Advent 1: When You Gonna Wake Up

Today, the First Sunday of Advent, we pray for God to “give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life…” Now! Right now, please! Which is echoed in the 64^th chapter of Isaiah: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—” Now! Right now! And as the challenging apocalyptic chapter 13 of Mark opens up, Jesus and the disciples are leaving the Temple. The four first disciples, Andrew, Peter, James and John are gushing at the how large, and powerful, and incredible it all is, having lived up north in Galilee where as fishermen they had never seen such a thing! Jesus tells them that soon it will just be a burning pile of rubble. Sun and Moon shall be darkened and stars will fall from the sky. When they walk across the valley to the Mount of Olives and look down upon the majesty of Jerusalem with the Temple majestically standing above everything, they ask, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” Because they want to know Now! After Jesus speaks of persecutions and suffering and destruction, he finally allows that no one, not even Jesus, knows when it will all come down. Only his Father knows. Given the number of crazy Christians who attempt to tell us when the Day of the Lord will come, beginning with the Millerites right up to the present day, you would think none of them had ever read chapter 13 at all! Wake up!

 

Which is just what Jesus says twice in the final verses of the chapter. Keep Awake! And if you didn’t hear me the first time: Keep Awake! Here endeth the chapter. These are the final public words he speaks in Mark. From here on out it is the arrest, the trial, the crucifixion and burial.

 

The late Anthony DeMello, Jesuit priest and psychologist tells us, “Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they have children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and beauty of this thing that we call human existence. You know, all mystics – Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, all traditions – no matter what religion, are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well.” [Awareness, Doubleday, 1990, p 5]

 

DeMello goes on to tell the story of a father who knocks on his son’s door. “Jaime, wake up,” he says. “I don’t want to get up, Papa,” Jaime replies. The father shouts, “You have to get up and go to school!” Jaime says, “I don’t want to go to school.” “Why not,” asks the father. “Three reasons,” says Jaime. “First, because it’s so dull; second, the kids tease me; and third, I hate school.” And the father says, “I’ll give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it is your duty; second, because you are forty-five years old; and third, because you are the headmaster.” Wake up! Wake Up! You’ve grown up. Stop playing with your toys. Most of us, writes DeMello, find waking up unpleasant. We are nice and warm in bed. Nice and cozy in our understanding of life as we see it. It’s irritating to be woken up. None of us want to be wakened out of our dreams to face reality.  [Ibid]

 

Jesus knows this. He knows that his disciples can’t wait for God to tear open the heavens and come down to shake up things the way they want it to be. But just look around you, says Jesus. By the time this version of Mark’s gospel was finalized, the Temple and all of Jerusalem had been burned to the ground by the Romans. Yet, there is more to see all around us than the chaos and destruction. There is more to life than crisis, competition and polarization. Wake up and keep awake. Keep awake, he says to all of us. All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well!

 

Don’t wait around. Don’t listen to those who tell us when the end will come. Or, when I will return. Don’t listen to those who claim to know. Cast away the works of darkness now. Put on the armor of light, now! Wake up and stay awake, now!

 

It was only last week that that we heard the last public words of Jesus in Matthew. Yet, somehow we fail to see the connection. That’s where he says if you want to see me look into the eyes of those who hunger and thirst, those who are naked or in prison. Look into the eyes of the stranger and welcome him or her. Love your neighbor. Love your enemies. That’s where I am now, always and forever. As you serve them you are serving me.

 

Every Tuesday at noon we pray, “It is in the depths of life that we find you, at the heart of this moment, at the center of our soul, deep in the earth and its eternal stirrings…May we know that we are of You, may we know that we are in You, may we know that we are one with You, together one…open us to wonder, strengthen us for love, humble us with gratitude, that we may find ourselves in one another, that we may lose ourselves in gladness, that we may give ourselves to peace.” [Praying With The Earth, John Philip Newell, pp 18&20]

 

What I believe Jesus is truly getting at is that we can sleepwalk through life allowing, even choosing, to be distracted by lesser things that make us anxious, fearful and angry. We can be distracted by the things that are falling apart. Or, we can wake up and strengthen the things that endure, things that are eternal like wonder, humility, gratitude, love and gladness.

 

Waking up means knowing we are of God.

Waking up means knowing we are in God.

Waking up means knowing we are one with God.

Together one.

 

Waking up means knowing that the answer to a life lived with and in God has no “When?”

Life with God in Christ is Now. Always. Forever Now. In the people we meet. In the people we do not want to meet. To avoid certain people not like ourselves, we are avoiding yet another opportunity to serve Christ in them. To learn something new about the world and about ourselves. Another opportunity to know God is with us and with them; in us and in them; we in him and they in him. Another chance to know all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well. If only we will wake up and keep awake. Keep awake! Here! Now! Always! Amen. It is so. It is truth. 

Like The Loon We Are

 

Like The Loon We Are

 

"For I have seen the face of God, and yet my life is preserved."

-Genesis 32:30

 

to sit and watch the mist rise off the surface of the cove,

listening for the call of the loon -

the loon

      who glides silently across the surface

and suddenly without notice dives

                                              searching for the evening's buffet

able to remain below the surface

    for extended periods of time

        only to pop up somewhere else,

gliding silently, patiently

 

how rarely we are like the loon

how rarely we glide silently and patiently

       across the surface of life, the surface of time

how rarely we dive down below the surface of our

       Being and Time

how rarely we stay below for extended periods

                          exploring the depths of our Being

                          and our Time

we flinch at first sight

and race back to the surface

knowing all along that what we need to see

                          what we need to be

                          lies below, deep within

                          where there

                          we encounter the face of the God

                          we feel is far off

                          when in truth

                          he is beside us

                          within us

                          beneath the surface

frolicking amidst the buffet of feelings, insights, impressions, thoughts

    held in the darkness, out of sight

 

 

we want to open to the God of darkness

     as well as to the God of light

i need only the courage of the loon

                          to wander the deep

                          feasting upon the evening's buffet

                          as once again i enter

                          the night journey of  

                                                          the spirit

to spend more than a moment focused on

                                                              the Presence

that enables us to glide silently across the surface

            silently, patiently

                          until suddenly

                              without notice

                              like the loon we are

                          called back into the deep places

                          by the eternal Presence

                          that is Being

                          that is Time

                              the face of God

 

On Herrick Cove July 30, 2014

The Problem With Kings

 

Christ the King?

YHWH, HaShem, the Lord God of the Exodus and Wilderness experience in which a disparate group of slaves and refugees were made into a people eventually named Israel – which literally means “one who struggles, or wrestles, with God,” – this God has issues with kings. Those of us who have been reading the First Book of Samuel at our Monday thru Friday Noonday Prayer & More have studied the transition made from God raising up Judges, leaders, to meet the needs of the current crisis (which usually had to do with idolatry, the people abandoning the Lord for foreign idols), to that moment when the people demand from the last of these, the boy Judge and Prophet Samuel, to persuade God to give them a king. God instructs Samuel to tell them that kings, in the end, never work out very well.

 

But the people whine, saying, “All the other countries have kings! We want to be like them! We want a king!” The Lord grudgingly instructs Samuel to anoint Saul to be their first king, and as promised by the Lord of the Exodus, things do not go well. Verna Dozier, a modern-day prophetic voice in the Episcopal Church, calls this the Second Fall: First there is the incident in The Garden, and now the Demand for a King. The Third fall, according to Dozier, would be a long way off: Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity around the year 313ce, and the church, which had for nearly three centuries been an alternative to life in the Empire becomes the Empire – a problem from which finds we are still trying to find our way out of this role and back to being a People of God. But that’s for another day.

 

We hear Ezekiel, having railed about the failure of kings to shepherd God’s people resulting in the people being scattered in diaspora far and wide throughout the ancient world, depicting the Lord God of the Exodus personally seeking them out and reuniting them all together again in their promised homeland. “I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land.” [Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24] Kings, it turns out, make for lousy shepherds!

 

Which begs the question of how it is that the Last Sunday of the Church year suddenly, in 1925, was designated Christ the King Sunday by Pope Pius XI? By any measure, the Bible, from First Samuel forward, is steadfastly critical of the lack of shepherding skills among the kings of Israel. Why on earth depict Jesus of Nazareth, one who gathered up the poor, the lame, the sick and the brokenhearted into a people who learn to care for one another as Christ the shepherd cares for them, as a king. Some years ago I entered the Abbey Church of St Peter and St Paul in Bath, England, and picked up a brochure that asks, Who is Jesus? This is what it says:

 

“Jesus was born in an obscure Middle Eastern town called Bethlehem, over 2000 years ago. During his first 30 years he shared the daily life and work of an ordinary home. For the next three years he went about teaching people about God and healing sick people by the shores of Lake Galilee. He called 12 ordinary men to be his helpers. He had no money. He wrote no books. He commanded no army. He wielded no political power. During his life he never travelled more than 200 miles in any direction. He was executed by being nailed to a cross at the age of 33.

 

“Today, nearly 2.4 billion people throughout the world worship Jesus as divine - the Son of God. Their experience has convinced them that in the wonders of nature we see God as our loving Father; in the person of Jesus we discover God as Son; and in our daily lives we encounter this same God as Spirit. Jesus is our way to finding God: we learn about Jesus by reading the Bible, particularly the New Testament and we meet him directly in our spiritual experience.

 

“Jesus taught us to trust in a loving and merciful Father and to pray to him in faith for all our needs. He taught that we are all infinitely precious, children of one heavenly Father, and that we should therefore treat one another with love, respect and forgiveness. He lived out what he taught by caring for those he met; by healing the sick - a sign of God's love at work; and by forgiving those who put him to death.

 

“Jesus' actions alone would not have led him to a criminal's death on the cross: but his teaching challenged the religious and moral beliefs of his day. Jesus claimed to be the way to reach God. Above all, he pointed to his death as God's appointed means of bringing self-centered people back to God. Jesus also foretold that he would be raised to life again three days after his death. When, three days after he had died on the cross, his followers did indeed meet him alive again; frightened and defeated women and men became fearless and joyful messengers.

 

“Their message of the Good News about Jesus is the reason this Abbey Church exists, here in Bath. More importantly, it is the reason why all over the world there are Christians who know what it means to meet the living Jesus, and believe that He alone has the key to human life.

May your time in the Bath Abbey Church be a blessing to you, as it is already to us in the church.”

 

This king of ours still challenges all our assumptions and understandings of power and meaning and truth. To a criminal hanging nearby on another cross he says, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise!’ [Luke 23:43] Not tomorrow, not a month, a year or an eon from now, but today. For those looking for a description of the paradise Jesus speaks from the cross, look no further than the 25^th chapter of Matthew’s gospel which describes a great day of reckoning – as all humanity is judged as sheep and goats; those who follow his example and those who do not. [Matthew 25:31-46]

 

When I was hungry you fed me; when I was thirsty you brought me a drink; when I was naked you clothed me; when I was in prison you visited me; when I was a stranger you welcomed me. Those listening say, “But when did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, in prison or as a stranger?” As you do this for the least of my sisters and brothers you do this for me.

 

The one we call King on this final Sunday of the Christian Year identifies himself with a common thief, with those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, in prison, strangers and resident aliens.

This, says Christ, is what ‘today in paradise’ looks like. This is what real kings do: identify themselves with those who are most in need. This is what true kings, real kings, do. Not like the bad shepherds of Ezekiel 34 or Jeremiah 23:1-6 who scatter God’s sheep and do not attend to their needs – that is, do not love them the way God loves them. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”

 

We live in a time in which idolatry of all kinds drives us apart from one another. There are still others who choose to lead by sowing division rather than unity; who neglect the needs of others to pursue their own personal idolatries. Yet, we are called by this Jesus, and the Lord God of the Exodus, to be those people who execute justice and righteousness in this and every land. We are to welcome the stranger and meet the needs of the hungry, the thirsty, the naked and those in prison. This is what it means to follow Jesus, plain and simple. Jesus is what a Good Shepherd and a Good King looks like: one who gathers and unites people, not one who scatters and divides them. This is the vision of paradise he promises to us all, here and now. Today. Let those who have ears, hear. Let those who have eyes, see. Come, follow me, says our king, and I will give you rest.

 

Christ the King. Our king is an odd sort of king, but a King of Kings! A Lord of Lords! And he shall reign forever and ever! May his reign be a model for all others who would be kings and leaders of people, God’s people, all people. May our time together with him this day be a blessing to us, and may we become a blessing to all the persons we meet, here, there and everywhere. Especially those in need of any and all kinds. Especially the stranger.

Amen. This is truth. It is so.

Things Fall Apart

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

In times of uncertainty, we often feel as if things are falling apart. We ask ourselves, “Is this the end?” As the Pandemic surges and many issues surrounding the recent election remain unresolved; as businesses close, more and more people are out of work; as hurricanes persist much later into the fall, and forest fires rage out west; as Adobe Flash Player issues an information sheet with “End of Life Info”. As many of us feel the pressures and uncertainties that caused the young church in Thessaloniki to question Paul about the End Times, The Day of the Lord, people among them out of work, people dying before the Lord Christ returns: they want to know when will he come? What’s going to happen to those who have already died?

 

I often wonder if well-meaning Christians really truly read the Bible. Especially this letter of Paul to the church in Thessaloniki which from beginning to end means to address their questions and reassure them that all shall be well, and there is still plenty of hard work to be done. In the fifth and summary chapter (I Thessalonians 5: 1-28), Paul goes to great lengths to say, “concerning the times and the seasons, sisters and brothers, you do not have to have anything written to you.” Because Paul knows what we all should know by now: Jesus repeatedly tells anyone who will listen that only his Father knows the time. That it is not about time. It is not about when. 

 

It is about being awake. Being ready. We are to be ready at any and all times. We are to be awake and sober! The answer to the Time question is always, “Now!” What Paul is concerned with is what we are to do now in this in between time. He knows we come from Love, we return to Love and Love is all around. The short answer: We are to be the Love that is all around! Here and Now! Do not worry about the time, for “God has destined us not for wrath but for salvation!” Whether we are alive or dead, awake or asleep, we will live with Him just as we always live with Him. We dwell in him as He dwells in us! This is eternal!

 

In the in-between time, the “Now” time, we are, writes Paul, to respect and love one another; to be at peace among ourselves; to be patient with one another; to repay no one evil for evil; to always seek to do good to one another and to all. It’s the “to all” clause that gets us every time!

He concludes with a trinity of things we are to do: Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances. For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. For me. For us all.

 

 I never cease to wonder how it is that the Lectionary course of readings, which was assembled over three decades ago, often supplies us with just the words we need to hear at this particular moment. If there was ever a time to be patient with one another, I think we might all agree, now is such a time. If there was ever a time to refrain from tit-for-tat repaying perceived evil for evil, it would be now. And it is always time to seek to do good to one another – and to all. All. My favorite theological word. We are to seek to do good, not for some, not for many, not for a few, but for all. Now. For every day is The Day of the Lord!

 

Whatever one might think of Paul, he knows that to persist in doing the things we are called to do now, always now, we need to live the residue of our lives out of a place of gratitude, thanksgiving, at all times. And from a place of joy, rejoicing always. And we are to “pray without ceasing.”

To pray without ceasing does not mean to get down on our knees, bow our head and fold our hands 24/7. It means to be so centered in our prayer life, so disciplined in prayer, that all we do and all we say comes out of a kind of prayerfulness.

 

And it helps to know that prayer is not about knowing the right words to say. Nor is it even about saying anything. As we have explored Monday through Friday for 155 days since the Pandemic shut down in-church worship, prayer is primarily about listening, or better, about attentiveness. There are those in the history of the church like John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz) to teach us to know that “Silence” is God’s first language. So it is that every day, Monday through Friday at Noon we practice Silent Prayer: call it mindfulness, contemplative or centering prayer – it is a posture of sitting and listening. It is practicing being attentive as we are attentive to each in breath and each out breath. The more we practice attentiveness, the more attentive we become to the beauty and life and love that surrounds us in this in-between time. As we become more and more attentive in the silence, the more we hear that God has not destined us for wrath but for salvation.

 

To pray without ceasing, then, takes practice. And we are to come to our practice with the sensibility of a beginner every day. This is what Zen teachers call “shoshin,” or “beginner’s mind.” “In the beginner’s mind there are endless opportunities; in the expert’s there are few,” writes Shunryu Suzuki [Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Weatherhill, NewYork&Tokyo, 1970: p21]. Or, as Saint Benedict was fond of saying, “Always we begin again.” With a beginner’s mind, we learn to Rejoice always, Give Thanks in all circumstances, and Pray without ceasing. And it is out of such practice and attentiveness that we become those people who naturally do good for one another and all others. We become those people who do not repay evil with evil. We become those people who encourage the faint hearted. Which results in Peace and Respect among ourselves, and with others – all others.

 

We remember, Paul begins this letter talking about work, about labor, and ends it in describing the kinds of work, practice and labor that results in a God oriented life, a Christ centered life – which is always a life oriented outward toward others. Rejoice always. Be grateful in all circumstances. Pray without ceasing. This is the work we are called to do. For Now is the Day of the Lord. Now. The Eternal Now. Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king!

 

The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this, writes Paul.

Beloved, pray for us. Pray for us all.

Amen. This is truth. It is so.

 

We are always members who belong to a larger organic whole

 

Sunday November 8, 2020

The 46^th President Elect is Announced

It was around 1987, my friend and colleague Ric called me at church to invite me to lunch the next day. I said sure, I’ll meet you at Redeemer. From there we got in his car and drove into the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore, pulling into the parking lot at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. “What are we doing here?” I ask. “You’ll see,” said Ric. We go down into the basement where there were about 20 or so people to have lunch the The Reverend Everett Leslie "Terry" Fullam – a worldwide leader of a charismatic renewal movement in the Episcopal Church. I felt like I had been punked. Ric knew I considered Terry to be a bit of a cult leader. And Ric knew I would never choose to be there myself. And Ric knew I needed to be there.

 

We sang a few songs over lunch and then Terry taught me an important lesson of just how wrong I was about a lot of things. It was during the time Jim Baker had just been convicted on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy, and fellow televangelist Jimmy Swaggart had been found with a prostitute in red-light motel. Terry allowed as how easy it is for people like Episcopalians to snicker at the sleazy televangelist empire being exposed as hypocritical. But then he said that like it or not, they, like us, are fully incorporated members of the Body of Christ. They are our brothers and sisters in faith. And when one part of the Body of Christ is hurt and in crisis, we are all hurt. My bigotry had been exposed. My understanding as being a part of a larger organic whole, the Church, had just widened. I was changed. I was beginning to learn what it really means to love my neighbor – which always includes those who are fundamentally “other” – fundamentally different from us. I forever owe Ric thanks for leading me a little closer to the light. Our love as disciples of Jesus can know no bounds. I have no idea what else Terry said that day in the basement of St. Mary’s, Hampden, but I have never forgotten what I was there to learn. I have been thinking about this lesson as we have moved through this year’s pandemic and presidential campaign.

 

The late, great Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple (1881-1944), once reminded us that, “The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.” In that, Temple was recalling the wisdom of Richard Hooker (1554-1600) who characterized the church not as an “assembly,” but a “society.” We may assemble as a congregation with the name of a church, like Christ Church. But such an assembly is not the church – for assemblies always have an exclusive agenda, while God’s Spirit includes everyone and everything. We are part of the larger inclusive Society of Christ. Assemblies may come and go, but the church gathered by Christ continues no less than when we gather as assemblies – and long after assemblies are gone.

 

That is to say, no matter how we subdivide ourselves into parties, whether in church or in society, we are always members who belong to a larger organic whole – which in church we call The Body of Christ, and which society calls the United States. The church goes so far as to say that the bond that incorporates us into the Body of Christ is “indissoluble” – it is eternal. This is exactly what Paul seeks to convey to the assembled Christians in Thessaloniki who are concerned about what will happen to those who have died before the Blessed Son of God returns “to make us like him in his glorious kingdom.” They will hear the trumpet call and be the first to be reunited with God in Christ – for we come from God, we return to God, and God is all around. Be more concerned about all the others who are still here, especially those beyond the assembly of the church. For all creatures great and small are of God. [1 Thessalonians 4:13-18]

 

We find ourselves surrounded by a Pandemic that knows no boundaries, no restrictions on one side, and a nation that is as divided along party lines as any time in our history since, perhaps, the Civil War. Like the foolish bridesmaids we are distracted and unprepared for the bridegroom’s arrival. [Matthew 25:1-13] Like the endless generations of Israelites who, after being liberated from slavery in Egypt, are pictured in the texts we have studied at Noonday Prayer for the past few months allow themselves to be distracted by foreign idols – something which the Bible describes as religion cast as money. Idols were made of wood or stone and overlaid with gold and silver. But, as Psalm 115 contends, they have mouths but they cannot speak, eyes but they cannot see, feet but they cannot walk, and cannot even make a sound like, “uh-uh-uh”, clearing their throat! The argument being, any god or idol that cannot make a noise in its throat will ever get you out of slavery or exile. You will never be saved by idols.

 

But we seem to never give up on idols. We never give up on the works of the devil! Whether it is money, or denominations, or parties within and outside of the church, that Society of Christ which is greater than the sum of all of our assemblies. Oh yes, we have the “right to assembly” all right. Yet, we pray that we aspire to a higher calling than any party or assembly: we pray to become children of God, heirs of eternal life, and if that is not all, to be made like the Blessed Son of God! Oh, and we pray that we will “purify ourselves as he is pure!” Wow. Such hubris.

 

When Jesus urges us to “keep awake,” he knows that we tend to sleepwalk through this life on a hope and a prayer, all the time forgetting that we do in fact belong to a larger organic whole. Belong. We are the property of the Church, the Body of Christ. Or, the Society of Christ. Or, children of the living God. We must never lose sight of this, for this ought to regulate how we treat others who associate in assemblies other than our own. For the Living God looks to include all of creation, creatures and peoples. Ultimately, we are all One. May we remember this now, and in the days ahead. Amen.