeliene L’Engle in her book Winter Song offers another vision of Christmas. She wonders just how this Word would choose to pitch his tent among us in a world in which words like evil, hate, enmity, fear, aggression, war, nuclear weapons, cloning, murder, and darkness seem to be the daily coin of the realm.

This is no time for a child to be born

With the earth betrayed by war and hate

And nova lighting the sky to warn

That time runs out and sun burns late.

That was no time for a child to be born,

In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;

Honor and truth were trampled by scorn –

Yet here did the Saviour make his home.

When is the time for love to be born?

The inn is full on the planet earth,

And by greed and pride the sky is torn –

Yet, love still takes the risk at birth.

If we close our eyes and listen to the poets, John and L’Engle, we can catch a glimpse of the light that shines in the darkness and which the darkness has not overcome. We can catch a glimpse of the Word pitching his tent to dwell among us as risky and unlikely as that seems.

Just a glimpse is all that we need. That is all that we are given. Glimpses. No one has ever seen God. Only the Word, God’s only Son. Like Father, like Son – the Son who is close to the Father’s heart. The Son who we pray will shine in our hearts and in our lives, in all we do and say. Just a glimpse is all we get. But it is enough. More than enough to dispel a little of our present darkness and draw us ever closer to the light, the true light, which even now is coming into the world.

It is the light of all people. Everyone, everywhere. And for this may we sit quietly in the stillness of John’s cosmic nativity and give thanks. Amen. 

The Ghosts of Christmas!

The Ghosts of Christmas

“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now

and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six….”

I return to these words of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales every year at this time. Or, at least I mean too. I at least take the book out. It’s because my mother sent me the little blue New Directions paper edition for Christmas 1975 since I was half a continent away from home, as I was most years back then. I wasn’t yet a priest in the church in 1975, but rather was off playing music. Usually in Maine where it really does begin to look a lot like Christmas. My bandmates and I would sometimes stay at a farm near Winslow and China, Maine, with no electricity, no running water, no telephone. Just the honking goose and ramming sheep in the barnyard, goats in the barn, and the good company of the woman who lived there with her daughters after taking off in an old school bus from Virginia and just kept driving until they found that place. A hand painted sign out front read, “Da Farm,” and the woman, who sometimes made the news in Waterville, was oft times simply referred to as the Winslow Woman!

One year she arranged for us to play at the Augusta County Jail on Christmas Eve. My bandmates played guitars, banjo and mandolin while I made do with washboard and spoons. The inmates sang along and were among the most appreciative audience we ever played for these past 50 years we have been playing. When I think back on it now after years of preaching and teaching, it must have been something like this for Saint Paul and his jail-mates who refused to give in to their imprisonment, would pray and sing songs, so moving that the jailers would join in! One time an earthquake sprung the jail doors open, but Paul did not leave. He didn’t want the Roman jailers to get in trouble. Nothing quite like that happened in Augusta that night, but it sure did feel like Christmas with the men who were being held there.

John Shea tells the story of an old priest who had one Christmas Eve sermon. Every year, people flocked to hear it again. He would seem to be talking to himself about the birth of Christ. He began softly, a low rumble like that of the distant trains I hear outside my bedroom window late at night. But this train was in the church. People had to lean forward just to hear him at first until soon he would bellow, “The wood of the crib is the wood of the cross!” A seemingly odd thing to say on the night of the child’s birth, which took place in a place not unlike Da Farm in Winslow, Maine. His mother and father certainly would not have been thinking of the seemingly tragic end of his life on a Roman cross. No doubt they were just happy to be together. And now – most of all – they were a threesome. At least for the next 30 years or so. And all these strange visitors. Shepherds of all things! Not just shepherds, but shepherds with tales of angels singing and a message about the child. And just like that they were gone and Mary and Joseph and the child were a threesome again.

Strange of the old priest to imply that this child of whom angels sing was born to die. But that would be the point of the story we come to rehearse year in and year out. God in this child comes to live among us as one of us to shed a little light into the darkness of this world. At the Council of Nicea, so the story goes, when Arius declared that Jesus was not divine, St. Nicholas, they say, swept across the room and slapped him. For that outburst Nicholas was put in jail until Mary appeared in his cell and freed him, for Mary knows the nature of the son she bore, and she was not going to let his defender languish in jail! In the less-fun world of theology, Mary was given the title “Theotokos,” or “God Bearer”! Thus, theology and legend combine to hold together the Christian rhetoric of Incarnation.

That same council gave us the words that “he suffered, died and was buried.” We repeat them every Sunday. That is, Christ’s human nature was not a sham. Unlike the Gnostics who would say that at the first moment of pain and suffering he magically left his body, climbed up to heaven to watch and laugh at his tormentors, we believe in his full humanity. Like each and every one of us, he was born, he lived and he died. He cried out in pain on the cross as any of us would. His full humanity is demonstrated by the very fact that he freely faced what we steadfastly try to avoid – suffering and death. The wood of the crib is the wood of the cross.

The old priest was on to something, for as in Dickens’ tale, Christmas time is when the dead seem to return – though usually friendlier than those who take after Old Scrooge. I have found myself thinking of Christmas nights at my Grandma and Grandpa Cooper’s house in Maywood. Roy Cooper had been something of a giant in his day, working in Mr. Wrigley’s downtown Chicago bank. One of his jobs was to oversee the cash take at Wrigley field. He would take my mother to the games. He would just sidle up to a side door, knock and say “Tell them it’s Roy,” and they would go right in. But on Christmas nights that I recall he was greatly reduced by the effects of his Parkinson’s, sitting in his armchair overseeing the family opening presents around the living room. His sister, my Great Aunt Grace, would always give us “men” in the family a stick of Old Spice deodorant and after-shave! I still have to keep some in my medicine chest if only to remember her and her 50 years at Marshall Field’s flagship store. What I remember most about Roy is that he always insisted on getting the parson’s-nose off the turkey, and that no matter how advanced his disease was, he always smiled. Something we could all do well to do – smile that is!

The wood of the crib is the wood of the cross. He was born to die. Those of us who know the rest of the story know that neither the crib nor the cross could contain him. Herod sent his troops to kill all the infants around Bethlehem two years-old and younger, his entire cohort! Yet, ironically, he survives, hiding in Egypt of all places. And he says, “I am with you always to the end of the age!” This not only means he is always with us, but that we cannot get rid of him. As John Donne once preached on Christmas day: ‘His birth and his death were but one continuall act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day.” The miracle of the Incarnation means to shout out: I am there. I am with you. I am your life. You are my beloved. I was born to die and rise again. Just like all those who return to be with us on Christmas Eve. It turns out that “born to die” translates into “accompanied by love.” Born to die proclaims the non-abandoning presence of God. God does not let go of the human person – not ours and not his own!

“Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night,” concludes Dylan Thomas. “I turned the gas down. I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

God bless us, every one!

Let it be....

Let it be, let it be

In Second Samuel chapter 7 there is a marvelous little tale. A morality play, if you will, for those who ascend to places of power. It begins with David, once a shepherd, now a king, talking to his prophet Nathan: I live in a house of cedar, says David. Yet, the ark of God stays in a tent. To which Nathan simply replies, one imagines with a sigh, “Sure thing, do all that you have in mind.”

But, says the text, that same night the Lord YHWH Ha Shem comes to Nathan and says: Go tell my servant David, “Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought you and your people up out of Egypt to this day! I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. And wherever we moved about together did I ever once say, Why have you not built me a house?

Now also say to David, Enough about me! I took you from the pasture to be king. I have been with you all the way. I have cut off all your enemies. I will appoint a place for my people to live and be disturbed no more. I appoint leaders for your people. And moreover, I will make you a house! Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever. By me!

It is one of the greatest humbling speeches of all time. David wants to perform a self-serving act of piety and political propaganda: Look at me. I built God a house. YHWH HaShem will have nothing to do with it and reminds David just who appointed and anointed him king in the first place. God says I will make you a house! The house David gets is a dynasty that will continue through to Jesus “of the house of David.” That is, this is where the story of the good news of Jesus Christ begins. Which goes far to explaining Jesus’ own humility as God made man. God makes himself small so as to enter into our world to shed some light on our ever-present darkness.

Jump forward some 800 or 900 years and we read in Luke 1: 26-38 that an angel, Gabriel appears to a young maid in Nazareth to proclaim some astounding news. We are told the young woman is betrothed to a man name Joseph who is “of the house of David.”

“Greetings, favored one! God’s grace is upon you!” The young woman, Mary, after Miriam, the sister of Moses who led the sisters in dancing and singing their way out of Egypt, is perplexed. She ponders these words. Mary, it seems, is a contemplative at a young age.

Then comes the most oft repeated angelic announcement, “Do not be afraid.” Which of course means that any right-thinking person ought to be afraid of what’s coming next! “You will conceive a child, a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David! His kingdom will have no end!”

How can this be, she exclaims! And rightfully so, for she has yet to know a man, any man. Look, says Gabe, nothing is impossible with God. Your relative Elizabeth has been barren all these years and yet she is already six months with child! In her old age no less! The Holy Spirit will go to work along with the Most High, and voila! Jesus shall be born!

Then Mary becomes a poet, a contemplative, and an active participant in God’s will when she says, “Let it be.” Make no mistake, these words, Let It Be, are anything but passive acceptance of her future. The ancient Chinese have a notion called wu wei (woo-way). It means something like, “doing not doing.” Which to our Western ears sounds like doing nothing. Which is to miss the careful construction, “DOING not doing.” Which means we are still doing something. But like water wanders where it will, working its way around or over anything in its way, wu wei signifies doing, as Mary says, whatever accords with God’s Word! Not according to our design as David wanted to do in building God a house. Mary knows God never asked for a house. And her son will never have a house.

As the Winter Olympics are coming up, we will hear of athletes who will ski a perfect slalom downhill as being “in the zone.” Wu Wei means being in the zone of the Dao, which biblically speaking means “in the God zone.” Were David in the zone, were David to “let it be,” he would not propose doing what God has not asked him to do. Wu Wei, Doing not doing, let it be. These are all ways of helping us to let go of what we think we know and allow God to keep us in the zone.

Anyone who has had an experience like Mary’s know what it is like. Years ago I was a musician. I once stood in Kroch’s and Brentano’s bookstore in Oak Park, IL. I was reading a few words in a book by Thomas Merton, On Solitude. Merton writes that solitude is like the wind whispering through the tree tops, or a light rain upon the hills. Suddenly I found myself standing on a beach with wave after wave rolling in and over me. Between each wave a voice said, “It is time for you to go to seminary.” Over and over, the waves and the voice for I don’t know how long. The cash register rang! Suddenly I was back in Kroch’s and Brentano’s. How can this be, I thought? I told my friend Bill whose father was a priest. He said, “You better talk to my father!” I did. I let it be. Four years later the Right Reverend James Winchester Montgomery was placing his hands on my head in the Cathedral Church of Saint James, in Chicago, and I was made a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek – Melchizedek who is the very epitome of “let it be” and wu wei as he rides in to serve Abraham bread and wine and then rides off never to be seen again.

Let it be. After some hemming and hawing I let it be, and here I am. It took a lot of hard work, it wasn’t easy, but my life was changed. It’s no coincidence that near the end of The Beatles phenomenal ride in the world of popular music that Lennon and McCartney would write:

When I find myself in times of trouble

Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom

Let it be, let it be

Mary and her child would know plenty about times of trouble. And yet, they consistently let it be. Let it be with me according to your word. It is a wisdom as old as the Dao itself, which is to say the Logos, the Word that was with God and that is God in the beginning. The wisdom is in the words, whether they be “doing not doing,” or “let it be.” We need to listen to the ancient wisdom and know, all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well. With God, nothing is impossible!

How Do We Walk?

How Do We Walk?

“In poetry we can do things not permitted by logic or reason,” writes Walter Brueggemann. “Poetry will open the world beyond reason. Poetry will give access to contradictions and tensions that logic must deny. Poetry will not only remember but also propose and conjure and wonder and imagine and foretell.” [Devotions for Advent, Celebrating Abundance, p 14]

When times are tough, Jews write poetry. Isaiah is a Jewish poet. A voice, says Isaiah, declares: In the wilderness imagine a highway, straight, level, the hills made low, the valleys lifted up so as to make the journey home direct, safe, and swift [Is 40: 1-11]. Wilderness is another word, a metaphor, for exile or captivity. The people are displaced in Babylon, a long way from Jerusalem. The world is suddenly and frighteningly unfamiliar. Life has been disrupted. Yet, the poet imagines that there is a way out, if only we can imagine it and prepare for it!

A herald of good tidings, good news, proclaims the word that the God of the Exodus “comes with great might…He will feed his flock, He will gather his lambs and gently but swiftly lead them home again. The Hebrew word for this herald is mabasar, in Greek evangelion.

We are meant to notice that the word for this herald, this voice, is used by the Gospel of Mark at the very outset, in the very first sentence: The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The beginning of the ev-angel-ion. Isaiah used it in the wilderness of Babylon for his imagined herald. Thank goodness for my high school homeroom teacher Mr. Baker and his Etymology course!  The Greek prefix ev, or eu, means good, angel means message or messenger, all of which we translate as “good news;” which in turn in old English becomes “god-spell,” or “gospel.”

Mark chooses this word carefully, for in the Roman Empire evangelion referred to a messenger from the Emperor announcing the “good news” that new territory and peoples had been captured by the Empire. Evangelion was, in essence, Roman Propaganda! Courageously Mark now turns the word in its current first century usage on its head to proclaim the coming arrival of the one who will strike blows against the empire – one Jesus Christ, who incidentally is the Son of God; the God of the Exodus, the God who motivated Cyrus of Persia [modern day Iran] to lead the people on the superhighway back to Jerusalem. Evangelion is now to be Godly propaganda!

Notice what a bold move Mark makes. Co-opting the Emperor’s chosen method of communicating news of his recent conquests to announce that there is coming a new authority – an authority that will energize us to defy the machinations of the Empire and return to “the way of the Lord.”

John picks up where Isaiah leaves off, and even borrows, with some changes, Isaiah’s poem. As John has it, Isaiah’s voice itself is now “in the wilderness.” And all the people of Judea and Jerusalem head out into the wilderness to hear the voice. And John is that voice. “Prepare the way of the Lord!”

“The Way.” The word means “good path,” a way of expressing the Hebrew halakha, which in turn means “how one walks.” Gustav Mahler, the composer, was a rock star in Vienna! He was the Mick Jagger of his day and age. Stories are told that people would follow behind him on the streets of Vienna and try to walk the way Mahler walks.

How do we walk? What is the way of our walking? That’s what John is talking about. This is what Advent is all about – walking in the way of the Lord. Mark declares that this is the beginning – a word meant to recall the very first words of the Bible, “In the beginning God creates…” Attending to our way of walking is a new beginning to things. The old ways of walking are not working. John says the command words are “repent” and “forgive.” To turn our lives around by walking and talking forgiveness. Do we walk in the way of the Empire? Or, in the Way of the Lord.

The first Christians were not called Christians at all. They were called the People of the Way. The way of walking like Jesus. Which was utterly unlike the ways in which the Romans walked. To repent means to recognize that we are already “in the wilderness” with John. We need to go down to the river and be washed. To let go of the ways of the Empire and to return to the ways of The Lord. This is as true today as it was back then.

It calls for an enormous public works project say Isaiah and John! Look at the highway projects, the reduced lanes, the reduced speed limits, the earth movers, the enormous effort necessary to make a highway straight and level. Don’t curse the highway projects. When you are stopped in a long line of cars waiting for the sign-holder to turn the sign from STOP to SLOW, remember what Isaiah and John proclaim – Prepare the way of the Lord. In this case, prepare a place within ourselves and within our community, our nation, the world, a landing strip if you will, for the Lord to come and once again dwell among us. For debts to be relieved, prisoners released, bind up the brokenhearted, comfort those who mourn, rebuild the ruins and devastations, and repair our ruined cities. It’s a big project Isaiah sees necessary to repair the world.

Isaiah and John, timeless poets of God’s Word, remind us that Advent is a time of hoping, receiving energy and resolve for the mission ahead. The mission is tough, but our God is not hidden, not indifferent and not powerless. And we are God’s people, God’s beloved community. We will once again escape the clutches of the Empire and walk in the way of the Lord! 

The Mountain and the Cathedral

A Parable For Johnny B

Our story begins, once upon a time, in an ancient and far away country, when there were no towns, no cities, but only small tribes and caravans of people living on the land, wandering from place to place looking for vegetation to feed their sheep and goats, there was a sacred mountain.

When people climbed to the top of the sacred mountain they would feel the presence of God who would say,  “Love the One God who loves and cares for you always, and always care for one another, especially the others, those who are poor and have no families, widows, orphans and strangers in the land.”

And the people would leave the sacred mountain and remember to care for others the way the One God who loved them cared for them. Throughout the years turning into ages people would come and go to the top of the sacred mountain and return with the message – to love the One God who loves them, and to care for one another, especially the others, those beyond the tribe.

As they would leave the sacred mountain many would place a stone there as a reminder that this is where they heard the message from God. Many also came who had not heard from God themselves, but had heard the stories of those who had. They too would leave a stone to commemorate that sacred place and the remarkable stories they had heard about those who had heard the voice of God. One stone was placed on top of another until over time a magnificent Cathedral was built upon the top of the sacred mountain where God’s presence could be found and God’s voice could be heard.

People came from all over to the Cathedral, knowing that something important and wonderful and true was there. They would pay their respects, listen to the stories, praise the name of God and experience God’s love and care for them, and for all people, especially the others, those who are poor and have no families, widows, orphans and strangers in the land. Each one would leave a stone and carry the message to all to whom they were sent.

Over the years more and more people came and left stones one atop the other, until a great city was built around the Cathedral and all over the mountain, with long, winding, narrow streets, lined with homes, shops, fountains and plazas. People who came to the mountain would need to stop and ask the way to the Cathedral so as not to get lost in the back streets of the city. Each one left a stone.

The years continued to roll by, people coming and going, each leaving a stone until a great wall was built around the city with majestic gates on four sides. People now would have to find a gate they would be allowed to enter. The gates were sometimes open and sometimes closed. For many, even those who lived in the city, the top of the sacred mountain became difficult to find now that the whole mountain was covered with so many many stones to remember the message heard at the top of the mountain for so many years.

The streets were crowded and narrow and winding. There was so much noise and activity throughout the city, that soon no one could hear the directions to find their way to the top of the sacred mountain where God’s presence would remind them to love the God who loves and cares for you, and to care for one another, all others, especially those beyond the walls of the city.

Far away, beyond the gates of the city, far beyond its walls, was a man, lonely in the wilderness. A voice crying in the wilderness. Above the crowded streets, above the noise of the city, above the very top of the Cathedral towers his voice could be heard soaring on the wind. So loud and lovely and lonely came the cry from the wilderness, calling people to come to the banks of the river.

First one, then another went beyond the gates of the city and followed the sound of that voice, the voice so loud and lonely floating on the winds, like music in the sky. As they came upon the man lonely in the wilderness they could hear his cry: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight the roadways, make the way smooth, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

Soon more and more people came out of the city into the wilderness, following the voice carried on the wind, until everyone, all those inside and outside the gates of the city were there with the man lonely in the wilderness. And the people all joined in his cry: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight the roadways, make the way smooth, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” All their voices together were carried on the winds to the four corners of the earth.

Then the man lonely in the wilderness led them to the banks of a river and invited them all to bathe in the waters – the waters their ancestors had crossed so many many ages ago. As they bathed in the river, cleansing themselves, renewing themselves, he said to them, “Remember, remember, our God also speaks to us in these sacred waters. Remember, remember what he has said, ‘Love the One God who loves you and cares for you, and always care for one another, especially the others those who are poor, have no families, widows, orphans and strangers in the land.’ This is how we prepare The Way of the Lord. This is The Way of the Lord!

"And, oh yes!  Another one is coming who will lead us all the way back to the top of the mountain. Yes, you will remember, remember, remember today, but The One who is coming will show us The Way. We have nowhere to look and nowhere to go. He will tell us that the Cathedral and the top of the mountain is here, in the midst of us, wherever we are as a community of his people.  Together.  All of us.  Including the others beyond the community. Especially the others.  Here in our midst, wherever we are, God's presence, God's voice, God's message does dwell.  Remember, remember, remember today, the one who shall come will show us the Way."

So it was, the beginning of our story. And so it is today. When you listen far above the crowds and noise, a voice can still be heard floating on the winds, beyond the gates of the city, above the tops of the highest cathedral, calling to us, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight the roadways, make the way smooth, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” Remember, remember, remember today, the one who shall come will show us The Way.

Amen.       

Stay awake, don't close your eyes...

Advent 1 – Keep Alert, Keep Awake, Keep Awake

Stay awake, don't rest your head

Don't lie down upon your bed

While the moon drifts in the skies

Stay awake, don't close your eyes

Though the world is fast asleep

Though your pillow's soft and deep

You're not sleepy as you seem

Stay awake, don't nod and dream

Stay awake, don't nod and dream

Words and music:Richard Sherman, Robert Sherman

This song by Mary Poppins could very well sum up the Advent message: Stay Awake!

In part, because Advent begins on a note of despair. Isaiah sounds the alarm: We implore you, O God, to intervene, to once again come among us. The people are captive in Babylon, or in Jesus’ day, under the iron yoke of Rome. It’s our fault, proclaims the prophet.  We are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. We need you here and now! [Isaiah 64:1-9]

In other words, the world is at the ends of its rope, and we realize all our self-help and so-called success and progress has not and cannot save us. We are to be those who stay awake and alert waiting, hoping, for God to intervene as we know he has in the past.

Isaiah’s final plea in verses 8-9 offers a clever argument: You made us. We belong to you. You cannot disown us, even though we often have disowned you. So, tear open the heavens! Come down! Make the mountains quake as when fire kindles wood and the fire causes water to boil! Make your name known to your adversaries so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

Meanwhile, Paul, an apostle to us, the Gentiles, affirms to the church in Corinth [1 Corinthians 1: 1-3-9] that we now live between two Advents: God has come down in Christ Jesus. The heavens have been torn open for the Divine Voice to declare, “You are my Beloved – with you I am well pleased!” A dove alights on Jesus in the River Jordan. He then spends his lifetime among us making God’s name known to his adversaries. The nations tremble, Rome shudders, and nails him to a cross to try and put a stop to his proclamation that God is with you! God is faithful!

Further, says Paul, that’s not the end of the story. God’s gifts to us are more than sufficient for this in-between time as we await his second Advent. God will come again. Meanwhile, it is time to demonstrate unity in community for we are in a time of transition – a time of uncertainty and ambiguity. Therefore, there is no time for passivity or selfish pursuits. Rather, exercise your God-given gifts for the cause and benefit of the larger community. You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait.

Wake up! Keep alert! Proclaims Jesus in the Apocalyptic thirteenth chapter of Mark (24-37)!

Stringing together quotations and images from Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah and others he offers healing balm.  Learn from the fig tree! Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. Despite the Temple lying in ruins, this is not the end.

Pay special-careful attention: “But about the day or hour no one knows! Neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware! Keep alert!” Many make claims to know:  Political, economic, social and ecological claims of the impending end of times are made over and over again. Remember! Only God knows, says Jesus. Don’t forget that. Stay alert!

Stay alert! Stay awake, sleepy head. You’re not as sleepy as you seem. Stay awake, don’t nod and dream. Don’t listen to those who say they know the time and place! Wait upon our true Master’s return. Meanwhile, use the gifts that have been given to us to heal the world!

There are always those who will mislead us in this season of watching and waiting. The merchants of gloom shall not prevail. Advent preparation does not involve shopping, consuming, and acquiring more stuff.  Instead, says Jesus, it is time to remember, to know, that God is with us. Time itself is in God’s hands. He will not leave us alone. He will not leave us without Hope! We will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory! He is not talking about destruction. He is speaking of construction – the building up of a new, faithful, just and merciful society!

Walter Brueggemann writes, “Advent proclaims that God will act in us, through us and beyond us, more than we can imagine because newness is on its way!” Stay Awake, sleepy heads! This is not the end, but just the beginning!  Though the world is fast asleep to these truths, be those who remain alert, awake and engaged! [Celebrating Abundance – Devotions for Advent, p4-5]

Living God, visit us in this season of Advent with your Holy Spirit that we may do those things you have gifted us to do, kingdom things we did not know we had in us – neighbor things, things; that reconcile and heal; things that build up, not things that tear down and divide. May you act in us, through us and beyond us, more than we can ever imagine! Newness is on its way among us! Help us to stay awake to Advent truths! Help us to embrace and live into the newness, your newness, the newness of unity and love for all. Amen.